Soviet cities were cauldrons for social change and for the conversion of peasants into proletarians. But the size of the inflow from the villages, the tenacity of agrarian identities, and the systematic underinvestment in urban infrastructure meant that the cities themselves were substantially peasantized in the 1930s and 1940s.5 When the Yeltsins first walked its streets, Berezniki had almost no pavement, no sewage system, and no public transit. It had some asphalt and sewage mains by 1950, though still no buses or streetcars. And yet, Berezniki had been laid out by planners from Leningrad as a “socialist city,” and there was some attention to culture and leisure: the Avangard cinema, a live theater, a museum, several stadiums, a park and arboretum on Stalin Prospect (Lenin Prospect today). Postwar apartment houses had “elements of the classical orders, immense window apertures reminiscent of Roman triumphal arches,” and “obelisk-like turrets in memory of those who had fallen” in the crusade against fascism.6
Nikolai Yeltsin made the best of the situation. He bootstrapped himself during and after the war from woodworker at the bench to foreman, work superintendent, dispatcher, planner, and head of several technical bureaus at Sevuraltyazhstroi. In wartime Klavdiya Yeltsina did twelve-hour shifts as a dressmaker. After 1945 she was that rarity in the urban USSR, a housewife who worked wholly in the home. She reared their two sons and a daughter, Valentina, born in July 1944, took in sewing to pad out Nikolai’s income, and cared for her parents, who did not work once they were out of exile.
Debarking in 1937, the family found lodgings for several months in Usol’e, from where Nikolai commuted to work by ferry (there was no bridge over the Kama until the 1950s). After about a year shoehorned with three other households into a scruffy timber cottage in Berezniki, they were given one of the twenty rooms in a new two-story wood barracks, in the adjacent Zhdanovo Fields section of town. It had outdoor plumbing (privies and a well) and was so leaky and drafty that the children huddled on winter nights with a nanny goat. The animal, Polya, was also a source of fresh milk. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, Yeltsin fastened on the auditory porousness of the thin walls. Were any tenant to mark a name day, birthday, or wedding, someone would put on the windup gramophone “and the whole barracks would be singing…. Quarrels, conversations, scandals, secrets, mirth—the entire barracks could hear, everyone knew everything. It could be that is why I still remember the barracks with such revulsion.”7 Across the street was the city’s only public bathhouse, where a weekly soaping and soaking could be had for pennies. Next to it was the bustling farmers’ bazaar, one of the thousands in Soviet towns where peasants since 1935 had been allowed to sell, at unregulated prices, food they grew in plots behind their homes. On another side were sheds for the barracks dwellers’ goats, chickens, and geese, while cattle grazed in the unbuilt portion of Zhdanovo Fields. The log house and the barracks have long since been torn down.8
In 1944, in anticipation of Valentina’s birth, Nikolai used his construction skills and tools and, it may be hazarded, his connections with materials suppliers to erect a private house, as was permissible under Soviet legislation. It was in brick and stood on a parcel of land known as the Seventh Block, facing First Pond, the water reservoir for the old Stroganov mine. The home’s four rooms and a kitchen were enough to accommodate the Starygins comfortably when they arrived from Serov in 1945. Boris Yeltsin did not note this change of circumstances in his autobiography, saying only that they lived in the Berezniki barracks for ten years (the actual figure was about six) and passing over how they were housed after that. More than likely, he feared some readers would impute the family’s acquisition of such an asset to greed or privilege. A private house (but not the land beneath it, which was owned by the state) was a valuable nest egg, and protection against the inflation that ate into cash savings.9
A decade and a half after dekulakization, the Yeltsin house, which is still in use, was palpable betterment, and it spoke well of the esteem Nikolai was earning in the urban world. Ironically, it also re-created the rural ambience the family had lost and felt the need of. Grandfather and grandmother Starygin having moved in, the three generations cohabited, much as they would have in the Russian village, where they would have shared a house or lived within walking distance. Out in the yard were a woodpile, a vegetable garden, some poultry—and the small steambath Boris built for Vasilii Starygin in 1949. But the village continued to tug at the family’s heartstrings. In 1955 Nikolai was asked to act as chairman of a Urals collective farm—in the village of Urol, Molotov oblast—during an all-USSR campaign to recruit urban specialists for positions in the agrarian economy. He accepted, but the experiment failed, and he took back his technical job in the Sevuraltyazhstroi construction trust in two months.10 In 1959 he was sent to represent the trust at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the trade fair and amusement park in Moscow lorded over by Vera Mukhina’s steel statue of a brawny male worker and a peasant woman holding aloft a hammer and a sickle. When he received the invitation to the capital, which he had never laid eyes on, he could not believe his good fortune: “He read it out, grabbed his head, and bounded off to the office [to check it], although by the standards of those years he cut a figure that corresponded [to the honor].”11 But the bright lights were not really for him. In 1962 Nikolai was to take a pension and, after a thirty-year absence, to repatriate to Butka with his wife, turning the wheel full circle. Klavdiya’s aging parents made the move with them. The sale of the Berezniki home allowed them to purchase a cozy cabin at 1 Korotkii Lane with cash.12
The family’s mores were rooted in communism and in the austerity of the Urals countryside and of their Old Believer and Russian Orthodox forerunners there. While Klavdiya was “devoutly religious” from first to the last, the Yeltsins, in the land of official atheism, were not observant. Churchgoing was impossible in Berezniki, as the only Orthodox temple, the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, was closed by the government in 1937 and did not open again for worship until 1992. Valentina Yeltsina, unlike her brothers, was not christened as a babe in 1944. A layman could have administered the sacrament, or the Yeltsins could have gone to a village church outside of Berezniki, but they took neither option. The living room of the home had no icons on display, although the Starygins did keep icons in their bedroom and Klavdiya Vasil’evna prayed before a miniature icon she hid from prying eyes.13 Boris grew up with no religious beliefs and developed a regard for Christianity only in the 1980s and 1990s.14
Nikolai and Klavdiya, she said in 1991, two years before her death, agreed that it was a big job “raising a good person who does not run around the streets like a waif or come into bad company.”15 None of the siblings smoked, played cards or dice, used smutty language, or touched liquor. Any trespass on this code would have been condemned in the classroom as well as in the home. Teachers at the schoolhouse where Boris studied after the war would order the pupils to shun for an entire month any pupil with the odor of tobacco on his or her breath; for the smell of alcohol, the penalty was a one-week suspension from classes and a stern note to the parents. At the age of sixteen, Yeltsin intercepted another adolescent in the act of buying a glassful of vodka at a roadside stand; he prudishly poured the liquid on the sidewalk, paid the vendor for it, and walked off. Unlike cigarettes, gambling, and swearing, drinking was one thing in which he would indulge in later life. His old classmate Sergei Molchanov, who lived in Berezniki until his death in 2006, was sure that the first alcohol that Yeltsin ever touched was the glass of champagne he was given to sip at his secondary-school graduation party in 1949.16