These were all trivial problems, I reflected as the car raced across the steppe to Marx. On either side of the road, vast fields stretched away. Right now, the perspectives for a farmer were extraordinary. Thanks to high global grain prices, the big investors had looked at the map and realized that 8 percent of the world’s cultivable land lay in Russia. They had started investing billions. Land prices here were soaring, but it was still ten times as cheap as land in France. Misha was in the right place at the right time.
Before the Revolution, the Volga had been Russia’s great wheat bowl, and there was no reason why it should not be again. Russia was going to become the world’s largest wheat exporter, and Misha was bound to be part of that success.
Outside Marx, Tatiana and I stopped by a truck piled high with green mottled watermelons. As a lad clambered over the green globes to reach a golden one for us I noticed that Tatiana was frowning. “What’s the matter?” “Nothing. It’s just that I loathe Marx—I’d never come here at all if it weren’t for Lyuba,” she replied. So fast did she whisk through the town center that I noticed only a blur of new shops.
Their house was on the outskirts, in the district where the Soviet bosses used to live. This was the original Thieftown, as opposed to the New Thieftown which had sprung up since the fall of communism. Back then, the grandees used to live here, but now the houses were going cheap. The sight of them made me nostalgic for the old days, when the thieving was so modest. They might have been built by blind men, with their small, awkwardly placed windows and badly laid brick walls festooned with electric cables. They cowered behind tall fences, as though ashamed of their appearance.
Over the gates of one house someone had hoisted lines of doggerel, written in crude, loopy letters. The gist of it was this: “All year I waited for my pension. The postman got so embarrassed he’d be lying, blushing. / Hunger’s no joke. But as you’ll find, prison’s a lot worse. / You may be living it up now, Baguette you bastard! / But you’ll get your comeuppance! / Give us our pensions! We fought for our country!”
“Baguette” was the head of the regional administration. When I first started coming to Marx he was a rough lad who ran a bakery, hence the nickname.
The sound of church music floated out to us as we approached Tatiana and Misha’s house. Tatiana winced: “She plays it day and night. It drives me nuts.” Lyuba, eighty this year, was sitting on the side of her bed, white kerchief around her head, flowered smock, growth stunted by malnutrition, blind eyes closed, folding and refolding her huge, knotted hands in her lap. “Ah, Brooksevna! Brooksevna’s back!” She called me by my father’s name, hugging me fiercely, lavishing a torrent of earthy Ukrainian endearments on me. “How is your husband? Is your daughter married yet? Any grandchildren? In my prayers I remember you all, ask God to give them, the girls, his grace. That your one and Polina should bring us grandchildren.” She had forgotten nothing.
Back then she was weeping every day for her lost home, the rose trees she kept watered through the hot summers, the raspberries and potatoes, the apple trees and the brindled cow. When she arrived four years ago the doctor said she’d not survive long (“they never do, when they’re moved”). She finally came to terms with the move only this summer. “This is where I want to see out my days,” she told me, patting my hand decisively. “The children weren’t good to me, they didn’t want me. But here my heart’s at peace. Tanyochka, my little sunshine, is more of a daughter to me than my own. She never makes me feel I’m a trouble, though I do no work. I pray for her though, for you all, every day. I can peel seeds, too—here, take these.” She fished a bag of sunflower seeds out of her cupboard. “I roasted them myself, too.”
In the evening, Tatiana’s brother, his wife, and their little boy arrived with a sack full of crayfish for our supper. I remembered Tatiana’s sister-in-law as a shy, retiring woman. This time, something about her intrigued me. She occupied the room differently. She had attitude. Yes, she explained as we scrubbed crayfish together, a lot had happened since we last met. She had become one of the moving spirits in a stubborn grassroots revolt in Marx. It was about their daughter’s lycée, the only good school in the district. Eight months ago, Baguette had announced that it was closing. The explanation he gave for the decision was utterly unconvincing. Everyone assumed some developer had paid him fairy-tale sums for the site.
Baguette can never have expected resistance. But out here, what hope people had was vested in their children’s future. That meant education. So the worm turned. The parents got together and took the matter to court. Twice, they won their case. Twice, the judges were bought off and Baguette won. After that, the parents and children simply refused to leave the school. Although the teachers had been reassigned to other schools, they also stayed on, though the gas had been switched off and there was no way of feeding the children. When word got out that trucks were coming to strip the school of furniture overnight, the mothers organized a roster and started spending nights there.
Such was Baguette’s power that not a single deputy from Marx (including the school’s founder, who had gone into local politics) backed the children. Anna had written up the story for her paper. But the paper’s editor rewrote it, to support Baguette’s version. The best Anna could do was remove her name from the article.
This was just a little revolt against those palaces on the hill. It was hardly going to go down in history alongside the great rebellions launched on the Volga by Pugachev and Stenka Razin, which had shaken the Russian empire. But then, as now, grassroots revolts remained the only way ordinary people could make themselves heard by autocratic rulers.
Putin’s government had seen off all legitimate outlets for opposition. But early in 2005, they were badly rattled when thousands of pensioners took to the streets in cities across Russia, protesting at an attempt to “rationalize” their pitiful pensions. Terrified by this massing of the powerless, the government caved in. Here in Marx, with its cult of obedience, this eight-month-long battle by mothers and children must also have sent shock waves through Baguette and his crew. “They’ll win in the end—we’re running out of options,” said Tatiana’s sister-in-law, before adding with a gleam in her eye, “Still, we’ll never be the same. Any of us.” That included Baguette’s own daughter, who was at the school, and had come out against her father.
THE PRICE OF DREAMS
Lyuba was already there, at the head of the table, when we sat down to eat the heaps of pink crayfish. She sat quietly, nibbling at a potato, a diminutive old woman who appeared to be drifting downstream, focused on some drama the rest of us could not see.
Then all of a sudden, in answer to a question of mine, she started talking. She talked about growing potatoes from seed, about preserving tomatoes with the green stem on, but what she said was not the point. Even the children fell silent, watching her pull on the words like oars, as she rowed back against the current toward us.
In the old days, they made dishes, boots, buckets, and clothes, Lyuba was saying. Yes, even the cloth. You’d take the hemp, only the female plants mind, soak them for a month, collect the strong strands, and weave them. That was what she and her mother did of an evening.
That dialect of hers, as rough and dark as freshly plowed earth, conjured up a whole way of life, a peasantry which Russia’s rulers had decided to kill off, in the interests of modernization. There was a time when I had hoped to bring the past of this town, Marx, to life, through the memory of old people. But with a few dazzling exceptions, most of them were too fearful. The past was not a place they dared return to.
In Cherkassk province, eastern Ukraine, before the war there wasn’t much they didn’t grow or make, Lyuba was saying. That included music. Her oldest brother played the fiddle at local weddings. She played the balalaika, like her father. And she sang. She was famous locally. The family would all play together in the evenings. On high days and holidays the villagers would come around to listen, as we were doing now.
Something was happeni
ng to Lyuba as she talked. There were pink spots in her cheeks and she spoke with such vigor that she had to keep pushing her white kerchief back over her hair. The years were falling off her. Then all of a sudden she was singing, in a clear, sweet voice. She sang about a husband who beats his wife. “Right, I’ve had it,” says the wife, gets into a little boat, and floats down the River Dunai. Home comes the husband. The children are hungry, the dishes are dirty. Bitterly then does he regret what he’s done. But it’s too late, by that time the River Dunai has carried her far, far away.
Lyuba sang on, singing herself back from the edge of death, back down the years, back under the skin of that vanished peasant life. The tunes were merry, but the words were about violent husbands who got their comeuppance. Songs written by women, wreaking musical vengeance. Only when Tatiana implored her, “Sing something cheerful,” did she pause, stuck to find happiness in the grown-up world, before starting off again on the children’s songs.
While Lyuba was singing, the wood-lined banya next door was sighing and creaking as it heated up. When everyone else had gone to bed, Tatiana and I retired into it. Afterward, light-headed, smelling of honey and wet birch leaves, we floated out to the kitchen and sat in dressing gowns, drinking tea.
“What did you really think about what Misha said about the war?” Tatiana asked me. “It’s exactly what I expected,” I replied, truthfully. Misha had become genuinely emotional on the subject of Russia’s war with Georgia. “You know how critical I can be of this country,” he burst out. “But on this one I’m right behind Medvedev and Putin. There’s a lot this country can learn from the West about how to run itself. I know that. But surely we’ve got the right to defend our own borders from attack! What’s Russia done to the West to deserve being provoked in that way? You tell me that.
“As you know, my family’s from Ukraine. So all this is very close to my heart. Half Ukraine’s population is Russian, or almost. Our language, our culture, it’s practically the same. Whatever that puppet Yushchenko says, there’s no way we’d stand for Ukraine being taken into NATO. It’s rubbish! What’s more, if push comes to shove, the West’s got a lot more to lose from such a conflict than we do. Europe depends on Russian oil and gas! We may not be in great shape domestically. But we’ve got what it takes. We don’t need the West! It’s going to take us a generation or two to sort ourselves out, but we’re smart people—we’re on our way now!”
Misha had indeed been remarkably consistent in his views. In those early days in Marx, when the rest of the group were still stunned by the trampling of their hopes for democracy and freedom in Russia, Misha’s vision had been distinct. A regular guy, a talented sportsman, he did not just long to be rich. Even then, he was dreaming of the day when Russia would be strong again.
It was another of his dreams that had been realized. On entering Gori, in Georgia, the youngest Russian conscript would have known that the one building they could not fire on was the hut where Stalin was born. Back home in Russia, the Georgian had just topped a poll as the country’s all-time favorite hero. As Russia’s tank commanders rumbled into the port of Poti, their heads were full of memories of childhood summers on the Black Sea. The Caucasus was Russia’s Ireland. Putting things to rights there was a task which had occupied her army since the days of Tolstoy and Lermontov.
It was clear from the expression on Tatiana’s face that she did not share her husband’s views on the war. “Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” she proposed. I turned to Lyuba’s dazzling performance. “You know, I’d never heard her sing before,” Tatiana said, before adding enigmatically, “If Misha’d been here, she’d never have been like that.” “What do you mean?” “She felt safe, loved.”
Misha had just rung up from Germany. He was amazed by Tatiana’s account of our evening. He said his mother had sworn she would never sing again, after the last of her brothers died thirty-three years ago—the one who returned from the war, terribly wounded. Until tonight, she had never done so.
I mentioned a strange story Lyuba had told us of how the village healer had brought her mother back from the dead after her accident. “My mother, matushka moya, was only twenty-seven when the lightning got her,” Lyuba told us. “Right down her spine it went. When they brought her in she was a corpse, lifeless. Babushka, her mother that is, started laying her out, but the znazhar said, “Hold it! Don’t be in such a hurry to bury your daughter!” He dug this great hole, buried her up to her neck in the earth for three days and three nights. When they dug her out she was not just alive. She’d recovered the use of her limbs. She could even work, though she remained in great pain.”
I knew that she had killed herself years later, when she could bear the pain no longer. But it was only now that Tatiana told me Misha was the one who found her hanging there. “He was three. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s so troubled now,” Tatiana muttered. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “He seemed in rather good form to me.” “You’re right, he was lovely with you, the way he always used to be. But when he’s drunk he’s different. Crude, awful.”
He had started drinking a couple of years ago, she said. Was that because things were going wrong on the farm, I asked Tatiana. “No, it was because he became too confident. He thought he could do it all. He thought he’d got it licked. But now he’s started drinking, he can’t control it. He’s spending more and more of his time down here, with Marx’s local bosses. And that’s what they do when they get together. Drink. They bring him home legless.
“He’s particularly bad with his mother, for some reason. He’s her favorite child. Before, he always used to be so good with her. He’d talk to her, spend time with her. Not anymore. When he’s drunk it’s her he takes it out on. And she, well, she just sits there and takes it.
“I’ve come to admire Lyuba enormously,” Tatiana went on. “She’s not just strong, she’s intelligent. I watch the way she can take a tiny bit of information and use it as the basis for making a much broader judgment. When Misha comes in drunk, she always manages to work out what lies behind it, for instance. And she’s never far from the mark.”
Four years ago, when Misha brought his mother here from Ukraine, the two women were dreading the prospect of living together. Now they had become close allies, mutually supportive in the face of their shared problem. Tatiana’s loving care was what had given Misha’s mother her new lease of life.
As for Misha, who had always been so gentle, such a meticulous manager, the drink was affecting his work, Tatiana said. “When things go wrong he loses his temper, blames it all on his subordinates. He spends time on the farm and the factory starts slipping. He concentrates on the factory, and the farm suffers. But he won’t delegate,” Tatiana sighed. “He’s a maximalist, as you know. He thought he could change everything at once. But what he took on was too much for one person.”
We sat in silence, listening to the creaking of the cooling banya. A cat appeared in the open doorway, stalked around the kitchen, and retired outside to feast on crayfish shells under the full moon. How sad, I thought. Misha had realized his dream. But he had paid too high a price.
His youthful appearance was deceptive, too, Tatiana confided. In fact, he had just spent three weeks in hospital, after being taken ill on holiday in Turkey. Years of unremitting work were taking their toll. The doctors were clear: he’d got to change the way he lived, or else …
As we shut the cat out and headed for bed Tatiana told me that Misha was just about to stand for election in Marx, as a deputy for one of the small opposition parties. If he got in, he would be working with that rogue Baguette. Tatiana sighed: “Sometimes, I look at him and think, yes, Marx has won.”
PILNYAK’S ISLAND
Early next morning, we climbed into the car and headed back for Saratov, half-awake, driving too fast. Tatiana and I had overslept. Nadya and her friend were going to be late for school. This time, we drove back on the old road, through the town of Engels. A week ago, it was from here that two
Tupolev-160s, each carrying twelve nuclear warheads, had taken off bound for Venezuela, bearing the message to the United States that two could play at fomenting trouble on each other’s borders.
Tatiana had been trying to help me reach Natasha and Igor, my own efforts having failed. The war with Georgia had left me worried about them and their underground newspaper in Sevastopol. Suddenly, the derelict naval port was in the geopolitical spotlight. Since its military triumph, Russia was viewing the map differently, as a foreign policy pundit had been telling me in Moscow.
America’s days of unchallenged global supremacy were over, he said. A new, multipolar world would emerge sooner or later, one in which Russia was destined to play a major role. But before that could happen, Uncle Sam was going to have to admit that it had failed in its bid to impose its vision of liberal democracy on the world. Until that happened, the world was going to be a dangerous place. Opportunistic conflicts were bound to break out in places like the Caucasus, borderlands between the spheres of influence.
By any reckoning, Crimea was high up among those potential flashpoints. Russia’s rusting navy still lay in the inlets of Sevastopol. Although Khrushchev had rashly bequeathed the peninsula to his native Ukraine, 59 percent of Crimea’s population was Russian. Russia’s sense of imperial entitlement had been stirred up now. The weaker the economy at home, the more Russia’s leaders would be tempted to find a rousing cause to distract attention from their failures domestically. How long was it going to be before Russia’s military moved to reclaim land where so much Russian blood had been spilled? Perhaps the first move had already been made. For one of Russia’s tame opposition parties had started championing its marooned compatriots in Crimea. They were arguing that Crimea’s Russians should have passports, that they should have the right to work and be educated in Russia.
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