Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Meanwhile, back home, the American financial system collapsed. From my perch at the Coffee Grind, I watched events unfold on Facebook and the website of the New York Times .

Some of my old classmates joked about the news—“Good thing I work in an industry where no one makes any money,” Sarah wrote on Facebook—but on the Slavic jobs website things were grim. One search got canceled when the funding for the job fell through. And there were rumors of further cuts.

“We’re fucked,” my adviser told me over Gchat. “Nelson”—Phil Nelson, the outspoken president of our university—“has been treating the endowment like his own personal poker game. I bet we’re about to lose some unthinkable chunk of it. And if oil prices collapse, the campus in Qatar is in trouble.” The satellite campus in Qatar had been one of President Nelson’s signature gambles, and it had been turning a nice profit during the era of $100 barrels of oil.

“Won’t more people go back to school if the economy is bad?” I said. I’d read that somewhere.

“Sure,” said my adviser, “but they’ll go to an affordable school. They’ll go to a good school.”

“I swear to God,” he went on, “I could get fired any minute. I’m afraid to check my email!”

“Aren’t you on email right now?”

“Yes. But I’m afraid.”

This conversation freaked me out. I felt momentarily like a person who had escaped a great cataclysm, but of course I had not escaped it. My adviser did not get fired, though neither would the Slavic department survive the crisis intact; as for me I eventually received an email from the university administration that in anticipation of declining PMOOC enrollment for the next semester, the maximum number of classes per instructor per semester was now three. This was effectively a 25 percent cut in my pay.

Back in Moscow, my grandmother and I watched the evening news in the back room three or four nights a week. All the channels were controlled by the state, but they weren’t gray or boring. The newscasters were attractive and spoke clearly, with conviction; the production values were top-notch. With terrifying music and fast cuts, the news presented a world in crisis: there was trouble in Georgia, there was trouble in Iraq, there was trouble in Africa. Luckily, we in Russia had Putin. Wherever trouble reared its head, Putin was there to tame it. Putin was no longer even president—his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, was president, and Putin was prime minister—but when push came to shove, Putin was still in charge. Everything was OK. Russians could sleep at night.

And now there was trouble in America too. The Russians really enjoyed the financial crisis, at least at first. The news showed footage of American bankers carrying boxes out of their ruined companies. Soviet propaganda had always stressed the problem of homelessness in the United States, and those images of the bankers with their boxes made you wonder—were they going to sleep in them? Meanwhile the Russian finance minister came on to explain that we had nothing to worry about: Russia was an island of stability in a sea of troubles. He did hope, however, that this experience would teach the Americans a valuable lesson.

One evening around this time my grandmother and I were out for a walk along the boulevard; we had ventured farther than usual and arrived at the small park on the other side of the Clean Ponds metro station. On this evening there was a group of people gathered at the Griboedov statue; they were surrounded by an even larger group of police. “It’s a protest,” said my grandmother. “Let’s get out of here.”

This time she was right. It was a protest. I maneuvered us across the street, at a safe distance but so that I could see what was going on. The protesters were mostly middle-aged and educated looking—glasses, shaggy hair, short-sleeve dress shirts, and some argyle sweaters. They looked like my parents. They held signs that said FRIENDSHIP WITH THE WEST and AMERICA’S CRISIS IS OUR CRISIS TOO! There were even some signs in English. These were the liberals, the Echo of Moscow listeners, the people whom Putin’s political adviser Vladislav Surkov had recently compared to a fifth column inside the country. Surrounded and significantly outnumbered by burly, stone-faced police, they seemed harmless and pathetic.

And then I noticed a group of what looked like teenagers, all in black, scrambling to the roof of the metro station. Once they got there they shot a flare into the sky. For a second I wondered if this was the direct action wing of the protest, the reinforcements. Then they unfurled a banner that read DON’T ROCK THE BOAT and started chanting it: “Don’t rock the boat! Don’t rock the boat!” These were counterprotesters, regime supporters, sent to intimidate this small protest as if the massive police presence weren’t enough. The police didn’t even pretend to try to stop them. Neither did the protesters. It was depressing.

We went home to watch the news. Our protest wasn’t on it. But Putin was. In truth you had to admire his mastery. The world saw in him a cold-blooded killer, a ruthless dictator, the gravedigger of Russian democracy. But from the Russian perspective, well, he was our cold-blooded killer, our ruthless dictator, our gravedigger. And he was good at what he did. He could be charming when he needed to be, or menacing, or full of pathos. He loved playing against type. If you expected tough Putin you’d get sensitive Putin, but if you started expecting sensitive Putin—kablamo! Tough Putin would sock you in the jaw. During one interview my grandmother and I watched, he was asked about the criticisms the opposition was making of his administration. Instead of dismissing them outright, he said sadly, “Some of these criticisms are fair. I think we need to listen to them and take them into account and work harder. But some of the criticisms are too much. They are directed not just at my administration, but at our country. And the truth is, our country is troubled. It has still not recovered from the turbulence that took place under my predecessor. I think we all know: Mother Russia is sick. But when your mother is sick, there is only one thing you can do: you have to help her.” It was a devastating response. And all the opposition’s yelling and screaming about Putin’s crimes, his corruption, his recklessness—all true, by the way, as far as I could tell—could not penetrate it.

My grandmother usually went to bed after the news ended; I stayed up to watch some more. You can learn a lot about a place by watching TV. Many shows were imports: American action movies, South American soap operas, even The Simpsons . But there was also some native programming. I enjoyed the reality shows. They were mostly rip-offs of American or European concepts, but with more sex and violence. The sex in particular was impressive. Even in Russia, a place where you’d think people would be worried about surviving, staying out of jail, and not getting run over by a car—even here people wanted to fuck one another.

One of my responsibilities as Dima’s replacement was to collect the rent once a month from the guys next door. They were a group of expats, but my grandmother called them “the soldiers,” for reasons that were not entirely clear—it’s possible she had misheard my brother or me when we’d mentioned “subletters” (but why in English, unless it was one of the soldiers introducing himself as a “subletter”?) or it’s possible she couldn’t understand why three unmarried men would be living together, rather than with their mothers (or grandmothers), unless they were in fact soldiers. In any case, they weren’t soldiers: they were a beautiful Italian guy named Roberto, who worked in real estate; a soft-spoken American blond from Seattle named Michael; and a chubby British journalist named Howard, who worked at the English-language expat newspaper, the Moscow Times . They were all in their midtwenties, and the first time I’d gone over there to collect the rent I found them arguing about whether to go to a particular nightclub. Actually, Roberto was arguing with Michael that it was Michael’s moral duty to go to the club, because girls liked him. Michael was arguing back that he didn’t want to go, he had a girlfriend back home, and anyway he had to be up early the next day. Meanwhile the third roommate, Howard, was watching a Premier League soccer game on Dima’s big flat-screen TV. It was a shock to go over there; the apartment was the same size as my grandmother’s and had once had the same layout, but Dima, under the direction of his second wife, Alina, had knocked down several walls to create an open space and then three small bedrooms off of it. If my grandmother’s place was a museum of Soviet furniture, Dima’s was a testament to refined Russian taste circa the turn of the millennium. It felt like I had crossed the landing and traveled forward in time fifty years.