Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

It was almost nine by the time we finished unpacking. The books were all out of the boxes and on the shelves, all the framed photographs and the few works of art my grandmother had collected over the years were on the walls, the plates and silverware were in their cupboards, and Seraphima Mikhailovna set up the green foldout couch and was ready to sleep on it. Dima and I were going to sleep on our bunk beds back at the old apartment.

I peeked into my grandmother’s room one last time. There was still a bare penumbra of light coming through the window, and she was sleeping on her back, as she always did, with her hands folded gently across her stomach.

We left.

We drove home and showered. Dima pounded angrily at his computer for a while as I packed up my big red suitcase, and then asked if I wanted to go to Gentlemen of Fortune. I didn’t. “Well, I’m going to go, if you don’t mind,” he said. I didn’t mind.

I finished packing and it was still only ten o’clock. It was my last night in Moscow. I had already said good-bye to the hockey guys, and I hadn’t tried calling Yulia in over a week. I had tried to visit Sergei and Misha in Lefortovo, but was turned away. The October email list was totally silent. The only one who still talked to me was Nikolai, from his friend’s place in Tallinn. He told me over an encrypted chat program—Gchat’s off the record was bullshit, he said; Dima had been right about that one—that he really liked Tallinn, there was a thriving tech sector, and he thought he might stay awhile.

“What about your dacha?” I said.

“I’ll return there in triumph after the Revolution,” Nikolai said. “We’ll throw an enormous party.”

“)))),” I said.

On that final night in Moscow, I texted Yulia one last time. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.

She texted back this time. She said, “Have a good trip.”

I considered asking to see her, but I was pretty sure she’d say no. Instead I said, “Thank you,” and went to bed.

My flight was at eight in the morning, which meant I had to be out of the house at five thirty. I decided to take a cab. It would mean an extra half hour of sleep, and I could afford it now: I was about to start getting a regular grown-up salary for the first time in my life.

Dima wasn’t yet home when I got a call from the driver that he was downstairs. I took one last look around the Stalin apartment and then left my keys under the doormat in the stairwell. If someone broke in and stole Dima’s computer, that was his fault for staying out so late. And anyway no one broke in.

The cab took a right on the boulevard and then kept going once we reached Trubnaya. It was so early in the morning, and a weekend, that the streets for once were almost empty. The driver took a right at the Pushkin monument, onto Tverskaya, and past Emma Abramovna’s, and Yulia’s, and Misha’s old place, from which he had been taken just the other day. We drove in silence. I remembered the feeling I’d had, exactly a year before, on the way into town on the train, that feeling of fear and excitement and worry that I’d be spotted as a foreigner. I probably no longer looked or sounded like a foreigner, and even if I did, I no longer cared. I sat in the front passenger seat and watched the city of my birth race by, decrepit building by decrepit building, and here and there some poor carless bastard walking along, scrambling through the broken glass and heaps of piled-up shit.

IHAD THOUGHT my research budget would mean I’d be flying back and forth almost all the time, but I soon got sucked up by the semester—the teaching and committee meetings and office hours. I enjoyed it all, I wore corduroys and a sweater to class and discussed the Gulag, but it didn’t leave much time for other things. I managed to make a short visit over Thanksgiving. My grandmother did not remember me.

“It’s Andryusha,” Seraphima Mikhailovna said to her. “You’re always asking after him.”

“No,” my grandmother said, shaking her head. “I don’t remember.”

Nonetheless we sat for a while, drank tea, and played a few games of anagrams. My grandmother was still unstoppable. There was no place for me to stay in the apartment. I stayed instead in a pretty filthy hotel a few stops north of Olympic Stadium, and though I had left Anton’s stick at my grandmother’s place, I had not brought my skates. Anyway I hadn’t had any time to play back in New York, and I didn’t want to get embarrassed.

Sergei and Misha’s trial took place in early December, during the last crunch of the semester, and I couldn’t get away; I thought it would last awhile, into break, but the prosecutors made short work of it and they both received three years in labor colonies for extremism. After that happened I did my best to bring attention to their cause, and even wrote a New York Times op-ed. President Nelson sent me a note to say how much he loved it, as did the woman who ran alumni development, but it didn’t seem to do much for Sergei and Misha. I continued trying, but I couldn’t get out of a peculiar loop, wherein I received praise, and speaking invitations, for bravely championing their cause, and they remained in prison. I did hear one time from Yulia, who had been to see Sergei—he had asked her to tell me that neither he nor Misha blamed me for what happened. “We knew what we were getting into,” Sergei said.

Misha was released after his three years were up. He had had a bad time in the colony—he started drinking the moonshine some of the prisoners made from potato peels and it eventually made him sick. After getting out he moved to Germany, where he was living off fellowships. I saw him at the last meeting of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies in D.C. He did not look well. His prison experiences had not done as much for his career as they had for mine.

I saw Fishman at that conference too. Things had not worked out for him at Watson—there was some kind of scandal with one of the faculty wives—and he had taken a job as a Russia expert with one of the D.C. think tanks. Occasionally he wrote columns in the Post about how the U.S. should finally “get tough” with Russia. Every time I saw Fishman the hawk in print, I wondered what our old classmate Jake, who’d once thrown Fishman halfway across a room, thought of that.

As of this writing, Sergei is still in a labor camp. He got in trouble with the colony administration for organizing the prisoners to protest against unfair working conditions, and when he had his release hearing, he was unapologetic. “I will go back to that prison colony, or whatever colony you want to send me to,” he said. “But someday I will go back to the colony out of curiosity, to see what people have built on its ruins. And the ruins of this court, and this rotten system, also.”

The hearing was public, and I watched it on YouTube. Sergei got another five years added to his sentence.

Boris had remained in Kiev after the arrests. When the protests at Maidan broke out in 2013, he criticized them for a neoliberal tendency, and eventually, to the shock and dismay of at least some of his old friends, moved to Donetsk and started writing in praise of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic. I worried for his safety—according to his Facebook page he had briefly been arrested during one of the governing crises in Donetsk—even as I was still kind of mad at him: after Misha and Sergei’s trial, he had taken it upon himself to kick me out of October.

Not that it mattered. After the arrests they had to shut down the website, and soon people started arguing with one another. When the anti-Putin protests that they’d been predicting for years finally arrived, Sergei and Misha were still away and October for all intents and purposes had ceased to exist. What was worse, the protests were fundamentally liberal rather than socialist in character, appealing to free speech and voting rights rather than to economic justice. They were not the protests October had hoped for, and they were, eventually, crushed.