The other departure in Yeltsin’s life had bigger implications. In March 1960 he applied for and was granted probationary membership in the CPSU; he was made a full member, with Card No. 03823301, on March 17, 1961. The Khrushchev thaw had made it permissible for the relatives of former political prisoners and deportees to enter the ranks of the party, subject themselves to its discipline, and be certified as model citizens. Yeltsin was to state in his autobiography in 1990 that he “sincerely believed in the ideals of justice the party espoused and enlisted in the party with equal sincerity.” This sentence stressed attentiveness to duty and ideals and the ideal he as a politician made his signature issue in the 1980s—justice for all and the elimination of privileges. He also tried to impart in the memoir that not all communists, even then, were as sincere as he. At the meeting that formalized his membership in 1961, the head bookkeeper of SU-13, with whom he had professional differences, asked a pharisaical question about the exact volume and page in Marx’s
Interviewed in 2002, though, Yeltsin stated that his decision about the party was half-hearted, ideals were of secondary moment, and it came down to a career calculus:
More than once, they urged me [to join]. I was doing well at work, and naturally they hung around me all the time. But I always held back. I did not want to bind myself to the party. I did not want it. I had, you see, a gut feeling about it. But then I was in a dead end. I was required to join the party to become chief of the construction directorate. They made me a simple proposition: If you are willing to do it [join the CPSU], we will promote you. I could still not be a party member when I was head engineer. . . . To be chief, no, for this you needed to be a communist.57
These revised words are more consonant than his memoirs with the fact that, while a young Yeltsin had soaked up mainstream Soviet values, he had not bought into the party qua organization. Unlike his wife, whose father (an official in railroad security) and many relatives in Orenburg were communists, none of the Yeltsins or Starygins was a member of the party. Yeltsin was thirty years of age when he received his party card, significantly older than the mean for that rite of passage. Roughly 10 percent of the adult population, but about 50 percent of all men with a higher education, were CPSU members in the late decades of the Soviet regime. Those bound for work in administration usually enrolled in their mid-twenties, and Gorbachev was twenty-one when admitted as a student.58 The description of Yeltsin’s standoffishness from the party and of his commonsensical decision to join it also comports with the chronology. He filed the application two months after his designation as head engineer of SU-13; he was promoted to SU-13 chief eleven months after his party admission. Unlike Gorbachev, who was a delegate to the Twenty-Second CPSU Congress in Moscow in 1961 (Yeltsin did not go to any congress until 1981), Yeltsin makes no memoir reference to the political headlines of the 1950s and 1960s: the death of Stalin in 1953, the attack on the Stalin cult at the Twentieth CPSU Congress in 1956, Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev in 1964. Having left Urals Polytechnic in 1955, he had missed the outbreak of student unrest in post-secondary institutions in Sverdlovsk and other Soviet cities in 1956, after the Twentieth Congress.59 It is of interest that his brother, Mikhail, a construction worker and UPI dropout, never belonged to the party and said that people only took out cards for selfish reasons. Mikhail, wrote Andrei Goryun in 1991 after getting to know him, “does not conceal his critical attitude toward the communists and asserts that most members whom he knows use their membership in the CPSU for mercenary purposes. He acknowledges he has never discussed these problems with Boris. The brothers have generally avoided conversations on touchy political themes, assuming, it would seem, that their views are too divergent.”60 If they had talked politics in depth, they might in fact have agreed on some matters. Naina Yeltsina entered the party only in 1972, at age forty, for the same reasons that Boris entered in 1961. She served as secretary of the party bureau in her firm, which she described to me as tedious work.
