Then there was Tatyana Yeltsina, who was to be a political player after communism. As a girl, she was “a dreamer” who wanted to become a sea captain, and learned Morse code in preparation, but girls were not taken into the Nakhimov schools (for naval cadets). She then, like her father in the 1940s, longed to be a shipbuilder, and she figure skated and inherited his love for volleyball. Teachers and schoolmates have testified that she was weighed down by high expectations and illness. Graduating from School No. 9 in 1977, she announced to her parents that she planned to study in faroff Moscow. She did not want to repeat the experience of her sister, whose 5s at UPI, she said, were unjustly devalued as having been awarded
Professionally, Yeltsin was every inch the boss he had told his mother he would become. He savored the chief apparatchik’s role. His time as Sverdlovsk first secretary, he was to say in 1989, brought him “the best years of my life” up to then.57 Receipt of the Order of Lenin upon his fiftieth birthday in 1981, with a crimson flag, crimson star, and hammer-and-sickle surrounding a disc portrait of Lenin in platinum, rounded out his set of official awards. It came with an ode to “services rendered to the Communist Party and the Soviet state” and was presented in the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin’s personal records in the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU show him receiving one award while in the construction industry—his Badge of Honor in 1966—and nine as a party official. These included medals honoring the Lenin centenary in 1970, the thirtieth anniversary of victory over Germany in 1975, the centenary of Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of the Soviet secret police) in 1977, and the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army in 1978; Orders of the Red Banner of Labor in 1971 and 1974; the Order of Lenin in 1981; a gold medal for his contribution to the Soviet economy in 1981; and a certificate of thanks from the obkom upon his departure in April 1985. Yeltsin held onto these medals after 1991, still proud of having earned them. They were stored in his home study and put on display at his wake in 2007.58
The boss Yeltsin of the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s must be evaluated in the context of the political and social order of the day. Roving far from the approved path was not in the choice set for the proconsul of the Soviet empire in a strategic province. The Ipat’ev House decision underlines the point. Yeltsin “could not imagine” balking at the Kremlin’s order. Had he, he “would have been fired” and whoever replaced him would have knocked down the building.59
A picture that incorporated nothing but orthodoxy, however, would overlook traits that differentiated Yeltsin from the typical CPSU secretary of his generation. There were signs of him holding back from the tedium of rites and routines. In television footage, he never wears his gold stars and medallions or busses dignitaries Brezhnev-style, although he does give out backslapping bear hugs. He seems more attentive than most to his wardrobe. His hair is suspiciously long for a member in good standing of the nomenklatura, and every few minutes he brushes a hank of it from his forehead. Ennui plays on his face as he drones on at conferences and sits through commemorations.
Substantively, Yeltsin nibbled at the edges of what was admissible in late Soviet conditions and presaged what he was to do in the reform era. He was a compliant activist—accepting of the system and ready to put body and soul into making it work, and yet able to make judicious intrasystemic innovations and accommodations.60
