The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In first grade, Masha's teacher also talked about the Great Patriotic War and the Soviet people, but added a children's subset to the category: the first-graders would be joining the Little Octobrists, the Communist Party's wing for seven-to-ten-year-olds. Over the decades, the Little Octobrists followed the Party's broadening trajectory: the organization had started out as small and voluntary, drawing politically motivated children, but by the 1960s all primary school children were inducted, wholesale, in first grade.¹ The ceremony usually took place in the fall, and from that point on every child wore a Little Octobrist pin on the lapel of his uniform. It was a red metal five-pointed star, with a picture of a toddler-age wavy- haired Vladimir Lenin in gold in the circle in the middle. Once inducted, Little Octobrists would be organized into "little stars"— groups of five, each with its own leader who reported to the class leader, who, in turn, reported to a mentor from within the school's Young Pioneer organization—the ten-to-fourteen-year-olds' segment of the Communist Party.

In Masha's year, the ceremony had to be postponed due to a shortage of Little Octobrist pins, so she spent months in anticipation. All the wide-ruled and large-graph green primary school notebooks had the bylaws of the Little Octobrists printed on the back cover. There were five of them:

Little Octobrists are future Young Pioneers.

Little Octobrists are studious kids. They study hard, love school, and respect their elders.

Little Octobrists are honest and truthful kids.

Little Octobrists are fun-loving kids. They read and they draw, they play and they sing, and they stick together.

Only those who work hard and persist earn the right to be called Little Octobrist.²

While they waited, the children learned the mythology of Communist-leader childhoods. They read Mikhail Zoshchenko's Stories About Lenin, written in 1940, a few years before Zoshchenko was condemned as an anti-Soviet writer and his short stories for adults were banned. The Lenin stories stayed in the curriculum, however, with the authorship de-emphasized. The stories portrayed Lenin as an extraordinary student and a loyal friend, but the story that made the biggest impression on Masha was the one called "Vase." In it, little Volodya accidentally breaks a vase while frolicking with his brothers and sisters at their aunt's house. He then lies about it and suffers pangs of conscience until, two or three months later, he makes a tearful confession to his mother, who then gets him absolved by the aunt. The story, ostensibly based on the recollections of Lenin's older sister, Anna, adds the apparently fictional detail that the other children had been so busy playing that they had not noticed who broke the vase—this serves to excuse their un-Soviet failure to denounce their little brother to the authorities.³

Masha also learned that another top Bolshevik, Sergei Kirov, was orphaned at an early age and spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. She did not learn that Kirov was assassinated in 1934 and that his death served as the pretext for one of the deadliest waves of Stalinist terror. She learned of a different set of deaths, though. The Bolsheviks—Lenin, Kirov, and others whose names she did not yet know—had killed the czar. There was scant mention of the czar's name, or of his wife and children, who perished with him. The killing of the czar was presented in a nondramatic, neutral manner, as an event that had been dictated by the laws of history.

Tatiana said this was wrong. Lenin had been no hero. He was bad. Did this mean that the czar was good? No, not really.

In fact, no one in the family shared Masha's joy when she finally became a Little Octobrist in March 1991. Her grandparents said it was nothing to be proud of. Yes, they affirmed, Lenin was bad. He had instigated something they called the Red Terror. The Chebotarev family did not do the Communist Party. Galina Vasilyevna's father had been a highly placed Party apparatchik who failed to stand up for his Jewish wife during Stalin's antisemitic purges of the late 1940s. His had been a fairly typical predicament. Most famously, Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had seen his Jewish wife arrested. Masha's grandfather Boris Mikhailovich had his own reasons to dislike the Party, though he never mentioned them directly. He had been drafted into the Red Army in 1945, at the age of eighteen, and shipped directly to the front line, which by then was in Germany. He spent the next six years in Berlin, where he served in what he invariably called "the occupying army." He deflected any questions about his time in the service with a statement of unparalleled bitterness: "I hate German women and Jews." If pressed, he would add only that he hated the Jews because they invented Communism.