Try living in Russia

It was some friends who came to my father's aid. They suggested he go to the North. They found him a job as a craftsman on a construction site near Kotlas. To work with criminals. It was evidently a settlement colony for convicts. My father went to his new place of work. A difficult contingent. The work wasn't easy. Three times he was the stake at a card game. When a criminal ran out of money he would try to recoup his losses. He would play «for Yashka». If he lost he had to finish off Yashka within a day. If he didn't finish him off he'd have to find the money or he'd be knifed himself for the gaming debt. Perhaps they applied different measures according to criminal customs, I don't know. Yashka found out in time, he evidently had his own guys in their groups, his snitches. When in Rome do as the Romans do… That was their life. My father spent the whole night near the entrance to his hut, axe in hand. Awaiting visitors. When the first sunlight appeared you could consider that the threat had passed.

That's how we lived – us in Leningrad and my father in the North.

In that year I wrote a poem for the first time in my life. A naive, childish poem: «Daddy beloved, daddy dear, I miss you so much. Please come home soon, come back here, I will make you lunch. I will grow up big and strong, fearless and courageous. For my homeland I will fight, I will fear no danger.»

The teachers at my school were amazing people. They knew that my father was in the North. But they never treated me badly. It seems they understood and felt compassion. They didn't lower my marks. And I was an excellent student anyway. The best in my class. But then the class wasn't very strong. I used to help many others with schoolwork. The boys would come to our house. I would explain the homework in the hard subjects. Later they would whisper behind my back. There was no gratitude. Understandably. The black cardboard loudspeakers kept droning on about the doctors who were murderers. About the cosmopolitans who wouldn't let us live in peace. Once the lads asked me to stay behind after lessons. They had decided to beat me up in secret. No words, no explanations. Just so I knew. Then our maths teacher came into the classroom, Alexandra Nikolaevna, a large, rotund woman. She was beside herself with fury. She let me go and remained behind with the boys. I don't know what they talked about, but nothing of that kind ever happened again. Not even a hint. Now I understand that this act, so simple and natural at first sight, had required a lot of personal courage from an ordinary teacher. In that class we were learning Spanish. Soon I joined another class that was learning English. I was lucky. The children there were completely different. And the teachers were different, too. Wonderful people, too. I loved them very much. But I will never forget you, Alexandra Nikolaevna. I take my hat off to you.

My dad spent two years in the North. At the end of 1953 the father of all peoples left us. He was weakened, evidently, the old viper, lording it over the other vipers in the can. He'd bitten them all, strangled them all. But ultimately he received his dose of venom from someone close, perhaps the one closest to him. The entire country mourned. Huge queues formed of people who wanted to say goodbye to their beloved leader. Children created a mourning page in their exercise books where they would write of their love for the Great Stalin. They would frame the page in red and black. Children and adults alike were poisoned with the venom of idolatry, the venom of worship before the most blood-stained figure in the history of Russia. Not everyone, naturally.

«He's the master of loud and threatening words, they help him flip the course of things. The man he sees living his own life he will suppress in a flash. Our path is straight nevertheless, he is the one who will lose. For life is ours for the taking, he's merely clinging to us», wrote «Emka», as the poet Naum Korzhavin was known, who was arrested in 1947 at the height of the fight against the cosmopolitans.

In a group of children there is always one whom no one likes. In our class this was Borka Ryaboi. Why we didn't like him? He grew up without his father. His mother was a quiet, unhappy woman. There was nothing distinguishing Borka from the others. He wasn't cheeky. A bit more stupid than the rest. A bit weaker than the other boys. Children are cruel. Borka was always guilty of everything. Now I understand why. One of the reasons was that Borka was Jewish. Just like me. The most horrible thing was that I sometimes supported the idea that «Borka is always guilty of everything» that was so popular among the boys. «Did you see that?», the children would tell each other, «Borka didn't cry when they announced Stalin's death.» Everybody cried, but he didn't. We need to beat him up. Thank God this disgraceful, unmotivated punishment didn't happen. I don't know why, but it didn't. Praise to our father in heaven that the turned the foolish children away from sin. The most repulsive trait of the marginal person is their urge to leave their social group behind. The urge to hide and dissolve in the crowd. To get close to the dominant group. How many people like that I happened to meet. I myself did not try to disguise my Jewish origins, at least I think I didn't. Almost never. But then, with Borka, I probably disguised them. Perhaps unconsciously. Did I discuss with the others that Borja didn't cry for Stalin? Yes I did. Being a little wimp, I reasoned just like the others. And that although I didn't cry either. But I judged Borka. Borya, if you are still alive, if you happen to read this, I implore you to forgive me for I have sinned. Forgive me that I was with the crowd then and not with you. I ask your forgiveness not because you are Jewish. But also because a decent person, and that includes a boy, a child, must not side with the crowd, but with the weak person who is being insulted through no fault of his own.

The Leningrad Affair was closed. The Doctors' Plot, too. «The inspection has shown that the doctors were arrested without good reason and illegally», and the doctors' testimonies were extracted with the help of «inadmissible methods of investigation». The question of resettling the cosmopolitans became redundant. There were prisoners' riots in Vorkuta, Norilsk and Kengir. There was a commission to inspect cases and rehabilitate individuals. An amnesty was held. «I walk towards freedom. Towards the gunshot. Towards everything that dares to interfere», Korzhavin wrote after the amnesty. The deported peoples returned home. The German and Japanese POWs were returned. Austria left the military blocks and declared itself neutral.

A new turn began in the straggle for power in the Kremlin. Who had time for cosmopolitans? My father came home. Re-joined the party. Found a job. Not the one he'd had before. The position was lower and so was the salary. That was understandable. My father was elderly already and had no specialist education. The family was reunited. Life went on. Another three years passed. The Twentieth Party Congress took place. Stalin's monument was thrown off its pedestal. Life in the country was changing. There would be no more excesses. My father was completely rehabilitated. He wanted to rehabilitate himself at work. They talked differently to him now. Politely and respectfully. So many years have passed, dear comrade. Let's not return to the past. We can't change the past. After all many people lost their lives, too. My father once again worked in the same system as before. He built bridges. Once he met his previous boss, the one who had pushed him to the brink of the abyss. He threw himself at my father and hugged him. «Yakov, I'm so glad to see you alive and unharmed. You haven't changed at all. How are you, where are you? Come on, stop turning your nose up. Let's forget the past. You have caused us a lot of trouble, too. So many commissions turned up because of your complaints. Why are you not saying anything? Really, you haven't changed at all. Just as spiteful and stubborn as before. You're breaking the principle.» I can imagine what my father must have felt during this meeting.

Nobody talked about cosmopolitism any more. They didn't pin yellow stars to our clothes. Thank you very much. But the shadow of being second-class people kept hovering above our family for a long time. «Where can I find a photograph, for myself as well as for the public, so that nobody can guess that according to my passport I'm a…» It hovered above all the other families. Those who had previously been called cosmopolitans. Above my parents – for their entire life, until their last day. Above me – until the collapse of the communist empire in the 1990s. Until the one-party monopoly collapsed.

Alas, neither the country nor the people have cleansed themselves through repentance for these and the other crimes of the communist regime. For the genocide of one's own people. For the annihilation of millions of the most honest and capable people who rotted in the torture chambers of the revolution's guards and at the timber felling sites of the GULAG. We can't begin a new life and become a free people if we don't cleanse ourselves through repentance. And thus we continue to carry to this day the ancestral stigma of a people living in slavery. Under the heel of the carefree children and grandchildren of the screws and other heirs to the screws. But we'll talk about that a bit later.

My universities

For Gorky it was the Volga and the strap of the barge hauler. I have no experience to match that, of course. I've never had to do hard, back-breaking labour. But I wasn't afraid of physical labour and didn't avoid it. When I was still a boy I learned to do everything with my own hands – I could work with wood and metal; I could solder and build electromechanical models. Our room on Liteiny Prospekt was heated by a stove in winter. Our firewood was kept in the second backyard, in a low basement. Right next to the neighbours' firewood. Nobody fenced in or guarded their firewood. Nobody ever stole another's firewood. Since I was ten years old it was my responsibility to fire up the stove after school. I would go down into the basement, chop wood, put it into a sack and carry it home, up the steep high staircase. There was no lift in our house. Once I had entered college there was the kolkhoz. We were sent to a village with the expressive name «Gnilki» – «Rotten». The kolkhoz allocated a hut to us students. We knocked together wooden bunks. And then we lived there. We cooked our food in huge pots over the fire. Some of the food we'd brought ourselves. Tinned stewed meat and cereals. The kolkhoz gave us potatoes, vegetables, milk and bread. We worked in the fields, weeding. Everyone tried to stand out and get a larger amount of work done. That's how it was. That's what young people were like. I also made an effort. And although I was constantly exhausted, I was Leningrad rowing champion by then already, well, I couldn't for the life of mine break out and become an exemplary worker. I didn't have the knack. Our exemplary workers were guys and gals who'd come from the provinces, most of them from Belarus. We went to work in the kolkhoz every year. On the first of September we'd show up at college. An assembly would be held during which it was announced who would go where with whom and when, which food items to buy, what things to take. And we'd be off for a month to help the country with the harvest. It was possible to avoid this labour in autumn by working on a building site during summer. In one such summer I was sent to dig pits for the foundations of future houses. The Malaya Okhta district was erected from scratch. Who could have known that a few years down the line, my parents and I would receive a flat there and would go on to live in precisely that district? I finished college. I was given an assignment and went to work straight to the kolkhoz. Those working there mostly worked to tick off a box, to have fun. Later it became customary to send employees to vegetable storehouses to pick through the vegetables. Not for long, just for one or two days. That went on until the year 1990. It even continued while I was working at the Academy of Sciences. Just to show off. Research associates, graduate students, doctors of science and professors with decent salary pretended to be doing something. They'd arrive at the vegetable storehouse at around 9am. At 10am the representative would appear and allocate the groups to different storage facilities. Around 10.30 they'd reach their workplace. Another person would come, give a briefing and distribute packing materials. At 11 they'd start work. At lpm they'd break for lunch. At 2 they'd gradually get down to work. At 3, well, perhaps it was time to stop? They would call the representative. Well, did you get at least something done – thank goodness. Can we take some vegetables, carrots, cabbages? Take a little, that is permitted. For some reason the plan was always fulfilled. The party coordinator in person watched over the plan fulfilment; he was a doctor of science, by the way. A self-evident mockery of common sense. Oh well. Not at all like the universities of Aleksei Maksimovich. Nothing would have happened had I been spared this stupid experience. But what has been has been. I won't renounce a single thing in my life. Everyone has his own universities, his own school of life. I had mine. Let me tell you of the real universities.

My first university was the communal flat. Our neighbours there were uncle Petya, his wife, aunt Zhenya, and their adult son, Tolya. They were good people. Of course they weren't my real aunt and uncle, but that's how you addressed adults back then. In everyday life you didn't call people by name and patronymic, it wasn't proletarian to play those tricks. The first to come into the kitchen would be uncle Petya, fat and good-hearted as he was. There was a wood-burning cooker in the kitchen and a separate gas cooker. Uncle Petya would be wearing his poison-green underwear, regardless of whether anyone else was in the kitchen. He'd light the gas cooker and stand close to it, warming his bottom. That was his obligatory ritual before leaving for work. Aunt Zhenya was a friendly, prematurely aged woman with black hair and a drawn, dark-skinned face. She didn't work and would sometimes keep an eye on what I was doing, at my mother's request. And that despite the fact that I coped well on my own after Nadezhda Danilovna had left: I would change after school, light the stove, have some food and do my homework. But my mother was calmer in the knowledge that there was a pair of eyes not indifferent to what I was up to. Tolya was a well-built blond young man, not very tall and resembling Utesov. He worked as a driver. Before leaving for work he'd always shine his shoes, but only the tips. The rest was invisible, as people used to wear wide bell-bottomed trousers. Tolya was very kind but good for nothing; he'd constantly end up in some scrape or other. He was arrested by the police many times. And he had no luck with women; his girlfriends were all bitches of the worst sort. But Tolya had one talent: he could whistle most beautifully. I think he could have performed in public. When Tolya was at home, you would constantly hear tunes coming from his room – popular songs, romances, arias from the opera. Aunt Zhenya would often ask Lyubov Lvovna, that is my mother, for advice as to what to do with this useless Tolya. And my mother, enthroned at the kitchen table, would then discuss the issues and explain something in a quiet voice. I don't know whether her advice helped them, but their relief when they returned to their room was palpable.

And then uncle Petya and aunt Zhenya were given a flat, and a single mother and her daughters, Ira and Nina, 16 and 18 years old, became our new neighbours. And communal hell began. These women were constantly fighting. For space in the kitchen, for a hob on the gas cooker, who could go to the toilet, whose turn it was in the bathroom. At some point ducks and hay turned up in the bathroom, unexpectedly. Yes, such a thing did happen. Our neighbours didn't understand that the bath was for washing oneself. How much did the electricity cost? In the end the flat had two different electric wires, two meters, two different lamps in the communal areas. These women fought for their place under the sun as if this was «their final and decisive battle». Screams and arguments. They would move our things without explanation and sometimes throw them out. Refrigerators didn't exist back then. Food items and cooked food was stored between the doors or behind the window. From time to time they would pour dirt into our lunch. A few years later the younger one, pretty and quarrelsome Irina, married a soldier. We rarely saw her husband, as he spent most of his time at his unit, but soon twins appeared, a boy and a girl. And with them a pile of nappies, hung out to dry literally everywhere. This fact provided the women with arguments in their constant fight for their legitimate rights. How could my mother endure all that? How did she preserve her calm? Wisdom, kindness and endurance worked miracles. Some time passed and the sisters were given their own place to live. Their mother kept the room for herself. She was rarely there now. She spent more time helping her daughters sort out their lives. Over time she moved out completely. But for many years she kept visiting Lyobov Lvovna, sometimes on her own and sometimes together with her daughters. To chat. To share news and worries. To seek advice. Naturally I didn't participate in the communal battles that were now over, but with half an ear I overheard my parents talk about the problems created by our tight-fisted neighbours. And then I witnessed the miracle not of human making worked by my mother's angelic patience. Not much good came out of the exoticism of the communal flat. Now it seems an exotic thing, then it was the truth of life. And the school of life. No matter how you look at it, this was also one of my universities.

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Примечания

1

A vydvizhenets was a young person with politically correct background and past who was recommended by the communist party for a leadership role in the national economy.

2

Cf. the remark that Russian politics resembles «dogs fighting under a carpet», attributed to Winston Churchill.

3

The first words of the official hymn of the Soviet Air Force: «We were born to turn the fairy take into a true story, to overcome space and expanse».