A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Once in a while I tried to jog her memory about Soviet history—Stalinism, the purges, the war, the “thaw”—but I never got anywhere. She didn’t remember, and she didn’t seem to want to try. Someone more committed to getting at the truth might have forced her to remember whether she wanted to or not. I don’t know. But I couldn’t do it.

  The one thing I did manage to do on our walks was remind her of who I was. This I enjoyed.

  “Do you remember who I am?” I said.

  “You’re Andryusha.”

  “But do you remember how I know you?”

  “How you know me . . .”

  “Do you remember your daughter?”

  “My daughter?” There was almost always a pause. “My little daughter? My Yelochka?”

  “Yes.”

  “She died.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?”

  “I am her son.”

  “You are her son.” I could practically see as her mind went back to the dacha at Sheremetevo, me as a little boy running around the yard, my father coming one weekend and teaching me how to ride a bike. Then she’d look up at grown-up me. “Andryusha?”

  “Yes.”

  And we would continue walking, and I would try not to cry.

  4.

  I TRY TO FIND A HOCKEY GAME

  YOU HAD TO BE fundamentally stupid, I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to focus on one narrow, particular thing. And how, without knowing all the other things out there, could you possibly choose? I was enjoying this thought one day while walking to the Coffee Grind. It wasn’t the only time in the day that I had to think, but it was the most concentrated. I always walked past the little grocery where I got my sushki and then I was on creepy, deserted Bolshaya Lubyanka. I had no choice but to think.

  If I looked at my classmates, the ones who started at the same time as I did, what was the difference between them and me? It wasn’t that they were actually stupid. Most of them were smart, and some were quite a bit smarter than I was. That wasn’t the difference, though. The difference was their willingness to stick with something. The successful ones were like pit bulls who had sunk their teeth into a topic and wouldn’t let go until someone shot them or they had tenure.

  To the ongoing frustration of my adviser, I was not doing that.

  “Pretend I’m a hiring committee,” he said once. “What is your pitch to me?”

  “My pitch is that I love this stuff. I love Russian history and literature and I love talking about it to people.”

  “OK, but a university is also a place for research. What’s your specialty?”

  I had been through this with him before. “Modernity,” I said, knowing already that he wasn’t going to like it. “I am a specialist in modernity.”

  My adviser, a six-foot-four former basketball player from Iowa, did a very girly imitation of my voice. “‘I’m a specialist in modernity,’” he said. “‘I study the ways in which modernity affects the Russian mind.’”

  I waited for him to finish.

  “I’m a specialist in my own butt!” yelled my adviser. “That’s not what got me this job!”

  “What’s wrong with modernity?”

  “It covers three centuries! It’s not a specialization. Three years is a specialization. Or better yet, three months. Three days. If you were a specialist in, like, Tuesday through Thursday of the first week of February 1904, but also in total command of Russian modernism, I could get you a job anywhere you wanted.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, look at the writers you’ve studied.” We were in my adviser’s tiny office, the two printed-out sheets of my CV lying on his desk between us. Despite his unorthodox advising methods, he was a good guy. He said he’d gotten serious about studying Russia after he realized he wasn’t going to the NBA. (“It took me a long time to realize that,” he said, “because I am dumb.”) He was a great teacher, a truly inspired teacher, but his own academic career had not gone smoothly. He wanted me to avoid his mistakes. “Who is Patrushkin?” he asked now, looking at the description of my dissertation. Grigory Patrushkin was an early-nineteenth-century poet. He hadn’t actually written very many poems, nor were the poems he wrote very good, but I wanted someone from that era who wasn’t Pushkin. Although Patrushkin knew Pushkin.

  “Patrushkin was a friend of Pushkin’s,” I now said.

  “A friend?”

  “He sort of knew Pushkin.”

  “And does this mean you can teach Pushkin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because there’s no course on Patrushkin!”

  “I just didn’t want to write about the usual suspects. I thought . . .” I sort of trailed off.

  “Look,” he said. “Do you think I want to be studying the architecture of early Russian huts?” In his one smart academic move, my adviser had developed a theory that medieval Russian huts lacked chimneys—they discovered chimneys some two hundred years after Western European peasants—and this gave early Russian peasants brain damage, which explains why they didn’t develop some of the farming strategies that radically increased crop yields in early modern Europe and helped bring about the Renaissance. “Do you think I wanted to become another of these people who come up with a monocause for Russian backwardness? No, dude. I wanted to be Isaiah Berlin!”

  “I know I’m not Isaiah Berlin.”

  “I know, OK. I’m just saying. I know you love teaching. That’s a good thing. But in order to teach, you need a teaching job, yes? And right now, at this point in time, that means finding a topic that’s going to appeal to a hiring committee.”

  Back in July he was very excited when I told him I was going to Russia.

  “This is great!” he said. “You’ll be on the ground. You can find something new and original. Or something old.” It was my adviser who suggested I interview my grandmother. “She’ll tell you stories about the USSR. You can weave them in and out of a tale of modernity. That shit is gold, my friend. People love that shit.”

  “Hiring committees love it?”

  “Yes. Who did you think I meant when I said ‘people’?”

  Now that was out. If I couldn’t use my grandmother’s stories, which she didn’t remember, I would have to think of something else. But what? I really had no idea. People like Alex Fishman made their careers repackaging Russian dictatorship. “Gulag,” said Fishman, then “internet,” and granting institutions swooned. (He was now doing an online history of the Gulag.) People loved reading about the Soviet Gulag—it made them feel better about the U.S. of A.

  Of course it wasn’t like Russia was now a flourishing democracy. But it was complicated. Back in Brooklyn on the internet, and now in my grandmother’s kitchen on Echo of Moscow, all I heard about was what a dangerous place Russia was, what a bloody tyrant Putin had become. And it was, and he was. But I had half expected to be arrested at the airport! I thought I’d be robbed on the train. In fact the only thing I was in danger of being arrested for was accidentally buying too many cappuccinos at the Coffee Grind and not having enough cash on me to pay. (They did not take credit cards.) The only robbery going on was the price of croissants on Sretenka.

  The country had become rich. Not everyone was rich—my grandmother wasn’t rich, and in fact, speaking of robbery, she had been robbed of certain things—but overall, generally speaking, a lot of people, especially in Moscow, were pretty well off. Looking out the window, it was hard to square all the talk of bloody dictatorship with all the people in expensive suits, getting into Audis, talking on their cell phones. Was this naïve? Didn’t people in Saudi Arabia drive fancy cars and talk on cell phones in between chopping off the heads of dissidents? Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I’d never been to Saudi
Arabia. For me—and not just for me, I think—Soviet oppression and Soviet poverty had always been inextricably intertwined.

  Not everyone was happy about the new conditions. The liberals on Echo complained about press censorship and the marginalization of opposition politicians. Sometimes they held small protests to express their anger at the regime. And there were also occasional local issue-oriented protests, for example against the building of a mall in Pushkin Square. Most of these were tolerated, but some were violently dispersed, and my grandmother had apparently seen such a dispersal because every time we walked past a larger than usual group of people—whether waiting in line or watching a juggler perform, and especially if there were police nearby—she would say, “Let’s get out of here, it’s a protest, the police are very harsh toward protesters,” and pull us in the opposite direction. Nonetheless she remained very curious about the news, and every time she found me in the kitchen with the radio on or Kommersant or the Moscow Times in front of me, she started asking questions. “What are they saying?” she’d say.

  “About what?”

  “You know, about the situation. What’s the situation?”

  What was the situation? I couldn’t tell! It was some kind of modern authoritarianism. Or authoritarian modernization. Or something. I tried to keep her up on the latest, and she gamely nodded her head.

  In the meantime, the fall PMOOC sections had begun. I was in charge of four online sections of Jeff Wilson’s class on the classics of Russian literature. It was an OK class. Jeff was in his midforties and taught a kind of hepped-up version of the classics. He would say things like “Vronski is a bro in a hipster outfit” and “Tolstoy was sort of the Kanye of Russian literature—he was always making embarrassing public statements and then being forced to apologize.” The idea was to make the books relatable to a younger audience. I didn’t mind, even though, having TA’ed for Jeff quite a bit in grad school, I had noticed that he also compared Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to Kanye, to the point where I wondered if he knew any other figures from popular culture. (“Pushkin is really the Tupac of Russian literature, though, don’t you think?” my adviser quipped once, when I complained about it to him.)

  The class began in early September, and so in the Coffee Grind across from the FSB I would watch Jeff’s lecture, skim the assigned book to refresh my memory, and then log on to the different class blogs, where the students wrote responses to the text and then commented on those responses and then commented on the comments—forever.

  In my many years of grad school I had taught all sorts of people. I had taught arriving freshmen in their first semester, when they still resembled children, their upper lips irritated from their first shaves; they thought that Tolstoy or, better still, Dostoevsky was trying to communicate directly to them and responded accordingly (often without doing the reading). I had taught cynical seniors who had learned to manipulate the limited belief system of contemporary literary studies and receive good grades. They knew that Tolstoy was just a name that we gave to a machine that had once written symbols on a piece of paper. It was ridiculous to try to assign some kind of intention or consistency to this machine. The seniors floated in and out of class, making fun of me. At the end of the year, I watched them all get jobs at hedge funds. I experienced it as a personal failure when they left literature; the only thing worse was when they remained. But the PMOOC students were something else altogether—a volatile mixture of the young and old, the overeducated and the autodidactic. They wrote me a tremendous number of emails.

  The first book we read that fall semester was Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. It was one of Tolstoy’s early novels, about a spoiled young officer from Moscow who is sent to do his army service in a Cossack town on the southern Russian frontier. Back home, the young officer has gambling debts and a bad reputation, but in the Cossack village he starts over again, falling in love with the simple, straightforward, earthbound ways of the natives. He falls in love too with a handsome, strong-boned Cossack girl named Dunya, and though she is engaged to be married to her childhood sweetheart, the spoiled young officer eventually convinces her to break it off. Though skeptical, she knows she’d be a fool to turn down a wealthy Muscovite. And then, just as they’re about to make it official, there is a raid on the village and Dunya’s former fiancé is killed. Somewhat unfairly, Dunya blames the young officer for her friend’s death. Unable to muster a defense of his actions, he packs his things and goes back to Moscow. The end.

  The students did not like the book, primarily because they didn’t like the young officer. “Why read a book about a jerk?” they said. After reading seven or eight responses along these lines, I wrote an impassioned defense of The Cossacks. Books weren’t just for likeable characters overcoming hardships, I said. Some of the world’s greatest books are about jerks! I wrote the post and uploaded it and waited. The blogging software we used allowed people to “like” posts, as on Facebook; after my heartfelt essay received just one like, I spent an hour in the Coffee Grind figuring out how to disable that function, and did.

  At the end of my work sessions at the Grind, I would check the Slavic jobs listings page—in early September it was, predictably, pretty fallow—and then give myself the dubious treat of scrolling through Facebook. Sarah hadn’t bothered to unfriend me after our break-up and it would have been churlish on my part to unfriend her, and now I saw her posting solo photos of herself, looking cuter and cuter with each one, here on some beach over Labor Day, there on some college campus that was definitely not our college campus . . . Her status was still “single,” and she was alone in all the photos, and it was possible that it was just a friend of hers who was taking them—maybe her friend Ellen?—but they didn’t feel like photos that Ellen would take. Sarah was going into her third year in the English department, and she had said that all the boys in English were ridiculous, but maybe she had found one who wasn’t. Or maybe she was dating a guy from anthro. I tried not to think too much about it. I went back to studying the Facebook posts of my stupid former classmates: A syllabus completed! A manuscript accepted! An issue of the Slavic Review with their peer-reviewed article in it! Oh, how I hated all of them. Through gritted teeth I pressed “like” on all their posts, pretty much without exception.

  * * *

  • • •

  I tried to be helpful around the house, but like much else this was more difficult than I had expected. The place was so old and had been adjusted over the years in so many ingenious but ad hoc ways that a person without deep knowledge of it was lost. I had lived in an old building in Brooklyn, at least as old as my grandmother’s, but it had been built to last, and when something broke down we called the super, Elvis, who took his time but eventually came up and more or less fixed what was broken. If you gave Elvis twenty dollars at Christmas, he would start coming up faster. In Moscow it would never occur to a group of residents to employ and house a permanent handyman. Every man of the house was his own handyman. Except, as it turned out, me.

  One morning I got up to find my grandmother at the kitchen table, looking worried. “Ah, Andryush, you’re up,” she said. “We have a problem. There’s no hot water.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  I half expected to turn on the tap and find hot water coming out and explain to my grandmother that she had been mistakenly turning the cold water knob, but this was not the case. I turned the hot water knob, let it run, and nothing but cold water emerged. She was right.

  The hot water, I knew, was regulated by a mini-boiler that was mounted in the corner of the bathroom. It was like a stove in that it had a little blue pilot light always working; when you turned on the hot water, the pilot light lit a big blue flame that warmed the water as, I guess, it went through the boiler. I went into the bathroom and, sure enough, the pilot light was extinguished. So I had identified the cause of the problem. But that was only half the battle.

  Dima had left me the number of his handyman, Ste
pan, to call in case anything broke. But surely I could fix this myself? I tried fiddling with the knobs on the boiler, none of which were labeled, to no effect; then I tried fiddling with them while holding a lit match next to where the pilot light used to be, to equally little effect. Then I tried to do all this with the hot water on. Then I tried it with the cold water on. Some of these attempts required the participation of my grandmother, who kept mumbling, “We’re ruined, we’re ruined,” over and over as she turned on the hot water, the cold water, and both of them at once. These attempts in their various combinations took about an hour and didn’t get us anywhere. Finally, I broke down and called Stepan.

  “Did you try turning the knob at the back to the left with the hot water on?” he asked right away.

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’ll come by. The traffic’s bad so it’s going to take a while, and I’ll need to charge you for that.”

  “How much?”

  “All told, fifteen hundred.”

  That was sixty dollars at the time. It seemed like a lot. But we needed hot water. “OK,” I said.

  Stepan was there two hours later, a gruff giant with a bushy mustache. He said hello to my grandmother, whom he knew by name, and headed for the bathroom. It took him exactly two seconds to get the pilot light back on. “You have to hold the knob in position for a bit,” he said. “Otherwise the gas doesn’t get there.”

  I handed him the rubles, which I’d prepared, and he took them with an air of profound regret, as if this was really something that should not have happened. I tried to cheer him up.

  “Next time I’ll be able to do it myself!” I said.

  “You should have done it yourself this time,” Stepan said gloomily, bid farewell to my grandmother, and left.

  * * *

  • • •

  Otherwise, around the house, things were OK. I grew used to my scratchy sheets and instant coffee (when I finally found a place that sold French presses, I discovered I could not afford one), and even the lack of wi-fi started to seem like a blessing, keeping me away from student blog posts and fruitless rage-filled Facebook sessions. The one real problem was that I couldn’t sleep. I kept waking at five in the morning and then lying in bed hoping to get to sleep again before I gave up and got out of bed. Then in the late afternoon I would become unbearably sleepy; as this was the time my grandmother most needed company, I would try to stay awake, but I didn’t always manage.