Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

She even stopped enjoying the TV news. One evening I put it on for her in the back room and went into the kitchen to work on the windowsill. A few minutes later I heard her calling for me. “Andryush, Andryush!” she said. There was real distress in her voice and I ran to her.

My grandmother was where I had left her, on the green foldout couch, in front of the TV.

“Is everything OK?” I said.

“Oy, oy,” said my grandmother, gesturing toward the television. “Who is that man?”

The man was Putin.

“Who?”

“He’s the prime minister.”

“Oy, what a horrible face! Make him go away,” said my grandmother. I flipped through the channels a bit and landed on a Russian police procedural.

“How about this?” I said.

“OK,” said my grandmother.

I went back to the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later I heard a crash in the back room. I ran there. My grandmother was standing, looking horrified, next to the TV stand. The television was on its back on the floor. It had somehow survived the fall and was showing Putin visiting a truck factory in Nizhny Novgorod. Apparently the cop show had ended and the news had come on. “Andryush, I’m sorry,” said my terrified grandmother, as if I would be angry at her for knocking over her own TV. “I was trying to change the channel.”

She was trying to change the channel by, apparently, pushing the TV to the floor. The TV was fine, it kept working, but as there was always the danger that Putin might appear, from now on I basically had to be in there with her so I could change the channel. Next time, after all, the TV might land on her foot.

This was not good. I could try to show her movies but she hated all the movies we saw; we couldn’t go outside; and there were only so many times I could play anagrams.

It was Sergei who inadvertently came up with a solution. He was driving me home from hockey one night when he said: “We think about the Soviet Union in terms of mistakes and crimes. The camps, the lack of preparation for the war, the forced psychiatric confinement of dissidents. But for a lot of people it was an OK place. It was free medicine, free housing, free education. And above all, cultural production, above all, movies: you know, contrary to the predictions of early film theorists, movies aren’t actually a highly ideologized space. They’re a mass entertainment. In order to be massively entertaining they need to have some basis in reality. There weren’t any Soviet films about the Gulag but there were some pretty good Soviet films. It’s one of the things the workers’ state needs least to be embarrassed about.”

Was this true? There was a kiosk outside the Clean Ponds metro station that sold DVDs. I had bought some new Russian films there to watch with my grandmother, but most of them were unwatchable. Even the good ones were filled with violence—that was the new Russian reality, and these guys were making movies reflecting that reality. My grandmother didn’t like them, and I didn’t blame her.

But what about Soviet films? It hadn’t for some reason occurred to me to show my grandmother old movies. I didn’t know much about them. In school I’d watched the old post-revolutionary classics, and then the great works of the late Soviet underground. But aside from Irony of Fate —the classic 1970s movie about a very drunk doctor who accidentally boards a flight to Leningrad and then takes a taxi to the same address as his Moscow address, and finds an apartment there just like his apartment, except occupied by a woman different from his fiancée; all Russians watched this film on New Year’s Eve, including my parents—Soviet popular film was not something I knew much about. I asked Yulia if she had any suggestions. “Well, you could try Osenniy Marafon, ” she said.

They had Autumn Marathon at the Clean Ponds kiosk, and a few days later my grandmother and I sat down in the back room to screen it. “Oh!” my grandmother said during the first sequence. “Leningrad!” We had watched numerous post-Soviet movies set in St. Petersburg, but my grandmother had never recognized it; the movies didn’t present the city in a way she understood. Autumn Marathon did.

The movie is about a college professor and translator in Soviet Leningrad who is having an affair. His main motivation for the affair is not lust or boredom or revenge; it is a sense of guilt and obligation. Everyone takes advantage of the professor: he rewrites his colleague’s poor translations; he spends hours with a visiting scholar from Denmark, helping him understand Lermontov; he is even unable to resist the importunities of his drunken neighbor, who insists that he and the Dane go mushroom hunting with him and drink a bunch of vodka. When his long-suffering wife confronts him with his affair he feels terrible and promises to break it off; but when his mistress threatens suicide if he does, he goes back to her. Through it all he has to contend with the drawbridges of Leningrad, which are raised every night at a certain hour, cutting off the old city (where he works, and where his mistress lives) from the new city, where he lives with his wife. He jogs each morning with the visiting Dane, but is also constantly running to catch a bus to take him across the bridge before it goes up, and sometimes he doesn’t make it—thus, autumn marathon. Halfway through the film he resolves to change his life; by the end of the film this resolve is in shambles, and we know things will go on as before.

“That’s a good movie,” said my grandmother when it was over. I agreed. That night I asked Yulia for more such movies.

“Nothing is as good as Osenniy Marafon ,” she admitted, “but let me think of some others.” The next day, she emailed me a list.

From then on, with the help of Yulia’s list, my grandmother and I watched old and not-so-old Soviet movies. She liked all of them, even when they weren’t that good (though some of them were very good). They reminded her of something. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t quite hear them and that she couldn’t quite follow the plot; for one thing, she had seen many of them before, and for another, wherever she was in the plot, whenever her mind and eye turned to the film: There it was. The USSR. The very images, and the presentation of those images, and the things people said as they walked through those images: they spoke of values she believed in, however much, under the Soviets, they had been honored only in the breach. And I became so friendly with the guys at the DVD kiosk that if they didn’t have some old film, they told me they’d put in an “order” for it. Since I was pretty sure that they were pirating the films and burning them onto DVDs, this meant they’d pirate the film and burn it just for me. This struck me as top-notch customer service.

Despite meeting my grandmother and getting along with her, Yulia did not want to sleep over; she was a Marxist revolutionary, maybe, but she was also a nice girl from Kiev, and she did not think it was proper to sleep over at the home of a man to whom she wasn’t married, especially if that man lived with his grandmother, who might not approve. So I found myself spending more and more time at Yulia’s place. What would have served as a living room in an American apartment had become a bedroom in theirs, so the only common area was the small kitchen and, once it got warmer, the balcony; Yulia’s other roommates, Masha and Sonya as well as Katya, would sit in the kitchen for hours, drinking tea and reading and talking. All of them were used to living in close quarters and were adept at tuning out other people’s conversations, so it never felt like we were bothering them if we hung out in the kitchen as well.