Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

They were all uncommonly close. The arrangement with Katya struck me at first as borderline crazy, but Yulia seemed to think it was eminently reasonable. Why pay all that money for a room that would sit empty half the time? Why not try to have someone there? They still tried to arrange their schedules so that each had as much time as possible in the room on her own, but often they slept together in the huge bed, and if Yulia and I had been there together earlier we always made sure to change the sheets. Eventually I grew used to it. None of the girls had any money to speak of and their wardrobes were sparse, but they constantly borrowed clothes from one another to create a sense of variety. Yulia knew a woman in her mother’s old apartment building who sewed clothes, and occasionally the girls would combine resources and order a sweater or a shawl. I remembered reading somewhere that Raisa Gorbachev, famed for her glamorous good looks, had been embarrassed at one of the first superpower summits because she ran out of clothes and had to wear the same cute blouse twice, while Nancy Reagan seemed to have a new designer outfit for every meal. That happened with Yulia and her roommates, but they never seemed to mind.

Misha was a frequent guest to the apartment, to see Masha and also to eat. (The other Misha, Misha impishly declared, “can’t cook for shit.”) To call Misha a guest doesn’t quite do him justice, though. He was more like an event. He could be there for dinner, polite and gregarious, or he could show up late and very drunk and end up sleeping on some chairs in the kitchen because Masha didn’t want him peeing in her bed (this had happened). I liked Misha a lot, despite the fact that he would sometimes get drunk at dinner and start hounding me to come with him to get more alcohol. He had been kicked out of grad school for organizing protests when his university had hired a deeply reactionary, pro-Putin professor. He was now writing a dissertation on the working-class opposition of the 1920s, for a German university. For a freewheeling intellectual alcoholic, he was surprisingly interested in academic politics. “There are only two countries where serious historical work is done right now,” he said one time at dinner, “and that’s Germany and the U.S. But in Germany people get emotional very quickly. The leftists still blame the Russians for the death of Rosa Luxemburg! It would affect my ability to get a job.”

“You wouldn’t want to teach in Russia?” I said.

“I would. I do. But you need to get a job somewhere else first. Russian universities don’t like to make the first hire of your career. And of course they can’t pay anything, so you need to be able to work the international granting system, which again is mostly German and American.”

“Misha,” Masha said, “maybe that’s enough? People are trying to eat.”

“I’m not hampering them,” said Misha.

“Your talk of grant applications gives everyone indigestion,” said Masha.

“OK,” Misha said, backing off. “I didn’t know that.” He was quiet for a few minutes, and then started quizzing me, not for the first time, about the job application process in the U.S.

There was also a lot at Yulia’s that I missed. I did my best to see my grandmother to bed, so I tended to get to Yulia’s late, and I tried to be back at my grandmother’s before she missed me, so I was rarely at Yulia’s in the morning. I never saw but was told about how Sergei also ended up sleeping there a fair amount as his marriage deteriorated. And how Masha declared that if Misha didn’t shape up she’d leave him. And how Yulia’s relationship with Katya too was not always perfectly harmonious. So maybe I had a slightly rosy-tinted view of the situation. But I loved it. It was a kind of primitive communism—from necessity but also by choice. They took pleasure, I think, in making it work.

In addition to spending more time at Yulia’s, I was increasingly caught up in the activities of October. They weren’t ready to launch their website, but in the meantime they kept sending me articles to translate. They were analyses of the Russian political situation from a Marxist perspective. It was a lot of the stuff Sergei and Yulia and the rest had been saying to me for months: That the authoritarianism of the regime could best be understood in an international capitalist rather than a post-Soviet context. That the regime did not imprison its opponents because it retained a memory of Soviet methods, but because it wanted to continue making money for its clients (the oligarchs). Money, here as elsewhere, was the goal. Once you understood that, modern-day Russia came into focus; it made sense.

I translated the articles into English with pleasure. And as the weather grew warmer, there were more and more protests and other events to attend. We protested the Kazakh embassy after police fired on striking oil workers in one of Kazakhstan’s Caspian boomtowns; we protested the bank that supported Norilsk Nickel after a report came out calling Norilsk the most polluted city on earth. We protested the Ministry of Education because of its new standardized college entrance exam, which was going to turn Russian kids into little test-preparation drones, just like their American counterparts, and we protested the Duma when it voted on a law to decrease government funding for education.

The protests were always peaceful and organized in such a way that we avoided arrest—either they were permitted, or we did them singly, so that they weren’t considered gatherings, or we didn’t present any political slogans, so they weren’t considered political. “The time will come when we need to heighten the contradictions,” Boris counseled, “but first we need to build a movement.” There were days we spent leafleting outside factories, supporting their independent trade unions, even inviting workers to contact us about membership in October. Aside from a few run-ins with security, we were never systematically bothered or harassed for any of this. I think the fact that we were in Moscow; that we were concentrating on national-level issues rather than smaller, more contentious local ones; and that no one really knew what to make of a group of friendly young socialists showing up at their factory or outside their embassy, shielded us, for a while, from the attention of the authorities. October was simply too small and too weird to seem anything but harmless. The apparent exception was the protest the summer before against the highway through the forest, the same one my brother had been accused of somehow instigating. The authorities still seemed very angry about it, and had been trying for months to find out who was involved; as I learned from Misha, it had been a joint protest with Mayhem, the group Shipalkin had joined, and it was the Mayhem people who had come up with the idea of destroying one of the bulldozers. Despite some qualms, the October members went along with it. It would turn out to be a big mistake.

At one point Sergei invited an acquaintance of his, a grizzled old Marxist who had been imprisoned in the 1970s for calling for a return to Leninism, to give us a brief tutorial on what to do if we ever got arrested. The gist of his message was to keep our mouths shut. “The minute you get in there, consider yourself deaf, dumb, and blind, because in essence you are,” he said. “You have no idea why they’re asking you the questions they’re asking, what they could possibly do with that information, where it might lead. Nothing you say can make anything better, but lots of things you say can make things worse. So keep quiet. Establish your identity, and that’s it.”

The man wore shabby clothes and was missing several teeth. He had bad breath. Nonetheless there was some romance to meeting an actual veteran of the fight against Russian tyranny. I wondered whether I might write a follow-up paper to the one on October, about this guy’s life.