I. The Darkness of the Yeltsin Years

Was Boris Yeltsin even Russian?

Coming from within my own family, I had always heard the following two characterizations of Boris Yeltsin: Russian swine-man or Yiddish traitor. The men went with the latter and the women would shriek in alarm when the men would whisper these conspiracy theories to me. In my mind then, as I learned to discern which gender was capable of truth-telling, Yeltsin became a non-Russian entity, and that’s the assumption that I had about him for a long while as a result.

[Caption: when you are around your own, you can relax.]

But this may have been a heuristic or an approximation of the truth, not a strict objective reality.

Generally, Westerners have always had this strange mental impairment by which they seem incapable of differentiating between ethnic phenotypes. You could show them a picture of an Ethiopian and a Swede side by side, and many would tell you with a straight face that they saw no difference. It is a religious dogma in America to not be able to recognize ethnic phenotypes, for some reason. In contrast, in Ukraine there is simply a dogma that states that Russians should be blamed for everything that non-Russians do.

Nowadays, despite Yandex (based in Israel) cracking down on search results, you will still find hundreds of blogs sharing conspiracy theories about Yeltsin’s non-Russian family roots.

I mention all of this to point out that what I am sharing here is very basic or entry level conspiracy tier information in the Slavlands. It wouldn’t really cause much of a reaction if you mentioned it in mixed company, although if you were wise, you’d avoid bringing it up around the hoes, of course.

I hesitate to bring Yeltsin’s possible non-Russian roots up in part because my earlier assertions, that a man named Yuri Fleckenstein was clearly Jewish, merited a summary ban from Unz Review by the proprietor of the otherwise open-minded alternative news e-magazine. This, to my mind, is explained at least partially by that peculiar cognitive inability of many Americans to detect ethnicity.

They are unable to look at a picture of a person and notice what our Eastern, barbaric, mystical Slavic eyes can detect with ease. For example, this picture is apparently not proof enough of my claims about Fleckenstein:

Hell, you can even find the skeleton of the conspiracy around “Andropov’s” ethnic background on Wikipedia.

Am I really such a genius and crack-investigator for being able to read the Wikipedia article on a public figure and cross-reference it with the Russian conspiracy blogosphere and the lurid tales of intrigue and betrayal that my Soviet grandfather shared with me? For sharing what anyone with an eccentric uncle or right-wing minded older Soviet man in the family would have heard growing up? Or is there some sort of peculiar consensus to not dig too deeply into these matters and exercise a kind of ethnographical blindness?

It seems like what I am really guilty of, is pointing out the Emperor’s long nose and little hat.

Unz is actually right to point out that for all the tomes upon tomes written about the collapse of the USSR, no one in the West seems to have noticed that major figures like Yakovlev, Chubais, Mao, Gaidar, Fleckenstein, Finklestein, Kissinger, and others were all Jewish, for some reason. But am I to blame for the fact that well-paid university court scholars and Israeli-funded political pundits and professional bureaucrats serving the Zio-American Deep State didn’t see fit to inform the American public of this fact?

Speaking of Y/Jakovlev:

Again: this is some sort of rare Western cognitive disease, clearly.

They look at this …

… and can’t see that it’s clearly very different from this:

Yakovlev is also literally a Jewish name to boot.

What’s more, Yakovlev literally wrote declarations accusing Russians of being racially prone to antisemitism and worked hard to promote the Holocaust and Zionist ideologies in the USSR and then the Russian Federation. All of these details were listed by me, exhaustively and intensively in my essays on the topic, but they were simply ignored because a man literally bearing the family name “of Jacob” couldn’t possibly be Jewish — American academics would have surely pointed out this fact!

Alas, there is no overcoming the cognitive disease that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent people and makes them see a Russian man where a Jewish man is actually standing right in front of them and lecturing about the horrors of the Holocaust and the need to support Israel.

This problem will also no doubt plague me when writing this Boris Yeltsin series.

Many of Boris’ decisions seem baffling from the perspective of a “Russian Nationalist”, which is what Yeltsin presented himself as when he staked out the Russian presidency. However, they all become clear and easy to understand when you consider the possibility that Yeltsin was just Jewish himself.

The problem is that there is no smoking gun like there is with messieurs Fleckenstein and Y/Jakovlev. Those two are so cut and dry and obvious that if Westerners cannot figure out that they were Jewish, they have absolutely no hope of understanding Russia or the Soviet Union before that at all.

Now, personally, I don’t think that there is obvious photographic/physiognomy proof of Yeltsin being Jewish. Nor do I think that the investigations into his family surname are conclusive. I will present my personal theory on Yeltsin towards the end of the essay.

Because all that we have with Yeltsin, is in fact just a conspiracy theory.

That doesn’t mean that the theory that he is Jewish is wrong or right; conspiracy theories exist because of the destruction or obfuscation of evidence for one reason or another and curious people trying to fill in the gaps as best they can with reasoned guesses. So, the reason why we have conspiracy theories about JFK and 9/11 are because the US federal government covers up the relevant information and fabricates fake narratives to effect its agenda. All we are left with are reasoned guesses of variable quality — conspiracy theories.

In the broadest outlines possible, the Yeltsin conspiracy goes something like this:

Professional historians and ordinary people have always been interested in the origins of politicians who went down in history. Who were Boris Yeltsin’s ancestors?

The first leader of the Russian Federation was born in the Sverdlovsk region into a family of dispossessed peasants. Relatives of Boris Nikolaevich – grandfather Ignat Eltsyn, father Nikolai Ignatievich and mother Klavdiya Vasilievna – Russian by nationality in several generations. Therefore, according to the official version, the politician was Russian.

However, the study of the family tree of the Yeltsin family continues. Various theories emerge. Some researchers are actively looking for Jewish roots in Yeltsin’s origins. Specialists are particularly interested in the absence of a soft sign in the surname of Boris Nikolaevich’s grandfather – Eltsyn.

The soft sign is usually a giveaway of a Jewish family, they would use the soft sign or Ь in a strange way in their names. So Eltsin/Yeltsin’s name is not a typical Russian name, and it appears to have been spelled in the Jewish way in the old census reports, that’s the claim.

Think of it like using “J” when you are hispanic where an Anglo would use an “H” instead. An American sees a “J” and immediately reads it as a “— ghe” sound, so like Jesus becomes “— ghee-sus” whereas a hispanic or Latinx would say “— hey-sus” instead.

And the same subtle distinction occurs with “— eh” sounding words and names between Yiddishers and Russians.

Historian D. Panov, referring to the questionnaires of immigrants who arrived in the Urals, argued that in 1921 a soft sign appeared in the surname of the first president of Russia. Among the settlers were Yeltsin’s ancestors. Note that the census says nothing about Jews. The politician’s relatives gained a foothold in the Urals, where the future leader of the state was born.

Also in the 1990s, the following theory was voiced: Boris Nikolaevich’s uncle was allegedly the Jew Eltsin Boris Moiseevich. Researchers even went to the Yeltsins’ native land to clarify information with local residents and look into the archives. However, FSB officers prevented the experiment from being carried out.

Had the FSB allowed that investigation to go through, perhaps we wouldn’t be conspiracizing now.

…

Now, let’s just dive into his biography to find out if there’s any fire behind all the smoke.

From a large Russian Culture Studies magazine we have the following mainstream and approved account. This article explains why Boris Yeltsin was caught lying and actively covering up his family origins in the late USSR and the 90s. It was when he started fumbling his own origin story that the people began to suspect yet another crypto had been appointed by the shtetl to fleece Russia.

Why the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin hid his origins

When the father of the future leader of the country was imprisoned in the Gulag, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, his wife was left alone with her three-year-old son. Klavdia Vasilievna had a hard time in those years, because her husband was a talented builder, and his inventions came into use. He is remembered as a very talented person, and even his unseemly past did not prevent Boris Nikolaevich from making a brilliant political career. Did the son of a dispossessed peasant actually conduct anti-Soviet activities and how did his life turn out after the camps?

Mother of Boris Yeltsin – Klavdiya Starygina was born ten years before the revolution in the family of a woodworker and a dressmaker. The girl followed in the footsteps of her mother, whose services were in great demand and was also introduced to her skills from childhood. Little Boris watched his mother work at the sewing machine from childhood, and it has always been an integral part of the interior, no matter where they live. Later, when, with her son’s high post, interest in Klavdia Vasilievna was also very high, she willingly shared memories of their lives, but almost never talked about the period when her husband was under arrest. Although, probably, she herself didn’t know much – the times were such that they could take anyone for anything overnight. And Boris Nikolaevich himself learned that his father had a criminal record only after the collapse of the USSR.It is quite possible that this was a very pedagogically correct decision so that he would not feel the pressure of other people’s «mistakes».

Already we have two interesting details.

His father was throw into a Gulag for anti-Stalinist activity. The only group still around in Russia at the time that was capable of working against the Soviet government was the Trotsky faction, which was in a struggle for power against the old Leninist and Stalin-aligned faction.

And Boris now has a reason to have hid his family background that is culturally acceptable in the later USSR, which had “de-Stalinized” and condemned the repressions that occurred under Stalin as being motivated by chauvinism and anti-Marxist ideals.

To summarize:

Until the 90s, Boris Yeltsin preferred not to remember his origins. Especially about the fact that not only his father was prosecuted under such an article, but also about the fact that he came from a family of dispossessed peasants. It was probably this circumstance that became one of the reasons for his father’s arrest, becoming another argument against it. If the general public had learned that his family had once fought the Bolsheviks, his political career could have turned out completely differently.

(…)

So there you go, case closed.

But why did these rumors of Yeltsin’s Jewishness find such fertile ground in the first place? Well, there was plenty of corroborating evidence, I suppose. Like, his entire government was Jewish. And here I am not really even exaggerating. Yeltsin famously couldn’t even name a single non-Jew in his own government when pressed by a journalist.