The Yeltsin surname derives from yel’, Russian for “fir tree,” and is a fairly common one in the region.11 The ancestors of Boris Yeltsin were age-long inhabitants of the Urals and adjoining parts of Russia’s north, probably since the fifteenth century. They are thought to have migrated from Novgorod, the principality opening out to the Baltic and distinguished by its local assembly, private property, and trade with Scandinavia and the Hanseatic League; Novgorod was devoured by Muscovy in 1478. Courtesy of the archivist Dmitrii Panov, there is a genealogy on the father’s side spreading back eight generations to one Sergei Yeltsin, a state peasant registered at the start of the eighteenth century in the village of Basmanovo, or Basmanovskoye. Basmanovo was half again as big as Butka (its 1897 population was 1,307) and is located eight miles south, upriver on the Belyakovka. The connotations of the name were better than those of Butka. Basman, imported from the Tatar, refers to a loaf of bread baked for the royal court and stamped with its badge.12 Sergei’s son Anika made his home in Butka, his grandson Pëtr in Basmanovo, and his great-grandson Ivan in Beregovaya, two miles downriver from Butka. Commencing with Boris Yeltsin’s great-great-grandfather, Savva, whose year of birth was 1807, and his great-grandfather, Yekim, born the fifth of Savva’s eight children in 1841, the family hearth was in Basmanovo.13 Another branch of the Yeltsins hailed from the hamlet of Konovalovaya, on a tributary of the Belyakovka fifteen miles to Butka’s east. Except for the odd soldier (an Ivan Yeltsin fought against Napoleon at Borodino in 1812, in the Yekaterinburg Regiment), the menfolk did not stray from the Basmanovo-Butka-Beregovaya-Konovalovaya quadrangle.14 The Basmanovo subgroup originally spelled the name “Yeltsyn,” and in Konovalovaya it was “Yel’tsyn.” The name was standardized to “Yel’tsin” after 1900. (I use the anglicized “Yeltsin.”)
Yekim Yeltsin had three sons, and Ignatii Yekimovich Yeltsin, evidently the oldest of them, born in Basmanovo in 1875, was to be Boris Yeltsin’s paternal grandfather. His paternal grandmother, the future Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina, was born there in 1877.15 Ignatii’s religious pedigree, it can be established secondhand, was Old Believer.16 The family’s dissidence had dimmed with time, as he was baptized Orthodox and worshiped in the Holy Trinity Orthodox congregation in Basmanovo (some say he was a deacon). But the telltale asceticism and industriousness of the sect endured. Wiry and bearded, Ignatii Yeltsin was a self-made man, a backwoods capitalist who, by Urals and Russian standards, prospered before the 1917 revolution. Shortly after marrying Anna in 1900 or 1901, he built a sizable framed house, trimmed in white, on the left bank of the Belyakovka; it stands to this day, a TV antenna jutting up between it and the toolshed. On twelve hectares (thirty acres) leased from the local land commune, he planted rye, wheat, and fodder. He had about five farmhands and owned a combine harvester, a thresher, five horses, four milk cows, and sheep and goats. In an outbuilding to his house, Ignatii worked as the Basmanovo blacksmith, shoeing horses, forging farm implements, and repairing mechanical equipment. He was also the proprietor of a water-powered flour mill on the Belyakovka and a larger windmill on the brow of the hill above the Yeltsin homestead. He was firm in the belief that, as one of his daughter-in-laws—Boris Yeltsin’s mother—was to put it after his death, good land and good economic results in this world fell to those who earned them: “People who worked lived well. And then there were lazybones and drinkers; they lived poorly.”17
A half-decade of accumulation was sacrificed to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Russia’s civil war, when platoons of Red and White troops marauded through Basmanovo and Butka and helped themselves to horses and loot. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik cavalry were driven from the middle Urals in late 1919. The requisitioning of grain by Moscow under War Communism eased off in 1920, although food was in short supply in 1921–22. Resilient Ignatii picked up where he had left off. By terms of the liberalized New Economic Policy enacted by Vladimir Lenin in 1921, which let private entrepreneurs operate in farming, light industry, and commerce, he cultivated twelve acres and rehabilitated the windmill. Doubled over time from four to eight sails, the mill was the only one that peasants for miles around could use to process grain. To minimize envy and taxation, Ignatii Yeltsin relied on family members for manpower and in 1924 divvied up title to many of his assets among his three oldest sons.18
Nikolai Ignat’evich Yeltsin, the father of Boris Yeltsin, was born in Basmanovo in June 1906. He was the middle of the five offspring Ignatii and Anna produced between 1902 and 1912. From eldest to youngest, the others were Mariya, Ivan, Dmitrii, and Andrian. Nikolai was schooled in reading, writing, and arithmetic for four years—Basmanovo, unlike Butka, had a one-room school—and went into the Yeltsin businesses about 1920. Of the four sons, he and Andrian did carpentry and odd jobs, Ivan worked as a blacksmith with his father, and Dmitrii tended to the windmill on the hill. With an ear for music and a dulcet voice, Nikolai sang in the church choir with his father and brothers and played the harmonica and accordion in the evenings. He appears to have tried to assist with the Communist Party–sponsored government in Basmanovo; according to an autobiographical essay written in the 1950s, he worked from 1924 to 1928 “in an elective post attached to the village soviet [council].” In that same text, he said he “worked as a carpenter in a district workshop” in 1928 and 1929.19 But both these positions, so far as one can tell, were accessorial to his base activity, which was to labor with his father and brothers in the private sector.
In early 1928, bowing to Ignatii’s wish that he terminate a dalliance with a married woman,20 Nikolai wed the nineteen-year-old daughter of a family of lesser means, which had been farming in Basmanovo since the 1670s. The bride’s name was Klavdiya Vasil’evna Starygina. Unschooled, she and her younger sister had been relegated to spinning, sewing, and field chores while waiting for husbands. “My mama would say,” she once told a journalist, “‘For what does a maiden need to be literate? To write letters to boys? She needs to think about getting married.’”21 Klavdiya, who was not much over five feet tall and had braided hair down to her waist, had known Nikolai since age fifteen. When he came courting, they decided to tie the knot immediately, during the Christmas season, and did without a church wedding. She was gladdened to enter the Yeltsin family, with its “golden hands” and property, but her people were not penniless. Vasilii Yegorovich Starygin, her father (born in 1877), was an accomplished carpenter and cabinetmaker who built houses in Basmanovo with the aid of relatives and wage workers; Afanasiya Kirillovna Starygina, her mother (born in 1881), was a needleworker of local acclaim.22