A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  As I said it, I knew that I was quoting someone. But who? Was it Shalamov? Was it Dostoevsky’s speech about Pushkin, which we’d read over the Thanksgiving break? I couldn’t quite place it.

  It was Fishman who figured it out. “‘Russia is sick,’” he mimicked me. Then, bursting into a grin: “Wait, Putin says that. You’re saying what Putin said!”

  “Enough with your Putin!” I yelled. He was right, I realized; the words had sort of bubbled up out of me. But also he was wrong. I said, “Just because Putin said it doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “Hmm,” said Fishman, smiling. Yulia, next to him, continued to look at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

  Anyway, it was time to go. “I’m sorry to disrupt your dinner,” I said to Simon, who gave a small cry of acknowledgment. He clearly wished for me to leave.

  In the hallway it took me a long time to put on my shoes, and as I did so no one back at the dinner table said a word. I finally hopped out into the hallway with one shoe half on; only in the elevator did I get it on entirely. I had held on to the beer I’d picked up, and in the elevator I opened it. Fizz sprayed out violently and all over the sleeve of my telogreyka. I must have lost a quarter of the can. But the rest of it I drank as I walked home from Simon’s in the cold.

  What had I done for Russia? I hadn’t done much. I had read many books written in Russian and I had for years taught Russian literature to students—I suppose that was something. But I hadn’t really changed anyone’s mind about Russia. I had not discovered anything new about Russia. To really do something for Russia, as an academic, would mean coming up with a new interpretation, a new way of seeing, that would change the way people talked about Russia and thought about Russia, and that would change Russia itself. This wasn’t impossible. But it wasn’t easy and I hadn’t yet done anything close.

  I spent a miserable night in my room and most of the next day, a Sunday, with my grandmother, trying to forget the whole embarrassing incident. That night I played hockey at the weird rink next to the elevated gas line. On Monday, I received an email from YuSemenova @yandex.ru—Yulia Semenova—Yulia from Saturday night. She had pulled my address from Simon’s initial invitation, she said. She was sorry for the imposition, but she was organizing a small discussion of neoliberalism in higher education at the Falanster bookstore in a few weeks, just after the New Year, and if I had time to come she’d be delighted if I could say a few words about the American system. The event was scheduled for 7:00 P.M.; she hoped there’d be a nice crowd.

  I was perplexed. What had I said or done to make her think that I would be a good person to address the state of neoliberalism in higher education? Was it that I had caused a ruckus and stolen a beer at Simon’s dinner, and she wanted me to cause a ruckus and steal a beer at her discussion? That didn’t make any sense. Perhaps she had seen, through the noise of my craziness, a good and loyal heart? It seemed unlikely. But there was only one way to find out. I said I’d be happy to go.

  4.

  REVELATION

  I SPENT New Year’s Eve at home, but it was not uneventful.

  First, we received in the mail a New Year’s greeting from Prime Minister Putin. It was addressed directly to my grandmother. “Dear Seva Efraimovna!” it read. “May you have a wonderful New Year. Our country is grateful for your sacrifices. We will not forget and we will not forgive!”

  My grandmother was not taken in. “They can go to hell,” she said, and threw out the postcard.

  A little while later, as I sat in the kitchen sipping instant coffee and listening to Echo, my grandmother came in and handed me a key.

  “Andryush,” she said. “I just found this key. Do you know what it’s from?”

  It was a small, old-style desk or cabinet key, and I figured there couldn’t possibly be too many answers to that question. “Let’s see,” I said. With my grandmother trailing behind me, I went into her room and tried it on the desk drawer, which was already unlocked. Happily, it was not the key. And then I tried it on the standing shelf in her room, which had been locked the entire time I was here, and which now, voilà, opened.

  “Hooray!” said my grandmother.

  “Did you need something in here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” said my grandmother. “What’s in there?”

  There were many things. My grandmother’s old work papers. Her old photos. Various other documents. And then, above it all, there was an old chocolate box full of letters. They were from my mother to my grandmother, after we emigrated. And then my grandmother’s letters to my mother—my father must have sent them back to my grandmother at some point, after my mother died.

  I spent all day reading the letters. My mother’s were filled with long, lively, not always ecstatic descriptions of our life in America, my childhood, Dima’s rebellion, her occasional alienation from my practical father; my grandmother’s contained sad evaluations of the home lives of the friends and relatives my mother had left behind. About her own life my grandmother spoke with a kind of hollow bravado. Even in letters designed to assuage her daughter’s guilt about leaving her, my grandmother couldn’t help but let a note of sadness enter. The winters in Dubna were so drab; the movies that she saw in Moscow disappointed her. And there was an envy or even resentment of Uncle Lev, disguised as wonderment. “He is entirely consumed by his work, he won’t even tear himself away from it when we’re traveling—when we were in Koktebel last month he started wondering why no one had ever checked for oil there. An amazing person!” This was not sarcastic exactly, but it was a little rueful: my grandmother had chosen a profession that turned out to be implicated in all sorts of political nonsense, and she had had, essentially, to abandon it, whereas Uncle Lev had become a scientist, and, tempted as the Party had been at times to meddle in science, it left its oilmen alone.

  Above all, in my grandmother’s letters there was a longing to be reunited with her daughter, a feeling that the center of her world had disappeared. The letters were incredibly frequent—as many as one a week for the first few years, and then never less than one a month until the late 1980s, when telephone contact became easier. My mother had a nickname for my grandmother; my grandmother addressed my mother as “my beloved little daughter.” And though the letters were sophisticated, ironic, full of conversation about movies they’d seen and books they’d read, they addressed each other with total, unaffected honesty. Though it made perfect sense—my grandmother had raised my mother all alone, through some of the most difficult years of the century—I had had no idea, really, how close they had been. I had no idea how much they had missed each other. There was even talk, as the Soviet Union started falling down around their ears, of my grandmother and Uncle Lev coming to Boston to live. It never happened. Uncle Lev had a security clearance, and even in the final years of the USSR people like that were not allowed to leave. And then my mother died.

  “It’s my fault, you know, that she left,” my grandmother said after reading through a few of the letters herself.

  “In what sense?”

  We were in my grandmother’s room—I on the green armchair next to her bed, she in the bed that turned into a sofa, resting.

  “I told her the truth,” said my grandmother. “Even when she was a little girl, I told her the truth about this place, about what a terrible country this was. So when she became old enough, she left.”

  I didn’t say anything. My grandmother hadn’t told her all the truth—she hadn’t revealed the secret of Aunt Klava, for example—but that wasn’t the point.

  “And it’s my fault that she died,” my grandmother went on. “When she worked here, they had mandatory mammograms. But not in America. If she had stayed here, they would have caught it in time.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said automatically. But now I understood what she had meant all those times she said that my mother had gone to America and died. I had thought it
was a statement of two unconnected facts. But my mother had died of breast cancer after a diagnosis that arrived too late. My grandmother had a point.

  That evening, I got us a bottle of wine and we drank to the New Year. “It’s so nice to have you here with me, Andryushenka,” my grandmother said. I was very moved. She called Emma Abramovna to wish her a happy New Year and went to bed early. For my part, I went across the landing to see the soldiers. They were going to a big party later on but for the moment they were having a mini-pre-party at their place.

  After we’d had a couple of beers, Howard took me aside.

  “Listen,” he said, “I need to ask you a favor.”

  He had met a girl through his customer-reviewed sex worker website and gone over to her place. “I show up, and her mother is there in the kitchen. A very nice lady. We drank tea together and then this girl takes me into her room and fucks me. Can you believe that? I felt like a teenager. It was one of the most erotic experiences I’ve ever had.”

  Howard paused. What favor could he possibly have in mind to ask of me?

  “I’d like to write her a very good review, but in Russian,” said Howard. “If I write it and email it to you, will you check it over so that it doesn’t have too many mistakes?”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, I received some interesting news. My adviser called me on the phone. “S novym godom!” he shouted. Happy New Year.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I have some sad news,” said my adviser. “Frank Miller has died.”

  Frank Miller was a beloved professor of Russian studies at a place called Watson College. Watson was a small undistinguished liberal arts school located in the far frigid reaches of upstate New York, but it had going for it that an eccentric alumnus, who had made millions manufacturing weapons systems at the height of the Cold War, had endowed a permanent professorship in Russian history and literature. Frank Miller had occupied it with distinction. He was also a close friend of and mentor to my adviser, and when Miller had gone on sabbatical a few years earlier, my adviser had arranged for me to take over his classes. I had done my best, both to teach the classes and stave off depression, and the student evaluations had been good.

  “I didn’t know he was sick,” I said.

  “No, he kept it quiet. And it was pretty sudden. Over Thanksgiving he got the news that it was in his liver, and from there it happened really fast.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “It does suck,” said my adviser. “But here’s the thing. Get your CV in order. I think they’re going to do a search for his replacement and they’re going to do it fast. I’m going to tell them they had better look at you.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “But also,” he went on, “you need to publish something. Everybody’s obsessed with publication right now. Has your grandmother told you a lot of cool shit about the USSR?”

  “No.”

  “Well, think of something else, then. You need to get a publication. That’ll help you a lot.”

  It was a strange phone call to get. I had pretty much resigned myself to my new Moscow life, and now here was my adviser pulling me back in the direction of the life I’d had. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. But I updated my CV.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Falanster bookstore, which was to host the discussion of neoliberalism in higher education, was hard to find. After dropping off my grandmother at Emma Abramovna’s, I walked there in the bitter cold and then wandered around the vicinity of the address for about fifteen minutes, going in and out of a courtyard through a big archway and growing increasingly cold and worried that I would miss the event. Why did I still think that just because I knew the address, I’d be able to locate a place, even after all the times this had proved not to be the case?

  Finally I asked someone and they pointed me to the archway. Over the generations Russians had taken these old tsarist-era buildings and divided them up in a million different ways, and here was an actual bookstore inside the structure of the archway.

  You could tell right away that it was a good bookstore. They had all the academic books from the legendary New Literary Observer, and a terrific journals section. There were no posters of Putin above the cash register, as there were at the bookstore under the strip club on Sretenka, no lurid books on America’s Plan to Steal Our Oil, no obscure tracts on revealed religion. There were serious books of poetry, philosophy, and political science. And there was a small plaster bust of Karl Marx in the corner, against which was leaning a stack of old journals.

  The bookstore was filled with about a dozen people, and I saw Yulia, in a red sweater and brown wool skirt, looking both severe and sexy. She was talking to some dude and didn’t appear to see me. Did she forget she’d invited me? I was pretending to study the stacks of books in the middle of the store when I saw a very familiar-looking person enter the space. I had positive associations with him, but where from? He was so decontextualized that for a moment I couldn’t figure it out. Then I did. “Sergei!” I said. It was the goalie from my hockey team. He looked up and smiled and came over to me. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I’m speaking,” he said. “What about you?”

  “I’m also speaking.” This sounded somehow unconvincing, like I was imitating him, so I added, “Yulia invited me.”

  “Ah, Yulia,” said Sergei. “Well, great.” He patted me on the shoulder and moved off to speak to someone who had been trying to get his attention.

  “Ah, Yulia,” meaning what exactly? I had to put the thought aside as Yulia now came over. “Thank you for coming,” she said, putting her hand on my arm momentarily. “Sergei Ivanov”—our goalie!—“is going to give a lecture on his path through contemporary education, but I thought it’d be useful to have a bit of global context, so if you don’t mind, I’ll introduce you and ask you to say a few words about the American situation, and then I’ll introduce Sergei. Does that sound all right?”

  “What do you want me to say about the American situation?”

  “Just whatever you think. The situation of professors and adjuncts and the job market.”

  I knew exactly what she meant: the shitty and embarrassing position of adjuncts, the humiliations visited on them and their students by the university, the rise of PMOOCs as the solution that solves nothing. How did she know I’d know all this? Maybe she had talked to Fishman about me. Or maybe she just knew. I wanted to ask but I couldn’t think of how to word it, and in any case once she’d explained what she wanted, she left me, moved to the front of the room, and asked everyone to take their seats. Looking around, I saw people in their twenties, many of them with glasses, ratty sweaters, poor posture; they looked a little like the group from dinner the other day but more unkempt—they were grad students who might not actually have been grad students. I liked them all immediately.

  “Our first speaker,” Yulia said, beautifully, “will be Andrei Kaplan, from New York, where he is an adjunct professor of Russian studies. Andrei?”

  I got up and, a little nervously—I would have been nervous in any case, but speaking in front of a group in Russian made it worse—gave a short description of the plight of adjuncts in the United States. My main complaint was inequality: if you won the academic sweepstakes and got a full-time job, you were paid about fifteen thousand dollars a class. If you didn’t, you might be paid something more like three thousand. (Or one thousand, for a PMOOC.) This was unfair. There was, in my opinion, no justification for such a huge disparity in payment, especially in institutions that considered themselves models of democracy and liberalism.

  I said all this as quickly as I could. People nodded in agreement or understanding and then gave a small round of applause when I finished. Yulia got up, gave me her smile, ducked her head to hide her teeth, and thanked me. I sat do
wn, relieved and happy, and then Yulia introduced Sergei.

  “As s-s-some of you know,” Sergei began, with a little stutter, “I quit the university three years ago in protest over the increasing privatization of education in Russia. My initial impulse after I quit was to do something else entirely. I thought I might write a novel. But I found this boring and in any case I had no talent. And I started thinking more about what my experience in the university had meant for my experience of life in our country.

  “The term ‘neoliberalism’ has come into vogue of late in foreign academic and political writing, and for a long time I was pretty sure that it had nothing to do with us, with me. It was a foreign word and our realities were different from the realities being described, even in such an apparently analogous situation, as Andrei Kaplan has just outlined, in the United States.

  “But the more I thought about it, the more clear it became. It’s an ugly word but it describes an ugly phenomenon. It’s a description of the privatization of matters that were previously public, of the marketization of human relations and affairs. And in Russia it explains a lot of what we see.

  “We’re used to thinking of our dictators as Stalin: Is this Stalin or is this not Stalin? Is this 1937 or is it not 1937? And if that’s the question, the answer is always going to be: it’s not 1937, and this is not Stalin. The supermarkets are overflowing with goods, the people have new televisions, some are driving new cars: everything is fine.

  “But not everything is fine! You know it and I know it. Stalin is no longer the benchmark. Because there is a dictator that is as tough as Stalin and as brutal as Stalin but is also more acceptable than Stalin, more popular than Stalin ever was. It’s called the market.

  “What we’ve seen in Russia in the last twenty years is the replacement of a stagnant, sometimes violent and oppressive, but basically functioning state with a dictatorship of the market. People have died, of starvation, of depression, of alcoholism and violence, and not only have they done so quietly, they have done so willingly. They have praised their conquerors. We all know about the Bolsheviks who confessed to terrible crimes in the 1930s of which they were innocent. This was a lot like that. Except the Old Bolsheviks had been tortured! People like our parents did it of their own free will. They had built a country; they had served it loyally and to the best of their ability. Now they were confessing to sins attributed to them by neoclassical economics. They were willing to renounce everything they had ever thought because they believed that, in the grand sweep of history, they were in the wrong.