Yeltsin полностью

Yeltsin’s diploma assignment had to be carried out in one month rather than the allotted five, since he had blown a semester on traveling with the volleyball team. “I still can’t figure out how I did it,” he burbles in Confession. “It was unreal how much of a mental and physical effort I had to make.” His project was an undistinguished design for an overhead bucket line to transfer waste materials out of a coal mine. In the memoir, he was to misrepresent it as a plan for a television tower, so avant-garde that assistance from faculty and students was out of the question and only Urals self-reliance would save the day. “Until then there were almost no [towers] around, and so I had to sort everything out myself. . . . No one . . . could help me with this new and unknown theme. I had to do the drawings myself, do the calculations myself, do everything from beginning to end myself.” ³⁹ Whether this was a fib or an inadvertency,⁴⁰ Yeltsin was attracted to futuristic undertakings and to the emerging medium of television, which was to play a big part in his political life. One of his pet projects as leader of the province’s party organization in the 1980s was to build a TV transmission tower at the midpoint of the Sverdlovsk skyline, not far from the city’s large circus building. Only the conical concrete column of the structure, and not the planned restaurant and metal spire, was up when work stopped around 1990. It is 725 feet high. The plan was for the tower to soar up to 1,300 feet, which would have made it the sixth or seventh tallest in the world.⁴¹

Graduates of Soviet universities and institutes were assigned to their first jobs by the educational bureaucracy and were free to seek other employment after two or three years. The year Yeltsin graduated was the last in which many young civil engineers, including UPI students, were ordered to projects in the Gulag, which was liquidated by 1956. He was fortunate not to have drawn such an assignment. Before getting into the work world, he spent ten weeks after graduation in June 1955 playing with UPI’s varsity volleyball team at tournaments in Tbilisi, Leningrad, and Riga, Latvia. He presented himself at the Lower Iset Construction Directorate in Sverdlovsk in September. The appointment augured well. Reacting against decades in which construction was a backwater of makeshift methods and unqualified, often convict, labor, the post-Stalin leadership was determined to give it a trained proletarian workforce, effective supervision, and the capital investment to press ahead with building factories and cities. The industry was to flourish under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

His UPI pedigree gave Yeltsin the right to go straightaway to project foreman. Instead, he chose to work for a year as a trainee in the building trades with the men and women he would later oversee. Several analysts have reasoned that it was a financial decision, since junior-grade engineers in the Soviet Union were paid less than construction workers.⁴² They are mistaken: Yeltsin’s wage as an apprentice worker was lower than what he would have gotten starting as a foreman. The decisive motivation was self-sufficiency. Some of the book knowledge from UPI would have been a dim guide to “the real life of the workplace.” Worse would be dependence on other people’s judgment. “I was certain that it would be very rocky for me if any crew leader [brigadir] could consciously or unconsciously wrap me around his finger because his practical knowledge of the job outstripped mine.”⁴³ Yeltsin waded through twelve hard-hat specialties—carpenter, plasterer, stonemason, painter, crane operator, and the like—and secured a rudimentary competence in each. He helped build factory workshops, apartments, and schools. The job sites were filthy and hazardous, and he did not shy away from danger in Sverdlovsk any more than he had as a youth in Berezniki. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he tells of a fall from scaffolding, a locomotive just missing him as he sat in a stalled truck, and having to secure a runaway crane.