The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Galina worked at a correctional school of the most common type— the type for children whose parents failed to take care of them, often because they drank. Her students came from the neighborhood that lay between Lyosha's childhood block and the school: while he and Galina lived in a regular concrete-block building, this neighborhood was made up of wooden barracks left over from when the Gulag exploded Solikamsk's population. They called it the barachnyi district. Walking through it, as Galina did on her way to and from work six days a week, was considered dangerous; she carried a knife to protect herself. Sometimes she had to take Lyosha with her to the barachnyi district, usually when she was looking for a student who had gone missing. Lyosha found the barracks impressive and terrifying. The ceilings looked like they might cave in. There was a stench that was stronger and more offensive than anything he had ever smelled. Most of the inhabitants, including the parents with whom Galina occasionally had long conversations, were drunk. Lyosha was aware that this was somehow a function of poverty. He also made a mental connection between poverty and the word "suicide," which Galina used with some regularity when talking about her students. Other words included "pregnancy" and "alcohol" and, later, "drugs." These were children—older than Lyosha but children nonetheless, she made this clear—who drank, got pregnant, and killed themselves. Lyosha understood that the fact that these words did not apply to his and Galina's world was a function of privilege.

One did not have to go to the barachnyi district to see extreme poverty: it was found on Lyosha and Galina's block as well. A woman who lived one door down drank heavily, and her kids went to the correctional school. Some nights she passed out and the kids were locked out. Those nights, they often slept on Galina's landing— Lyosha figured they chose it because they knew she would not hurt them. Unfortunately, this meant that some mornings when Galina opened the door to take Lyosha to preschool the landing stank: the children went to the bathroom there. Eventually, in the 1990s, the building's residents installed a lock on the front door, to keep these and other interlopers out.

Lyosha's preschool days were long: he was dropped off at six,

before his mother walked the half hour to her own school, and was often not picked up until ten, when only the night guards remained on the grounds. This was just the way it had to be, because Galina was raising Lyosha alone, she had a demanding job, and her own mother lived too far away to help on a daily basis. Galina told Lyosha that his father lived in the big city of Perm, where she had gone to university. Perm was 120 kilometers* away, but for how often people went there, it may as well have been a thousand miles. Sometimes, a nice man stopped by and spent time with them. Galina told Lyosha to call him Uncle Yura.

When Lyosha was about three, Galina started to have the television turned on at all times. Sometimes she sat down in front of the black-and-white set and watched for hours as gray men on the screen did nothing but talk, occasionally raising their voices. Galina talked to Lyosha about the men—she seemed to have personal relationships with them—and there was tension in what was happening on-screen, a sense of earnestness and importance, so it was not boring. Lyosha learned some names, including Gorbachev, who was the most important. He had a large mark on his forehead, and Lyosha's cousin, who was quite a bit older, told Lyosha that it was a map of the USSR because Gorbachev was the president. When Lyosha told Galina that, she laughed and said it was just a birthmark. She had to be right, but the cousin would not hear of it. Galina took Lyosha to the polls, explaining that it was their "civic duty." What exactly their civic duty was, was unclear, but Lyosha liked voting because the precinct was decorated with red cloth and there were open salami sandwiches for sale.