Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

It was a strange phone call to get. I had pretty much resigned myself to my new Moscow life, and now here was my adviser pulling me back in the direction of the life I’d had. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. But I updated my CV.

The Falanster bookstore, which was to host the discussion of neoliberalism in higher education, was hard to find. After dropping off my grandmother at Emma Abramovna’s, I walked there in the bitter cold and then wandered around the vicinity of the address for about fifteen minutes, going in and out of a courtyard through a big archway and growing increasingly cold and worried that I would miss the event. Why did I still think that just because I knew the address, I’d be able to locate a place, even after all the times this had proved not to be the case?

Finally I asked someone and they pointed me to the archway. Over the generations Russians had taken these old tsarist-era buildings and divided them up in a million different ways, and here was an actual bookstore inside the structure of the archway.

You could tell right away that it was a good bookstore. They had all the academic books from the legendary New Literary Observer, and a terrific journals section. There were no posters of Putin above the cash register, as there were at the bookstore under the strip club on Sretenka, no lurid books on America’s Plan to Steal Our Oil, no obscure tracts on revealed religion. There were serious books of poetry, philosophy, and political science. And there was a small plaster bust of Karl Marx in the corner, against which was leaning a stack of old journals.

The bookstore was filled with about a dozen people, and I saw Yulia, in a red sweater and brown wool skirt, looking both severe and sexy. She was talking to some dude and didn’t appear to see me. Did she forget she’d invited me? I was pretending to study the stacks of books in the middle of the store when I saw a very familiar-looking person enter the space. I had positive associations with him, but where from? He was so decontextualized that for a moment I couldn’t figure it out. Then I did. “Sergei!” I said. It was the goalie from my hockey team. He looked up and smiled and came over to me. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m speaking,” he said. “What about you?”

“I’m also speaking.” This sounded somehow unconvincing, like I was imitating him, so I added, “Yulia invited me.”

“Ah, Yulia,” said Sergei. “Well, great.” He patted me on the shoulder and moved off to speak to someone who had been trying to get his attention.

“Ah, Yulia,” meaning what exactly? I had to put the thought aside as Yulia now came over. “Thank you for coming,” she said, putting her hand on my arm momentarily. “Sergei Ivanov”—our goalie!—“is going to give a lecture on his path through contemporary education, but I thought it’d be useful to have a bit of global context, so if you don’t mind, I’ll introduce you and ask you to say a few words about the American situation, and then I’ll introduce Sergei. Does that sound all right?”

“What do you want me to say about the American situation?”

“Just whatever you think. The situation of professors and adjuncts and the job market.”

I knew exactly what she meant: the shitty and embarrassing position of adjuncts, the humiliations visited on them and their students by the university, the rise of PMOOCs as the solution that solves nothing. How did she know I’d know all this? Maybe she had talked to Fishman about me. Or maybe she just knew. I wanted to ask but I couldn’t think of how to word it, and in any case once she’d explained what she wanted, she left me, moved to the front of the room, and asked everyone to take their seats. Looking around, I saw people in their twenties, many of them with glasses, ratty sweaters, poor posture; they looked a little like the group from dinner the other day but more unkempt—they were grad students who might not actually have been grad students. I liked them all immediately.

“Our first speaker,” Yulia said, beautifully, “will be Andrei Kaplan, from New York, where he is an adjunct professor of Russian studies. Andrei?”

I got up and, a little nervously—I would have been nervous in any case, but speaking in front of a group in Russian made it worse—gave a short description of the plight of adjuncts in the United States. My main complaint was inequality: if you won the academic sweepstakes and got a full-time job, you were paid about fifteen thousand dollars a class. If you didn’t, you might be paid something more like three thousand. (Or one thousand, for a PMOOC.) This was unfair. There was, in my opinion, no justification for such a huge disparity in payment, especially in institutions that considered themselves models of democracy and liberalism.

I said all this as quickly as I could. People nodded in agreement or understanding and then gave a small round of applause when I finished. Yulia got up, gave me her smile, ducked her head to hide her teeth, and thanked me. I sat down, relieved and happy, and then Yulia introduced Sergei.

“As s-s-some of you know,” Sergei began, with a little stutter, “I quit the university three years ago in protest over the increasing privatization of education in Russia. My initial impulse after I quit was to do something else entirely. I thought I might write a novel. But I found this boring and in any case I had no talent. And I started thinking more about what my experience in the university had meant for my experience of life in our country.

“The term ‘neoliberalism’ has come into vogue of late in foreign academic and political writing, and for a long time I was pretty sure that it had nothing to do with us, with me. It was a foreign word and our realities were different from the realities being described, even in such an apparently analogous situation, as Andrei Kaplan has just outlined, in the United States.

“But the more I thought about it, the more clear it became. It’s an ugly word but it describes an ugly phenomenon. It’s a description of the privatization of matters that were previously public, of the marketization of human relations and affairs. And in Russia it explains a lot of what we see.

“We’re used to thinking of our dictators as Stalin: Is this Stalin or is this not Stalin? Is this 1937 or is it not 1937? And if that’s the question, the answer is always going to be: it’s not 1937, and this is not Stalin. The supermarkets are overflowing with goods, the people have new televisions, some are driving new cars: everything is fine.

“But not everything is fine! You know it and I know it. Stalin is no longer the benchmark. Because there is a dictator that is as tough as Stalin and as brutal as Stalin but is also more acceptable than Stalin, more popular than Stalin ever was. It’s called the market.

“What we’ve seen in Russia in the last twenty years is the replacement of a stagnant, sometimes violent and oppressive, but basically functioning state with a dictatorship of the market. People have died, of starvation, of depression, of alcoholism and violence, and not only have they done so quietly, they have done so willingly . They have praised their conquerors. We all know about the Bolsheviks who confessed to terrible crimes in the 1930s of which they were innocent. This was a lot like that. Except the Old Bolsheviks had been tortured! People like our parents did it of their own free will. They had built a country; they had served it loyally and to the best of their ability. Now they were confessing to sins attributed to them by neoclassical economics. They were willing to renounce everything they had ever thought because they believed that, in the grand sweep of history, they were in the wrong.