The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Solikamsk was one of the oldest settlements in the Urals: salt was mined there starting in the fifteenth century. In the 1930s and 1940s the town swelled with labor camps: tens of thousands of inmates were brought in from elsewhere in Russia and, later, from the occupied Baltic states and from defeated Germany.¹⁴ By the time Galina came here in the late 1970s, the camps were gone but the town, like so many Soviet towns, seemed bloated: many of its roughly hundred thousand residents lived like temporary settlers, in makeshift accommodations.

By the age of thirty-one, Galina was working as the vice-principal of a trade school and seeing the principal of another trade school in town. He was married. She became pregnant and planned to have an abortion. It would not have been her first, and this was normal: in the absence of methods for pregnancy prevention—hormonal contraceptives were unavailable in the Soviet Union and condoms were of abominable quality and in short supply—abortion was a common contraception method. In 1984, the year Galina became pregnant, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births.¹⁵ There was nothing shameful about having an abortion, so there was no reason to keep the plan secret: Galina's family knew, and her brother-in-law talked her out of it. He pointed out the obvious: she was over thirty, still unmarried, and if she had an abortion this time, she might never have a child at all. Statistically speaking, he was right: more than 90 percent of Russian women were married by age thirty,¹⁶ and few had children after that age.¹⁷

Galina agreed. She would keep the baby and raise him alone. This, too, was an ordinary path. For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, without forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility. "The new project was designed to encourage both men and women to have non- conjugal sexual relationships that would result in procreation," writes historian Mie Nakachi.— When Galina's son was born on May 9— Victory Day—1985, she gave him her own last name, Misharina, and the patronymic Yurievich, to indicate that his father's name was Yuri. Lyosha's full official name was thus Alexei Yurievich Misharin.

Galina became the principal at what was called a "correctional school." The name was misleading: the school was less a correctional facility than the state's attempt to compensate for any number of things that had gone terribly wrong with its students. Correctional schools were created to serve children deemed incapable of succeeding in mainstream schools. Most of these schools provided boarding during the week or year-round; some had special services for children with disabilities.