Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (37 page)

I knew that she had killed herself years later, when she could bear the pain no longer. But it was only now that Tatiana told me Misha was the one who found her hanging there. “He was three. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s so troubled now,” Tatiana muttered. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “He seemed in rather good form to me.” “You’re right, he was lovely with you, the way he always used to be. But when he’s drunk he’s different. Crude, awful.”

He had started drinking a couple of years ago, she said. Was that because things were going wrong on the farm, I asked Tatiana. “No, it was because he became too confident. He thought he could do it all. He thought he’d got it licked. But now he’s started drinking, he can’t control it. He’s spending more and more of his time down here, with Marx’s local bosses. And that’s what they do when they get together. Drink. They bring him home legless.

“He’s particularly bad with his mother, for some reason. He’s her favorite child. Before, he always used to be so good with her. He’d talk to her, spend time with her. Not anymore. When he’s drunk it’s her he takes it out on. And she, well, she just sits there and takes it.

“I’ve come to admire Lyuba enormously,” Tatiana went on. “She’s not just strong, she’s intelligent. I watch the way she can take a tiny bit of information and use it as the basis for making a much broader judgment. When Misha comes in drunk, she always manages to work out what lies behind it, for instance. And she’s never far from the mark.”

Four years ago, when Misha brought his mother here from Ukraine, the two women were dreading the prospect of living together. Now they had become close allies, mutually supportive in the face of their shared problem. Tatiana’s loving care was what had given Misha’s mother her new lease of life.

As for Misha, who had always been so gentle, such a meticulous manager, the drink was affecting his work, Tatiana said. “When things go wrong he loses his temper, blames it all on his subordinates. He spends time on the farm and the factory starts slipping. He concentrates on the factory, and the farm suffers. But he won’t delegate,” Tatiana sighed. “He’s a maximalist, as you know. He thought he could change everything at once. But what he took on was too much for one person.”

We sat in silence, listening to the creaking of the cooling
banya
. A cat appeared in the open doorway, stalked around the kitchen, and retired outside to feast on crayfish shells under the full moon. How sad, I thought. Misha had realized his dream. But he had paid too high a price.

His youthful appearance was deceptive, too, Tatiana confided. In fact, he had just spent three weeks in hospital, after being taken ill on holiday in Turkey. Years of unremitting work were taking their toll. The doctors were clear: he’d got to change the way he lived, or else …

As we shut the cat out and headed for bed Tatiana told me that Misha was just about to stand for election in Marx, as a deputy for one of the small opposition parties. If he got in, he would be working with that rogue Baguette. Tatiana sighed: “Sometimes, I look at him and think, yes, Marx has won.”

PILNYAK’S ISLAND

Early next morning, we climbed into the car and headed back for Saratov, half-awake, driving too fast. Tatiana and I had overslept. Nadya and her friend were going to be late for school. This time, we drove back on the old road, through the town of Engels. A week ago, it was from here that two Tupolev-160s, each carrying twelve nuclear warheads, had taken off bound for Venezuela, bearing the message to the United States that two could play at fomenting trouble on each other’s borders.

Tatiana had been trying to help me reach Natasha and Igor, my own efforts having failed. The war with Georgia had left me worried about them and their underground newspaper in Sevastopol. Suddenly, the derelict naval port was in the geopolitical spotlight. Since its military triumph, Russia was viewing the map differently, as a foreign policy pundit had been telling me in Moscow.

America’s days of unchallenged global supremacy were over, he said. A new, multipolar world would emerge sooner or later, one in which Russia was destined to play a major role. But before that could happen, Uncle Sam was going to have to admit that it had failed in its bid to impose its vision of liberal democracy on the world. Until that happened, the world was going to be a dangerous place. Opportunistic conflicts were bound to break out in places like the Caucasus, borderlands between the spheres of influence.

By any reckoning, Crimea was high up among those potential flashpoints. Russia’s rusting navy still lay in the inlets of Sevastopol. Although Khrushchev had rashly bequeathed the peninsula to his native Ukraine, 59 percent of Crimea’s population was Russian. Russia’s sense of imperial entitlement had been stirred up now. The weaker the economy at home, the more Russia’s leaders would be tempted to find a rousing cause to distract attention from their failures domestically. How long was it going to be before Russia’s military moved to reclaim land where so much Russian blood had been spilled? Perhaps the first move had already been made. For one of Russia’s tame opposition parties had started championing its marooned compatriots in Crimea. They were arguing that Crimea’s Russians should have passports, that they should have the right to work and be educated in Russia.

I would like to have had more confidence that an incumbent President Obama would steer clear of stirring up trouble there. But the worse the US domestic economy became, the more attractive it might seem to keep pressing on with the crazy policy of expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, to include Ukraine and Georgia.

Natasha and Igor had lived their private lives rashly. But I knew my friends well enough to be confident that they would do whatever they could to help Crimea’s Russians resist becoming political pawns. At least there was no history of ethnic tension to exploit between Ukrainians and Russians, as there had been in South Ossetia. The only group in Crimea with a declared interest in separatism were the increasingly politically organized Crimean Tatars, men such as Igor’s friend Evdan. For them, the memory of Stalin’s wholesale deportation in 1944 would never fade. In any conflict, they would always side with Ukraine.

Tatiana had tried ringing Natasha’s sister in Novosibirsk. When she asked for news of Natasha, her sister slammed the phone down. “I’m not surprised,” Tatiana sighed. “In Marx I remember watching Natasha throw away a pile of unopened letters. ‘I don’t know how to manage long-distance friendships,’ she said when I asked her why. ‘They’re just an imitation of friendship.’ ” Knowing how wounded Tatiana had been by the way Natasha broke off contact when she left Saratov, I said quickly: “I don’t know what it is about Natasha. But there’s something inevitable about the way she’s ended up in the eye of the political storm yet again, don’t you think?”

•  •  •

When the car rumbled over the old bridge across the Volga, I was looking out for Pilnyak’s island. Pilnyak (né Wogau) was the popular “bourgeois” writer from Marx whom Stalin hounded to death for having hinted that the Great Leader ordered the elimination of his rival, Frunze. There the island was, stretched out below, its two long white sandy beaches looking like a pair of tights laid out to dry. A long time ago, Pilnyak tells us, a barge had sunk there. Over the years sand had built up around it, until finally it surfaced in that island.

It was an image that mattered to Pilnyak. He returns to it again and again, even in the atrocious Socialist Realist novel Stalin forced out of him in a final act of creative humiliation. What did it mean to him, I wondered? Was he protesting against the Soviet faith that you can refashion history, and human nature? Was he objecting that while the river flowed on, the sunken barge remained? It was a more ambiguous image than that, though. For the island kept changing shape.

This autumn, Putin had been launching an ambitious bid to do just that, to impose a new shape on Russian history. He had given his enthusiastic endorsement to a new standard history textbook for secondary schools. Western commentators construed it as an attempt to repeal the revelations of the glasnost years and return to the pre-Gorbachev version of Soviet history. So I tracked the book down in a Saratov bookshop when I arrived and spent a long time huddled on a stool, leafing through it.

It certainly contained a fulsome litany of Soviet achievements, imperial, economic, and technological. But it was not just a return to the old Soviet view. It was altogether more ambitious, a considered attempt to make the notion of “sovereign democracy” mean something.

Teachers were being offered ways of presenting Russia as having a special destiny, one which could not, should not, be measured by any Western yardstick. Yes, Russia’s Eurasianists had finally come in from the cold. Nineteenth-century Orthodox autocracy and Stalin’s imperial vision were finally reconciled in a single narrative whose underlying theme was Russian exceptionalism.

In the Soviet period there had indeed been bouts of repression and execution, the revisionist argument went. But the rationale for them needed to be understood. There had been famines, too, there was no denying it. But the numbers who died had been vastly exaggerated (one to two million perhaps, not the seven to ten million the detractors claimed). Stalin, “the most successful leader of the USSR,” had been acting entirely rationally. How else could an industrial state have been forged from a peasant society in such a short time? How else could the fascist enemy have been conquered? Yes, Stalin did deport whole ethnic groups, “in order to keep the monolithic character of the system.” But Russia emerged victorious. Russia’s greatness had been realized.

As we left behind the aching, bloodstained Volga countryside and dropped Nadya and her friend at school I was wondering what these bright twelve-year-olds were going to make of this rebranding of their country.

Tatiana dropped me off at the handsome Radishchev Museum. Framed by great plane trees, it stood on its own in the heart of the city. It had been closed for years, this fine, neoclassical building, one of the first purpose-built provincial museums in Russia. “For repairs,” they said. People wearily assumed it had been grabbed by some powerful organization. But when I arrived this time, I heard it had been reopened.

I spent the morning treading the magnificent wrought-iron staircase, marveling at the renovation, checking in with my favorite paintings. I had started coming here sixteen years ago, when Benya’s boat brought me to this old closed city. Inflation was taking off and the privileged workforce of those armaments factories were in a rage at their sudden impoverishment. This was where I would take refuge when I could no longer bear the hostility my foreign accent had provoked.

Now hard times were setting in again. Long before world markets started crashing, there were already fears of an impending catastrophe if Russia’s government did not use oil revenues to improve people’s lives. All over the world, the myth of the free market had gone to the heads of elites, but nowhere more than here. The price of oil was tumbling. Judging by the newspaper reports, xenophobia was on the rise: attacks on anyone non-Slav in appearance had been on the increase for some time. If the regime continued to stoke up anti-Western feeling a time might come when my accent again provoked hostility.

I was hunting for my favorite painting, by the remarkable Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Born in the Saratov countryside, son of a cobbler, he bicycled all the way from Leningrad to Paris, and from there to Italy to study the art of western Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance. Where was it? There it was, hanging high up in a corner. Two girls were getting dressed after bathing in the Volga. Their outstretched arms filled the canvas. The painting was a feast of lemon yellow, fuchsia, scarlet, and Giotto blue. Petrov-Vodkin had brought together the legacy of medieval Russian iconography with that of Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance. The composition was modern, yet ancient, an everyday image suffused with intimations of transcendence.

One of the girls looked like Tatiana when we first met, a clear-browed beauty with pale skin, pale hair, and wide gray eyes. Then, she was still a shy provincial girl, under the influence of the sophisticated Natasha. Now, she had taken her place in the army of Russia’s strong women, as the point of first and last resort for the old and the young, the single and the frail, the idealists and the honest. All of these stood far more frighteningly exposed in Russia than in the West. For them, family and friendship were the only safety nets.

When things fell apart, it would be Tatiana who absorbed the anger and fear, kept her judgments to herself and supported those around her, as Lyuba had done, as women down the centuries had done in this unyielding northern landscape.

Matushka moya
, mother of them all. The clarity with which Tatiana understood all that went on around her was the burden she had to carry. After our
banya
, when we were sitting in the kitchen, she had talked, in her balanced way, about the Georgia war and the difficulties of living in this postideological age. “I don’t believe in anything they tell us in the mass media. I know it’s all propaganda.

“Twenty years ago it was different. We did all believe in communism—we accepted it, like the weather. You don’t demonstrate against the rain. But I remember as a child this feeling of shame, listening to those leaden speeches they used to make in the name of the Party. I knew it was false—children can tell these things. Not that I was especially sensitive. I’ve talked about this with other people of my generation—they all had the same feeling, a sort of inner chill.”

However much they pushed Putin’s new history textbook in the schools, I reflected, they were not going to be able to shape the minds of Tatiana’s children in the old Soviet way. Some of the gains of the last twenty years could not be undone. Russians would remain free to talk, to travel the world and use the Internet. A return to monolithic control over information was a technological impossibility.

FESTIVAL OF DEAD LEAVES

“Of course I despise my Fatherland from head to foot, but I mind when a foreigner shares my feelings.”