Yeltsin полностью

The UPI students bunked eight to a room in the first year and five to a room in the upper classes. Coeducation brought close contact with the opposite sex. Yeltsin had a crush on Margarita Yerina, a student from Berezniki and a figure skater. Yeltsin, the story goes, requested that an acquaintance of both from home, Mikhail Ustinov, help Yerina with a work assignment. “Misha carried out his friend’s request so enthusiastically that he took up with Rita himself and beat Boris to the punch.” One thing led to another and the two married early in the 1952–53 school year. “Boris was invited to the wedding. Congratulating them, he half-jokingly said to Ustinov, ‘So this is the kind of friend you are! I got you to watch over Rita and look what you did!’”¹⁶

In November 1952 Yeltsin and five roommates and neighbors (three females and two males) pooled resources to form a self-help collective that they facetiously called the Troublemaker (Shkodnik) Kolkhoz. Yeltsin, who had suggested it, chaired the group, and each member assumed some responsibility. In the “charter” they signed, the friends agreed to sub for one another in lectures, buy and cook food jointly, go to the movies or to a sports event weekly, visit the bathhouse once a week (where the boys were to drink beer and the girls champagne), and celebrate holidays and birthdays together. With several substitutions, the sextet stayed together until graduation. All were from towns and villages quite remote from Sverdlovsk, and so from parents’ gardens, and much of Shkodnik’s activity focused on food. To save money, the members skipped breakfast, used coupons to buy a cheap lunch, and gathered for a supper cooked on a hotplate in the kitchen cubicle on the residence floor, the ingredients bought by contributions from their stipends.¹⁷

In charge of “sanitation” in the group was Naina Iosifovna Girina, a female student born on March 14, 1932, who had enrolled in the hydraulics department of the construction division in 1950. Naina, baptized Anastasiya and nicknamed Naya, was from the city of Orenburg in the south Urals hills, the eldest of six children of a Cossack family in which some Russian Orthodox religious practices had survived. Her mother kept small icons and every Easter prepared ritual foods (painted eggs and kulich and paskha cakes) and lit candles; from her grandmother she learned two prayers which she memorized and would recite thereafter at times of distress. Naina had wanted to enter medicine, an impecunious and feminized profession in the Soviet Union, but chose engineering, higher-status work in which males were prevalent. She came to UPI not much better clad than Yeltsin: All she owned was two dresses and a flannel track suit hand-sewn by her mother.¹⁸ In 1951–52, the year Yeltsin had to take medical leave, he and Girina had been in a group that took waltz, tango, and foxtrot lessons together. They began a courtship in 1953. Girina “was distinguished by her amicability, affability, and cleanliness. It was impossible to break her composure, and she was able to put out all conflicts in the female collective. . . . She was always neatly dressed and coiffed and was willing to sacrifice an hour of lectures in the institute for a more attractive undertaking.”¹⁹

Yeltsin took away idyllic memories of the camaraderie and “giddy romanticism” shared at the polytechnic. “Never since can I remember feeling such fabulous energy, and against the background of a half-starving, Spartan, almost garrison-like existence.”²⁰ Besides finding his future wife, he made friends there for the duration. The schoolmates were to do a summer journey with their families in 1960 and every five years after that.

A slug of the energy Yeltsin felt was injected into his studies, in which he got almost all 4s and 5s, the honors grades. He was known for a fire-and-ice pattern of work, cramming for exams and handing in assignments in the nick of time. “He studied in quite a strange way—by snatches, convulsively, whatever you want to call it. For the days when the most intense exercises or examinations were scheduled, he would manage to master a mound of information. Then he would take a long break, which did not appeal in the slightest to his teachers.”²¹ It foreshadowed his style as president of Russia four decades later.