28 The bell tower fell to the ground at one point. After communism, in 1993, the church was reconsecrated; a temporary tower was built in the yard and five bells purchased. Boris Yeltsin as president (personally or via a government grant, it is not clear) made a contribution to restoration (Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi”). A gutting and reconstruction funded by local businessmen began in 2005. The church in Basmanovo, dating from 1860, was torn down in the 1930s and never replaced. The location is still a debris-strewn vacant lot. Orthodox services are held in the village in a home chapel.
29 On cannibalism, Pëtr Porotnikov, a regional official who grew up in Butka, interview with the author (September 10, 2004). See the reference to the phenomenon in Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 347.
30 Raskulachivaniye (dekulakization) was a pre-existing Russian word adapted to a new purpose. Derived from kulak, whose original meaning was “fist,” it denoted the relaxing of the fingers in a clenched fist. In the context of Stalinist class warfare, it signified the draining away of the wealth of the village elite, the heartless kulaks.
31 References to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, 20, 26, 144.
32 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:5–6.
33 See John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 32–33; Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 116–18; Timothy J. Colton, “Boris Yeltsin: Russia’s All-Thumbs Democrat,” in Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds., Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 50–51, 71; Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 49–51; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 1, which has rather more up-to-date information than the others about Nikolai Yeltsin. Mikheyev mistakenly refers (51) to Yeltsin’s childhood as “difficult but devoid of atrocities and destruction.”
34 For background, see Golfo Alexopolous, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). In the cities, the disenfranchised were denied ration cards, which did not apply in the countryside.
35 A. I. Bedel’ and T. I. Slavko, eds., Sud’ba raskulachennykh spetspereselentsev na Urale, 1930–1936 gg. (The fate of the dekulakized special migrants in the Urals, 1930–36) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994), 14.
36 Gomzikova interview. Serafima Gomzikova, who was a young girl in 1930, recalled the scene. Her parents’ house was confiscated and local communists demanded that her father divorce her mother, Mariya (Ignatii’s only daughter), which he refused to do. If Anna Yeltsina’s name has been left out of previous accounts, the very existence of Mariya, who died in the 1950s, has not registered. Serafima is her surviving daughter.
37 Statistics in Viktor Danilov et al., eds., Tragediya sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye; dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 (The tragedy of the Soviet village: collectivization and dekulakization; documents and materials, 1927–39), 5 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 2:745; and Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 73. The peak number, about 484,000, was reached in early 1932; by a year from then, it was down to 366,000, mostly because of deaths (33,000) and flight (97,000). For perspective, see James R. Harris, “The Growth of the Gulag: Forced Labor in the Urals Region, 1929–31,” Russian Review 56 (April 1997), 265–80; Judith Pallot, “Russia’s Penal Peripheries: Space, Place, and Penalty in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (March 2005), 98–112; and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Viola shows, the regional administration was originally against central efforts to make the Urals the prime locale for deportees from all over the Soviet Union.
