Yeltsin полностью

The frolicking and jousting with classroom instructors that were so frequent in Berezniki tailed off. Yeltsin’s tiff with a lecturer in political economy, a dour communist by the name of Savel’ëva (the students nicknamed her Sova, the Owl), was trivial by comparison. He was turned off more by her unbending pedagogy than by the conservatism of her lectures. His grade of 3 in the course barred him from graduating with distinction, and he waived the chance to retake the exam and try for a higher grade.²² Yeltsin cut classes in favor of athletic and other interests, but his friend, group monitor Yurii Poluzadov, who filled out attendance sheets with the dean’s office, covered for him. Poluzadov and Yeltsin both had their stipends docked one September for late filing of their reports on summer activities.²³ Yeltsin allows in Confession on an Assigned Theme that some of his teachers were hard on him out of disapproval of the time he put into athletics. The example he gives is not Savel’ëva but Stanislav Rogitskii, the head of the department of construction mechanics. In a course on elasticity, Rogitskii once gave him a snap quiz, saying that a great athlete like him would need no preparation, and did not let him use the formulas recorded in his notebook. Yeltsin was not up to the exercise, and the two “fought for a long time.” One day, though, Yeltsin found the solution to a mathematical problem set by the professor, which, he said, had baffled students for ten years. Rogitskii worked up “a true affection” for Yeltsin—repaid in Yeltsin’s memoirs—but still gave him a grade of 4, not the 5 Yeltsin expected. As with Savel’ëva, Yeltsin refused an offer to retake the final exam.²⁴

Yeltsin shunned all political topics and involvements at Urals Polytechnic and did not talk about the regime’s maltreatment of his family. His attitude makes for a ringing contrast with his rival-to-be, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, a Komsomol organizer in his village school, served as a Komsomol secretary in the Moscow State University law division and took out full membership in the governing party in 1952, in his second year of study. Yeltsin gave wide berth to the UPI committee of the Komsomol, in which participation was necessary for anyone intending to work in the guilds of the Communist Party apparatus and the Soviet security services. Committee documents cite his name but two or three times, in connection with his favorite extracurricular activity: sports, and specifically volleyball.²⁵

Games sublimated Yeltsin’s need to prove himself, at an age when boyish capers were no longer appropriate. At the Pushkin School in Berezniki, he had conditioned muscles and nerves to compensate for the gash in his left hand and to get firmer control of the all-white leather sphere. His love for volleyball was quasi political: “I liked the way the ball obeyed me, the way I could pounce on it and return the most awesome of volleys.”²⁶ That he was tall and strong helped. He also liked volleyball’s cooperative dimension. In the other games he tried out (cross-country skiing, decathlon, gymnastics, boxing, and wrestling), the competitors were individuals; only this was a team endeavor, with six per side and a need for synchronization on the compact playing surface. Versatility and waiting one’s turn were required, since volleyball players rotate through the positions. Yeltsin’s favorite move was the downward “spike” of the ball over the net after it had been set on a high flight. Impatient with waiting, he had the squad work out maneuvers that let him spike from the back court as well as the normal location, the two hitter’s places in the front row.²⁷ He made the divisional and institute-wide teams his freshman year, captaining both and coaching several other teams for extra income. He gleefully noted in his memoirs that he logged six hours at the gymnasium daily and, between that and homework, pared his sleeping time to four hours a night—a figure confirmed by contemporaries.