The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

A session with a psychologist at one of the new centers would cost three rubles if the psychologist had the equivalent of a master's degree; a doctorate holder's hour ran five rubles and fifty kopecks. This was a fraction of the cost of a black market pair of jeans, but one could buy dozens of loaves of bread with such a sum. Arutyunyan held a doctorate in philosophy by now, but her first client was disappointed to discover that he had just paid top-shelf rate for a meeting with a skinny young woman. She showed him her degree. He still wanted his money back because he had come for help talking sense into his teenage son but the boy had taken off on the way to the appointment. Arutyunyan was firm: there would be no refunds.

They met weekly for about six months. The son never showed, but judging from the father's reports, their relationship gradually evened out. As for the father himself, at his last session he told Arutyunyan, "All this time I have simply been living my life when I should really have been thinking about life."

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PRIVILEGE

SERYOZHA

for seryozha, 1985 was the year his family was reunited.* Seryozha was three years old, and for as long as he had known, his family had been divided: he had an older sister, whom his parents missed very much, and so Seryozha missed her too, though he was not sure he had ever seen her. She lived very far away, in Canada, with Seryozha's grandfather. Seryozha's parents had chosen to send her to Canada; it was an opportunity for a better life for her, but the separation seemed to weigh heavily. Now she would come home, because Seryozha's grandfather was being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. He had been living in Canada as the Soviet ambassador. For someone like Seryozha's grandfather, this was exile. That is what he called it: "political exile."

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a strange Communist bird. Raised in rural central Russia outside the city of Yaroslavl, he first learned of the Party as the all-powerful monster that punished the needy and the hungry: women in his village were jailed for digging potatoes out of the already frozen soil of collective farm fields, where they had been abandoned after a poorly managed harvest. He was not yet eighteen when he was drafted in August 1941. At the front he saw that the Communists were the bravest, most dedicated soldiers. He joined the Party. He was severely wounded and survived. Before the war was over, he was given an opportunity to go to college. He shared

a dorm room with four other disabled veterans. One of them had books of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, who had once written of the beauty of the countryside not far from where Alexander Nikolaevich had grown up. Then Yesenin had led a life of glamour and debauchery, marrying the American dancer Isadora Duncan, traveling to the United States with her, and finally committing suicide in a Leningrad hotel in 1925. His books went out of print shortly after, and for the next quarter century were circulated only surreptitiously. He was too lyrical, too reckless, too human to be Soviet.

Snow-clad is the plain, and the moon is white

Covered with a shroud is my country side.

Birches dressed in white are crying, as I see.

Who is dead, I wonder? Is it really me?¹

he had written in the year of his death.

Alexander Nikolaevich was struggling, in a way he could not yet put into words, with the idea of what—and who—was and was not Soviet. Yesenin, who had so eloquently written about his love of Russia and his childhood in its beautiful and impoverished countryside, was somehow not Soviet. Now, as the Red Army was liberating its own citizens from Nazi camps, they were condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. Alexander Nikolaevich went to the railroad station to see the cattle cars carrying these inmates from the Nazi camps to the Soviet camps, and he saw women who went there in the hopes of seeing their missing men, if only for a second, and he saw hands throwing crumpled-up pieces of paper out of the cattle cars—these contained their names and addresses and the hope that someone would let their loved ones know they were alive.

Alexander Nikolaevich wondered how this could possibly be right. But the Party was very good to him. It gave him an education and started rapidly pulling him up the career ladder. Alexander Nikolaevich set his doubts aside. By the time Stalin died in 1953, Alexander Nikolaevich was a member of the Central Committee. As