At this juncture, the clan’s luck had taken a calamitous turn. In 1928 Stalin and his allies applied pressure on the Soviet peasantry to increase deliveries to government granaries. In 1929–30 they unleashed a social revolution in town and country, swinging from the market-oriented New Economic Policy to breakneck, state-led industrialization. In village Russia, the communists set neighbor against neighbor, divested well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, of their property, and corraled independent growers into kolkhozes and sovkhozes, bureaucratized collective and state farms.
Collectivization did not go unopposed. The young Leonid Brezhnev, who was to lead the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, worked in the 1920s as a land surveyor and organizer of collective farms in Bisert district, to the west of Sverdlovsk; he became a probationary member of the party there in 1929. In his memoirs, he wrote that irate farmers “railed at us with ropes, pitchforks, malicious notes, and stones heaved through the window”—prompting government agents to “lead the onslaught against the hated kulaks” with ever more fervor.26 It was an unequal contest and one in which, toward the end of 1929, the ruling party pressed its advantage with fury. If 1 percent of peasant households in the unified Urals region were collectivized in May 1928, that ratio went up to 7 percent in October 1929, 19 percent by late November 1929, and 67 percent by March 1930; many of the new collectives fell apart in 1930 and had to be reorganized in 1931 and 1932.27
In Yeltsin’s birthplace, as at many a Urals address, symbols of the past came thudding down: The Church of the Presentation, shorn of its icons and its seven-point Orthodox cross, and the bronze bells in its belfry melted down, was converted into the district House of Culture and, in the 1950s, into a movie theater.28 In 1932 and 1933, the leanest years, when crops failed and many peasants slaughtered their livestock, residents say there was cannibalism in Butka.29 The population stagnated, coming to 1,007 in the Soviet census of 1939, only 182 more than in 1897. Lenin had envisioned communism in an amaranthine slogan as “Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.” Butka was to be wired into the national electric grid only in 1946, after World War II. The first macadam road to Talitsa came in 1936 (asphalting waited until 1976), the first Butka school in 1937, and a spur line from the railroad, laid by corvée labor, in 1949.
In Confession on an Assigned Theme, composed hurriedly in 1989 and published in still-Soviet Russia in 1990, Boris Yeltsin sketched the Butka scene in one solitary page and without proper names, identifying individuals only by their position in the line of descent (father, mother, grandfather). He writes of “dekulakization” (as nasty a word as any in the Soviet lexicon) of “one and all”;30 of bread and seed grain running out; of armed brigands roving the village; of his grandfather, seeing the family’s last cow and horse starve, installing home stoves for cash in 1935.
Some paragraphs down, we read how the teenaged Yeltsin decided in 1949 to get his grandfather’s blessing for his plans to study construction engineering in Sverdlovsk. Grandpa had the boy build a home steambath single-handedly as a show of his commitment. As for Nikolai, the word was that in 1935, “to save the family,” he fled Butka with them to drudge in construction in the city of Berezniki, which is in the vicinity of Perm, on the western, European incline of the Urals. Later in the memoir, Boris referred in a single disarming sentence to an arrest in the 1930s. “I well remember when my father was taken away in the night, and I was six years old,” which would date it in 1937.31 The Sverdlovsk journalist Andrei Goryun, who had conversations with Yeltsin’s mother, quoted her in 1991 as saying her father-in-law, Ignatii, going on eighty, was “sent away to certain death” on the northern taiga in 1931 and made it for only several months. Goryun also quoted a statement by Boris Yeltsin at a news conference in Sverdlovsk in 1989 that his father sat “several months in prison” in 1937.32
Hamstrung by incomplete data and by Yeltsin’s taciturnity, analysts long recited these bits and pieces as gospel truth. Unwittingly, they misstated and understated the family’s tribulations.33 Some shards, it transpires, were correct and some were not. Even in the accounts as of 1990, there were gaps and discrepancies. Ignatii Yeltsin could not have been eighty in 1931; if so, he would have been fifty when he sired his first child, most unlikely in a peasant family. Boris Yeltsin speaks in Confession of his grandfather surviving wraithlike in Butka until 1934–35, while his mother has him deported in 1931. Yeltsin describes meeting with his grandfather in 1949, almost two decades after he reputedly died in the north, and gives his age then as “over seventy,” another inconsistency. Yeltsin also states that both grandfathers got into their nineties, which would belie what his mother said about Ignatii Yekimovich. And nothing was ever said about what befell Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina—her very name was missing from the narrative.
The missing links in the chain of events can now be filled in, thanks to informational nuggets from family members and, for Nikolai Yeltsin, his unpublished autobiographical note and the forensic research of Aleksei Litvin, a historian from Kazan State University. The fate of the Yeltsin paterfamilias and his spouse was as harsh as Klavdiya Yeltsina presented it to Goryun, though different in some of the particulars. The die was cast when the Basmanovo village council in 1928 or 1929 slapped a punitive tax on Ignatii Yeltsin and disenfranchised him under a clause in the Soviet Russian constitution of 1918. The elections in which he had lost the right to vote were by now bogus affairs without competition; the real penalty was being fixed a member of a social category hostile to the regime and ineligible for all state benefits and services.34 In 1930 the authorities officially branded Ignatii a kulak. He was triply vulnerable, as a profit-making cultivator, a mill owner, and a blacksmith—all of them in the regime’s black book.
Dekulakization scarred one and all indirectly but a substring of the rural population directly and viciously. A decision of the party Politburo, in Moscow, in January 1930 delineated three categories of kulak. The first were the “counterrevolutionary kulak activists,” persons who had been in the White armies or were against the regime; they were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps. Category two was “rich” kulaks, who had property but had not committed political offenses; their punishment was to be sent to boreal exile in “special settlements.” Ignatii was slotted into the third, smallest, and least nefarious category. Third-class kulaks were to be expropriated and resettled, serflike, on inferior land in their home districts, and could keep some of their farm tools and possessions on the say-so of the local government. The boundaries between the three categories of kulak were indistinct, as was the line between kulaks and the “middle peasants” below. The typical dekulakized family in the Urals owned a house, one cow, and three domestic fowl, worked five to eight acres of land, and was “far from prosperous.”35 These assets were considerably less than Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin had had in the 1920s and much less than they had before 1917, so they were at risk for being put into the second category. But the third category was bad enough. In August or September of 1930, at harvest time, the village leaders impounded Ignatii’s farmstead and ran him, Anna, and his sons and daughters-in-law (one of them the pregnant Klavdiya Yeltsina) out of the community and sent them to Butka, which had been made the district seat for the area in the early 1920s. As he was put on a horse-drawn cart for the ride to Butka, the heartsick Ignatii wept and wrung his hands. He asked his daughter, Mariya, the only one of his progeny to stay behind, to pray for him: “Why am I being forced to go? For what I built with my own hands!”36 His windmill and smithy would quickly fall into ruin, their remnants hauled off for scrap by neighbors.