78 This sentence appears only in the English-language edition of the memoir (Yeltsin, Struggle for Russia, 98), not in the Russian original.
79 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 354, where it is noted that, of the 8 million residents of the Urals, 900,000 were convicted of crimes in the 1930s, many of them of a political nature. Stalinist fears of sedition from without were not entirely based on fantasy. There were in fact attempts by émigrés and others to smuggle anti-Soviet materials into the country, the main effect of which was to intensify police attacks on real and imagined oppositionists.
80 Source: the Perm branch of the Memorial Society. See http://www.pmem.ru/index.php?mode=rpm&exmod=rpm/12, which has a list of the 6,553 known victims.
CHAPTER TWO
1 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 170–71.
2 Figure on blood diseases from Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 101. Chemical-weapons making and pollution in Berezniki are documented at http://www.pollutedplaces.org/region/e_europe/russia/berez.shtml; http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/86/sakan.html; http://neespi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/NEESPI_SP_chapters/SB_Appendix_Ch_3.pdf; and http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/russiaenviro.pdf.
3 M. M. Zagorul’ko, ed., Voyennoplennyye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of war in the USSR, 1939–56: documents and materials) (Moscow: Logos, 2000), 104, 112; Obshchestvo “Memorial” and Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1940: spravochnik (The USSR’s system of corrective-labor camps, 1923–40: a reference book) (Moscow: Zven’ya: 1998), 275–76, 291–92, 451–52, 456–57, 491–92, 493–94, 514. A detailed map of Gulag in the Perm area is available at http://pmem.ru/rpm/map/Rus06.htm. Gulag inmates in the Urals totaled 330,000 in 1938, excluding the 530,000 exiles in special settlements and not confined to camps. At war’s end, there were about 300,000 German POWs in camps in Sverdlovsk province alone.
4 In Molotov province as a whole in 1940–41, convict crews came to 30 percent of the total industrial labor force. Ol’ga Malova, “Gulag Permskoi oblasti” (The Gulag of Perm oblast), http://perm.psu.ru/school136/1945/antifashist/newspaper/malova.htm. But Gulag labor was concentrated in the Berezniki and Vishera areas, where its proportion was considerably higher.
5 This was so even in the largest Soviet cities. See David L. Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
6 Larisa Korzhavkina, Berezniki (Berezniki) (Perm: Permskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 2002), 76–77.
7 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 20. Yeltsin told an interviewer in the 1990s that a sixth person, a male Kazakh worker, shared the barracks room with them for some time during the war. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Polya’s name is not given in Yeltsin’s memoirs, but his mother mentioned it to acquaintances later.
8 Klavdiya Pashikhina, interview with the author (September 7, 2005). House, barracks, and fields were located just west and just east of where today’s Berezniki Street meets Five-Year-Plan Street.
9 Details on the house from author’s second interview with Naina Yeltsina (September 18, 2007). She says conversations in the 1950s suggested that the family had lived in a small rented house for a short time before moving into their private home.
10 Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, “Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu” (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998 (copy given to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki); and Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author, July 29, 2007. Mrs. Yeltsin checked the particulars with Boris Yeltsin’s brother and sister.
11 Igor Neverov, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1.
