Yeltsin полностью

77 Sverdlovsk’s was the fifth subway to be started in the USSR’s Russian republic. Yeltsin’s conversation with Brezhnev is described in Ispoved’, 54. But Kirilenko played a key role before then in getting the Soviet railways minister, Ivan Pavlovskii, to agree in a single telephone conversation. Although he misnamed the project—calling it the metr (meter) rather than metro (subway)—Uncle Andrei came through for Sverdlovsk. Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 130.

78 Second Petrov interview. Overcentralization was also rampant within the CPSU. Lobov, Yeltsin’s second secretary from 1982 to 1985, had to ask the Central Committee to let him add a cleaning lady to his staff chart (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 41).

79 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 395.

80 Second Yeltsin interview.

81 Comments by Naina Yeltsina during third Yeltsin interview.

82 Second Petrov interview. On the pursuit of regional autonomy, see James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

83 See on this point Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 54–59.

84 There is film of the ceremony in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1.

85 Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 78.

86 Rossel, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1. According to what Yeltsin told Rossel, he and Brezhnev met on work matters on Yeltsin’s birthday—it would 4 have had to be February 1, 1977, his forty-sixth—and an aide informed the general secretary of the birthday. Brezhnev gave him the watch at that point. The funny thing is that Brezhnev had a reputation among foreign diplomats for asking if he could trade their watches for one of his, usually a mass-produced Soviet model.

87 Second Yeltsina interview.

88 Kaëta interview.

89 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 50.

90 Kaëta interview. Beside the public-relations and morale-building side of these forays, Yeltsin could have a soft heart for those in need. Kaëta remembered an episode in the town of Severoural’sk when Yeltsin was approached by a female construction worker with four children, who said she was unable to feed her family on her wages. Yeltsin volunteered in front of the group to give her 100 rubles a month from his own salary. Kaëta doubted the woman ever received any of this cash, but suspected that Yeltsin found some other way to help her out.

91 Plans for the meeting with the students are contained in TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 100, file 275, and the questions and answers are in file 116 (quotation about capitalist competition at 136). Aron, Yeltsin, 87–92, gives a good account of the meeting.

92 Yel’tsin, Srednii Ural, 101–2; Aron, Yeltsin, 78–80.

93 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 101, file 106, 3.

94 Ibid., register 107, file 118, 39.

95 Ibid., 37–42.

96 Ibid., register 101, file 105, 116.

97 Anatolii Kirillov, interview with the author (June 21, 2004).

98 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 56.

99 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53.

100 Ibid., 22.

101 Second Yeltsin interview. Compare to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53: “We found ourselves working, practically speaking, in almost total self-reliance [samostoyatel’nost’].”

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 67–69.

2 Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 37–38. Ryabov mentions Yeltsin fielding suggestions to become secretary of the party obkom of Kostroma province and, in Moscow, deputy head of Gosstroi, the State Construction Committee. The second organization is where Yeltsin was to be sent after his break with Gorbachev in 1987.

3 Interview with Yakov Ryabov, Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White).

4 Calculated from lists at http://www.worldstatesmen.org/RussSFSR_admin.html. We have only years of birth, not exact dates, for most of the secretaries. Five of the 1976 first secretaries had been born in 1931, the same year as Yeltsin.