A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “And, you know, for a long time I agreed. I thought Communism was the worst thing that could happen to a country. The lies, the shortages, the violence against dissidents. It was abominable.

  “A lot of us knew that things in the nineties were bad. That the new capitalism was in many ways more destructive, more deceptive, and more violent than the Soviet Union had been in the seventies and eighties. When Putin became president, a lot of people thought that he represented the return of the USSR—that we had failed to ‘cleanse’ the country of the communist menace, and that now we were in for it again. As you recall, others argued that Putin was young and a ‘reformer,’ that the KGB was the only businesslike structure in the USSR, and that he would continue the ‘reforms.’

  “What I realized at the university in 2001, 2002, 2003, as I watched the administration adopt more and more of the lingo and practices of big business, was that the reforms were in fact continuing. And that Putin was a reformer, just as the optimists had said, but that, as the pessimists had said, he was adopting Soviet methods of political repression, control of the press, and so on. It appeared to be a contradiction. But it wasn’t one. As I read more about it, I understood: This is what capitalism looks like on the margins of the world system. Turkey, China, Mexico, Egypt . . . all of them had governments that looked like ours, economies that looked like ours. Whether this was a permanent state of things, I didn’t know (though I had some guesses). What I did know, what I continue to know, is that this was a state of affairs, and a regime, that needed to be resisted. And it needed to be resisted in the name of anti-capitalism. Not anti-communism, as the liberals thought, and think, and which aside from being a misdiagnosis of the situation also aligns them with the worst forces in international life, but anti-capitalism, which happens to be correct and also aligns us with the best of those forces—with the radical students in Greece, with the striking autoworkers in Spain, with the protesting oil workers in Kazakhstan, with the newly conscious academic workers in the United States.” Sergei nodded at me. “So, that’s what I finally understood.”

  Sergei paused for a moment and took a drink of water. As he did so, I tried, as unobtrusively as possible, to turn around in my seat in the front row and see how the audience was taking it. I had felt like something very special was happening here, but now, looking at the others, I saw nothing more nor less than a group of students politely listening. A few of them were even taking advantage of Sergei’s short pause to look at their phones. “You could come to them with the Sermon on the Mount,” my adviser once said, “and they’d just sit there taking notes.”

  This wasn’t the Sermon on the Mount, I knew that—but to me, in that room, at that time, it might as well have been. I couldn’t believe it. Sergei was a good goalie, but not an outstanding one. He seemed like a nice guy, but not a superhuman one. In the vulgar yelling and joking of our locker room, I hardly ever noticed him.

  Yet he had figured it out. Suddenly everything I had been looking at—not just over these past months in Moscow, but over the past few years in academia, and over the past fifteen years of studying Russia—became clear to me. Russia had always been late to the achievements and realizations of Western civilization. Its lateness was its charm and its curse—it was as if Russia were a drug addict who received every concoction only after it was perfectly crystallized, maximally potent. Nowhere were Western ideas, Western beliefs, taken more seriously; nowhere were they so passionately implemented. Thus the Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew the old regime; thus the human rights movement, plus blue jeans, which overthrew the Bolshevik one; and thus finally this new form of capitalism created here, which had enriched and then expelled my brother, and which had impoverished my grandmother and killed Uncle Lev. You didn’t have to go and read a thousand books to see it; you just had to stay where you were and look around.

  Yulia sat a few chairs from me. If I were her I would be in love with Sergei. But she appeared not to be. She was watching the audience more than she was watching him. She had organized the event and wanted it to go well. I went back to listening to the lecture. In addition to everything else, I noticed that Sergei’s stutter disappeared when he was speaking like this.

  “It was hard for me to leave the university, despite all the reasons I had to do so. We had a small child, and though my salary was meager, it was something. And I believed in the university as an idea. I believed in education. But then again, what is the point of education? The end point of education is liberation. There can be no total liberation, and so education never ends. What I realized is that you do not have to remain inside an institution of education to continue your education and to continue educating others. The goal of our movement is freedom, and in order to be free, we must first learn how to think. We must learn how to think together; we must practice solidarity; we must organize ourselves and we must organize others. Only that way can we move forward against the darkness; only that way can we build equality and democracy here on earth.”

  Sergei paused.

  “I’ll be happy to take some questions.”

  The question-and-answer session lasted an hour. When it was over, Yulia told me that she and Sergei and some others were going to a nearby bar for a drink. I would have loved to get a drink with Yulia or near Yulia but I needed to pick up my grandmother at Emma Abramovna’s. I walked in that direction down Tverskaya, pondering what I’d just heard.

  It was the first time I’d walked through Moscow that I didn’t see only expensive restaurants and execution chambers. Yes, there were expensive restaurants and execution chambers. But there were also the homes of the people who had been executed in those chambers. There were the books they’d read and the books they’d written. And then, arriving at last at Emma Abramovna’s, where she sat with my grandmother playing anagrams, there were the homes of those who had, one way or another, survived.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day at the Coffee Grind I looked up Sergei on the internet. His break with the university and the regime that supported it had been public and, it turned out, controversial. He had announced it on his LiveJournal page and then spent weeks arguing with people in the comments. I read all of it. He was accused of abandoning the education of young Russians, of exaggerating the level of corruption within the private university, of being a communist. Sergei calmly and methodically answered every accusation. He was abandoning the education of the rich, he said, but he intended to continue educating those without resources; he was not exaggerating; and, yes, he was a communist.

  Where did he think the money for the university—for the physical plant, for the library collection, for the salaries of lazy professors like him—was going to come from? Sergei answered that it should come from the government, that education was something people should pay for through their taxes, as individuals and as corporations. “If the state can reform its military and put billions of dollars into superhighways, why shouldn’t it help its universities provide free education to its children?”

  “People like you teach children godlessness and all sorts of other idiocy,” said one person. “Why should I pay for that?”

  “Ah,” said Sergei.

  But he had not backed down.

  We had hockey that night and I came early in case Sergei did too. But he arrived with the others. He said hi to me and complimented my talk from the other night; I spent at least part of the game wondering how I would broach the subject of our talking again. Sergei was the one who suggested it. In the locker room after we lost he asked if I needed a ride home. I’d been getting a ride home from Oleg but I immediately said yes. Oleg didn’t mind. He had recently found a tenant for the bank space vacated by the Europeans. When he mentioned this in the locker room, and named the group he was renting to, I saw several of the guys raise their eyebrows. Not understanding, I asked, “Is it a bank?”

  “Not exactly,” said Oleg. It turned out they wer
e a criminal outfit. When Tolya wondered aloud if this was wise, Oleg laughed. “I’m not going into business with them,” he said, “just renting them a space.” He seemed giddy with the news, as if he’d once again managed to pull a great trick on the world, and I realized then that Oleg was less careful, less reserved, than the other guys we played with. It was part of his charm, but I could see that the guys were worried about him.

  Sergei had a boxy old Lada and we loaded our stuff in the back. If I was worried about striking up a conversation with him, I need not have been. He seemed happy to basically continue his talk from the night before.

  “One of the important political events of my life was the Iraq War,” he said. “Or, rather, watching the reaction to it inside Russia. I saw people who opposed Putin, which I instinctively agreed with, supporting the Iraq War, which I instinctively disagreed with. So either my instincts were wrong, or there was something the matter here.

  “Until then I’d been a fairly standard liberal. I voted for Yeltsin. But I started thinking about my parents and grandparents. They were good people, hardworking people. And they had been totally decimated by the reforms. I started looking into it. I studied literature, like you. I wrote my thesis on late Soviet nonconformist poetry. But I started reading about politics, world politics and Russian politics. And the more I read, the more I understood that it wasn’t my parents who were the problem, it was the reforms that were the problem, it was capitalism that was the problem, and Putin was a particular kind of capitalist. Once I saw that, I saw a lot of things.”

  By now we’d reached Trubnaya Square; Sergei pulled over next to one of the big construction sites.

  A few years ago, he said, he and some friends had started a political group called October. It was still small, like twenty people small, but it was growing.

  “And Yulia?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “Yulia joined the group with her husband, Petya Shipalkin, a year ago. But then they broke up. We kept Yulia, and Shipalkin joined the anarchists.” Sergei laughed. “Yulia’s a very good organizer,” he added.

  It was the first I’d heard about a husband, but he was now an ex-husband, and I had a more immediate question, about Fishman.

  Sergei was surprised. “Sasha Fishman? You know him?”

  “Yeah, he was in my department.”

  “Well.” Sergei laughed again. “Fishman is Fishman. A little sneak. He’s a friend of Shipalkin’s, but now that they’ve split up he calls Yulia when he comes to Moscow.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah,” said Sergei. “That’s Fishman.”

  “There’s another group,” I said, “called September?”

  “Oh, that’s us. I mean, it used to be us. It was like, the revolution is in October, and we were in the month before the revolution.”

  “And now the revolution is closer?”

  “Well, no, we just decided it was a stupid name.”

  “Did you guys do that protest against the Moscow–Petersburg highway?”

  “Yes.”

  “My brother is Dima Kaplan. People accused him of being involved in that.”

  “That’s your brother?” Sergei was amused. “No, we had nothing to do with him, nor would we ever. He’s a capitalist snake. No offense.”

  None taken. I thanked Sergei for the ride and retrieved my stuff from the trunk.

  “I’ll see you next week,” said Sergei, before driving off.

  I had finally found some people I could talk to.

  5.

  I GET SICK

  I DID NOT SEE Sergei the next week because that weekend I got sick. I had somewhat miraculously avoided getting sick before now, but it began with a scratchy throat and before I knew it I had a fever. It was still winter break, so I could stay in bed for a few days.

  As I lay there, I thought about my grandmother, who came and checked on me heroically every five minutes. She had been robbed by capitalism, I now saw. Or an accidental conspiracy between capitalism and Communism. Communism had nationalized the country’s resources: all the oil that Uncle Lev found was owned by the state. When that state collapsed, it sold control of the oil for a pittance to a few well-connected men. It was in fact the explicit policy of the Russian reformers to create megacapitalists—the oligarchs, as they eventually came to be called—who would modernize the Russian economy and drag the country into the future. “People who grew up under Communism have a slave mentality,” Dima told me the first time I visited him in the 1990s. “They don’t do anything on their own. You have to make them. And, yes, it’s going to be ugly sometimes. You can’t build a capitalism omelet without breaking some eggs!” It was people like this, with ideas like this, who formed the conditions under which my poor grandmother lost her dacha and Uncle Lev had a stroke.

  I had never been a socialist. In fact I’d been an anti-socialist. It was how I was raised. We had escaped the Soviet Union, where you weren’t allowed to keep anything you made or earned, and had come to America and changed our lives. My father had voted Republican in every election since they’d let him start. Under the influence of college and grad school, I had moved to the left and become a liberal, but at the word “socialism” I drew the line. It just struck me as one of those things my otherwise intelligent American friends were stupid or naïve about, like iPods. A person did not need an iPod, in my opinion, when he could get music on the radio for free. And likewise we did not need socialism when democratic capitalism was working just fine.

  “These people think Karl Marx is a nice old man with a beard,” my adviser once said to me when a group of grad students demanding a union took over one of our campus cafeterias. This annoyed my adviser on a number of levels, not least of which being that this cafeteria made his favorite chicken parm sandwich. “They think he’s Santa Claus!” he said, of the grad students. “I’d like to plunk these friends of the working class down in Petrograd in 1917. See how long they’d last.”

  Over in the Slavic department, we’d all read Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam’s widow, Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky. . . . We were steeped in memories of the violent Revolution and its even more violent Stalinist sequel. Whenever some bright-eyed grad student from the English department said “socialism,” we reached for our bookshelves. “We live without feeling the ground beneath our feet / from a few steps away you can’t hear us speak. / Though if someone does begin talking / we know that the man in the Kremlin is watching.” The Stalin epigram by Mandelshtam. Any questions?

  But Russian socialists? That was different. That was interesting. From listening to Sergei I could tell that he did not need any lessons from me in Soviet history. He knew about the camps, the purges, the lies. But there was more to socialism, he seemed to be saying. It wasn’t just camps and insane asylums. And what replaced it—“the reforms”—had not made things any better.

  At the height of my fever I had a dream about my mother. She was not dead, it turned out; she had merely gone away for a while, and now she was back. We were in Newton, in our old house. My father still lived there. “I’m living with Baba Seva,” I told my mother. “I know,” she said. “I’m hoping to get a job teaching soon,” I half lied. “I know,” she said. “I don’t have any children,” I said, because my mom loved children. “That’s OK,” she said. “It’s not too late.” I wanted to tell her that we had thought she was dead, but it was a misunderstanding, and I was so happy that she was still alive. But in the dream I wasn’t able to tell her these things. I woke up with a profound warmness running through my body, and soon I was feeling better again.

  6.

  OCTOBER

  JUST AS I WAS starting to feel better, Sergei invited me to attend an anti-fascist protest at the Clean Ponds metro stop. It was a bitterly cold day and when I showed up there were only six other people there. But one of them was Sergei, and another was Yulia. She wore a puffy black jacket with a fur-lined hood, th
e kind gangster teenagers wear in New York, and underneath the hood a fur hat with earflaps. Her nose and cheeks were red from the cold and there were tears, it looked like, also from the cold, in her big green eyes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I wanted to tell her about how I’d been sick, and my thoughts about socialism, and the dream I’d had about my mother, but it was obviously too early for that, and I tried instead to concentrate on the protest. Someone had made a big banner, which we unfurled, that said END FASCISM. We were going to stand in front of the metro station, near the entrance to the park, and hold this banner for thirty minutes, in the cold. “That’s it?” I said to Sergei. In anticipation of the protest and unaware of any fascists in Russia at this time, I went online and looked it up. It turned out there were plenty of fascists; their activities included attacking and sometimes killing Central Asian migrants and posting videos of the attacks on YouTube. They also engaged in fighting and sometimes killing anti-fascist activists, or antifa. I had gone to the event prepared for just about anything. That wasn’t the plan. “For the moment,” Sergei said, “we just need to show people we’re not afraid, and they don’t need to be, either. That’s enough.”