When not reading his mail, Yeltsin soon started taking volleyball serves in the Berezniki gym:
My friends would put me down on a bench and I would lie there. I felt trapped: I might never break out of this situation, my heart would be permanently damaged, I would be washed up as a player. Nonetheless, I decided to fight and to go only forward. At first I took the court for a minute at a time, and after that two and then five, and within a month I was able to make it through a whole game. When I got back to Sverdlovsk, I went to the doctor. “Well, even though you gave us the slip,” she said, “it would appear that you have spent the entire time in bed, and now your heart is fine.” I have to admit I had taken a colossal risk, because my heart could have been ruined. But there was no point feeling self-pity. No, I was better off loading myself up and letting like cure like.29
While not every detail may be dead-on here, Yeltsin’s illness and furlough were real and were entered into his student file.30 The scene with the doctor testifies to openness to risk and neglect of his health, patterns that were to recur.
Sports brought out another talent in Yeltsin, according to his lifelong friend Yakov Ol’kov:
Captaincy of the [UPI] team was his first manifestation of leadership qualities. It was a small team, but a team…. He was a good organizer. He knew how to stir people up. As we would use the term today, he had charisma…. He was quite an impulsive organizer. He was able to draw people in and get results…. He knew how to make decisions on the run that would push the cause forward. And if a loss was threatened, then he would come up with something that would catch everybody on fire.31
As a side venture, Yeltsin organized his study group’s participation in the UPI relay race held every May. To get the students out of bed for calisthenics on spring mornings, he had a professor of geology, Nikolai Mazurov, go to the dormitory hall with his trumpet and blow reveille. Boris Furmanov, a freshman in the construction division in the spring of 1955 and later a Russian government minister, remembered Yeltsin jabbering before his class about past victories in the relay and about “the need to stick up for the division’s honor.” “Not just anyone, when you first hear and see him, manages to make a mark on ‘the multitude’ (there were one hundred of us), compel you to believe him, and then influence you in accord with his will.”32
As with the mischief-maker in Berezniki, the athlete and cheerleader at UPI attested to qualities Yeltsin would later apply to political causes. For now, the applications were exclusively apolitical, and those who knew him assumed his interests would keep it that way. As Ol’kov put it, “To say that he was going to be a political boss or someone like that would have seemed quite unreal to me. We simply could not have foreseen it.”33
Yeltsin’s biggest self-reported adventure came to pass on summer vacation in 1953. It was a two-and-a-half-month hobo’s tour of the Volga and central Russia (taking him to Kazan for the first time since 1937), Belorussia, Ukraine, and Georgia. A UPI friend who had agreed to tag along bailed out after one day on the road. Yeltsin, in his telling, stowed away on trains, scrounged for meals, and played strip poker with ex-convicts. Several times policemen took him off the train and asked him where he was going. “I would say something along the lines of, I am on my way to Simferopol [in Crimea] to see my grandmother. They would ask me what street she lived on. I knew there was a Lenin Street in every Soviet city, so I would give that answer every time. And they would let me go.”34 Yeltsin’s poker mates, imprisoned for common criminal offenses, had been released from jails and camps in the amnesty after Stalin’s death. They were banned from Moscow, so he went on his own to see Red Square and the mausoleum holding Lenin’s body (and Stalin’s, which was to be removed in 1961 and buried in the ground behind the mausoleum) and the walls and towers of the Kremlin, which, because it was closed to nonofficials until 1955, he could not enter. Yeltsin writes that in Zaporozh’e, a steel town on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, he earned his keep by teaching a one-week course in mathematics to an army colonel who wanted to enter a local polytechnic—with twenty hours of drill a day. He got word at the next stop that his tutee had won a place in the institute.35
In the fall of 1954, Yeltsin had a mini-adventure on a trip with the UPI volleyballers. To procure some food for his famished teammates, he set down at the station in Lozovaya, near the big Ukrainian city of Kharkov. He did not make it back to the train on time, and his coach gave him up for lost and sent a telegram to that effect back to UPI. Their next stop was Tbilisi, Georgia. Two days after the team got there, Yeltsin rapped on the door of the coach’s hotel room, bushy-tailed but bearing two shopping bags laden with provisions. Fearing that his cargo would be pilfered, he had come from Lozovaya to Tbilisi, about 700 miles, on the roof of one of the passenger cars.36
Upon reading Yeltsin’s prose about the main conflictual episodes at UPI, one cannot but see the progression in his ego and attitude toward authority. When he gives short shrift to his studies and fences with Rogitskii, he engages in the mildest of rebellions, checked by his respect for the learned professor. A point of pride in the narration of his illness is when he pulls the wool over the physician’s eyes—he did not lie to her but did not act to correct her misconception, either—and so outfoxes authority rather than defy it. In the summer of 1953 he rides the rails with the ex-cons, only to turn the student’s role on its head and become a source of knowledge in the crash course with the Ukrainian officer twice his age: “The colonel had his doubts: Would we be able to do it? I told him there was no other way to get ready in one week. [He showed himself to be] a person of perseverance, with a character that kept the pace of the lessons I gave him.”37 To be able to give lessons and hold up in a competitive world, Yeltsin worked at learning self-restraint and mental toughness. “Boris Nikolayevich worked a lot, consciously, on his character. At first it seemed to contain a good deal of personal sensitivity, but he did much to counter this, saying he had to squeeze the flabbiness out of himself. If he felt sorry for someone, he would express it in reverse—he would say words of support yet, intentionally, in a harsh fashion.”38
Yeltsin’s diploma assignment had to be carried out in one month rather than the allotted five, since he had blown a semester on traveling with the volleyball team. “I still can’t figure out how I did it,” he burbles in Confession. “It was unreal how much of a mental and physical effort I had to make.” His project was an undistinguished design for an overhead bucket line to transfer waste materials out of a coal mine. In the memoir, he was to misrepresent it as a plan for a television tower, so avant-garde that assistance from faculty and students was out of the question and only Urals self-reliance would save the day. “Until then there were almost no [towers] around, and so I had to sort everything out myself…. No one… could help me with this new and unknown theme. I had to do the drawings myself, do the calculations myself, do everything from beginning to end myself.”39 Whether this was a fib or an inadvertency,40 Yeltsin was attracted to futuristic undertakings and to the emerging medium of television, which was to play a big part in his political life. One of his pet projects as leader of the province’s party organization in the 1980s was to build a TV transmission tower at the midpoint of the Sverdlovsk skyline, not far from the city’s large circus building. Only the conical concrete column of the structure, and not the planned restaurant and metal spire, was up when work stopped around 1990. It is 725 feet high. The plan was for the tower to soar up to 1,300 feet, which would have made it the sixth or seventh tallest in the world.41