Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

One night as Sergei was dropping me off after hockey, I finally brought it up with him. “Remember that night at Falanster?” I said. “When I told you that Yulia had invited me, you sort of said, ‘Ah, Yulia.’ What did you mean by that?”

“What did I mean?” Sergei said.

“Yes. Come on. You meant something.”

“OK. Well. Yulia is a very good recruiter. She can really spot people who might be sympathetic to us. You might say she has an intuition.”

“OK.”

“Well, and sometimes it happens that the person she spots is a man, and he then gets ideas about her.”

“I see,” I said.

There is a play in hockey called slew-footing. It’s when you slide (slew) your foot behind an opponent’s skates and kick it forward so that his legs get taken out from beneath him. It’s considered a very dirty play, because the victim falls straight back, sometimes smashing his head on the ice. When Sergei told me that guys often fall for Yulia when joining October, I felt like I’d been slew-footed.

Sergei could sense this, maybe. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t actually know what her situation is. Shipalkin wasn’t a very good comrade and he wasn’t a very good husband, and my impression is he’s still coming around. It’s very confusing for her, I imagine. He was the same with us, you know, in terms of his politics—first he was a democratic socialist, then he was an accelerationist, now he’s an anarchist.

“So I don’t know exactly what’s going on. But I think if someone was serious about Yulia, that could break the situation.”

I nodded. Sergei had said more than enough. I extracted my hockey stuff from the car and headed up the boulevard toward our place. On the way I bought a big brown can of Zhigulovskoye beer from a kiosk. At some point I’d noticed it had stopped making my tummy hurt.

Who were these people and where had they come from? Why weren’t they more like Dima’s friends, who had gone to many of the same schools and had read at least some of the same books?

I didn’t have a ready answer for this, but it had something to do with their experience of post-Soviet life. In the Maxim group, I knew, the parents were prosperous. They had converted their anti-Soviet credentials into jobs on television or in publishing, or in the murky world of “consulting.” My impression of the October group was that the parents were barely hanging on. I don’t know if this was the decisive factor, but it was certainly something the Octobrists talked a lot about.

I found myself gradually but unmistakably looking at the world a little differently. I had once thought it so strange that across the street from the KGB was a cute café with wi-fi. But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t any more strange than the fact that my university back home, a place where people were supposed to live silent and monklike lives in the pursuit of knowledge, had a beautiful multimillion-dollar gym; or that in my old Brooklyn neighborhood the violent displacement of people from the homes in which they’d lived for decades and the stoops on which they were used to sitting took place to the accompaniment of… cute cafés. Cute cafés were not the problem, but they were also not, as I’d once apparently thought, the opposite of the problem. Money was the problem. It had always been the problem. Private property, possessions, the fact that some people had to suffer so that others could live lives of leisure: that was the problem. And that there were intellectual arguments ardently justifying this—that was a bigger problem still.

In the reading group my presence was taken in stride. I was an observer on the one hand, but also an observer-participant on the other, and finally it was assumed that I was a sympathizer. My total lack of knowledge about Marx and Marxism was chalked up to a general American ignorance of everything, while my slightly ambiguous remarks about my own past were always interpreted in the best possible light. One time Misha, who had once been kicked out of school for protesting, asked me if there was student agitation on my campus. Yes, I said, recalling the grad student unionization drive and cafeteria takeover. Misha didn’t ask if I had been part of the drive—he assumed that I had. “What was the result?” he asked. The result was that in exchange for the students leaving the cafeteria and liberating the chicken parm, the university agreed to create a committee to investigate grad student unionization. The committee ended up proposing that in lieu of a union, there would be a new committee (a different committee) to examine grad student grievances. Four years later, there was still no union, and I happened to know that the university was using the financial crisis to strip away some of the protections the grad students had finally managed to win. “ Svolochi ,” said Misha.

Svolochi . Bastards. It was true. In fact, as I knew from Gchatting with my adviser, not only were they busting the nascent union, they were breaking up the Slavic department. One or two people whose work was more historically oriented were being pushed into the history department; the others were being sent into the German department, which was being renamed the Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. The Germans were in charge. And a few professors with really low enrollments, though not yet my adviser, were being asked to take early retirement. “Yes,” I agreed with Misha. “They’re bastards.”

If the Octobrists were from families that had been victimized by the reforms, what about me? My father, over in the States with his new American family, was no victim, though sometimes I wondered, as I thought of him on his exercise bike watching Russian TV shows, if he was lonely and wished he’d never left. My brother, the would-be business tycoon, painted himself as a victim of the new regime, but he was in fact its accomplice. If anything he was a victim of the regime’s corrupting influence, like so many others who’d been corrupted by the riches that flowed into the country along with high oil prices, and the partial reforms.

Whereas my grandmother—my grandmother really had been robbed.

One day around this time we were out walking along the boulevard. A light snow was falling and my grandmother held tightly on to my arm. Moscow didn’t tend to get a lot of snow all at once, but it remained so consistently cold that once the first snow fell in early November, it didn’t melt until the spring, so the snow accreted gradually, turning brown and hardening, occasionally freshened by new snow. In New York, the sidewalks were the responsibility of the landlords, who got fined if they didn’t clear snow and ice in a timely fashion; in Moscow, the city still owned most of the buildings, and in any case most of the houses faced inward, into courtyards, and so it was left to the city to clear the sidewalks. This sometimes took weeks. Walking outside became treacherous.

We were out for our walk, then, when we passed the towering Krupskaya statue, which depicted a young Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, wrapped in a flowing shawl. With a light coat of snow on her she looked even more dramatic than usual, which may be what caused my grandmother to remark, after walking by her almost daily for the past five months: “Look at her! She was a very modest lady. But here she’s a—ballerina!”

I looked at my grandmother. She was making her way carefully, but indomitably, forward through the snow. The other day at the reading group, while discussing Marx’s account of the extraction of value from the worker through his exploitation, I started talking about the expropriation of Uncle Lev’s oil and sputtering about the unfairness of it. Boris urged me onward. “What does fairness have to do with it?” he said. “We’re talking about the laws of capitalism.”