A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Sergei and the others were very excited. Labor unrest was at the heart of their concept of political action. “The liberals have never even tried to speak to these people, and in fact they have nothing but contempt for them,” Sergei wrote on the October website. “They call them sovok. But in fact these sovok are the very people who have the power and the right to annihilate this regime.” The protest at RussOil and a few others like it were grounds for hope. “We’re not in a revolutionary situation,” Sergei told me one night as we sat in his car on Trubnaya. “We’re not even on the brink of a revolutionary situation. But at least we can start using the words.” Throughout the summer we held pickets in support of protesting workers, handed out leaflets at Moscow factories, and published excited reports on our website, analyzing the situation and predicting more labor unrest in the future.

  I was still managing a few nights a week of hockey. Our luck against the white team had hardly changed; maybe once a month we’d beat them, if that. But for a week that summer, before he went back home to Seattle to settle down and get married, Michael from next door had two college friends visiting him. He had gone to school in Vancouver and his friends were Canadian, and at my prompting he had asked them to bring their hockey gear. They had been glad to, and I brought them to hockey with me. They were regular, unassuming guys, neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, and I could tell when they showed up with me that the guys on my team were underimpressed by “the Canadians.” But when they got on the ice the Canadians were unbelievable. The game was in their bones. We put them on a line with Oleg and they must have scored six or seven goals. The white team was so amazed they didn’t even bother trying to maim them. We won both games they played in. The team was thrilled, and Sergei quietly asked some questions about the Canadian health-care system.

  Something else happened at hockey that I found pretty interesting. The white team, while a cohesive unit, occasionally invited some friend or client to come and play in the game. One Wednesday night they had a new guy playing, and in the warm-ups when I saw him I immediately had a strong, deeply unpleasant reaction. I couldn’t place where it was coming from and I skated by him again: he was young, blue-eyed, and had chiseled features, very familiar, and I knew I didn’t like him. I’d had this reaction a few times in New York when seeing actors on the street who played bad guys on TV. Had I seen this guy in one of the movies Yulia and I watched together? I started trying to figure out which one it might have been. On the bench once the game started I asked Anton if the guy was an actor. “An actor?” said Anton. “No. He’s just some asshole. His father’s in the Duma.”

  Then I knew who it was. It was the guy who had pistol-whipped me outside of Teatr. And he was on the ice at this very moment. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t my turn to go out but I announced that I was taking the next man off and no one argued with me. When I got on the ice, the guy was still on, and I skated right at him and slashed him in the leg. He looked up, surprised.

  “Remember me?” I yelled.

  He looked like he didn’t remember and didn’t care. “Fuck off,” he said.

  At this I lost my mind. It was one thing for some guy to hit me with a gun for no reason. I mean, that was bad enough. But for him to show up to my hockey game, skate around like it was no big deal, and then pretend not even to care whether he knew who I was—this was too much. Without dropping my stick, I punched him hard in the back of the helmet. He fell forward onto the ice. I wanted to kick him but it wasn’t possible with skates so I dropped my stick and gloves and jumped on top of him to tear his helmet off. It wouldn’t come off so as he lay on the ice I started punching the back of his helmet—it was a little idiotic, but I don’t think it was ineffective. “All right,” I heard him say. “Enough.” By this point several of the guys from both teams had skated over and were trying to pull me away. I let them do so. The guy wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t a strong skater, his pads were brand-new, and apparently he felt less sure of himself on the ice than he did out on the street. Whereas I felt, just then, right at home.

  “Andryush, what the fuck’s going on?”

  Fedya, from the white team, was in my face. He had been slipping passes by me to his linemate Alyosha for months and had never once smiled at me, or even after our first meeting acknowledged my existence, though a few weeks earlier he’d accidentally hit me in the face with his stick and apologized.

  I said, “That guy hit me with a gun outside a nightclub on Clean Ponds. Without any reason. He just came up to me and hit me.”

  Fedya turned to the blond, who was slowly gathering the equipment he’d dropped when I attacked him. “Alexei, is that true?”

  “I don’t remember,” said the guy. “Maybe. He was talking to my girlfriend.”

  “Fuck off!” I yelled. Literally, “go on a cock.” I delivered the curse with total authority. “I didn’t say a word to her. And you had a gun.”

  Fedya turned to the guy and said, “Leave.”

  The guy nodded and without looking at me skated off the ice, holding his gloves and stick against his chest like a little boy. I stayed. At the end of the skate, I went over to Fedya to thank him.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “You were right and he was wrong. He won’t be invited to play again.”

  And that was it. The next time we played, Fedya gave no indication of being my new friend. But what happened had happened. The hockey guys were OK.

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t all triumphs and victories during this period. One night on my way home from Yulia’s, I saw a fire—it was the Azeri chicken and pastry stand. It was in flames. A group of people was standing around, and then a fire truck came and poured a bunch of water on the stand. No one was hurt, but, as I read online a few days later, it wasn’t an accident: several Azeri-owned businesses had been torched that night in Moscow in retaliation for the stabbing of a Russian teenager by an Azeri man at one of the markets. For a couple of weeks, the burned husk of the chicken stand stood there, and then it was removed. The Azeri guys didn’t come back.

  Something foul was in the air. One Sunday the speakers at October’s Street University were two Italian communists—“comrades of Negri,” according to Boris, in the email announcement, meaning the legendary Italian communist and political prisoner Antonio Negri—and the location was right around the corner from us, at the Krupskaya statue. My grandmother was feeling pretty good that day, and I invited her along.

  The Italians were sweet grad student types in their midthirties. They spoke in English and Boris translated, with some help from me. The Italians wanted to talk about “cognitive capitalism.” This was a concept Negri developed to deal with the fact that actual physical capitalism had done OK by workers in Europe. They received decent wages and were able to purchase property and were no longer interested in revolution. But, Negri argued, their minds were being colonized. Not just their bodies, as Marx had said; their very minds.

  I liked the Italians but I couldn’t help but think that this news was, for Russia, a little premature. Here working people were still being exploited in the old-fashioned way. They did not earn decent wages; they could not afford to buy property; they had no protections. There was no need to come up with fancy new theories when the old ones were still so obviously true.

  As I was thinking this a group of skinheads appeared from the far end of the boulevard and approached the Krupskaya statue. They wore combat boots and army surplus pants and jackets. There were five or six of them. I had never seen actual skinheads in the center of Moscow. Maybe, I thought, they were the good kind? Then they set up shop at the base of the statue, not fifteen feet from us, and started goofing around and taking cell phone photos of themselves with Lenin’s widow in the background. “Beat the Jews, save Russia!” they yelled. Click. And then, “Heil Hitler!” Click. These were not the good kind of skinheads. They were behind the Italians, who didn�
�t seem to notice and kept going on about cognitive capitalism. Boris kept dutifully translating, though he occasionally sneaked a look over his shoulder.

  I sized up our group. There were seven of us: the two Italians, Boris, Vera, Yulia, me, and my grandmother. Of the seven of us, I was the only one who looked like he engaged in any regular exercise. We did not stand a chance against the skinheads.

  “Sieg heil!” yelled the skinheads.

  “You know,” Boris said, turning to the Italians, “I think we should move a little farther into the park. It’ll be quieter there.”

  And so we did. I thought for a moment that the skinheads would wonder what was up, or even that they had deliberately come over to our group to yell their slogans, but they didn’t pay us any mind. They were busy taking photos of their Nazi salutes. Maybe they had just redesigned their website and needed some content. We found a shady spot farther along the boulevard, and the Italians finished their lecture on cognitive capitalism. By the time my grandmother and Yulia and I went back to our place, the skinheads were gone.

  A few days later, my grandmother and I were walking back together from the market when I noticed, not for the first time, the group of old ladies who sat in the children’s playground in the courtyard between our building and the market. These were the women my grandmother had dismissed to me as anti-Semites, but ever since the Vladlenna incident I wondered if she wasn’t just imagining it. And if they were a little anti-Semitic, who cared. What an opportunity! These old ladies sitting on a bench, feeding the pigeons and keeping an eye on the neighborhood, had once been a common feature of every Soviet and post-Soviet courtyard. In the center of Moscow, the era of high oil prices had all but wiped them out. And yet here, literally one courtyard away, a little pocket of resistance remained. There was still plenty of summer left; perhaps my grandmother would enjoy coming out here and sitting with her near contemporaries and discussing the problems of the day?

  Before my grandmother or my own natural shyness could stop me, I turned to address the old ladies.

  “Hello!” I said. I pulled my grandmother over to them. Several pigeons the old ladies had been feeding with bread scattered loudly as we walked over. “Hello,” I said again, after the pigeons had cleared out. “My name is Andrei. And this is Seva.”

  The old ladies nodded—there were three of them—and waited for me to continue.

  “Tell me,” I said, not really knowing what else to say, “what are your plans for the summer?”

  The old ladies exchanged what seemed like amused looks. Then one of them, who was sitting in the middle and had a half loaf of white bread in her hand, spoke up. “We’re going to be sitting right here, where else are we gonna go?” she said. “Not like some people who’re probably going to Israel for the summer.”

  The sudden invocation of Israel wiped the polite smile from my face, which I suppose was the intended effect.

  “How’s that?” I said. “Why Israel?”

  “Well, isn’t that where Seva Efraimovna’s going to go?” said the woman. She put a lot of stress on my grandmother’s obviously Jewish patronymic. The other two women snickered their approval.

  “No,” I said uselessly. “She doesn’t have any relatives there.”

  “No?” said the woman. “Maybe she’ll go to America then. There’s plenty of your kind there, right?”

  Now the other two women were really enjoying it. One of them clapped her hands in delight. My heart was racing. I had never met an actual, real-live anti-Semite before. I felt my grandmother beside me; I couldn’t tell how much of this she could hear, but I think she sensed the hostility of these women, and knew what they were about. For my part, I couldn’t believe it. And yet what could I do? Was I going to stand there and yell at them? Or fight them?

  I stood for a few long moments, just kind of staring, and then without saying anything I turned with my grandmother—her hand was looped around my elbow, so we turned together—and walked away.

  “Good-bye, Jews!” the women called after us, and laughed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Still, it was a beautiful summer. One Sunday in June, Misha, Boris, Yulia, and I borrowed Sergei’s car and took a trip out to a place called Petrovo, a few hours south of Moscow. Misha and Boris had found it at random on a map. They pretended that the trip was for my benefit, so that I could see “the real Russia,” but they were obviously curious as well. In Petrovo we found a simple Soviet town, with the old 1950s five-story apartment buildings called Khrushchevki, a grocery store that sold local vodka, a department store where you could still buy the old Russian-made pots and pans and can openers that my grandmother’s apartment was filled with. “This is real Russian vodka,” Misha said when we went to the grocery store, and “These are real Russian utensils,” he said at the department store; and when we went to an old-fashioned cafeteria and ate cold borscht and cucumber salad, he informed us that “this is a real Russian cafeteria and this is real Russian cuisine.”

  “It will give you,” said Yulia, “a real Russian stomachache.” Everyone laughed. I realized then how much in common I had with all of them, more than I realized; they remembered this Soviet world from their childhoods just as I remembered it from mine. They were, in a way, as nostalgic for it as I was. On our way home, we pulled off the road so that Misha, who’d had a few beers in the cafeteria, could go to the bathroom. The dirt road we found ourselves on was so narrow that we couldn’t turn around and had to keep going until we reached an opening; we ended up at an old Soviet schoolhouse, obviously abandoned. SCHOOL NUMBER 3, it said over the entrance. It was dusk when we came to the school, and the broken windows and trash piled up near it gave it a kind of haunted aspect.

  “You know,” said Boris, “most of the rest of the country is like this.” He turned the car around and we sped back toward the main road.

  A few weekends later, Yulia and I took a trip to Kiev so that I could meet her mother. Sophia Nikolaevna lived alone in one of the crumbling high-rise blocks on Kiev’s Right Bank; she was approaching sixty, and hadn’t worked in over a decade. Yulia had warned me that in her loneliness and disappointment her mother had fallen victim to the infowar between Russia and Ukraine that would eventually, some years later, turn into a shooting war. Sophia Nikolaevna was an ethnic Russian; this didn’t used to matter in Ukraine, but now it could, if you let it, and she let it by consuming Russian television, which warned her that soon the Russian language would be banned in Ukraine. There were times, Yulia told me, that she told Yulia she feared leaving the house because she thought she’d be outed as a Russian. “If she starts railing against the government, just ignore her,” said Yulia as we took the subway to her childhood apartment. The Kiev subway was identical in just about every way to the Moscow subway, but older and poorer (and about five times cheaper), and the announcements were in Ukrainian (as it turned out, and contrary to Sophia Nikolaevna’s fears, this was just about the only Ukrainian I heard while in Kiev). Yulia’s mother was much sweeter and more together than advertised. Aside from complimenting my Russian, which, given that she was such a brave defender of the Russian language, I took as high praise, she kept her rantings about the government to herself. If anything, I found her a little distant.

  “Thank you for visiting me, my friend,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.” I couldn’t tell if this was a commentary on her sense of her own unimportance, or an expression of skepticism toward my commitment to her daughter. Or some combination.

  “I’m happy to finally meet you,” I said.

  “Thank you, my friend,” answered Sophia Nikolaevna.

  Yulia’s childhood room was filled with books, and the walls were covered with little drawings, in goauche, that she had done as a teenager. The apartment, on the sixth floor, was small—three rooms, low ceilings, a tiny kitchen—but it was tidy and lived-in. The building itself and the neighborhood were a
different story. The elevator smelled like someone had died in it. The entrance had been graffitied over a hundred times. It was surrounded by identical buildings, some small grocery stores, and a fast-food chicken place where Yulia and I sneaked off for lunch.

  “This place was OK when I was growing up here,” said Yulia. “It was full of children. Every winter they would make an ice rink in front of our building and everyone would go skating.”

  To reach the chicken spot, we had walked through what seemed like a series of abandoned lots full of trash and broken glass (but no furniture—Ukrainians were too poor to throw out furniture). Once upon a time this was meant to be a tree-lined play area for children. That was hard to picture now.

  “It was very different,” Yulia said. “It wasn’t just physically different, it was morally different. People had work and they weren’t ashamed of themselves. They were poor, but poverty is relative. Remember the immiseration thesis? ‘As capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.’ The reverse is also true. People can be poor without suffering, as long as they are not abandoned, as long as they don’t perceive themselves to be abandoned. My mother was poor under Communism but she had a job, she had access to medical care, she could look me in the eye and tell me things would be OK and believe it. She was a happy person. That person you see in there is not her.”