3 See A. A. Kondrashenkov, Krest’yane Zaural’ya v XVII–XVIII vekakh (The peasants of the Trans-Urals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) (Chelyabinsk: Yuzhno-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1966), 30, 53; “Iz istorii Butki” (From Butka’s history), http://rx9cfs.narod.ru/butka/7.html; and “Rodnomy selu Yel’tsina ispolnilos’ 325 let” (Yeltsin’s native village is 325 years old), http:/txt.newsru.com/russia/03nov2001/butka.html.
4 See on this point Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Eighty percent of rural dwellers in the Urals on the eve of emancipation were state peasants. There were urban serfs in the Urals, attached to mines and factories.
5 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 551.
6 V. P. Semënov-Tyan-Shyanskii, Rossiya: polnoye geograficheskoye opisaniye nashego otechestva (Russia: a complete geographic description of our fatherland), 11 vols. (St. Petersburg: Devrien, 1899–1914), 5:170.
7 Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25 (March 1966), 24. See also Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Most Old Believers lived deep in the interior, but there were also concentrations, particularly of merchants, in the big cities. One-third of the population of Yekaterinburg in the mid-eighteenth century was Old Believer. The rural sectarians tended to be more radical in their beliefs than the urban, who were usually willing to say prayers for the tsar.
8 The Russian historian Rudol’f Pikhoya, quoted in Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 15. This valuable study was first published in Spanish as La Rusia Imposible: Boris Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin (Madrid: El Paìs, S.A./Aguilar, S.A., 1994).
9 Ocherki istorii staroobryadchestva Urala i sopredel’nykh territorii (Essays on the history of the Old Believers of the Urals and abutting territories) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2000), 85. The 1897 census (which I consulted in the original) counted 23,762 Old Believers in Shadrinsk district, or 8 percent of the population. Experts have generally felt that official statistics underestimated the number of Old Believers.
10 The census of 1897 said 780 of the 825 lawful residents of Butka were Orthodox. Most of the remaining forty-five would have been Old Believers, and undoubtedly quite a few of the 780 had mixed beliefs. Seventeen residents of Basmanovo and 105 in Talitsa were unaccounted for in the same way. In Butkinskoozërskaya village, at the terminus of the Butka River, the census recorded 162 of 914 persons as Old Believers.
11 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007, reports that approximately 1,000 people bearing the name live in today’s Sverdlovsk and Perm provinces.
12 Students of twentieth-century cinema will recognize the name from the characters Aleksei and Fëdor Basmanov in Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, Ivan the Terrible, released in parts in 1944 and 1958. Aleksei is a lieutenant of Tsar Ivan. His only son, Fëdor, is the bloodthirsty founder of the Oprichnina, Ivan’s palace guard.
13 D. A. Panov, Opyt pokolennoi rospisi roda Yel’tsinykh (An experiment in doing a genealogy of the Yeltsin clan) (Perm: Assotsiatsiya genealogov-lyubitelei, 1992), and Panov’s work at http://www.vgd.ru/Ye, give years of birth and death for all male heads of the Yeltsin family prior to Yekim, and only a year of birth for him. At that point, the well runs dry because of changes in record keeping under the Soviet regime.
14 Ivan Yeltsin (1794–1825) was a nephew of Savva. He returned to Basmanovo from the army and fathered two children. After his death, his widow, Marfa, had seven more sons and daughters by another man.
