Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“Yes,” said my grandmother, when the film ended, “just don’t let there be another war.”

From her mouth the phrase, which had become, during Soviet times, a kind of slogan, contained so much. Her husband, my grandfather, dying at the front; her parents, forced to evacuate Moscow despite her father’s poor health; in the midst of all this, her pregnancy and the birth of my mother. Just don’t let there be another war: a mixture of terror and hope.

We were sitting next to each other on the couch that became, with the removal of some pillows, her cot. If her husband, my grandfather, had survived the war, she could have had other children. Or if she’d agreed to remarry sooner than she did. If she’d had other children, one of them could be here now, and she would have had more grandchildren, probably, than just me and Dima. “But you don’t get to say how your life is going to be,” my grandmother said suddenly. And that was also true. On a whim I took her hand in mine. For such a tiny little grandmother she had surprisingly big hands.

THAT WAS REALLY the end of it, for me, the last good thing that happened. After we got back from the dacha, things started falling apart.

One day in late July, Howard rang our buzzer. He looked upset.

“Tea?” I said.

“Russians and Brits can have tea in any weather,” he said. “But it’s too hot for me.”

I had some half-liter Zhigulovskoye beer bottles in the fridge; my grandmother was in her room napping, so we sat in the kitchen and drank those.

“I need your counsel,” Howard began. “I met a girl online and we set up a date. She was hot. And—”

“Wait,” I said. “What about the girl from Esquire ?”

“Vera? She was away. But that’s part of it. So, I, uh, this girl was hot. And she had her own place, which is pretty rare.” Howard paused to see if I was still indignant about Vera, or listening. I was listening. “OK, so in retrospect her place seems a little weird, like there wasn’t much in the way of personal stuff. It was kind of anonymous, you know?”

I nodded.

“So, um, you know, we hung out and I paid and went home and that was that. Vera came back. I tried to put it out of my mind.

“And then this guy just fucking cold-calls me. He says, ‘Howard, my name is Vitaly, we need to meet, I have some information about Natasha’—that was her name—‘that I need to share with you.’

“So I’m a little freaked-out, naturally, but I go to meet this chap for lunch, he’s very nice, he’s well dressed, quiet, says he works for an ‘information consulting agency,’ and he hands me a thumb drive and says, you know, ‘This was sent to us the other day, with your contact information, and we wanted to make you aware of it, in case it wasn’t something you wanted getting out.’

“And it was a fucking tape of me and Natasha in her room, screwing around!”

“Ho ho ho!” I cried. “ Kompromat ! Amazing.”

“Yes, right? I mean, there are two issues. Or three.”

“Vera,” I said.

“Yes, but, actually, she’s quite understanding about that. She knows I’m not the world’s most abstemious person.”

“OK, but still.”

“Yes, true.”

“And the Moscow Times ?” I said. I was trying to earn my role as his adviser.

“Yes, but, actually, I don’t care. I’ve been there three years, and I’m ready to move on. And in terms of being a freelancer, I mean, I’m not saying I’m some kind of sex hero, but if this ever came out, I’d be like a hero, right?”

It was an actual question. “A sex hero?” I said.

“Yes, you know, I’m in a sex tape.”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s suppose.”

Howard nodded and looked at me expectantly.

“So Vera forgives you,” I said, “and you’re a sex hero. What’s the problem?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. I don’t think my friend Vitaly is really from a private information security company, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said. Howard was implying, not without justification, that he was from the FSB.

“So I guess I’m wondering, if they’d go to the trouble of doing this, what else might they do?”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

Howard had been working on a piece about the tenth anniversary of the Moscow apartment bombings. The bombings had taken place shortly after Putin became prime minister (the first time) and had been blamed, immediately, on Chechen terrorists; in response, Putin launched the Second Chechen War, promising, in a famous early moment of his leadership, to wipe out the Chechen enemy wherever he might hide, even if it were the shitter. The war immediately made him the most popular political figure in Russia and guaranteed his election to the presidency in early 2000. He had not looked back since.

But over the years questions had been raised about the bombings. The terrorist suspects had never been produced; several of them supposedly died while being apprehended. The Duma tried to convene an independent investigation; two of its members ended up dead. Two former FSB agents who voiced suspicions publicly about possible state involvement in the bombings were arrested; one eventually emigrated, doubled down on his claims, and was poisoned in London by polonium. As time went on, and no further light was shed on the supposed terrorist masterminds of the bombings, more and more people came to suspect, rightly or wrongly, that the government itself had done it.

“Am I in danger?” Howard asked.

“How should I know?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “You seem to know Russian history.”

I did know Russian history, I thought. And it wasn’t good. “I’ll tell you what my grandmother would say,” I said. “She’d say it’s a terrible country and you ought to leave.”

Howard seemed relieved. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

A few days later, he came by to bid farewell. He was especially attentive to my grandmother, who seemed quite moved by this and then immediately asked, when he left, “Who was that?” Not long after, someone with very good aim came by and threw a rock through Howard’s bedroom window.

Then Oleg got shot. I found out about it from Anton, who found out from Oleg’s wife. Oleg was at a meeting in central Moscow and was getting into his car to go to hockey when a guy in a mask came up to the driver’s side window and started firing. He shot Oleg three times in the torso and then raised the gun to his head. When Oleg saw this he instinctively started falling sideways, onto the passenger-side seat. This saved his life. The bullet entered his head at an angle, only partly entering his brain, and doctors were able to remove it. He survived.

He was relatively certain that his troublesome tenants were responsible. After they’d declared that they weren’t paying rent, he had tried to negotiate with them, and when that didn’t work out he’d gone to the police. That, apparently, was a mistake.

The Sklifosovsky emergency clinic where he’d been taken was close to my house, and Anton and I went by there a couple of times before he was finally able to see us, about a week after he was shot. His head was bandaged from the surgery, and his speech was slurred—something he said the doctors thought would get better with time—but otherwise he seemed OK and in surprisingly good spirits. He must have figured he was going to die and was pleased not to be dead. He had decided, after the shooting, to go ahead and sign away the property to his bandit tenants. He still had the other property to lease, and plenty of money squirreled away, and he didn’t need this sort of craziness in his life. He thought he might go to Spain for a bit when he was ready to travel. Anton and I agreed this was a good idea. “You guys are going to have to get a new left wing,” Oleg slurred. Anton and I told him not to worry about that, that we would keep his spot for him as long as it took.