The pattern continued in the house-building combine from 1963 to 1968. Yeltsin himself writes of the mad dash to finish the plan and of how he was in his element in it: “The hardest part of building housing came at the end of the year and at the end of a quarter, when we had to work practically twenty-four hours. Often, especially on the night shifts, I visited the work crews, mostly the female ones.”66 Without self-consciousness, he discloses that as head engineer he sponsored a successful “experiment” to slap up a five-story apartment house in five days flat. The building yard was equipped with three cranes, a network of transport rails, and large stocks of pre-positioned materials; it was the “industrial equivalent of street theater.”67 In March 1966, in his first year as director, a five-story building being completed by the DSK on Moscow Street keeled over. A slipshod subcontractor had not correctly gauged the time needed to allow the foundation to set in the winter months. There was a criminal probe; no charges were laid and Yeltsin was not held culpable. But plans to give him an Order of Lenin for his work were scrubbed, and in April the Sverdlovsk party committee hit him with a formal reprimand. The combine hauled off the detritus and did the building a second time. It was known from then on as the
Yeltsin’s evolving relationships within the layer of CPSU appointees, or nomenklatura, of the post-Stalin Soviet system brought him advantage and vulnerability both. In no time, he learned how to deploy and manipulate incentives. Yakov Ryabov, the first secretary of the party gorkom (city committee) since 1963, was impressed at how he jawboned Sverdlovsk factory directors into lending hundreds of workers to the combine every year to help it meet its housing plan. The Soviet rules required that the resource quotas for any apartments not finished by December 31 be deleted from the coming year’s plan. Yeltsin cagily made the directors see they would be better off assigning the labor and getting housing in exchange. They received their apartments; Yeltsin and his employees met their plans and pocketed year-end bonuses.69
At the same time, Yeltsin raised hackles. He scrapped tirelessly with Nikolai Sitnikov, his boss in SU-13, who had ordered him to give up volleyball coaching. They stayed at the feud when Sitnikov went on to higher things and Yeltsin succeeded him in the directorate. Ryabov and his second secretary, Fëdor Morshchakov, the official behind the creation of the DSK, were sympathetic to Yeltsin, seeing him as a diamond in the rough. They did not write him off when he received his party reprimand in 1966. Ryabov saw to it that Yeltsin was put on the list to be granted a Badge of Honor, his first state award.
Yeltsin needed a mentor. He was on good terms with the head of the construction department of the party gorkom, Boris Kiselëv, a former UPI classmate. Kiselëv saw promise in Yeltsin and introduced him to the party apparatus.70 But the crucial patron was Ryabov. Born in 1928 in the province of Penza, Ryabov labored at the bench in the Urals Turbine Works, assembling diesel engines for tanks, and took his UPI diploma in mechanical engineering by correspondence. Bantam-sized, he was as much of a go-getter as Yeltsin but had a loutish edge. The teenaged Tatyana Yeltsina saw him as one of the more unpleasant of her father’s associates and was slightly afraid of him.71 Ryabov was drawn into work in the CPSU apparatus in 1960 by Andrei Kirilenko, an outsider from the Ukrainian party machine who had been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk
