Already his life’s plotline diverged from that of his future ally and antagonist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the Gorbachevs of Privol’noye, Stavropol province, had their share of tears, the family had been dirt poor and supported the collectivization drive that was at its climax when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were born in 1931. Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Pantelei Gopkalo, was a communist, the organizer of a peasant cooperative in the 1920s, and the first chairman of the local kolkhoz; his father, Sergei, to whom he was close, joined the party at the front during World War II.75 While still in Privol’noye, in 1948, young Gorbachev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, one of the USSR’s highest laurels, for his norm-busting work at bringing in the harvest (Sergei, a tractor driver, won the Order of Lenin), and won a medal in school for a hagiographic essay about Stalin.76 Yeltsin, the son and grandson of kulaks, would be torn from the village by collectivization, grew up in a city, had a twinge of doubt about Stalin, had strained relations with his father, and would wait until 1971 to win his first Order of the Red Banner. In 1950, still a teenager and about to leave Privol’noye for university in Moscow, Gorbachev applied for the Communist Party and was made a probationary member; he was promoted to full membership in 1952, with Stalin still in the Kremlin.77 Yeltsin was to take out probationary membership ten years after Gorbachev and full membership nine years after him.
To deal with the demands of his provincial youth, Boris Yeltsin developed a repertoire of life scripts. They were not mere coming-of-age stereotypes but were to be of ongoing relevance in later life. The scripts implied various relationships with the social environment. Survival was for the lonely individual, and the few others he trusted, to achieve, leaving nothing to chance and saying not a word more about it than needed to be said. Duty was about conforming to conditions and meeting the standards of family, equals, and superiors. Success was earned in contestation with others, not primarily through the pursuit of security at all costs or through cooperation. Testing was also a comparative exercise, though more about the capability of acting than the doing. And rebellion, in the confines of the Soviet system, required a break with convention and with lines of subordination. Artistry in one role did not negate the next. The boy with the mathematical cast of mind also had a Tom Sawyer–like taste for adventure. Yeltsin could give teacher Khonina the sense that he “never violated” the rules, and get faculty approval as class monitor year after year, while showing her a “fiery temperament” and coming on to the other young people as someone who could contravene the rules to his and sometimes their benefit. As his friend Sergei Molchanov put it, “He stood out, without a doubt. He . . . was someone who made things a little dangerous.”78 As both propagator of and occasional scoffer at the constituted ways, he was more than a face in the crowd. One comparative study of modern rulers finds that as youths 61 percent of them tended to conform to authority and 16 percent were nonconformists. Yeltsin in a sense was these two things together.79
The common denominator in all five scripts is the ethos of flinty self-sufficiency and willpower that suffuses the vibrant subculture of the Urals. As Yeltsin commented, he was a person “who incessantly needs to prove his strength and ability to overcome, to breathe deep . . . to load himself up to total exhaustion.” Until his health nosedived in the 1990s, he was what Russians call a
