Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“But they’re not fair!” I said. Boris shrugged.

“Grandma,” I said now. “What do you think of Communism?”

“Communism?” She sighed one of her patented sighs. “What do I think of Communism? I think it was worth a try. In this terrible country, nothing is ever going to work. But it was worth a try.”

“Was life better under Communism?”

“For some people it was better. For us it was better. We had a dacha and this apartment and everyone had work. But there were bad things about it too. You couldn’t say anything in the papers. There were books you couldn’t get. I don’t know, Andryush. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there.” The other day Vanya had come into hockey in a foul mood. His sugar factory was being asked to keep its prices artificially low so that sugar wouldn’t become too expensive for people whose salaries were being affected by the financial crisis. “Fuck your mother, it’s the same thing all over again,” he said. Back in the Soviet Union he’d worked as the head of a shoe factory. “We were making boots for fifteen rubles apiece and selling them for five. Sergei, no offense”—it was well known in the locker room that Sergei was sympathetic to the Soviet experiment—“but that shit had to stop.”

“Now they’re just doing the same thing but from the other side,” he went on. “We’ve got a market, we’ve got prices, I own the factory, but they’re still fucking with us.” He’d kicked the local officials who’d made the request out of his office and a few days later got a visit from the local prosecutor, who already had a case against him, for tax infractions, all drawn up. “So I’m going to do it. But it means I won’t be able to index the salaries of my workers”—to inflation—“but of course no one cares about that.”

“I knew Putin in Petersburg,” Tolya said. Putin had worked as the deputy mayor there in the 1990s, before his move to Moscow and meteoric rise to the presidency. “He had dirt on everyone. That’s how he got people to do things. He had all the dirt.”

“That’s right!” said Vanya. “Now the whole state is run that way.”

“So what’s the solution?” Ilya said. He was addressing Sergei.

“Democracy,” Sergei immediately said. “Workers’ councils. Vanya, do your workers own the factory along with you?”

“Of course not,” said Vanya. “We bought all their shares in the nineties.”

“There you go,” said Sergei. “If the factory was owned by the workers, no prosecutor could show up and threaten them. Is he going to put the entire factory in jail? Then there’ll be no sugar at all. That’s worse than expensive sugar.”

Vanya considered this. “What about me?” he said. “I know how to run that factory.”

“No problem,” said Sergei. “The factory still needs a good manager. You still have the respect of your coworkers. But maybe your salary is not as great.”

“Instead of you flying to Spain every weekend, the whole factory flies there once a year,” Tolya said. Everyone laughed. They pictured Vanya’s workers—gold-toothed, uneducated, awkwardly dressed—enjoying the warm beaches of Spain. But it was a warm laughter. No one seemed to think it was a bad idea.

My grandmother and I had reached the end of our portion of the boulevard, with the huge RussOil building darkening our way. It reminded me of Dima—the other day he’d sent me an article on the rapidly deteriorating Moscow real estate market. Residential property in central Moscow had declined 4 percent since we’d last talked. “You owe me $6K,” he had written. I didn’t answer that email.

“If it had worked out,” my grandmother now said, of the Soviet experiment, “that would have been nice.”

We turned around and headed back toward Krupskaya, bride of the Revolution, Lenin’s faithful wife.

YULIA DID NOT comment on my political awakening, if she even noticed it. She was guarded during our reading group; I saw her smiling during my stammering expressions of indignation, but whether this meant she was charmed or just politely embarrassed on my behalf, I could not say. On our walks to Mayakovka she continued to talk pretty much exclusively to Boris about Central Asia. A couple of times Boris and Nikolai took me for a beer at a Czech beer place not far from Mayakovskaya, but Yulia never joined us. And always in the background there was the figure of her Shipalkin. I brought it up once during beers with Boris and Nikolai. It turned out that Boris, in particular, really disliked the anarchist group, Mayhem, that Shipalkin had joined after leaving October. “The thing about them,” said Boris, “is they don’t have a political position. They think they’re going to overthrow the regime by spray-painting police cars!” Mayhem had recently done precisely this in Moscow, posting a YouTube video afterward. “It’s just as Lenin said,” Boris concluded. “Anarchism is an infantile disorder.”

“OK,” I said. “But what’s the deal with him and Yulia?”

Boris looked at me like he couldn’t understand why someone would care about such a triviality when we had the opportunity to denounce anarchism. “You mean personally? I have no idea. I do know she shares my views on anarchism.” That was all he’d say.

“Are you guys doing anything this weekend?” Nikolai asked. “Because I could use some help on the dacha.” And both Boris and I had to think up excuses for why we couldn’t go.

Then after our fifth or sixth session, the whole group of us was met outside by a nervous-looking dandy. Yulia had been laughing at something Boris said and the moment she saw him she stopped. “Petya,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” said the dandy, who I immediately understood to be Shipalkin. He wore a wool car coat and a scarf thrown over his shoulder and leather gloves and Converse high-top sneakers, the outfit of a Moscow hipster. The other notable thing about his appearance was that he looked like me—he was a short, olive-skinned, Eastern European Jew. We weren’t identical twins or anything, but where previously I had wondered if Yulia could even entertain the prospect of going out with a guy who looked like me, I now had my answer.

And something else, as well. Shipalkin shook hands with Boris and Nikolai and said privet to Vera. Then he looked inquisitively, and even it seemed with some hostility, at me. “This is Andrei,” said Yulia quietly.

“Ah,” said Shipalkin. “I thought so.”

There could have been a hundred reasons for this reaction, in theory, but the simplest one was this: Yulia had said something to him about me in such a way that he’d deemed me a threat. I mean, there might have been other explanations. But that one was plausible. Men aren’t as stupid as we pretend to be. A jilted husband knows.

A week later, Sergei invited a bunch of us over for a party at his place. His wife had gone for the weekend with their four-year-old to visit her mother in St. Petersburg, and Sergei said he felt lonely and wanted some company.

“Is your wife mad that you didn’t go with her?” I asked.

“I think so, yes,” said Sergei matter-of-factly. We were sitting in his car after hockey.

“And you don’t care?”

“I care,” he said. “But I didn’t want to go. In the end, I’ve found that it’s better not to do things I don’t want to do. It’s better for everyone.”

So a party it was. Sergei lived way out in the endless exurbs of the city; I took the gray line north, caught a bus, and walked past five identical sixteen-story blocks until I reached the sixth, which was his. The neighborhood was a particularly pure example of what the modernist architects, led by Le Corbusier, had once imagined: giant blocks where people lived, between which they would transport themselves in automobiles. Meanwhile the ground between the blocks would be filled with parks and trees and other recreations.