The common denominator in all five scripts is the ethos of flinty self-sufficiency and willpower that suffuses the vibrant subculture of the Urals. As Yeltsin commented, he was a person “who incessantly needs to prove his strength and ability to overcome, to breathe deep… to load himself up to total exhaustion.” Until his health nosedived in the 1990s, he was what Russians call a morzh, a walrus—a devotee of swimming in icy water. Healthy and unhealthy, he started his day’s regimen with a cold shower. He yoked this passion to his rural beginnings and the reflexes nourished there: “My childhood was tied to the village, to physical burdens and labor. If you don’t develop your strength there, you fall by the wayside.”80 To stay alive, meet filial and societal obligations, impose one’s ego on others, demonstrate one’s abilities, and hit back at unfeeling authority, one had to be strong and appear to be strong. Physical power and the ability to overcome would in most societies be typecast as masculine traits. But it should not be forgotten that family realities and the demographics of gender imbalance in the Soviet Union put women disproportionately in positions of authority over the young Yeltsin. Of the abilities he was to manifest in politics, the greatest—the intuition for grasping a situation holistically, as he was learning to do in Berezniki—is one we normally categorize as feminine.
In 1949 Yeltsin prepared to leave town for manhood and a higher education in Sverdlovsk. He had stargazed about shipbuilding—his beau ideal, Peter the Great, worked for some time as a shipwright in Holland in the 1690s—but changed the plan in order to follow his father’s footsteps into the construction industry, only at a higher level of expertise, influence, and remuneration. His mother’s father gave Boris his curmudgeonly lesson in the self-reliance of the uralets, the man of the Urals—the job of putting up a backyard steambath for the family, which uncoupled them from the city’s collective bathhouse and went farther to reproduce village living conditions. Vasilii Starygin was well cut out to teach the lesson, as his ability to live hand to mouth in northern exile had spared him and his wife the sad end of Yeltsin’s paternal grandparents. Boris Yeltsin related without criticism how he did Starygin’s bidding. “You must build it yourself from beginning to end,” the graybeard said to him, “and I will not come near you.” Beyond getting approval from the Berezniki timber trust for his grandson to fell some conifers, Vasilii did not lift a finger. Boris cut the logs, hauled them two miles to their yard, dried them, sawed boards, dug footings, fitted the frame, roofed the structure and caulked it with moss, and added a porch. He was at it the whole summer long. “At the finish, my grandfather said gravely that I had passed the test and had his full permission to enter the construction division” in the polytechnic across the mountains. Yeltsin’s mother did not object. “Oh how I cried,” she told a woman friend forty years later, “but he had to learn.”81
CHAPTER THREE
Only Forward
In September 1949 Boris Yeltsin matriculated at the Urals Polytechnic Institute (UPI) in Sverdlovsk, a sixteen-hour train ride through Molotov (the once and future Perm) and over the ridge of the mountains toward Siberia. He went there because there was no technical college in Molotov province and Moscow and Leningrad, the centers of higher learning in the USSR, were more than he could aspire to.1 Unlike his parents and his maternal grandparents, who went from Berezniki back to Butka, Boris accepted city life. He was to be a Sverdlovsker for thirty-six years, thrice the time he spent in Berezniki, and to go on from there to twenty-two years in Moscow.
Sverdlovsk was founded as Yekaterinburg and is called that once again. The city lies in the eastern foothills of the mid-Urals, on the banks of the Iset River, which the Russians dammed up to form reservoirs and ponds. It was set up in 1723 by the soldier and historian Vasilii Tatishchev, commissioned by Yeltsin’s hero Peter the Great to prospect for ores and to open mines and metalworks, and named Yekaterinburg in honor of Catherine I, Peter’s second wife. Before the 1917 revolution, it was a considerable place for mining (iron, gold, and gemstones), industry (foundries and machinery), transportation (the Trans-Siberian Railroad), education (the Urals Mining College), and administration but was overshadowed by the Urals guberniya seats of Perm, Orenburg, and Ufa. It was also where the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were executed in 1918. The new regime made Yekaterinburg capital of the Urals section in 1923, replacing Perm, which it considered a more bourgeois, backward-looking place.2 In 1924 Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik based there before the revolution who authorized the killing of the Romanovs. A more compact Sverdlovsk oblast was demarcated in January 1934 and took its final contours with the severance of the Perm area in 1938. With the exception of a hump in the southwest, it was to the east of the spine of the Urals.
Local communists lobbied for state investment in the metallurgical sector and in 1930 put forward a Great Urals plan that would have had the Urals, and Sverdlovsk within it, displace the south of Ukraine as the powerhouse of Soviet heavy industry.3 The plan as such was never adopted, but its showpiece, the processing of Urals metals by means of coking coal transported from west Siberia and Kazakhstan, did come about. Joseph Stalin’s five-year plans stimulated growth. “It didn’t matter where you went,” Leonid Brezhnev, who was in those days a bureaucrat in Sverdlovsk province, was to recall, “all around you rose factory chimneys and plumes of smoke pouring out of them.”4 Up-to-date blast furnaces transformed the eighteenth-century Upper Iset Works in Sverdlovsk and the Demidov Works in Nizhnii Tagil, the province’s second city, into throbbing combines putting out pig iron and steel. New plants smelted copper, nickel, aluminum, and titanium. Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, opened in Sverdlovsk in 1933, was the largest of its kind in the USSR, a “factory of factories” making equipment for mining, oil extraction, manufacturing, and construction. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil, opened in 1936, led the Soviet Union in the assembly of rolling stock. By the late 1930s, plants like Uralmash were changing over to the production of matériel for the armed forces. An influx of factories evacuated eastward from front-line cities in 1941–42 raised Sverdlovsk’s profile and gave its economy a more militarized cast.5 Urals Wagon, merged with an enterprise from Kharkov, Ukraine, was the top maker of tanks on Soviet territory, and Uralmash converted to tanks, howitzers, and self-propelled artillery. Urals Wagon, Uralmash, and the Tankograd Works in Chelyabinsk, south of Sverdlovsk oblast, made all of the Red Army’s heavy tanks in 1942–45 and 60 percent of the medium tanks. Conversion back to civilian uses after 1945 was halting. In the Cold War, branches of the military-industrial complex based on high technology, such as atomic energy and rocketry, took root, shielded from foreign eyes.
The population of the oblast capital, powered by the boom in smokestack industry and armaments, roared from 150,000 in 1929 to 426,000 in 1939 and 600,000 by midcentury. The deracinated peasants who were the majority of Sverdlovskers lived in factory housing toward the city limits, as higgledy-piggledy as Berezniki’s. Downtown was a different sliver of Soviet reality. An Australian-born American historian who visited as it was opening up to Westerners in 1990 said that, never mind the industrial wasteland in the outlying areas, the center of Sverdlovsk was citified and a lot like Victorian Melbourne—“solid, civic, self-respecting.”6 When Yeltsin detrained in 1949, he saw landmarks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, avant-garde Constructivist creations from the 1920s, pompous government buildings, and the accessories of urbanity—an opera and ballet house, a philharmonic hall, a movie studio, Urals State University, a unit of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A clutter of cultural and research establishments from central Russia sat out the war in Sverdlovsk. Many artists, performers, and scientists settled there, and partly for that reason the Jewish community was one of the largest in Russia.7 For a country lad a few years out of the barracks on the Zhdanovo Fields, it was a far richer environment than any he had known.