Yeltsin полностью

The Yeltsins’ first connubial home was a space in a dormitory owned by Uralkhimmash. They graduated from there to a single room in a two-room apartment owned by the plant and in 1958, after Yelena was born, to a two-room apartment of their own—twenty-eight square meters (300 square feet), with the bathtub in the kitchen, and not far from Vtorchermet, a scrap-iron plant. There they shared a tiny icebox with their next-door neighbors. On Sundays they cooked Boris’s favorite dishes, pel’meni (Siberian dumplings stuffed with ground meat), blinchiki (fritters), and walnut cake, with them and sang folk music. The Yeltsins were among the first in their building to acquire an electric washing machine. A UPI comrade of theirs lived up the stairwell, and the two families used the machine alternate weeks, toting it back and forth. In 1959 Yeltsin’s job as head engineer of SU-13 got him a company car and driver. In 1960, having been issued another two-room apartment in the settlement of Yuzhnyi, closer to his work, they bought their first family refrigerator.⁴⁹

As was the woman’s lot in the USSR, Naina balanced a job—hers was in Vodokanalproyekt, a bureau that drafted blueprints for water and drainage utilities, where she was promoted to head engineer—with running a household and raising children without much husbandly assistance. Nor, unlike umpteen Soviet mothers, could she fall back on a live-in babushka, a grandmother who would hold the fort as she worked: Grandma Girina was in Orenburg and grandma Yeltsina back home in Berezniki and then, beginning in 1962, in Butka. Boris was relieved to delegate money and the care of belongings to his wife: “Never in his life did Boris Nikolayevich concern himself with the family budget, and he had no idea what I was spending the money on. When I ironed his suit, I always put some cash in the pocket, because every respectable man should have cash in his pocket. . . . He never tried to control me and he purchased nothing on his own but books.”⁵⁰

Boris was largely an absentee father, although when his daughters were teenagers he did review their grades on the weekend and, if they were less than a 5, he would zing the underachiever’s school diary across the living room of the apartment. Of their childhood he writes, “I must honestly admit I do not remember the details—when they took their baby steps, when they started to talk, or the rare moments when I tried to help raise them—since I worked almost without a break and we would meet only on Sunday afternoons.” ⁵¹ Naina was as candid about the imbalance between the spouses in a press interview in retirement: “If a woman marries and has children, she has to make sacrifices. . . . You can rarely expect the husband to sacrifice anything on behalf of the family. For the man, the big thing is work. I always tried to make things go smoothly in the family.” She acknowledged in the 1990s that she, too, made less time for the children than she should have and was caught between opposing demands. Friends accused her of negligence, while “at work they chuckled, ‘Here you are guiding them across the street on the telephone.’”⁵² When Yeltsin’s work demanded it, the family’s comfort suffered. Having briefly lived in their first three-room apartment in the south of the city after Tatyana’s birth, they moved to a smaller flat, of two rooms only, around 1965, so he could be handier to the construction sites where he was needed. They transferred several years after that to a sunlit three-room apartment on Voyevodin Street, in the city center. In the first eleven or twelve years of their marriage, Boris and Naina had called seven different places home.⁵³

Romantic gifts and festivities were primarily how Yeltsin expressed affection and salved a guilty conscience. Naina, he wrote, “loves my surprises.” As examples he cited the nosegay and several verses of poetry he sent to the maternity home where she had Yelena in 1957—in Berezniki, where his mother could help with the diapers—and his daughters “squealing from joy” when he picked them up at eleven one night to go a friend’s birthday party.⁵⁴ They all would have loved to see him in the home more. When Yelena and Tatyana were young, the couple took summer holidays at one of the Soviet Union’s Caucasus resorts, dropping the girls off with Yeltsin’s parents and grandparents in Butka. The village was bigger and a little more prosperous than they had left it in the 1930s, although it lost the status of district seat in 1962 and was put under the town of Talitsa. A carpet manufactory, a creamery, and starch mill had opened in the 1950s, and the kolkhoz specialized in breeding hogs. Returning to pick the children up, Boris and Naina would remain in Butka for up to a week to bring in the hay and pick berries and mushrooms.⁵⁵