A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “That’s a good movie,” said my grandmother when it was over. I agreed. That night I asked Yulia for more such movies.

  “Nothing is as good as Osenniy Marafon,” she admitted, “but let me think of some others.” The next day, she emailed me a list.

  From then on, with the help of Yulia’s list, my grandmother and I watched old and not-so-old Soviet movies. She liked all of them, even when they weren’t that good (though some of them were very good). They reminded her of something. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t quite hear them and that she couldn’t quite follow the plot; for one thing, she had seen many of them before, and for another, wherever she was in the plot, whenever her mind and eye turned to the film: There it was. The USSR. The very images, and the presentation of those images, and the things people said as they walked through those images: they spoke of values she believed in, however much, under the Soviets, they had been honored only in the breach. And I became so friendly with the guys at the DVD kiosk that if they didn’t have some old film, they told me they’d put in an “order” for it. Since I was pretty sure that they were pirating the films and burning them onto DVDs, this meant they’d pirate the film and burn it just for me. This struck me as top-notch customer service.

  * * *

  • • •

  Despite meeting my grandmother and getting along with her, Yulia did not want to sleep over; she was a Marxist revolutionary, maybe, but she was also a nice girl from Kiev, and she did not think it was proper to sleep over at the home of a man to whom she wasn’t married, especially if that man lived with his grandmother, who might not approve. So I found myself spending more and more time at Yulia’s place. What would have served as a living room in an American apartment had become a bedroom in theirs, so the only common area was the small kitchen and, once it got warmer, the balcony; Yulia’s other roommates, Masha and Sonya as well as Katya, would sit in the kitchen for hours, drinking tea and reading and talking. All of them were used to living in close quarters and were adept at tuning out other people’s conversations, so it never felt like we were bothering them if we hung out in the kitchen as well.

  They were all uncommonly close. The arrangement with Katya struck me at first as borderline crazy, but Yulia seemed to think it was eminently reasonable. Why pay all that money for a room that would sit empty half the time? Why not try to have someone there? They still tried to arrange their schedules so that each had as much time as possible in the room on her own, but often they slept together in the huge bed, and if Yulia and I had been there together earlier we always made sure to change the sheets. Eventually I grew used to it. None of the girls had any money to speak of and their wardrobes were sparse, but they constantly borrowed clothes from one another to create a sense of variety. Yulia knew a woman in her mother’s old apartment building who sewed clothes, and occasionally the girls would combine resources and order a sweater or a shawl. I remembered reading somewhere that Raisa Gorbachev, famed for her glamorous good looks, had been embarrassed at one of the first superpower summits because she ran out of clothes and had to wear the same cute blouse twice, while Nancy Reagan seemed to have a new designer outfit for every meal. That happened with Yulia and her roommates, but they never seemed to mind.

  Misha was a frequent guest to the apartment, to see Masha and also to eat. (The other Misha, Misha impishly declared, “can’t cook for shit.”) To call Misha a guest doesn’t quite do him justice, though. He was more like an event. He could be there for dinner, polite and gregarious, or he could show up late and very drunk and end up sleeping on some chairs in the kitchen because Masha didn’t want him peeing in her bed (this had happened). I liked Misha a lot, despite the fact that he would sometimes get drunk at dinner and start hounding me to come with him to get more alcohol. He had been kicked out of grad school for organizing protests when his university had hired a deeply reactionary, pro-Putin professor. He was now writing a dissertation on the working-class opposition of the 1920s, for a German university. For a freewheeling intellectual alcoholic, he was surprisingly interested in academic politics. “There are only two countries where serious historical work is done right now,” he said one time at dinner, “and that’s Germany and the U.S. But in Germany people get emotional very quickly. The leftists still blame the Russians for the death of Rosa Luxemburg! It would affect my ability to get a job.”

  “You wouldn’t want to teach in Russia?” I said.

  “I would. I do. But you need to get a job somewhere else first. Russian universities don’t like to make the first hire of your career. And of course they can’t pay anything, so you need to be able to work the international granting system, which again is mostly German and American.”

  “Misha,” Masha said, “maybe that’s enough? People are trying to eat.”

  “I’m not hampering them,” said Misha.

  “Your talk of grant applications gives everyone indigestion,” said Masha.

  “OK,” Misha said, backing off. “I didn’t know that.” He was quiet for a few minutes, and then started quizzing me, not for the first time, about the job application process in the U.S.

  There was also a lot at Yulia’s that I missed. I did my best to see my grandmother to bed, so I tended to get to Yulia’s late, and I tried to be back at my grandmother’s before she missed me, so I was rarely at Yulia’s in the morning. I never saw but was told about how Sergei also ended up sleeping there a fair amount as his marriage deteriorated. And how Masha declared that if Misha didn’t shape up she’d leave him. And how Yulia’s relationship with Katya too was not always perfectly harmonious. So maybe I had a slightly rosy-tinted view of the situation. But I loved it. It was a kind of primitive communism—from necessity but also by choice. They took pleasure, I think, in making it work.

  In addition to spending more time at Yulia’s, I was increasingly caught up in the activities of October. They weren’t ready to launch their website, but in the meantime they kept sending me articles to translate. They were analyses of the Russian political situation from a Marxist perspective. It was a lot of the stuff Sergei and Yulia and the rest had been saying to me for months: That the authoritarianism of the regime could best be understood in an international capitalist rather than a post-Soviet context. That the regime did not imprison its opponents because it retained a memory of Soviet methods, but because it wanted to continue making money for its clients (the oligarchs). Money, here as elsewhere, was the goal. Once you understood that, modern-day Russia came into focus; it made sense.

  I translated the articles into English with pleasure. And as the weather grew warmer, there were more and more protests and other events to attend. We protested the Kazakh embassy after police fired on striking oil workers in one of Kazakhstan’s Caspian boomtowns; we protested the bank that supported Norilsk Nickel after a report came out calling Norilsk the most polluted city on earth. We protested the Ministry of Education because of its new standardized college entrance exam, which was going to turn Russian kids into little test-preparation drones, just like their American counterparts, and we protested the Duma when it voted on a law to decrease government funding for education.

  The protests were always peaceful and organized in such a way that we avoided arrest—either they were permitted, or we did them singly, so that they weren’t considered gatherings, or we didn’t present any political slogans, so they weren’t considered political. “The time will come when we need to heighten the contradictions,” Boris counseled, “but first we need to build a movement.” There were days we spent leafleting outside factories, supporting their independent trade unions, even inviting workers to contact us about membership in October. Aside from a few run-ins with security, we were never systematically bothered or harassed for any of this. I think the fact that we were in Moscow; that we were concentrating on national-level issues rather than smaller, more contentious local ones; and that no one really knew what to make of a group of friendly young
socialists showing up at their factory or outside their embassy, shielded us, for a while, from the attention of the authorities. October was simply too small and too weird to seem anything but harmless. The apparent exception was the protest the summer before against the highway through the forest, the same one my brother had been accused of somehow instigating. The authorities still seemed very angry about it, and had been trying for months to find out who was involved; as I learned from Misha, it had been a joint protest with Mayhem, the group Shipalkin had joined, and it was the Mayhem people who had come up with the idea of destroying one of the bulldozers. Despite some qualms, the October members went along with it. It would turn out to be a big mistake.

  At one point Sergei invited an acquaintance of his, a grizzled old Marxist who had been imprisoned in the 1970s for calling for a return to Leninism, to give us a brief tutorial on what to do if we ever got arrested. The gist of his message was to keep our mouths shut. “The minute you get in there, consider yourself deaf, dumb, and blind, because in essence you are,” he said. “You have no idea why they’re asking you the questions they’re asking, what they could possibly do with that information, where it might lead. Nothing you say can make anything better, but lots of things you say can make things worse. So keep quiet. Establish your identity, and that’s it.”

  The man wore shabby clothes and was missing several teeth. He had bad breath. Nonetheless there was some romance to meeting an actual veteran of the fight against Russian tyranny. I wondered whether I might write a follow-up paper to the one on October, about this guy’s life.

  I never got around to it, of course. There were many things I didn’t get around to.

  One Sunday in late April Yulia and I finally made the long trip to Nikolai’s dacha. We met up in the middle of the Novokuznetskaya subway station and took the orange line all the way to the southern end. Then we caught a bus, rode it for half an hour into emptiness, got off, and walked a mile along a patchily paved road until we reached Nikolai’s dacha settlement, and then Nikolai’s dacha itself.

  It was at this point half built. The frame of the house—a small two-story colonial—was done, the windows and doors were in, there was even a functioning staircase installed, but the bathroom and kitchen were missing, there was no railing on the staircase, and the walls weren’t painted—that was our task for the day, to start painting—and dacha season was fast approaching. The yard was a mess, with trees and bushes and tall grass all seemingly falling into one another. It wasn’t clear that Nikolai was going to make it before dacha season began, or even before the fall.

  The location left something to be desired. There just wasn’t much in the way of nature. No woods, no lake, no river. There was a huge abandoned quarry, but it wasn’t filled with water; you could climb around in it, but that was all. There was a field nearby, but it was just a big field of mud.

  “So what do you guys think?” Nikolai said happily, after we’d taken a quick tour. We were, it turned out, the first ones to have come out to help.

  “It’s pretty close to being done?” Yulia said gently.

  “Yes! You should have seen it just last year,” said Nikolai enthusiastically. “It was a hole in the ground.”

  “And now it’s an aboveground hole,” Yulia whispered to me. In Russian “hole” meant a depression in the ground but also a dump. It was difficult to imagine Nikolai’s dacha being anything else.

  We spent the day painting the walls of one of the upstairs rooms. It was hard work and it was still cold enough outside that we didn’t want to have the windows open too much, but at the same time the fumes were bad enough that we didn’t want the windows closed entirely. Nikolai tried to entertain us by playing music on his phone but the sound quality was bad and Yulia kept asking him to skip songs. Finally, toward evening, we finished. Nikolai had dragged an old wooden bench and chair from somewhere and plunked them down in the jumble of weeds in the back, so after we were done we sat on these and drank vodka and ate the black bread and salami he had prepared for this occasion. He was thrilled. “That’s the first room we’ve painted, so two more rooms upstairs, all the hallways, and the entire downstairs—probably seven more days like this,” he said. “But before we do the downstairs we need to put in the kitchen and the bathroom.” He was counting it up on his fingers. “Maybe we’ll be done by June!”

  He had been living there on weekends, sleeping on the floor, and waking up and working for as long as he could stand it. Nikolai, I had by this point learned, was a programmer at an outfit that perpetrated various online scams mostly to do with gaming advertising revenues; Nikolai said they mostly targeted major corporations and would eventually cause capitalism to collapse. He probably made more money than anyone else in October, and was now spending all of it on this dacha, but he didn’t mind. “This was the inheritance my father left me,” he said. “This is it. A piece of land in a shitty dacha settlement in a very hard-to-reach area. But that was all he had to give, and I’ve taken it. When we’re done here we can all use it. We can even have retreats here for the group. Hell, if things go wrong it can be a safe house!”

  “It can’t be a safe house and a meeting place,” Yulia said, not unkindly. “Either it’s official or it’s a secret. Given that your name is on it, it probably shouldn’t be a secret.”

  “OK, OK,” said Nikolai. “Anyway, who says things need to go wrong?”

  By the time we left it was dark; Nikolai walked us to the bus stop and then headed back to his dacha, to keep building.

  “It’s impressive that he’s done so much,” I said, once we got on the creaky old bus and Nikolai retreated into the distance.

  “We’ll see if he finishes,” said Yulia. “God, I’m so tired.”

  We got back to her place around ten, both of us so exhausted that we immediately went to sleep in our clothes. I woke up at around midnight, just before Katya was supposed to return, kissed Yulia good-bye, and headed home.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, Dima Gchatted me to say that he had lost the final hearing on his case; he had expected as much, but this put an end to the story of his gas stations.

  “I’m wiped out,” he said. “I need to move on the apartments.”

  “When?”

  “In the next couple of months,” he said.

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes.” Pause. “Sorry.”

  “No,” I typed before I could think better of it. “We’re not moving Grandma. She’s weak and the only reason she can get around this apartment is because she knows where everything is.”

  There was also something that I didn’t say, which was that two months after submitting my Watson application, and six weeks after submitting my Slavic Review article, I hadn’t heard a peep from either place.

  “OK,” said Dima. “How much longer is she going to be able to get up those stairs?”

  “She gets up them OK now, with my help.”

  “You’re going to stay there and help her up the stairs indefinitely?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you fucking serious?” Dima was typing very quickly. “Have you looked out the window recently? Do you have any fucking clue what’s going on in that country?”

  “I’ve looked out the window,” I said.

  “You don’t have a clue,” Dima said. He could be very charming when he wanted something; he could also be mean. Sometimes, of course, he was right. Maybe in this case he was right. At some level I really didn’t have a clue.

  But also he was wrong. I liked it here. And I was not going to let him evict our grandmother.

  A week after this conversation he wrote to say that a prospective buyer interested in just our grandmother’s apartment was coming over and would I at least let him look at the place? If he made an offer we could decide then. But I wasn’t interested. I asked the Marxist reading group to com
e over and stage a small protest in the courtyard. They relished the opportunity. They made little signs that said HANDS OFF OUR GRANDMOTHERS! and NOUVEAUX RICHES NOT WELCOME HERE! When the buyer showed up and saw this, he didn’t even get out of his Mercedes-Benz. I watched him from my grandmother’s bedroom. That evening I got a short email from Dima. “You’re an idiot,” it said. “Buyer is out. You’re on your own.”

  Good, I thought. Good.

  A week later he sold his apartment to a Bulgarian arms dealer named Miklos, who had been the one who wanted to buy both. “Four hundred grand,” Dima wrote me. “The agent said we were lucky. If we sit on Grandma’s place any longer, the market’s going to collapse right out from under us.”

  “Sorry,” I wrote him. “I’m not going.”