55 School records, including Yeltsin’s school-leaving certificate
56 Tsipushtanov interview.
57 Molchanov interview. The railway school, as was not uncommon in the Soviet provinces, had no athletics. “The teacher would lead out the class single file into the corridor for ‘free calisthenics.’ You would wave your hands, and that was the whole sports program.” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”
58 Ol’ga Yevtyukhova and Yelena Zaitseva, “Rovesniki moi” (They were the same age as me), 1999 essay in the Pushkin School museum.
59 “Istoriya shkoly No. 1,” 9.
60 Aleksandr Abramov, the current Pushkin headmaster, showed me the 1948 directive in my interview with him (September 8, 2005). The class photograph and notes about future occupations are in the archive of the Berezniki Museum of History and Art.
61 Second Yeltsin interview.
62 Marietta Chudakova, interview with the author (April 14, 2003).
63 Yel’tsin,
64 Second Yeltsin interview; Molchanov interview. The bath was of the “black” variety, in which smoke from the fire escapes the steam room through a hole in the ceiling. (In a Russian “white” steambath, such as Boris Yeltsin built in his family’s yard, smoke exits through a stovepipe.) In
65 Yel’tsin,
66 Alya Tanachëva, interview with the author (June 22, 2004).
67 Yel’tsin,
68 Ibid., 25. When he fought the school’s decision on tenth-grade registration, he repeated the cycle: “The path was already familiar.” He was by then known to some city officials because of his success as an athlete.
69 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”
70 Interviews with Abramov (jump out of the window) and Pashikhina (needles on the teacher’s chair).
71 Molchanov interview. Molchanov was an unusually reliable source, since, he said, he never read Yeltsin’s published account. In his memoirs, Yeltsin’s memories of his years at the Pushkin School are generally clearer than those of School No. 95. His studies at Pushkin were less remote in time and the school is still a going concern, whereas School No. 95 was converted into a trade school in 1964 and shut down in 1971 (a fragment of the building remains). Yeltsin, by this time Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk province, sent a sculpture of semiprecious Urals stone for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pushkin School in 1982. He had planned to attend the celebration but could not because his opposite number in Perm, Boris Konoplëv, would not make the time to accompany him, as protocol required. His gift for the sixtieth anniversary in 1992, on display in the school museum in 2005, was a book inscribed “With thanks for the foundation.” In the 1990s Yeltsin had discretionary funds from the president’s office donated to the schools for repairs and renovations. His foundation also provided assistance to the school after his retirement.
72 His school-leaving certificate dates his entry to the school in 1945, without giving the month.
73 Zhdanov remembers nothing about pupils being required to collect scraps for the teacher’s pig or about Yeltsin attacking her at a public ceremony. When he read these things in Yeltsin’s memoirs, “I even wanted to phone him up and ask, ‘Where did you come up with that?’” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Conversion of the three secondary schools in town into single-sex schools was completed only in 1946, but in 1945, when Yeltsin transferred, the Pushkin School was already the only one to admit boys.
74 Interviews with Stanislav Glebov (September 11, 2005) and Abramov. Yarns pop up every now and then about Yeltsin doing some dastardly deed around this time. One of the silliest is to the effect that in the hand-grenade incident he threw the weapon at a group of his friends and killed two of them. It can be found in Yurii Mukhin’s screed
