A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  We took turns holding the banner. We chanted anti-fascist slogans—“No to fascism!” “Fascism will not pass!” People came out of the subway and walked past us. Most of them didn’t look at us. Nonetheless it felt like we were doing something.

  Yulia didn’t pay much attention to me. But I enjoyed hearing her say that fascism wouldn’t pass.

  And then we noticed a commotion at the entrance to the Clean Ponds metro. It was the pro-regime protesters, scrambling up to the roof, where they dutifully unfurled their banner urging us not to rock the boat. Our small protest had not attracted any police, but these guys were vigilant.

  Sergei wasted no time. As soon as they were up with their banner, he walked closer to them and yelled, “This is an anti-fascist protest! Are you guys for fascism?”

  “What do you mean?” one of them yelled back.

  “Our banner says, ‘End fascism.’ Do you think the regime is fascist and that therefore saying no to fascism is going to destabilize the regime?”

  “What?”

  “Come down here and we’ll talk,” said Sergei.

  The counterprotesters were clearly confused by this. They talked among themselves and eventually came down and joined our protest. After Sergei worked on them for a while, they even held our banner for a bit. They were just kids—college students. They admitted that they were paid five hundred rubles apiece to do these counterprotests. One of them tried to hit on Yulia. Eventually they grew bored and left, though not before taking some socialist literature Sergei had brought with him.

  “You can talk to just about anybody,” Sergei said to me. “You won’t necessarily talk them into it, but the total absence of any real political discourse in the country means that there’s an openness to ideas, since people aren’t used to hearing them.”

  We stayed out another fifteen minutes in the cold and then Sergei announced that it was time to get some tea and warm up. At this point Yulia excused herself. “I have a deadline tomorrow,” she said.

  She started to head toward the metro entrance. It had been a week since the bookstore event and I hadn’t heard a peep from her. She may have been separated from her husband and she may not actually have liked Fishman, but that by no means indicated that she liked me. Nonetheless I stepped over to her and asked, using the polite form of “you,” when I would see her again.

  She looked at me without surprise. “Soon, I think,” she said, and smiled. I saw her beautiful crooked teeth, and then she ducked her head, and she was gone. I found this encouraging. When Sergei asked if I wanted to get some tea with the rest of the protesters, I wondered if I was already becoming part of the group.

  The answer, for the moment, was no. In the basement café that they took me to, part bohemian hangout, part place where middle-aged men sat grimly drinking beers though it was still relatively early in the afternoon, I was treated politely, but as a guest. Everyone decided to order cranberry vodkas instead of tea, and then the guys explained their socialism to me. In addition to Sergei there were two grad-student types—blond, skinny, handsome Misha; dark-haired, chubby, cerebral Boris—and a computer programmer named Nikolai, who had a ponytail. It turned out they knew all about Dima—they felt like they’d been arguing with him for years. “Liberals like your brother think that if we just had a functioning free market, if we just had ‘good’ capitalism, then everything would work itself out,” said Boris. “What they don’t understand is that this is capitalism. We’re in it already. And if you took the restraints off, it would get even worse.”

  “But how can you say there’s capitalism when there’s no free market?” I said. “When a market is this skewed by corruption, it’s not really a market, right?”

  “Yes and no,” said Boris. “You’re right that it’s not an efficiently functioning market. But you still have wage labor; you still have profits that are invested; you have companies buying up other companies. Just because a market is distorted doesn’t mean it ceases to be a market. But even if you imagined that all the corrupt bureaucrats disappeared—if they were all taken out tomorrow and shot—that money wouldn’t go into the pockets of the workers. It would go into the capitalists’ pockets. It would be used to buy yachts and foreign sports teams.”

  “So what’s the solution?” I said. “Revolution?”

  “Yes,” said Boris. “That’s correct. Expropriation of the capitalists. Worker councils to elect leaders. Common ownership of property.”

  “That’s been tried in this country.”

  “Lots of things have been tried. Capitalism has also been tried, including in this country. And it’s led to exploitation and misery and death. That doesn’t keep people from trying it again.”

  “Look,” said Misha, leaning into the group. We were sitting around an old wooden table and it was cold in that basement and most everyone had kept their coats on. “The point is simply that life cannot go on as before. The oil companies are in league with the state to suppress wages, strip us of our rights, and destroy the planet. And it’s important to understand that they do this in league with the rest of the capitalist world system, whether the individual figureheads get along with one another or not. We need to fight them.”

  I must have looked unconvinced, because here Sergei stepped in.

  “You’re living with your grandmother, right?” he said. I nodded. “She did what in the Soviet Union?”

  “She was a college professor. Her husband was a geophysicist.”

  “And were they bad people? Did they lie, cheat, steal? Or did they try to build a country, despite various obstacles?”

  “They tried to build a country,” I said.

  “That’s how our parents were too. They were doctors and architects and engineers. They were trying to build a good place. They did what they could. And then everything they built was seized by a small cabal of people who had connections to the Yeltsin administration. That’s not right.”

  “It’s not just not right,” Boris said. “It was entirely and fully predictable. This is what capitalism looks like. And in order to resist it you need to know what it is. That’s the difference between us and the liberals. They think it’s all one bad man named Putin. We know it’s an economic system that’s been in place for hundreds of years.”

  We sat there for three hours—at one point, I ordered a plate of dumplings and Boris criticized me for putting too much sour cream on them, but I told him my father had done the same thing, and he backed off—and at the end received a bill for twelve hundred rubles—forty dollars. This was remarkably cheap, given that the five of us had been drinking for so long, but it seemed to make a deep impression on the Octobrists. “Holy shit,” said Misha. “I can’t believe we drank so many vodka cranberries!” I made sure to put in more money than the others, because of my dumplings.

  * * *

  • • •

  Watson College officially announced its search for Frank Miller’s replacement. I waited a decent interval and then sent in my application.

  On the one hand, it felt like a betrayal of everything I was doing. On the other hand, who knew what things would be like eight months from now, when the fall semester began? My grandmother might not even be alive. Heaven knew—she kept telling me—that she hoped not to be. And it was unlikely I’d get the job—I had, after all, been rejected for all the others. So I decided to apply. And in the meantime that meant following my adviser’s advice and seeking some kind of publication.

  “Listen,” I wrote him one day when I saw him in the Gchat bar. “I met some young socialists here. Is that an interesting subject, do you think?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “The return of the repressed. The incorrigible Russians. Whatever. Yes. Do it.”

  Would Sergei find the idea craven? He wanted to liberate himself and others from academic institutions so they could begin to change the world. Here I was proposing to make him and his comra
des the object of academic study. But we had hockey again in two nights, and I decided to ask. He was open to it. “We’ll have to discuss it internally,” he said, meaning within October, “but I don’t see why not. It’s possible that talking to someone who isn’t us might help us formulate our ideas better. I’ll put it to the group.” The next time we had hockey he told me that they had agreed, and that I was invited to start attending their weekly Marxist study sessions. “But of course as we don’t believe in objective scientific discourse, you have to participate. That was one of the conditions the group put forth.”

  I didn’t have a problem with that. I was in.

  * * *

  • • •

  The study sessions met on Tuesday evenings at Misha’s apartment near the Belarus train station. Misha lived with another graduate student, also named Misha, in a large studio apartment that had once been his grandmother’s; it was just a kitchen and one room, though a large room, and the two Mishas slept on sofa beds on opposite ends of it. The other Misha studied Greek and his end of the room was piled high with Greek texts, while our Misha studied history and sociology, and his side of the room was piled high with Weber, Marx, and Wallerstein. On Tuesday evenings, the second Misha had some kind of Greek-related seminar, and we usually had the place to ourselves.

  The other regular members of the group were Boris and Nikolai, whom I’d met at the anti-fascist protest; Vera, a precocious high school student with thick glasses; and, most important of all, Yulia. Sergei came to about half the sessions; he was the only one of the group who was married and had a child, and I was beginning to get the impression that his home life was not unclouded, so he sometimes begged off.

  The reading group had only existed for a brief time, and they had apparently spent the first several sessions arguing over what to read. Part of the group wanted to read the works of contemporary Marxist writers, while others wanted to go back to the source and read Marx’s Capital. In the end, the Capital-ists had scored a narrow victory, and a few weeks ago the group had embarked on Marx’s masterpiece. During my first session there was a half-hour discussion as to whether the vote should be revisited in light of the fact that there was a new member. The initiator of the discussion was Boris, who apparently wanted a recount, but the rest took it up eagerly and debated the fine points of my participation, their voting procedures, and consensus politics, until finally Yulia said that I was an associate and nonvoting member and in any case they had already started reading the book! It was agreed then that we’d take a break and have a snack and start in on the book immediately afterward.

  In short, I was not surprised to learn that they were still on the first chapter and that I could catch up.

  Since Misha was a bachelor and didn’t have anything in his refrigerator except beer and vodka, all of us brought some kind of food to reading group—I stuck with basics like black bread and salami, others brought little pies or salads that they’d made. Yulia sometimes brought wine for her and Vera. In advance of the meeting, everyone would read a portion of the text, but one person was selected in advance to lead the discussion. That person would spend the next week studying the text with particular care and also doing outside reading to better understand it. The first time around I was allowed to skip my turn, but the next time, everyone said, I’d have to go.

  In the meantime, I was becoming more and more infatuated with Yulia. She was, it turned out, a grad student in Russian literature; she was writing her thesis on some medieval Slavic texts I’d puzzled out a little bit in grad school. In short talks during our breaks, I quickly gathered that she knew about five times more about Russian literature than I ever would. She wore conservative clothing—button-down shirts and sweaters and long skirts—but these if anything accentuated her figure. She was cute. She was also exceedingly polite. She addressed me as vy, which initially I thought had to do with my age—she was twenty-nine, four years younger than I was—but which I eventually concluded had to do with her traditional upbringing. She was not the most vocal member of our study circle—that was either Misha, who liked to drink beer at the sessions and became especially voluble on the subject of capital once he’d had two or three of them, or Boris, who seemed to have read everything and had total, if sometimes slightly robotic, recall of it—but she was always engaged, had always done the reading, and took it all very seriously. I loved watching her talk, the precision she insisted on in discussing this very difficult text, and when someone said something funny, I loved watching her duck her head and laugh. I was starved for female non-grandmother companionship, yes, but I think I would have felt the same about her even if I hadn’t been.

  I had been a little dismayed initially at the number of dudes in the study circle, but it soon became clear that they didn’t care about Yulia. Boris didn’t seem to be interested in girls at all, only socialism, whereas Misha was apparently involved, in an on-and-off manner, with one of Yulia’s roommates, Masha. As for Nikolai, he may have been interested in girls, but I did not get the impression that girls were interested in him.

  That said, it didn’t seem like this particular girl was interested in me, either. During the study sessions she was always focused on the discussion, and even afterward, when we all left together and walked in a bunch to the Mayakovsky monument, where we split up, I was never able to get her to talk to me. She kept quizzing Boris on the political situation in one Central Asian country after another, and I was left to fend off Nikolai, who, it turned out, was in the process of building a dacha outside the city and was always trying to get people to help him. Everyone had begged off, however, and now he had his eyes on me. I told him that I tried to stay with my grandmother on weekends, but he kept asking. And Yulia kept asking Boris about Central Asia. And then we’d arrive at the Mayakovsky monument and all go our separate ways.

  One night as Sergei was dropping me off after hockey, I finally brought it up with him. “Remember that night at Falanster?” I said. “When I told you that Yulia had invited me, you sort of said, ‘Ah, Yulia.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “What did I mean?” Sergei said.

  “Yes. Come on. You meant something.”

  “OK. Well. Yulia is a very good recruiter. She can really spot people who might be sympathetic to us. You might say she has an intuition.”

  “OK.”

  “Well, and sometimes it happens that the person she spots is a man, and he then gets ideas about her.”

  “I see,” I said.

  There is a play in hockey called slew-footing. It’s when you slide (slew) your foot behind an opponent’s skates and kick it forward so that his legs get taken out from beneath him. It’s considered a very dirty play, because the victim falls straight back, sometimes smashing his head on the ice. When Sergei told me that guys often fall for Yulia when joining October, I felt like I’d been slew-footed.

  Sergei could sense this, maybe. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t actually know what her situation is. Shipalkin wasn’t a very good comrade and he wasn’t a very good husband, and my impression is he’s still coming around. It’s very confusing for her, I imagine. He was the same with us, you know, in terms of his politics—first he was a democratic socialist, then he was an accelerationist, now he’s an anarchist.

  “So I don’t know exactly what’s going on. But I think if someone was serious about Yulia, that could break the situation.”

  I nodded. Sergei had said more than enough. I extracted my hockey stuff from the car and headed up the boulevard toward our place. On the way I bought a big brown can of Zhigulovskoye beer from a kiosk. At some point I’d noticed it had stopped making my tummy hurt.

  * * *

  • • •

  Who were these people and where had they come from? Why weren’t they more like Dima’s friends, who had gone to many of the same schools and had read at least some of the same books?

  I didn’t have a ready answer for this,
but it had something to do with their experience of post-Soviet life. In the Maxim group, I knew, the parents were prosperous. They had converted their anti-Soviet credentials into jobs on television or in publishing, or in the murky world of “consulting.” My impression of the October group was that the parents were barely hanging on. I don’t know if this was the decisive factor, but it was certainly something the Octobrists talked a lot about.

  I found myself gradually but unmistakably looking at the world a little differently. I had once thought it so strange that across the street from the KGB was a cute café with wi-fi. But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t any more strange than the fact that my university back home, a place where people were supposed to live silent and monklike lives in the pursuit of knowledge, had a beautiful multimillion-dollar gym; or that in my old Brooklyn neighborhood the violent displacement of people from the homes in which they’d lived for decades and the stoops on which they were used to sitting took place to the accompaniment of . . . cute cafés. Cute cafés were not the problem, but they were also not, as I’d once apparently thought, the opposite of the problem. Money was the problem. It had always been the problem. Private property, possessions, the fact that some people had to suffer so that others could live lives of leisure: that was the problem. And that there were intellectual arguments ardently justifying this—that was a bigger problem still.

  In the reading group my presence was taken in stride. I was an observer on the one hand, but also an observer-participant on the other, and finally it was assumed that I was a sympathizer. My total lack of knowledge about Marx and Marxism was chalked up to a general American ignorance of everything, while my slightly ambiguous remarks about my own past were always interpreted in the best possible light. One time Misha, who had once been kicked out of school for protesting, asked me if there was student agitation on my campus. Yes, I said, recalling the grad student unionization drive and cafeteria takeover. Misha didn’t ask if I had been part of the drive—he assumed that I had. “What was the result?” he asked. The result was that in exchange for the students leaving the cafeteria and liberating the chicken parm, the university agreed to create a committee to investigate grad student unionization. The committee ended up proposing that in lieu of a union, there would be a new committee (a different committee) to examine grad student grievances. Four years later, there was still no union, and I happened to know that the university was using the financial crisis to strip away some of the protections the grad students had finally managed to win. “Svolochi,” said Misha.