A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Svolochi. Bastards. It was true. In fact, as I knew from Gchatting with my adviser, not only were they busting the nascent union, they were breaking up the Slavic department. One or two people whose work was more historically oriented were being pushed into the history department; the others were being sent into the German department, which was being renamed the Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. The Germans were in charge. And a few professors with really low enrollments, though not yet my adviser, were being asked to take early retirement. “Yes,” I agreed with Misha. “They’re bastards.”

  If the Octobrists were from families that had been victimized by the reforms, what about me? My father, over in the States with his new American family, was no victim, though sometimes I wondered, as I thought of him on his exercise bike watching Russian TV shows, if he was lonely and wished he’d never left. My brother, the would-be business tycoon, painted himself as a victim of the new regime, but he was in fact its accomplice. If anything he was a victim of the regime’s corrupting influence, like so many others who’d been corrupted by the riches that flowed into the country along with high oil prices, and the partial reforms.

  Whereas my grandmother—my grandmother really had been robbed.

  One day around this time we were out walking along the boulevard. A light snow was falling and my grandmother held tightly on to my arm. Moscow didn’t tend to get a lot of snow all at once, but it remained so consistently cold that once the first snow fell in early November, it didn’t melt until the spring, so the snow accreted gradually, turning brown and hardening, occasionally freshened by new snow. In New York, the sidewalks were the responsibility of the landlords, who got fined if they didn’t clear snow and ice in a timely fashion; in Moscow, the city still owned most of the buildings, and in any case most of the houses faced inward, into courtyards, and so it was left to the city to clear the sidewalks. This sometimes took weeks. Walking outside became treacherous.

  We were out for our walk, then, when we passed the towering Krupskaya statue, which depicted a young Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, wrapped in a flowing shawl. With a light coat of snow on her she looked even more dramatic than usual, which may be what caused my grandmother to remark, after walking by her almost daily for the past five months: “Look at her! She was a very modest lady. But here she’s a—ballerina!”

  I looked at my grandmother. She was making her way carefully, but indomitably, forward through the snow. The other day at the reading group, while discussing Marx’s account of the extraction of value from the worker through his exploitation, I started talking about the expropriation of Uncle Lev’s oil and sputtering about the unfairness of it. Boris urged me onward. “What does fairness have to do with it?” he said. “We’re talking about the laws of capitalism.”

  “But they’re not fair!” I said. Boris shrugged.

  “Grandma,” I said now. “What do you think of Communism?”

  “Communism?” She sighed one of her patented sighs. “What do I think of Communism? I think it was worth a try. In this terrible country, nothing is ever going to work. But it was worth a try.”

  “Was life better under Communism?”

  “For some people it was better. For us it was better. We had a dacha and this apartment and everyone had work. But there were bad things about it too. You couldn’t say anything in the papers. There were books you couldn’t get. I don’t know, Andryush. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there.” The other day Vanya had come into hockey in a foul mood. His sugar factory was being asked to keep its prices artificially low so that sugar wouldn’t become too expensive for people whose salaries were being affected by the financial crisis. “Fuck your mother, it’s the same thing all over again,” he said. Back in the Soviet Union he’d worked as the head of a shoe factory. “We were making boots for fifteen rubles apiece and selling them for five. Sergei, no offense”—it was well known in the locker room that Sergei was sympathetic to the Soviet experiment—“but that shit had to stop.”

  “Now they’re just doing the same thing but from the other side,” he went on. “We’ve got a market, we’ve got prices, I own the factory, but they’re still fucking with us.” He’d kicked the local officials who’d made the request out of his office and a few days later got a visit from the local prosecutor, who already had a case against him, for tax infractions, all drawn up. “So I’m going to do it. But it means I won’t be able to index the salaries of my workers”—to inflation—“but of course no one cares about that.”

  “I knew Putin in Petersburg,” Tolya said. Putin had worked as the deputy mayor there in the 1990s, before his move to Moscow and meteoric rise to the presidency. “He had dirt on everyone. That’s how he got people to do things. He had all the dirt.”

  “That’s right!” said Vanya. “Now the whole state is run that way.”

  “So what’s the solution?” Ilya said. He was addressing Sergei.

  “Democracy,” Sergei immediately said. “Workers’ councils. Vanya, do your workers own the factory along with you?”

  “Of course not,” said Vanya. “We bought all their shares in the nineties.”

  “There you go,” said Sergei. “If the factory was owned by the workers, no prosecutor could show up and threaten them. Is he going to put the entire factory in jail? Then there’ll be no sugar at all. That’s worse than expensive sugar.”

  Vanya considered this. “What about me?” he said. “I know how to run that factory.”

  “No problem,” said Sergei. “The factory still needs a good manager. You still have the respect of your coworkers. But maybe your salary is not as great.”

  “Instead of you flying to Spain every weekend, the whole factory flies there once a year,” Tolya said. Everyone laughed. They pictured Vanya’s workers—gold-toothed, uneducated, awkwardly dressed—enjoying the warm beaches of Spain. But it was a warm laughter. No one seemed to think it was a bad idea.

  My grandmother and I had reached the end of our portion of the boulevard, with the huge RussOil building darkening our way. It reminded me of Dima—the other day he’d sent me an article on the rapidly deteriorating Moscow real estate market. Residential property in central Moscow had declined 4 percent since we’d last talked. “You owe me $6K,” he had written. I didn’t answer that email.

  “If it had worked out,” my grandmother now said, of the Soviet experiment, “that would have been nice.”

  We turned around and headed back toward Krupskaya, bride of the Revolution, Lenin’s faithful wife.

  7.

  SERGEI’S PARTY

  YULIA DID NOT comment on my political awakening, if she even noticed it. She was guarded during our reading group; I saw her smiling during my stammering expressions of indignation, but whether this meant she was charmed or just politely embarrassed on my behalf, I could not say. On our walks to Mayakovka she continued to talk pretty much exclusively to Boris about Central Asia. A couple of times Boris and Nikolai took me for a beer at a Czech beer place not far from Mayakovskaya, but Yulia never joined us. And always in the background there was the figure of her Shipalkin. I brought it up once during beers with Boris and Nikolai. It turned out that Boris, in particular, really disliked the anarchist group, Mayhem, that Shipalkin had joined after leaving October. “The thing about them,” said Boris, “is they don’t have a political position. They think they’re going to overthrow the regime by spray-painting police cars!” Mayhem had recently done precisely this in Moscow, posting a YouTube video afterward. “It’s just as Lenin said,” Boris concluded. “Anarchism is an infantile disorder.”

  “OK,” I said. “But what’s the deal with him and Yulia?”

  Boris looked at me like he couldn’t understand why someone would care about such a triviality when we had the opportunity to denounce anarchism. “You mean personally? I have no idea. I do know she share
s my views on anarchism.” That was all he’d say.

  “Are you guys doing anything this weekend?” Nikolai asked. “Because I could use some help on the dacha.” And both Boris and I had to think up excuses for why we couldn’t go.

  Then after our fifth or sixth session, the whole group of us was met outside by a nervous-looking dandy. Yulia had been laughing at something Boris said and the moment she saw him she stopped. “Petya,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” said the dandy, who I immediately understood to be Shipalkin. He wore a wool car coat and a scarf thrown over his shoulder and leather gloves and Converse high-top sneakers, the outfit of a Moscow hipster. The other notable thing about his appearance was that he looked like me—he was a short, olive-skinned, Eastern European Jew. We weren’t identical twins or anything, but where previously I had wondered if Yulia could even entertain the prospect of going out with a guy who looked like me, I now had my answer.

  And something else, as well. Shipalkin shook hands with Boris and Nikolai and said privet to Vera. Then he looked inquisitively, and even it seemed with some hostility, at me. “This is Andrei,” said Yulia quietly.

  “Ah,” said Shipalkin. “I thought so.”

  There could have been a hundred reasons for this reaction, in theory, but the simplest one was this: Yulia had said something to him about me in such a way that he’d deemed me a threat. I mean, there might have been other explanations. But that one was plausible. Men aren’t as stupid as we pretend to be. A jilted husband knows.

  A week later, Sergei invited a bunch of us over for a party at his place. His wife had gone for the weekend with their four-year-old to visit her mother in St. Petersburg, and Sergei said he felt lonely and wanted some company.

  “Is your wife mad that you didn’t go with her?” I asked.

  “I think so, yes,” said Sergei matter-of-factly. We were sitting in his car after hockey.

  “And you don’t care?”

  “I care,” he said. “But I didn’t want to go. In the end, I’ve found that it’s better not to do things I don’t want to do. It’s better for everyone.”

  So a party it was. Sergei lived way out in the endless exurbs of the city; I took the gray line north, caught a bus, and walked past five identical sixteen-story blocks until I reached the sixth, which was his. The neighborhood was a particularly pure example of what the modernist architects, led by Le Corbusier, had once imagined: giant blocks where people lived, between which they would transport themselves in automobiles. Meanwhile the ground between the blocks would be filled with parks and trees and other recreations.

  What an asshole, I thought as I walked the six long blocks to Sergei’s. Because if people were supposed to get everywhere in their cars, why would they spend a lot of time tending to the gardens in between their buildings? The answer was, they wouldn’t. As with the big public housing projects built in the United States, the grounds between the big apartment blocks had not automatically filled themselves with park space and trees and children playing. Maybe in the Soviet era it was different, but now they were filled with trash, cars that people had nowhere else to park, more trash, and construction projects. I must have passed at least half a dozen construction-like holes in the ground on my way to Sergei’s, though what exactly was being dug I had no idea, and in any case it was already dark. Dogs were barking. The street I walked along was so desolate that I worried there wouldn’t even be a store for me to buy beer at, but finally when I reached Sergei’s place I saw one in the basement of his building. I bought a bunch of beers and then rang upstairs. Someone buzzed me in. I pulled on the heavy metal door and entered a cramped, poorly lit foyer; it was the same exact design as my grandmother’s old building in Dubna, with a little screened-in booth for the building “superintendent,” who usually sat inside watching television—in fact, he was doing so now—and scowled at people who came in. This wasn’t exactly a doorman whose visitor book you had to sign, but it wasn’t not a doorman, either; I made the mistake of saying hello, to which the man, who looked to be in his late sixties, asked without acknowledging the greeting, “Who’re you here to see?”

  “Sergei Ivanov,” I said.

  The man grunted. “You having some kind of party up there or what?”

  “Just a little one,” I said, smiling.

  He didn’t answer, and I kept going. I walked past the mailboxes, which were in the same spot as in my grandmother’s Dubna building and in the same condition—smashed, half open, covered in graffiti—then up three short steps and to the elevator. It smelled like piss. I held my breath and pressed the number 9.

  As soon as I reached his floor, things got better. I heard music coming from his apartment, and it was Yulia who opened the door. “Andrei!” she said, in a way I had never heard her say it. She was wearing a white cotton dress with flowers on it, and beaming, and when I stepped in she gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was drunk. She told me to throw my coat on the bed and then danced off into the living room. Still processing this, I went into the kitchen to drop off my beers and take one for myself. There I found Misha and Nikolai and a few people I didn’t know sitting at the kitchen table and drinking. Misha was telling a story about growing up in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow before inheriting his grandmother’s apartment. As little Misha navigated the area in the early nineties, gangs of kids would approach him. “Grunge or metal?” they’d say, meaning, which do you prefer? The right answer could be either, and if you gave the wrong answer you’d get beaten up. “Though usually the right answer was metal,” said Misha. “They’d say, ‘Oh, yeah? Which groups do you like?’ But you could bluff, because they didn’t have any more access to it than you did. I’d say ‘Deep Purple.’ And they’d be like, ‘OK, Deep Purple, cool,’ and let me go.”

  “In my neighborhood it was ‘Rap or metal,’” said Nikolai. “And the answer was always definitely metal, because otherwise it meant you liked black people. That made it easier. Though I’d still sometimes get beaten up.”

  I liked these guys so much. It was like they’d lived some heightened version of my own life, where Western popular culture filtered in slowly, at first merely in the form of rumors about rap and metal, but gradually nudging out the older Russian literary culture that our parents had passed on to us. For me, in order to fit in, learning American pop culture was merely a matter of catching up. For them it was a kind of decision that they lived with, and had to remake, almost every day. To be Russian was in some way constantly to have to choose, not between rap and metal per se, but between the Russian and the Western—in what you ate, what you listened to, what you thought. And Misha, Yulia, Sergei, Boris, my friends, had settled on an appealing hybrid: no one I met in Russia had studied Western culture as deeply as they had and extracted so much that was so good in it, while staying true, as best they could, to the place where they were from. In their politics it was the same. Marx was a German philosopher who had fled his native land for Paris and then London. But he had had his greatest success, his most devoted students, in the Russians. And here he had them still.

  I stood in the kitchen and looked out the window. We were close to the edge of the city; an apartment like this, as far from the center and then as far from the metro as this was, went for pretty cheap, and yet what a view it had. From Sergei’s kitchen you could see a highway, a train track, an elevated subway track, an elevated highway, and another train track. In the dark the cars and trains raced by in both directions; it was, on the one hand, a vision of modernity, the future, but on the other hand it looked shabby and improvised, clearly the result of not doing things right the first time. You had the distinct impression that one of the cars or trains was about to fall off and collide with something. In between these rail lines of the future were tall buildings like the one I was in; they looked like bookshelves left behind on a street corner, tottering.

  I took my bee
r and walked down the corridor to the living room, where dance music was playing and about ten people were somewhat awkwardly dancing. I was still pondering the kiss on the cheek from Yulia; as I stepped into the living room and my eyes adjusted to the relative lack of light, I couldn’t find her. Momentarily I feared that she was here with Shipalkin, that this accounted for her happy mood, and that they were somewhere together right now. Then someone grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward her: Yulia. I even thought I saw a mild look of impatience in her eyes. We danced. I am a terrible dancer, but so was Yulia, so it was OK. At one point during “Stayin’ Alive,” Yulia did a pretty credible disco dance, and I copied her. Then she pulled me close to her and straightened up and kissed me on the lips. It was only a momentary kiss, but it was on purpose, and after she released me she looked at me in a way that seemed to say that she was not blind to the fact that I’d been following her around with my eyes for the past two months. We kept dancing, and we kissed some more, and more intently, and then it was late, and she, Boris, Misha, and I shared a car back to the center, since by then the metro was closed. Boris and Yulia and I huddled in the backseat, and for the entirety of the ride Yulia had her head on my shoulder and was asleep. We dropped her off first, then the guys, and me last. I had the driver drop me at the corner of Sretenka and the Garden Ring, so that I could buy a pastry from the Azeri chicken guys. I walked the few remaining blocks home in the cold, eating it. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened back there between Yulia and me, and whether she would care to continue it the next day and the day after, but I didn’t care. All of Sretenka was lit up on this night, and all of it seemed to smile on me.