Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“It’s not just not right,” Boris said. “It was entirely and fully predictable. This is what capitalism looks like. And in order to resist it you need to know what it is. That’s the difference between us and the liberals. They think it’s all one bad man named Putin. We know it’s an economic system that’s been in place for hundreds of years.”

We sat there for three hours—at one point, I ordered a plate of dumplings and Boris criticized me for putting too much sour cream on them, but I told him my father had done the same thing, and he backed off—and at the end received a bill for twelve hundred rubles—forty dollars. This was remarkably cheap, given that the five of us had been drinking for so long, but it seemed to make a deep impression on the Octobrists. “Holy shit,” said Misha. “I can’t believe we drank so many vodka cranberries!” I made sure to put in more money than the others, because of my dumplings.

Watson College officially announced its search for Frank Miller’s replacement. I waited a decent interval and then sent in my application.

On the one hand, it felt like a betrayal of everything I was doing. On the other hand, who knew what things would be like eight months from now, when the fall semester began? My grandmother might not even be alive. Heaven knew—she kept telling me—that she hoped not to be. And it was unlikely I’d get the job—I had, after all, been rejected for all the others. So I decided to apply. And in the meantime that meant following my adviser’s advice and seeking some kind of publication.

“Listen,” I wrote him one day when I saw him in the Gchat bar. “I met some young socialists here. Is that an interesting subject, do you think?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “The return of the repressed. The incorrigible Russians. Whatever. Yes. Do it.”

Would Sergei find the idea craven? He wanted to liberate himself and others from academic institutions so they could begin to change the world. Here I was proposing to make him and his comrades the object of academic study. But we had hockey again in two nights, and I decided to ask. He was open to it. “We’ll have to discuss it internally,” he said, meaning within October, “but I don’t see why not. It’s possible that talking to someone who isn’t us might help us formulate our ideas better. I’ll put it to the group.” The next time we had hockey he told me that they had agreed, and that I was invited to start attending their weekly Marxist study sessions. “But of course as we don’t believe in objective scientific discourse, you have to participate. That was one of the conditions the group put forth.”

I didn’t have a problem with that. I was in.

The study sessions met on Tuesday evenings at Misha’s apartment near the Belarus train station. Misha lived with another graduate student, also named Misha, in a large studio apartment that had once been his grandmother’s; it was just a kitchen and one room, though a large room, and the two Mishas slept on sofa beds on opposite ends of it. The other Misha studied Greek and his end of the room was piled high with Greek texts, while our Misha studied history and sociology, and his side of the room was piled high with Weber, Marx, and Wallerstein. On Tuesday evenings, the second Misha had some kind of Greek-related seminar, and we usually had the place to ourselves.

The other regular members of the group were Boris and Nikolai, whom I’d met at the anti-fascist protest; Vera, a precocious high school student with thick glasses; and, most important of all, Yulia. Sergei came to about half the sessions; he was the only one of the group who was married and had a child, and I was beginning to get the impression that his home life was not unclouded, so he sometimes begged off.

The reading group had only existed for a brief time, and they had apparently spent the first several sessions arguing over what to read. Part of the group wanted to read the works of contemporary Marxist writers, while others wanted to go back to the source and read Marx’s Capital . In the end, the Capital -ists had scored a narrow victory, and a few weeks ago the group had embarked on Marx’s masterpiece. During my first session there was a half-hour discussion as to whether the vote should be revisited in light of the fact that there was a new member. The initiator of the discussion was Boris, who apparently wanted a recount, but the rest took it up eagerly and debated the fine points of my participation, their voting procedures, and consensus politics, until finally Yulia said that I was an associate and nonvoting member and in any case they had already started reading the book! It was agreed then that we’d take a break and have a snack and start in on the book immediately afterward.

In short, I was not surprised to learn that they were still on the first chapter and that I could catch up.

Since Misha was a bachelor and didn’t have anything in his refrigerator except beer and vodka, all of us brought some kind of food to reading group—I stuck with basics like black bread and salami, others brought little pies or salads that they’d made. Yulia sometimes brought wine for her and Vera. In advance of the meeting, everyone would read a portion of the text, but one person was selected in advance to lead the discussion. That person would spend the next week studying the text with particular care and also doing outside reading to better understand it. The first time around I was allowed to skip my turn, but the next time, everyone said, I’d have to go.

In the meantime, I was becoming more and more infatuated with Yulia. She was, it turned out, a grad student in Russian literature; she was writing her thesis on some medieval Slavic texts I’d puzzled out a little bit in grad school. In short talks during our breaks, I quickly gathered that she knew about five times more about Russian literature than I ever would. She wore conservative clothing—button-down shirts and sweaters and long skirts—but these if anything accentuated her figure. She was cute. She was also exceedingly polite. She addressed me as vy , which initially I thought had to do with my age—she was twenty-nine, four years younger than I was—but which I eventually concluded had to do with her traditional upbringing. She was not the most vocal member of our study circle—that was either Misha, who liked to drink beer at the sessions and became especially voluble on the subject of capital once he’d had two or three of them, or Boris, who seemed to have read everything and had total, if sometimes slightly robotic, recall of it—but she was always engaged, had always done the reading, and took it all very seriously. I loved watching her talk, the precision she insisted on in discussing this very difficult text, and when someone said something funny, I loved watching her duck her head and laugh. I was starved for female non-grandmother companionship, yes, but I think I would have felt the same about her even if I hadn’t been.

I had been a little dismayed initially at the number of dudes in the study circle, but it soon became clear that they didn’t care about Yulia. Boris didn’t seem to be interested in girls at all, only socialism, whereas Misha was apparently involved, in an on-and-off manner, with one of Yulia’s roommates, Masha. As for Nikolai, he may have been interested in girls, but I did not get the impression that girls were interested in him.

That said, it didn’t seem like this particular girl was interested in me, either. During the study sessions she was always focused on the discussion, and even afterward, when we all left together and walked in a bunch to the Mayakovsky monument, where we split up, I was never able to get her to talk to me. She kept quizzing Boris on the political situation in one Central Asian country after another, and I was left to fend off Nikolai, who, it turned out, was in the process of building a dacha outside the city and was always trying to get people to help him. Everyone had begged off, however, and now he had his eyes on me. I told him that I tried to stay with my grandmother on weekends, but he kept asking. And Yulia kept asking Boris about Central Asia. And then we’d arrive at the Mayakovsky monument and all go our separate ways.