Yeltsin полностью

The greater blight was that Yeltsin attracted unpropitious publicity at several of his ports of call. The tour was originally scheduled for two weeks, but CPSU officials refused to give him an exit visa for more than eight days, since he needed to attend a Central Committee plenum on agricultural policy. James Garrison of Esalen compressed the program into the eight days, saying Yeltsin “would have to sleep less.”⁹⁹ At Johns Hopkins University on September 12, jet lag, sleeping pills, and perhaps the aftereffects of evening-before libations left him the worse for wear. Sukhanov had to admit it was “not his most successful meeting.”¹⁰⁰ The Washington Post’s Paul Hendrickson chronicled “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day” and identified bourbon as the main source of the grief, which was an overstatement if not a falsehood. Hendrickson was a prize-winning feature writer; the Post did not think the Yeltsin story important enough to fly its Moscow bureau chief, David Remnick, in for it. Hendrickson would later be contrite about the piece, but the damage was done. On September 18, the day after Yeltsin landed back in Moscow, Pravda reprinted a five-day-old story by Vittorio Zucconi, the Washington correspondent of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, portraying the voyage as one long orgy of shopping and drinking. It was a mishmash of a few facts and much fiction and innuendo. Videotape of the Johns Hopkins appearance shown on Soviet television appears to have been doctored to garble Yeltsin’s words. His son-in-law Valerii Okulov delivered a letter from Yeltsin to Pravda denouncing the article as libelous. An outcry in Italy and Russia forced the paper to publish a retraction.¹⁰¹ At the Central Committee plenum shortly afterward, Yeltsin accosted Pravda editor Viktor Afanas’ev for publishing the article. It was too bad, he said about their conversation, “that the time of duels has passed.”¹⁰²

Another barrage of flak was fairer to link to Yeltsin’s behavior. About ten P.M. on September 28, 1989, he showed up drenched and bruised at the guardhouse of the Uspenskoye dacha compound for VIPs, on the Moskva River west of Moscow. He informed police that he had been forced to swim for his life after a carful of thugs waylaid him and dumped him off a bridge with a sack over his head. Yeltsin had been driven from a political rally in Ramenki, the Moscow neighborhood he represented in the city council, bearing two bouquets he took from the meeting, to the dacha of Sergei Bashilov, another construction bureaucrat from Sverdlovsk, with whom he was social. (He had known Bashilov, Yurii Batalin’s predecessor as chairman of Gosstroi, since the 1960s.) Aleksandr Korzhakov, called in by the family, went to the guardhouse, gave Yeltsin a shot of vodka, and took him home. Yeltsin’s purpose in going to Uspenskoye is unclear, as the Bashilovs were not home and their steambath room was locked. Press speculation centered on a tryst, although there is no proof of that and womanizing is a charge his enemies have almost never aimed at him. Speaking the day after to the Soviet interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, he retracted his statement about a plot to drown him. Today Bakatin, in retirement, says Yeltsin was doused in a pond near the dacha (by whom or for what he will not say) and what ensued was a KGB caper to embarrass him. ¹⁰³

If that was the plan, it misfired. Bakatin and Gorbachev reported to the Supreme Soviet that the reasons for the incident were not known and that there had been no attempt to murder Yeltsin, and Yeltsin issued a statement fulminating at infringement on his “private life.” Yeltsin called off several public appearances, and some of his amateur helpers, fearing he was losing his touch, had “nervous eruptions verging on frenzy.”¹⁰⁴ But nerves calmed, and the uproar blew over. Korzhakov offered to be his full-time security man and chaperone, to prevent further misadventures. Yeltsin soon perked up and was back on track.¹⁰⁵ Greener pastures beckoned.

The house Yeltsin’s paternal grandfather, Ignatii, built in the village of Basmanovo around 1900. The home of his uncle Ivan is in the rear. His father, Nikolai’s, house was across the lane but no longer stands.

The small cottage in Butka in which Yeltsin was born in 1931.

The workers’ barracks in Berezniki where Yeltsin and his immediate family occupied a single room from 1938 to 1944. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)

Vasilii and Afanasiya Starygin, Yeltsin’s maternal grandparents, in a 1950s photo. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)

Boris with parents Klavdiya and Nikolai and brother Mikhail in Berezniki, 1939. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)

Railway School No. 95, where Yeltsin was a pupil from 1939 to 1945. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)

The Pushkin School, which Yeltsin attended from 1945 to 1949. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)

Yeltsin as a ninth grader, 1948. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)