Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“And, you know, for a long time I agreed. I thought Communism was the worst thing that could happen to a country. The lies, the shortages, the violence against dissidents. It was abominable.

“A lot of us knew that things in the nineties were bad. That the new capitalism was in many ways more destructive, more deceptive, and more violent than the Soviet Union had been in the seventies and eighties. When Putin became president, a lot of people thought that he represented the return of the USSR—that we had failed to ‘cleanse’ the country of the communist menace, and that now we were in for it again. As you recall, others argued that Putin was young and a ‘reformer,’ that the KGB was the only businesslike structure in the USSR, and that he would continue the ‘reforms.’

“What I realized at the university in 2001, 2002, 2003, as I watched the administration adopt more and more of the lingo and practices of big business, was that the reforms were in fact continuing. And that Putin was a reformer, just as the optimists had said, but that, as the pessimists had said, he was adopting Soviet methods of political repression, control of the press, and so on. It appeared to be a contradiction. But it wasn’t one. As I read more about it, I understood: This is what capitalism looks like on the margins of the world system . Turkey, China, Mexico, Egypt… all of them had governments that looked like ours, economies that looked like ours. Whether this was a permanent state of things, I didn’t know (though I had some guesses). What I did know, what I continue to know, is that this was a state of affairs, and a regime, that needed to be resisted. And it needed to be resisted in the name of anti-capitalism. Not anti-communism, as the liberals thought, and think, and which aside from being a misdiagnosis of the situation also aligns them with the worst forces in international life, but anti-capitalism, which happens to be correct and also aligns us with the best of those forces—with the radical students in Greece, with the striking autoworkers in Spain, with the protesting oil workers in Kazakhstan, with the newly conscious academic workers in the United States.” Sergei nodded at me. “So, that’s what I finally understood.”

Sergei paused for a moment and took a drink of water. As he did so, I tried, as unobtrusively as possible, to turn around in my seat in the front row and see how the audience was taking it. I had felt like something very special was happening here, but now, looking at the others, I saw nothing more nor less than a group of students politely listening. A few of them were even taking advantage of Sergei’s short pause to look at their phones. “You could come to them with the Sermon on the Mount,” my adviser once said, “and they’d just sit there taking notes.”

This wasn’t the Sermon on the Mount, I knew that—but to me, in that room, at that time, it might as well have been. I couldn’t believe it. Sergei was a good goalie, but not an outstanding one. He seemed like a nice guy, but not a superhuman one. In the vulgar yelling and joking of our locker room, I hardly ever noticed him.

Yet he had figured it out. Suddenly everything I had been looking at—not just over these past months in Moscow, but over the past few years in academia, and over the past fifteen years of studying Russia—became clear to me. Russia had always been late to the achievements and realizations of Western civilization. Its lateness was its charm and its curse—it was as if Russia were a drug addict who received every concoction only after it was perfectly crystallized, maximally potent. Nowhere were Western ideas, Western beliefs, taken more seriously; nowhere were they so passionately implemented. Thus the Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew the old regime; thus the human rights movement, plus blue jeans, which overthrew the Bolshevik one; and thus finally this new form of capitalism created here, which had enriched and then expelled my brother, and which had impoverished my grandmother and killed Uncle Lev. You didn’t have to go and read a thousand books to see it; you just had to stay where you were and look around.

Yulia sat a few chairs from me. If I were her I would be in love with Sergei. But she appeared not to be. She was watching the audience more than she was watching him. She had organized the event and wanted it to go well. I went back to listening to the lecture. In addition to everything else, I noticed that Sergei’s stutter disappeared when he was speaking like this.

“It was hard for me to leave the university, despite all the reasons I had to do so. We had a small child, and though my salary was meager, it was something. And I believed in the university as an idea. I believed in education. But then again, what is the point of education? The end point of education is liberation. There can be no total liberation, and so education never ends. What I realized is that you do not have to remain inside an institution of education to continue your education and to continue educating others. The goal of our movement is freedom, and in order to be free, we must first learn how to think. We must learn how to think together; we must practice solidarity; we must organize ourselves and we must organize others. Only that way can we move forward against the darkness; only that way can we build equality and democracy here on earth.”

Sergei paused.

“I’ll be happy to take some questions.”

The question-and-answer session lasted an hour. When it was over, Yulia told me that she and Sergei and some others were going to a nearby bar for a drink. I would have loved to get a drink with Yulia or near Yulia but I needed to pick up my grandmother at Emma Abramovna’s. I walked in that direction down Tverskaya, pondering what I’d just heard.

It was the first time I’d walked through Moscow that I didn’t see only expensive restaurants and execution chambers. Yes, there were expensive restaurants and execution chambers. But there were also the homes of the people who had been executed in those chambers. There were the books they’d read and the books they’d written. And then, arriving at last at Emma Abramovna’s, where she sat with my grandmother playing anagrams, there were the homes of those who had, one way or another, survived.

The next day at the Coffee Grind I looked up Sergei on the internet. His break with the university and the regime that supported it had been public and, it turned out, controversial. He had announced it on his LiveJournal page and then spent weeks arguing with people in the comments. I read all of it. He was accused of abandoning the education of young Russians, of exaggerating the level of corruption within the private university, of being a communist. Sergei calmly and methodically answered every accusation. He was abandoning the education of the rich, he said, but he intended to continue educating those without resources; he was not exaggerating; and, yes, he was a communist.

Where did he think the money for the university—for the physical plant, for the library collection, for the salaries of lazy professors like him—was going to come from? Sergei answered that it should come from the government, that education was something people should pay for through their taxes, as individuals and as corporations. “If the state can reform its military and put billions of dollars into superhighways, why shouldn’t it help its universities provide free education to its children?”

“People like you teach children godlessness and all sorts of other idiocy,” said one person. “Why should I pay for that?”

“Ah,” said Sergei.

But he had not backed down.

We had hockey that night and I came early in case Sergei did too. But he arrived with the others. He said hi to me and complimented my talk from the other night; I spent at least part of the game wondering how I would broach the subject of our talking again. Sergei was the one who suggested it. In the locker room after we lost he asked if I needed a ride home. I’d been getting a ride home from Oleg but I immediately said yes. Oleg didn’t mind. He had recently found a tenant for the bank space vacated by the Europeans. When he mentioned this in the locker room, and named the group he was renting to, I saw several of the guys raise their eyebrows. Not understanding, I asked, “Is it a bank?”