Khonina was not the only member of the faculty to hold him in warm regard. In April 1948 Yeltsin was one of but two pupils, out of a total of more than nine hundred, to be selected by headmaster Mikhail Zalesov to sit on the teachers’ committee organizing the assembly for the May Day holiday. Classmates Robert Zaidel and Viktor Nikolin, the other boy named to the May Day committee, qualified for the school’s gold medal in 1949, with straight 5s in tenth grade. Yeltsin was a tier down, in a cohort that was mobile into social strata closed to the older generation. The adult occupations of thirteen members of the Pushkin class of 1949 are known. Among them were seven engineers—one of them Yeltsin—a physicist (Zaidel), a professor of engineering (Nikolin), an architect, an agronomist, an army officer, and a dentist.60
Yeltsin was rambunctious as well as proficient and a striver. In his brief reminiscences with me about Berezniki, fifty-odd years afterward, he said it was into his relations with the educational system that such discomfort as he had with Soviet reality spilled over:
I did have a certain alienation from the school system. I waged war, if you like. Throughout my time as a pupil, I warred with my teachers—with their dictates, with their pedantry, with the absence of any freedom of choice. I might like [Anton] Chekhov, but they would force me to read [Leo] Tolstoy. I read Tolstoy also, yet still I liked Chekhov more. . . . You may say that, to the extent I opposed the system of instruction, I did it as a sign of protest against something.
The concise stories and plays of Chekhov (1860–1904), with their epiphanies and their argumentative and misunderstood characters, struck much more of a chord with Yeltsin than the voluminous, fatalistic novels of Leo Tolstoy. Chekhov was to be his favorite author: “In one short story he could describe an entire life. He had no need of the tomes that Leo Tolstoy wrote.”61 In 1993, as president of Russia, he spoke with literary critic Marietta Chudakova and her husband, Aleksandr Chudakov, who is a Chekhov scholar. Yeltsin led off with his thoughts on a Chekhov short story that neither of the Chudakovs was familiar with. When they got home, they found it in Chekhov’s collected works.62
In
1. At age eleven, in third or fourth grade, he crawled under a fence and purloined two live RGD-33 hand grenades from an arms depot in a derelict church (the John the Baptist temple, it turns out), “to learn what was inside them.”
2. As a fifth grader, he goaded his class to jump out a second-floor window and hide in an outbuilding in the schoolyard.
3. Around that time, motivated by the anti-German emotions rampant during the war, he hammered phonograph needles bottom-up through the seat of a German-language teacher’s desk chair, exposing her to the sharp points.
4. In the springtime, he participated in races over slithery logs on the runoff-swollen Zyryanka River.
5. He led mêlées with fists and clubs and up to a hundred combatants.
6. In 1945 or 1946 (the timing is unclear), he raked his elementary-school homeroom teacher over the coals, before a packed auditorium at graduation from School No. 95, for tormenting the class.
7. In 1948, after ninth grade in the Pushkin School, he went AWOL for weeks in the forest with chums.
8. In 1949 he contested the school’s ruling that he repeat tenth grade after missing time recuperating from his backpack hike.63
And there unquestionably were others, as Yeltsin said to me in an interview. Sergei Molchanov has recounted how the two of them lit a sooty wood fire in a home steambath in their neighborhood; Sergei left for dinner, and Boris blacked out from inhaling the fumes.64
