The tales of puckishness and delinquency from Confession are required reading for anyone seeking to comprehend Yeltsin’s life, but he was not above embellishing them. The Zyryanka, dammed to form First Pond, is about the width of a city street downstream (where it is five minutes down the hill from John the Baptist church). Even in the annual snow melt, it is not the raging torrent Yeltsin depicts—which is not to rule out jousting on the logs. Vladimir Zhdanov has no remembrance of the fifth graders going out the window; the railway school, he points out, was all on one floor, and it would have been easier to play hooky than to follow a showoff outside. Some of Yeltsin’s defiance of his teachers may have been more impish than impudent. When Zhdanov was asked by the reporter if teachers had tonguelashed Yeltsin for passing his problem sets around, he replied, “They are only finding out about it now.”69 For some events, memoirist Yeltsin mistakes the fine points yet not the main meaning. The jump out the window seems indeed to have occurred, but at the Pushkin School, which has two stories and where Yeltsin’s homeroom (which I saw in 2005) was on the second floor.70 While the mean trick on his elementary school German teacher is uncorroborated, again there appears to have been such an incident with a chair at the Pushkin School. A boxer’s nose and a maimed hand, about which he was always self-conscious, were fleshly mementos of his adventures. Conversations in 2005 with clergy and parishioners at the reopened Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist substantiated that it was used as a furniture factory and munitions warehouse during the war, and that a daredevil could have slipped in and made off with small projectiles. None doubted that Yeltsin had done so. For the wilderness trek and the infection in 1948, we have verification by a fellow pupil.71
The episode that remains mysterious is the one to which Yeltsin gives the most import: the stand against his oafish teacher at School No. 95 and the struggle for exculpation that followed. Yeltsin’s own account does not quite add up. He writes that after the fracas he “decided not to return” to the school and to enroll at Pushkin, the place that was to open doors for him. But School No. 95 offered seven years of classes only, and so he would have had no choice but to move on to a secondary school had he finished the seventh grade there; the one secondary school in Berezniki that accepted boys was School No. 1, the Pushkin School. Muddying the waters is a prosaic detail: Pushkin School records, and the commemorative plaque outside, show Boris Yeltsin to have transferred there in 1945—in the second half of or at the end of sixth grade or in the first half of seventh grade—and not, as he says, after seventh grade, which would have been in mid-1946.72 The acting up with his teacher, if it happened, could not have been at his graduation, since he never passed out of School No. 95.73 But something got Yeltsin in hot water there. His mother told relatives later that he left his first school because of a disagreement with a female teacher. It was unheard-of for a pupil to quit a Soviet elementary school without completing the sequence of instruction in it. Teachers at the Pushkin School believed that the decision was mutual, that friction over behavior such as the theft of the grenades had coiled to a level where young Boris was happy to go and the exasperated staff of School No. 95 was relieved to see the last of him.74
A bloodline in the free and religious peasantry, a proud and individualistic family, the confiscation of hard-earned property, the arbitrary arrest and loss of loved ones, a closet anti-communist of a father—any one ingredient would have shortened the odds that Yeltsin would eventually strike out on another road. He was not unique in any one of these respects, and not in the millstone of hardship he carried. Other Soviet leaders had poverty and politically driven private tragedies in their blood. For Yeltsin, it is not the particulars but the gestalt that commands our attention.
