Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Yet understanding did come.

The Pioneer camp where I was sent had a big storage area, a windowless cellar, where they kept bugles, flags, drums, banners, posters, and costumes. It was a big camp, with probably a thousand children; these props had been kept since the camp’s founding, it seemed—the administrators were probably afraid to throw them out or burn them, since someone could write an anonymous letter revealing that Soviet symbols were being destroyed at Camp X. The job of camp director must have been a highly desirable one; it was a good location, high on a bank of the Oka River, with a view of the flood-meadows, and so the administration preferred to save this arsenal of propaganda assets for an eventual inspection.

I was sent to help the cleaning woman sweep the storeroom; she gave me a broom and dustpan and went off somewhere. I was left alone in the dark space with burned-out lightbulbs; it was filled with cupboards, shelves, and boxes, the ones that might come in handy placed closer to the door, and farther back the old and dusty ones that were never touched.

The particularly disorderly disorder that comes about when various people use things only from time to time was rampant in there; small poles without banners, piles of gold fringe, spools of gold braid, rolls of faded red bunting, rolled-up banners, tarnished bugles, broken drums, hundreds of small flags with stars, tattered songbooks, white belts with star buckles, scattered cockades, plastic emblems of the USSR, and costumes—moth-eaten fur hats with red ribbons, a cloak à la Chapayev. The mess formed a shipwrecked mass. Drawings from camp contests were stuffed into various cracks, and they protruded like giant cabbage leaves, always with the same elements—red stars, Pioneers, flags, tanks, foxholes, hammers and sickles.

A spacious and innocent sunny day awaited outside, while here, in the musty cramped dark there reigned the senile promiscuity of things, the trash heap orgy of obsolete symbols. If there had been just one ordinary object, say a soup pot or an oar, the room would have resembled a storeroom, a collection of junk like the ones I’ve seen in dachas. But no—here there were only the tools of symbolism, abandoned, touched by the beginnings of corruption, when an object begins to fall apart but still maintains its form.

I suddenly realized that for each child in the camp there were three caps, one-and-a-half bugles, two drums, two banners, five flags, and fifteen posters; they manufactured them faster than they were used up, and they didn’t wear out, just got old and accumulated. You could explode trying to blow the bugle, hold a banner, wave a flag, carry a big sign, and play the drum at the same time.

“It would be fun to play grave robbers here,” an inner voice prompted; of course, my parents had told me about thieves in the Valley of the Kings who went down into the stone labyrinths, avoiding traps, and I often imagined myself as one—for I looked for secret places in my parents’ apartment, finding other people’s secrets, intruding on forbidden territory.

I had just decided to play at being a robber of subterranean Egypt when I bumped into something, and the whole edifice of things reaching to the ceiling made a cracking sound and began to list. It was enough to touch one thing for the rest to fall, held by nothing. A bank of shelves fell on me, and with it a mountain of emblems, banners, and drums along with folders of rules for Pioneer games and packets of pennants. They tipped me over softly and stiflingly, pressing me onto the floor, squashing me. I tried to climb out, then laughed: how ridiculous to be buried under this! But after three minutes my arms started going numb under the shelves, I was dizzy from the heat and dust, and most important, I didn’t feel like calling for help, not out of shame or embarrassment but from a worrying, unhealthy lassitude.

In a desperate need to free myself from the pile of dead things, I fought my way out, covered in dust and flakes of gilt paint, and ran to the river to let the flowing water wash away the decay of paper and fabric. Now I did feel like a thief who had made his way into an Egyptian tomb and was caught by dead watchmen; a thief who had not believed the stories of ghostly guardians and who then felt their spectral and yet fully real power.

Another event at the camp advanced my understanding even more.

In a playground surrounded by tall, dark firs stood an enormous portrait of Lenin.

I had seen many different depictions of Lenin, some I liked, some elicited no response. But the camp portrait was special. Triple the height of a man, it stood behind us during morning roll call; you sensed his gaze on the back of your head, pushing you down into the ground. I felt that the Lenin in the portrait knew I thought something about him that the others did not and he wouldn’t stop until he squashed me some day.

Lenin’s face—lips, cheeks, eyes—had melted downward and the forehead, huge, convex, filled with petrified thoughts, took up more than half of the head. The exposed gigantic forehead was horrifying, as if a great and terrible idea was pushing out the skull from within. When we were lined up under that portrait, I thought that Lenin’s head would burst any minute, and something bloody that had been living inside him, like a tapeworm, would crawl out; Lenin would die, but that thing would live.

Around that time, my parents gave me Nikolai Kun’s Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece , probably for the pictures rather than the text; once again, as with the Egyptian slides, I sensed that this was something familiar and once again could not understand why I had these feelings.

Lenin on the poster reminded me of someone or something; I imagined that once I figured it out, I would be safe; the very fact of comparison, recognition, would save me.

Enlightenment came unexpectedly; there must have been some preliminary hint, but I don’t remember it, I remember only how I understood, and gloried in the risky accuracy of the comparison, that Lenin was giving birth to the revolution the way Zeus gave birth to Athena!

I sensed instantly that I had performed an action for which my upbringing, education, and general life conditions had not prepared me; like a cosmonaut, I went out into space, a place where few venture.

The ancient Greek myth and the portrait at the Pioneer camp were one and the same. This was a powerful breakthrough; I was no longer defenseless before Zeus-Lenin, I knew what he was made of, I grasped the matter of his image, I had power over him; of course, not absolute power, but enough to protect me from his pursuing gaze from the poster.

The case with Lenin was more of an exception; more often my feeling about Soviet symbols was what I had experienced in the camp storeroom—lifelessness. I regretted that I had not lived in the times when the heroic legends were created, before there were children’s red flags and pins.

Every year my parents took me to the photographer’s studio near our house, where they had a small pink plastic horse, a toy Red Army stallion. It came with a yellow plastic saber in a blue sheath—the random motley colors proved that the toy was fake even as a toy—and a knit wool cap with an October star and a pointy top, a fake Budyonny broadcloth helmet.

Sitting in the plastic saddle you were supposed to raise the plastic saber over your head, as if riding to the attack; the photographer commanded “Flash!” with an important air and my parents squinted and smiled in satisfaction. For them, this was fun and the props seemed appropriate for my age. Maybe they wanted to even give me some historical images, a sense of connection to the past, in safe form. But for me, this was painful and insulting nonsense, as if they were intentionally mocking me.