Boris Yeltsin

1931–1948: Childhood and adolescence

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on 1 February 1931 in Butka, a village in the Ural Oblast of the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union. His family, who were ethnic Russians, had lived in this area of the Urals since at least the eighteenth century.

His father, Nikolai Yeltsin, had married his mother, Klavdiya Vasilyevna Starygina, in 1928. Yeltsin always remained closer to his mother than to his father; the latter beat his wife and children on various occasions.

The Soviet Union was then under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, who led the one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Seeking to transform the country into a socialist society according to Marxist–Leninist doctrine, in the late 1920s Stalin's government had initiated a project of mass rural collectivisation coupled with dekulakization. As a prosperous farmer, Yeltsin's paternal grandfather, Ignatii, was accused of being a kulak in 1930. His farm, which was in Basmanovo (also known as Basmanovskoye), was confiscated, and he and his family were forced to reside in a cottage in nearby Butka. There, Nikolai and Ignatii's other children were allowed to join the local kolkhoz (collective farm), but Ignatii himself was not; he and his wife, Anna, were exiled in 1934 to Nadezhdinsk, where he died two years later.

As an infant, Yeltsin was christened in the Russian Orthodox Church; his mother was devout, and his father unobservant. In the years after his birth, the area was hit by the famine of 1932–1933; throughout his childhood, Yeltsin was often hungry. In 1932, Yeltsin's parents moved to Kazan, where Yeltsin attended kindergarten. There, in 1934, the OGPU state security services arrested Nikolai, accused him of anti-Soviet agitation, and sentenced him to three years in the Dmitrov labor camp. Yeltsin and his mother then were ejected from their residence and were taken in by friends; Klavdiya worked at a garment factory in her husband's absence. In October 1936, Nikolai returned; in July 1937, the couple's second child, Mikhail, was born. That month, they moved to Berezniki, in Perm Krai, where Nikolai got work on a potash combine project. In July 1944, they had a third child, Valentina.

Between 1939 and 1945, Yeltsin received a primary education at Berezniki's Railway School Number 95. Academically, he did well at primary school and was repeatedly elected class monitor by fellow pupils. There, he also took part in activities organized by the Komsomol and Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization. This overlapped with Soviet involvement in the Second World War, during which Yeltsin's paternal uncle, Andrian, served in the Red Army and was killed. From 1945 to 1949, Yeltsin studied at the municipal secondary school number 1, also known as Pushkin High School. Yeltsin did well at secondary school, and there took an increasing interest in sports, becoming captain of the school's volleyball squad. He enjoyed playing pranks and in one instance played with a grenade, which blew off the thumb and index finger of his left hand. With friends, he would go on summer walking expeditions in the adjacent taiga, sometimes for many weeks.

1960–1975: Early membership of the Communist Party

In March 1960, Yeltsin became a probationary member of the governing Communist Party and a full member in March 1961. In his later autobiography, he stated that his original reasons for joining were "sincere" and rooted in a genuine belief in the party's socialist ideals. In other interviews he instead stated that he joined because membership was a necessity for career advancement. His career continued to progress during the early 1960s; in February 1962 he was promoted chief (nachal'nik) of the construction directorate. In June 1963, Yeltsin was reassigned to the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine as its head engineer, and in December 1965 became the combine's director. During this period he was largely involved in building residential housing, the expansion of which was a major priority for the government. He gained a reputation within the construction industry as a hard worker who was punctual and effective and who was used to meeting the targets set forth by the state apparatus. There had been plans to award him the Order of Lenin for his work, although this was scrapped after a five-story building he was constructing collapsed in March 1966. An official investigation found that Yeltsin was not culpable for the accident.

Within the local Communist Party, Yeltsin gained a patron in Yakov Ryabov, who became the first secretary of the party gorkom in 1963. In April 1968, Ryabov decided to recruit Yeltsin into the regional party apparatus, proposing him for a vacancy in the obkom's department for construction. Ryabov ensured that Yeltsin got the job despite objections that he was not a longstanding party member. That year, Yeltsin and his family moved into a four-room apartment on Mamin-Sibiryak Street, downtown Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin then received his second Order of the Red Banner of Labor for his work completing a cold-rolling mill at the Upper Iset Works, a project for which he had overseen the actions of 15,000 laborers. In the late 1960s, Yeltsin was permitted to visit the West for the first time as he was sent on a trip to France. In 1975, Yeltsin was then made one of the five obkom secretaries in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, a position that gave him responsibility not only for construction in the region but also for the forest and the pulp-and-paper industries. Also in 1975, his family relocated to a flat in the House of Old Bolsheviks on March Street.

1976–1985: First Secretary of Sverdlovsk Oblast

In October 1976, Ryabov was promoted to a new position in Moscow. He recommended that Yeltsin replace him as the First Secretary of the Party Committee in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Leonid Brezhnev, who then led the Soviet Union as General Secretary of the party's Central Committee, interviewed Yeltsin personally to determine his suitability and agreed with Ryabov's assessment. At the Central Committee's recommendation, the Sverdlovsk obkom then unanimously voted to appoint Yeltsin as its first secretary. This made him one of the youngest provincial first secretaries in the Russian SFSR, and gave him significant power within the province.

Where possible, Yeltsin tried to improve consumer welfare in the province, arguing that it would make for more productive workers. Under his provincial leadership, work started on various construction and infrastructure projects in the city of Sverdlovsk, including a subway system, the replacement of its barracks housing, new theaters and a circus, the refurbishment of its 1912 opera house, and youth housing projects to build new homes for young families. In September 1977, Yeltsin carried out orders to demolish the Ipatiev House, the location where the Romanov royal family had been killed in 1918, over the government's fears that it was attracting growing foreign and domestic attention. He was also responsible for punishing those living in the province who wrote or published material that the Soviet government considered to be seditious or damaging to the established order.

Yeltsin sat on the civil-military collegium of the Urals Military District and attended its field exercises. In October 1978, the Ministry of Defence gave him the rank of colonel. Also in 1978, Yeltsin was elected without opposition to the Supreme Soviet. In 1979 Yeltsin and his family moved into a five-room apartment at the Working Youth Embankment in Sverdlovsk. In February 1981, Yeltsin gave a speech to the 26th CPSU Congress and on the final day of the Congress was selected to join the Communist Party Central Committee.

Yeltsin's reports to party meetings reflected the ideological conformity that was expected within the authoritarian state. Yeltsin played along with the personality cult surrounding Brezhnev, but he was contemptuous of what he saw as the Soviet leader's vanity and sloth. He later claimed to have quashed plans for a Brezhnev museum in Sverdlovsk. While First Secretary, his world-view began to shift, influenced by his reading; he kept up with a wide range of journals published in the country and also claimed to have read an illegally printed samizdat copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Many of his concerns about the Soviet system were prosaic rather than ideological, as he believed that the system was losing effectiveness and beginning to decay. He was increasingly faced with the problem of Russia's place within the Soviet Union; unlike other republics in the country, the RSFSR lacked the same levels of autonomy from the central government in Moscow. In the early 1980s, he and Yurii Petrov privately devised a tripartite scheme for reforming the Soviet Union that would involve strengthening the Russian government, but it was never presented publicly.

By 1980, Yeltsin had developed the habit of appearing unannounced in factories, shops, and public transport to get a closer look at the realities of Soviet life. In May 1981, he held a question-and-answer session with college students at the Sverdlovsk Youth Palace, where he was unusually frank in his discussion of the country's problems. In December 1982 he then gave a television broadcast for the region in which he responded to various letters. This personalised approach to interacting with the public brought disapproval from some Communist Party figures, such as First Secretary of Tyumen Oblast, Gennadii Bogomyakov, although the Central Committee showed no concern. In 1981, he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his work. The following year, Brezhnev died and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who in turn ruled for 15 months before his own death; Yeltsin spoke positively about Andropov. Andropov was succeeded by another short-lived leader, Konstantin Chernenko. After his death, Yeltsin took part in the Central Committee plenum which appointed Mikhail Gorbachev the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thus de facto Soviet leader, in March 1985.

Colton described Yeltsin as a man who "teemed with inner complexities", who exhibited both a "mathematical cast of mind" and a "taste for adventure", noting that Yeltsin had "the intuition for grasping a situation holistically". Colton thought Yeltsin could be bullheaded, and restless. Evans noted that in Yeltsin's autobiography, the leader appeared to view himself as more of a Soviet person than a Russian. Throughout his life, Yeltsin sustained a number of health problems which he would usually try to conceal. As a child, he sustained both a broken nose and a maimed hand, physical attributes he remained self-conscious about; in public he would often conceal his left hand under the table or behind his tie. He was also deaf on the right side due to a middle-ear infection. Although his mother was a devout Orthodox Christian, Yeltsin did not grow up as a practitioner, only becoming so in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yeltsin stated that his "style of management" was "tough" and that he "demanded strict discipline and fulfilment of promises". Yeltsin was a workaholic; at UPI university, he developed the habit of sleeping for only four hours at night. He was punctual and very strict regarding the tardiness of his subordinates. He had an excellent memory, and enjoyed reading; by 1985 his family had around 6000 volumes in their possession. At UPI university, he was known for enjoying practical jokes. He enjoyed listening to folk songs and pop tunes, and from youth could play the lozhki spoons. Until poor health stopped him in the 1990s, Yeltsin enjoyed swimming in icy water, and throughout his life started each day with a cold shower. He also loved using the banya steambath. Yeltsin also enjoyed hunting and had his own collection of hunting guns. He liked to give watches and other keepsakes to his employees, often as a means of motivating them to work harder. He disliked people swearing, and when frustrated or angry, he was known to often snap pencils in his hand.

Yeltsin had a high tolerance for alcohol, and by the 1980s he was drinking alcohol at or above the average for the party elite. Yeltsin's favorite writer was Anton Chekhov, although he also enjoyed the work of Sergei Yesenin and Alexander Pushkin. Colton described Yeltsin as having a "husky baritone" voice.

Doder and Branson noted that Yeltsin was "a hero for young Russians, a cult figure to those who were not necessarily anticommunists but who were filled with bitterness and apathy" from the Brezhnev years. They noted he was "ebullient, almost outrageously open", and also "charismatic". They added that Yeltsin presented himself as "a true working-class hero" when challenging the Soviet administration.

Yeltsin had nevertheless always wanted a son.

Yelena briefly married a school friend, Aleksei Fefelov, against her parents' wishes. They had a daughter, Yekaterina, in 1979, before separating. Yelena then married an Aeroflot pilot, Valerii Okulov, with whom she had a second daughter, Mariya, in 1983. Yeltsin's other daughter, Tatyana, married fellow student Vilen Khairullin, an ethnic Tatar, while studying at Moscow State University in 1980. In 1981 they had a son, named Boris after his grandfather, but soon separated. Tatyana then married again, to Leonid Dyachenko, and for a while they lived with Yeltsin at his Moscow apartment during the mid-1980s. Yeltsin was loyal to his friends. As friends, Yeltsin selected individuals he deemed to be professionally competent and morally fastidious. Aron noted that Yeltsin could be "an inexhaustible fount of merriment, exuberance and hospitality" among his friends.