Yeltsin полностью

The Iset building trust took Yeltsin on as a foreman (master) in June 1956. From there, he climbed sure-footed up the organizational ladder, rung by rung: work superintendent (prorab) in June 1957, senior work superintendent (starshii prorab) in June 1958, head engineer (glavnyi inzhener) of SU-13 (Construction Directorate No. 13) in January 1960, and chief (nachal’nik) of the directorate in February 1962. The first project he completed, in time for the November 7 holiday in 1957, was a five-story apartment house on Griboyedov Street, which ran by Uralkhimmash, the Urals Chemical Machinery Works, on the southeastern extremity of Sverdlovsk. In 1957–58 he finished construction at a textile-mill project that had been incomplete for several years and had been ransacked by the workers. But he went back to residential construction. Housing was a political priority for Moscow, dictated by the need to gain favor with the populace.

Shelter for the masses had gotten the short end of the stick under Stalin, whose preference was for office blocks and luxury apartments destined for elite groups. The war and the postwar military buildup had exacerbated the shortfall. Griboyedov Street was part of the first wave of the new consumerism in Soviet housing. The new self-contained flats in houses like this one, informally dubbed khrushchëby (a play on Khrushchev’s surname and trushchoba, an old Russian word for “slum”), were built to standardized designs. Minimalist as they were, they were a real step up from barracks and communal apartments and gave families spaces in which to store and improve possessions, and a kitchen where they could talk, laugh, and grieve in privacy. Five stories was the maximum that could be completed in one building season, and, under the regulations, could be commissioned with neither an elevator nor garbage chute. By the early 1960s a second wave of innovation was toward korobki, or “boxes,” much taller structures out of prefabricated reinforced-concrete slabs, generally on bulldozer-cleared outer areas of the cities. There was one production cycle for the lookalike product, from mixing the cement to fitting the doorknobs and the kitchen sink.⁴⁴

In June 1963 Yeltsin was reassigned to the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine, the high-profile enterprise for housing construction in the city, as head engineer. In December 1965 he was elevated to director of the combine. “He knew,” Naina Yeltsina remembers, “that it was time to move on when the [post] he was in had started to bore him. So when he was chief of the construction directorate, for example, he found it was getting repetitive, he had done everything he could, and he wanted more challenging work.”⁴⁵ The need was satisfied temporarily, as Yeltsin now held Sverdlovsk’s most salient administrative post associated with popular welfare. “Being ‘first’ was probably always in my nature,” he was to observe in Notes of a President, “although I perhaps did not realize it in the early years.”⁴⁶ Ten years after leaving the polytechnic, now that he was in his mid-thirties, he and everyone around him realized it.

Meantime, Yeltsin made shifts in his personal life. He stopped playing league volleyball in 1956, limiting himself to coaching a local women’s team. That year, he and his college sweetheart, Naina Girina, who had returned to Orenburg after graduation, were reunited in Sverdlovsk and married in a civil ceremony on September 28, 1956, celebrating the nuptials with 150 friends in a local reception hall. Boris had to borrow his grandfather Starygin’s copper wedding band to give Naina. He did not buy her a gold band until their fortieth anniversary in 1996.

The couple soon joined the Soviet baby boom, parents to Yelena (Lena, born in August 1957) and Tatyana (Tanya, born in January 1960). The son Boris earnestly hoped for never materialized. After the birth of Yelena, all the peasant prescriptions for conceiving a boy were followed, such as putting an axe and workman’s cap under the pillow: “My friends, experts on customs, told us that for sure we would now have a son. The verified methods were of no use.” The new arrival “was a prim, smiling child, who maybe took after her mother’s character, where our elder daughter takes after me.”⁴⁷ When they were still young girls, their maternal grandmother, Mariya Girina, had a priest secretly baptize them at a home chapel in Orenburg, there being no officially recognized Orthodox church in the vicinity. Their father was not informed about the procedure. Their mother not only approved but brought each child to Orenburg for the purpose. Naina Iosifovna, in her words, “lived all my life with God in my soul,” although active practice was impossible. Like Klavdiya Yeltsina, she owned several small icons, and stood one of them on her night table, a talisman of pre-Soviet ways and beliefs.⁴⁸