In charge of “sanitation” in the group was Naina Iosifovna Girina, a female student born on March 14, 1932, who had enrolled in the hydraulics department of the construction division in 1950. Naina, baptized Anastasiya and nicknamed Naya, was from the city of Orenburg in the south Urals hills, the eldest of six children of a Cossack family in which some Russian Orthodox religious practices had survived. Her mother kept small icons and every Easter prepared ritual foods (painted eggs and kulich and paskha cakes) and lit candles; from her grandmother she learned two prayers which she memorized and would recite thereafter at times of distress. Naina had wanted to enter medicine, an impecunious and feminized profession in the Soviet Union, but chose engineering, higher-status work in which males were prevalent. She came to UPI not much better clad than Yeltsin: All she owned was two dresses and a flannel track suit hand-sewn by her mother.18 In 1951–52, the year Yeltsin had to take medical leave, he and Girina had been in a group that took waltz, tango, and foxtrot lessons together. They began a courtship in 1953. Girina “was distinguished by her amicability, affability, and cleanliness. It was impossible to break her composure, and she was able to put out all conflicts in the female collective…. She was always neatly dressed and coiffed and was willing to sacrifice an hour of lectures in the institute for a more attractive undertaking.”19
Yeltsin took away idyllic memories of the camaraderie and “giddy romanticism” shared at the polytechnic. “Never since can I remember feeling such fabulous energy, and against the background of a half-starving, Spartan, almost garrison-like existence.”20 Besides finding his future wife, he made friends there for the duration. The schoolmates were to do a summer journey with their families in 1960 and every five years after that.
A slug of the energy Yeltsin felt was injected into his studies, in which he got almost all 4s and 5s, the honors grades. He was known for a fire-and-ice pattern of work, cramming for exams and handing in assignments in the nick of time. “He studied in quite a strange way—by snatches, convulsively, whatever you want to call it. For the days when the most intense exercises or examinations were scheduled, he would manage to master a mound of information. Then he would take a long break, which did not appeal in the slightest to his teachers.”21 It foreshadowed his style as president of Russia four decades later.
The frolicking and jousting with classroom instructors that were so frequent in Berezniki tailed off. Yeltsin’s tiff with a lecturer in political economy, a dour communist by the name of Savel’ëva (the students nicknamed her Sova, the Owl), was trivial by comparison. He was turned off more by her unbending pedagogy than by the conservatism of her lectures. His grade of 3 in the course barred him from graduating with distinction, and he waived the chance to retake the exam and try for a higher grade.22 Yeltsin cut classes in favor of athletic and other interests, but his friend, group monitor Yurii Poluzadov, who filled out attendance sheets with the dean’s office, covered for him. Poluzadov and Yeltsin both had their stipends docked one September for late filing of their reports on summer activities.23 Yeltsin allows in Confession on an Assigned Theme that some of his teachers were hard on him out of disapproval of the time he put into athletics. The example he gives is not Savel’ëva but Stanislav Rogitskii, the head of the department of construction mechanics. In a course on elasticity, Rogitskii once gave him a snap quiz, saying that a great athlete like him would need no preparation, and did not let him use the formulas recorded in his notebook. Yeltsin was not up to the exercise, and the two “fought for a long time.” One day, though, Yeltsin found the solution to a mathematical problem set by the professor, which, he said, had baffled students for ten years. Rogitskii worked up “a true affection” for Yeltsin—repaid in Yeltsin’s memoirs—but still gave him a grade of 4, not the 5 Yeltsin expected. As with Savel’ëva, Yeltsin refused an offer to retake the final exam.24
Yeltsin shunned all political topics and involvements at Urals Polytechnic and did not talk about the regime’s maltreatment of his family. His attitude makes for a ringing contrast with his rival-to-be, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, a Komsomol organizer in his village school, served as a Komsomol secretary in the Moscow State University law division and took out full membership in the governing party in 1952, in his second year of study. Yeltsin gave wide berth to the UPI committee of the Komsomol, in which participation was necessary for anyone intending to work in the guilds of the Communist Party apparatus and the Soviet security services. Committee documents cite his name but two or three times, in connection with his favorite extracurricular activity: sports, and specifically volleyball.25
Games sublimated Yeltsin’s need to prove himself, at an age when boyish capers were no longer appropriate. At the Pushkin School in Berezniki, he had conditioned muscles and nerves to compensate for the gash in his left hand and to get firmer control of the all-white leather sphere. His love for volleyball was quasi politicaclass="underline" “I liked the way the ball obeyed me, the way I could pounce on it and return the most awesome of volleys.”26 That he was tall and strong helped. He also liked volleyball’s cooperative dimension. In the other games he tried out (cross-country skiing, decathlon, gymnastics, boxing, and wrestling), the competitors were individuals; only this was a team endeavor, with six per side and a need for synchronization on the compact playing surface. Versatility and waiting one’s turn were required, since volleyball players rotate through the positions. Yeltsin’s favorite move was the downward “spike” of the ball over the net after it had been set on a high flight. Impatient with waiting, he had the squad work out maneuvers that let him spike from the back court as well as the normal location, the two hitter’s places in the front row.27 He made the divisional and institute-wide teams his freshman year, captaining both and coaching several other teams for extra income. He gleefully noted in his memoirs that he logged six hours at the gymnasium daily and, between that and homework, pared his sleeping time to four hours a night—a figure confirmed by contemporaries.
But the schedule took its toll. In 1952 overexertion made Yeltsin ill. It cost him a year in the program and “nearly put me in the grave” at the age of twenty-one. An untreated streptococcal infection of the throat grew into inflammation of his tonsils, joints, and coronary valves. It would have responded to penicillin; there is no mention of an antibiotic or any drug in Yeltsin’s writeup. By his account, he went to the hospital only when his temperature surged to 104 degrees and his pulse to 150 beats per minute. The physician prescribed four months in sick bay to allow his heart to recover. Still feverish, says Yeltsin, he skipped out several days later—lowering himself out the window on a cable of knotted bed sheets—and went to his parents’ house in Berezniki. Fellow students have recollected that Yeltsin had earlier sneaked out of his sickroom to play in a big game, then returned to the hospital before making his final escape. After shinnying down the sheets to leave for home, he was given a sendoff by teammates and friends. “Our room consoled him and promised to write him letters. And we kept our word. Each day one of the eight of us took a turn and wrote him.”28