Yeltsin полностью

12 Tatyana Yumasheva, personal communication to the author, March 4, 2005. In Butka Nikolai was to supplement his pension by working part-time for a Talitsabased building organization. One of his projects was to supervise construction of a new village school.

13 The quotation and the description of Klavdiya’s hidden icon are from Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Other details from the author’s interviews.

14 Yeltsin said shamefacedly in 1993 (Muzhskoi razgovor) that he chided his mother for praying in the 1960s, after he joined the Communist Party, but she ignored him.

15 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

16 Details from ibid., and my interviews with Sergei Molchanov (September 8, 2005) and Klavdiya Pashikhina.

17 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20, 26.

19 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.

20 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. The drinking was a delicate subject in the family. One relative who knew Nikolai well in Butka in the 1960s said in an interview that he hid bottles of vodka from his wife in the cellar of their house.

21 “In a way they were a match: if the father was a sadist, then the son showed an early masochistic bent.” Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 120; also 128–29, where it is claimed he showed the same attitude at college in Sverdlovsk. Cf. Oleg Davydov, “Prezidentskii kolovorot” (Presidential brace), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 81–92, for an Oedipal interpretation.

22 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

23 Oksana Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina” (The school years of Boris Yeltsin), http://www.aif.ru/online/sv/1181/11_01.

24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. This picture is supported by workmates. See in particular Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” which mentions Nikolai trying to invent a machine for unloading railroad freight cars.

25 Yeltsina communication.

26 Zhdanov does mention (Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina”) a friendship at School No. 95 with one Svetlana Zhemchuzhnikova, an evacuee from Leningrad, “very pretty” and somewhat of a tomboy. When she broke her leg in an accident, Boris talked his pals into visiting her at home.

27 Stalin made most Soviet schools single-sex schools during and after the war; they reverted to coeducation in 1954.

28 See Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviets Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 46 (July 1994), 671–80; and more generally on gender roles Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

29 Quotation from Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 155.

30 I use scripts in the sense that some biographers use phrases such as inner myths and private self-concepts. See James E. Veninga, “Biography: Self and Sacred Canopy,” in Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 59–79; and Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (New York: Norton, 1984), 159–73.

31 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Details about the schools come from my interviews with Sergei Molchanov and with Viktor Tsipushtanov (September 8, 2005).

32 Indicative are the food supplies allocated to the town of Solikamsk, just up the Kama, for the year 1938. For each resident, they provided 1.1 kilograms of meat (less than 2½ pounds), 2.4 kilos of sausage, 3.9 kilos of fish, one jar of preserves, 100 grams of cheese, and 2.6 kilos of macaroni. The worst years were 1932–33, when rationing was in effect and the Urals norms for urban laborers were a pound of bread or bread surrogate, a pound of potatoes, and a glass of milk per day. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 341.