Rural beginnings
Yeltsin's early life belonged to the hard world of Stalin's Soviet Union, not to the polished setting of later Kremlin power. He was born in Butka in the Ural region, and his family experienced the upheavals of collectivisation; his father was imprisoned for a period during the 1930s. Yeltsin grew up amid scarcity, discipline and the official certainties of Soviet life. He trained as a construction engineer in Sverdlovsk, a practical field that rewarded command of schedules, materials and people. That background mattered. Yeltsin's later politics always carried the feel of the building site: impatient with delay, physically energetic, willing to smash through obstacles, sometimes careless about what the smashing damaged. Long before he became a reformer, he learned how Soviet systems worked from the inside.
