And the The Welcome to Russian History Retold, episode 171, Communist, Rebel and Capitalist

Wannabe, Boris Yeltsin.

Before I get into the podcast, I want to say,

I'm back, took a few months off,

as you may have heard from one of my updates.

The play is over, no longer playing the role of

Sheriff Tate in To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm no longer the chairman of the

fundraising committee for my Rotary Club, taking a lot of things off plate and so I'm going to do an episode this week and next week

Unfortunately afterwards I have to take another couple weeks off because I'm flying out to New York City for a meeting, but then after that I plan to do regularly scheduled podcasts from here on out.

So anyway, let's get back to the topic at hand.

On February 1st, 1931 in Butka,

Talytsky District Svidlovsk, U.S.S.R. Nikolai and Klavdia

welcomed a baby boy to the world. Boris Nikolayevich

Yeltsin. They could never have imagined that their child would help dismantle

the USSR some 60 years later.

His father Nikolai probably would be happy as he had been sent to a gulag for three years, starting in 1934.

Going back a little bit, in 1932, Stalin was forcibly collectivizing the farms and had ordered

entire harvests confiscated.

It was the time of the Holomodor where millions of people died of starvation, so Boris's family decided to move away, heading to Kazan, some 700 miles or about 1, 100 kilometers away.

After he was released from the gulag,

Nikolai moved the family yet again,

this time to Beresniki and the Prem Kri

...