Rough-Hewn Father of Russian Democracy

Youth in the Urals

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born, reared and launched on his career in Sverdlovsk province, a heavily industrial region in the Ural Mountains, 850 miles east of Moscow. He was born Feb. 1, 1931, in the village of Butka, the first of Nikolai and Klavdia Yeltsin's three children. His early youth was harsh and impoverished, in many ways typical of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, when farmers were being forced into collectives and Stalin's purges touched even the remotest villages.

Yeltsin's grandfather, a blacksmith and church elder, was branded a kulak, or wealthy peasant, and exiled in 1931 to the remote north, where he died after four months. Yeltsin's father, a down-on-his-luck construction worker with a fourth-grade education, was arrested when his eldest son was 3. He spent three years in a prison camp and never spoke about it with his son, whom he beat with a strap. Yeltsin's mother, a seamstress, was warm and loving, and her firstborn was attached to her all his life.

In recollections of his primary school days, Yeltsin painted himself as a little "hooligan" who went out of his way to find trouble. During World War II, he broke into an ammunition dump, stole two hand grenades and tried to break one open with a hammer. The grenade exploded, blowing off two fingers of his left hand.

Tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, Yeltsin became a strong volleyball player. In sports, at school, around the family table, he insisted on being the leader. He graduated from Ural Polytechnic Institute in 1955 -- the first member of his family to go to college -- and married a classmate, Anastasia Girina, known as Naina.

After graduation, he worked as a carpenter, a bricklayer, a concrete maker, a dump-truck driver, a crane operator, a woodworker, a glazier, a plasterer, a painter and a construction foreman. In 1965, he became director of a large factory that manufactured prefabricated houses. To his workers, he was a tough boss who insisted that deadlines be met and brooked no excuses.

In 1976, he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist Party committee, a post he held for nearly 10 years. By now Yeltsin and Naina had two daughters, but by his own account, home and family came second for him. He regarded them as a source of warmth and support but was mostly absorbed with work and, later, politics.

Summoned to Moscow

As a top party official in Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin got to know many of his counterparts around the Soviet Union, including Gorbachev, the party chief of Stavropol province in southwestern Russia. A month after becoming general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, Gorbachev summoned Yeltsin to Moscow as part of a campaign to shake up the party leadership and soon made him Moscow party boss.

From December 1985 to November 1987, Yeltsin shattered the special code of fuzzy language and aloofness that guided Soviet officialdom. He denounced the special stores, dachas and medical services enjoyed by party elites. He rode the buses and subways. He staged a surprise inspection of a state meat store where workers were skimming the best cuts for big shots.

If Moscow intellectuals or Western Sovietologists viewed him as a bit of a rube, most Russians saw him as a muzhik -- a macho peasant, a regular guy. At first, they loved it.

Breaking With the Politburo

Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet leadership were less charmed. Yeltsin had shaken the status quo. His grass-roots appeal frightened the staid men of the Politburo. Opposites in style, bearing and vision, and rivals for the affections of their countrymen, Yeltsin and Gorbachev grew to loathe each other. Yeltsin saw the Soviet leader as a windbag. To Gorbachev, the man from Sverdlovsk was an uncouth media hound.

In late 1987, Yeltsin resigned as a nonvoting Politburo member and slammed the party hierarchy for dragging its feet on perestroika, or restructuring. In an astonishing attack on Gorbachev, he warned that a "cult of personality" was forming around the Soviet leader.

Retribution was swift and brutal. In a three-hour verbal barrage, 23 of Yeltsin's colleagues, including several reformers he had counted as allies, turned on him, accusing him of grandstanding, slander, sowing panic and excessive ambition. Gorbachev had the last word: "It's amazing how one could develop such an oversize ego, such conceit, to set one's ambition above party interests -- above our cause! . . . And now, Comrade Yeltsin, you got what you deserved."