Yeltsin полностью

38 The Basmanovo council’s report on the family to the police in Kazan, in connection with the case against Ignatii’s son Nikolai, said Yeltsin senior was “on the run” (v begakh). The report was sent in February 1934. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 29.

39 The age limit is noted in Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 64.

40 Family details taken from Yumasheva communication. The severity of the restrictions suggests some unusual police animus toward the Yeltsins. Second-category kulaks were supposed to get shipment of thirty poods (about a half-ton) of baggage per family member. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 80.

41 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 340.

42 Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 94–95.

43 The town took its name when founded in the 1890s from Nadezhda (Hope) Polovtsova, the owner of the local iron mine and the wife of a personal aide to the tsar. From 1934 to 1937, it was called Kabakovsk, after Ivan Kabakov, the first secretary of the Communist Party committee of Sverdlovsk province—the job to be held by Boris Yeltsin from 1976 to 1985. When Kabakov was purged in 1937, Kabakovsk reverted to Nadezhdinsk. In 1939 it was named after Anatolii Serov, a Soviet aviator and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

44 No one can be sure today, but the likely trigger for Ignatii’s blindness was a stroke. His son Nikolai, Boris’s father, was to die of stroke in the 1970s.

45 Yumasheva communication. Taibbi, in his unpublished “Butka,” is the only analyst to have suggested that Yeltsin’s maternal grandfather was sent to the north. He tracked down no other details.

46 Second Yeltsin interview. The only way to reach Serov, just 130 miles northeast of Berezniki as the crow flies, was a laborious U-shaped train route, taking two days of travel.

47 About 70,000 banished peasants in the Urals were called up into the army during the war and qualified for release that way. Others were allowed to leave in dribs and drabs before the war. By January 1946 the number of peasant exiles in the Urals was down to 138,000 and by January 1954 it was less than 10,000. By that last date, though, the total number of banished people in all categories in the Soviet Union as a whole was still very high—2,720,000. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 145–46.

48 Details again from Yumasheva communication.

49 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, describes Nikolai as present for his baptism. He could not possibly have remembered who attended, but it is a fair guess that Klavdiya would have let it be known if Nikolai had missed the event. A Spanish journalist heard from Yeltsin relations in 1991 that Nikolai around this time worked on the construction of the Butka-Talitsa road (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 16), but the project went on from 1934 to 1936, so the timing seems off. It is possible that another one of the brothers worked on the road.

51 Klavdiya Yeltsina told an American visitor in 1991 that the three of them did exactly that (she used the name Serov for their destination). Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 78–79.

52 Eventually known as the Gorbunov Works, the plant was over the years to make reconnaissance planes, Blackjack strategic bombers, and civil airliners. The nearby Kazan Helicopter Works built the Mi-8 helicopter that Boris Yeltsin flew as president of post-Soviet Russia.

53 This was his claim in his 1950s autobiography: Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

54 This is by later assertion of Klavdiya Yeltsina (Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5). The trips ended, she said, when her brother-in-law Ivan left Butka for Berezniki, which was in 1935.

55 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 26. Litvin dug out Nikolai’s OGPU file from the Kazan archive of the KGB and gave it to Boris Yeltsin, who included excerpts in his second book of memoirs. The file also provided information on the dekulakization of Ignatii. English-language readers can find some details in Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Times Books, 1994), 94–98, which translates Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 121–25.

56 The secret police arrested 4,721 people in Tatariya in 1931 and shot 252 of them. None of the 887 arrested in 1934 was shot. In the last four months of 1937, some 4,750 individuals were arrested and 2,510 of them shot. Altogether, from 1929 through 1938 more than 20,000 were arrested in the republic and about 4,000 were executed. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 18, 47, 49–50.

57 Ibid., 27.

58 Ibid., 38.