The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

To Seryozha, entry to School Number 57 felt a bit like the Russian bathhouse where his grandfather so liked to go: a jarring sequence of warm comfort, extreme overstimulating heat, and dips in an ice-cold pool. He liked the lessons—most of them centered on an experimental classification of all worldly phenomena as either "bags" or "chains," meaning sets and sequences, and this made good sense. The school's social world, however, was harsh and convoluted. The class was divided into castes, with four extremely bright and charismatic boys at the top. They made up games that were worlds unto themselves, governed by rules and plots accessible only to their authors and their handpicked playmates. Seryozha was rarely invited. When he was allowed a peek into their world, he saw ghosts, spirits, and cosmic vampires. The second social tier consisted of boys and girls whose parents belonged to the same circles as the parents of the boys at the top—the Moscow intelligentsia that was now feeling confident and free. Seryozha was generally accepted by this second caste, but he felt a bit different from them, perhaps because his language and habits came from another world, or because their parents viewed him with suspicion. In his mind, Seryozha belonged to a third caste, in which he was perhaps alone. Still, he was not one of the kids at the bottom—the misfits, whom the rest of the class called "the untouchables" when they were not calling them something far more insulting, like bomzh, a new acronym for a new phenomenon: someone who was homeless.*

So rigid and cruel were the divisions these ten-year-olds created that one day their teacher canceled a regular biology class in order to teach them the plot of Lord of the Flies. Everyone was deeply impressed, and nothing changed in the way the class dynamics operated. Seryozha had a sense that what happened in class mirrored the new ways of life for the adults. He had been born into a small world where everyone stood on equal footing and was affirmed and appreciated simply for being, not for doing anything in particular. Adults were talking about this a lot now, and their words—"snobbery" and "inequality"—described his experience too.

Perhaps it was because the other children had not spent their childhoods behind tall fences that Seryozha also felt like a bigger child—or, to be more precise, like a smaller child—than everyone else. Soon after he finally became close friends with two boys in his class, both of his friends developed crushes on the same girl and fought about it, and Seryozha went home and cried himself to sleep over the fact that his friends felt pain and caused each other pain and he could do nothing to alleviate this pain or even to understand it.

Seryozha's mother, who taught at Moscow State University, could not have made ends meet on her salary (which, in the past, had been largely irrelevant because the nomenklatura distribution system had provided a safety net). Unlike other professors, though, she had their large Czars' Village apartment, and she took a boarder, a Belgian man. He had a car, and he paid Seryozha a dollar to wash it. That bought a couple of cans of Coca-Cola at a new kiosk right in Red Square, a ten- minute walk from School Number 57. What had been sacred ground was now home to commerce. The honor guard still goose-stepped to their post at the entrance to the Lenin Mausoleum and stood there perfectly motionless, but there was no longer a giant line of people waiting to see the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in his glass coffin. After the Execution of the White House, Yeltsin ordered the honor guard removed, and on October 6, 1993, the last two soldiers to have had that duty departed with a casual wave.⁶ In 1990 Seryozha and his classmates from his old school were inducted into the Little Octobrists at the History Museum at the entrance to Red Square. Now he treated his new classmates to Coca-Cola here. It felt like freedom.

It seemed that Seryozha's grandfather was experiencing something similar. Alexander Nikolaevich no longer had his Central Committee dacha behind the tall solid fence but he had been granted a dacha in an Academy of Sciences village, just one rung lower on the ladder of privilege. The house was opulent by Soviet standards and most of the world's standards, but Seryozha had never seen a smaller house. Still, it sat on a plot filled with century-old pines, and the trees, combined with the size of the yard, made it feel like the only house for miles. Alexander Nikolaevich had always wanted a yard with a pond with fish in it, and now his son and his grandson were endlessly pushing wheelbarrows of soil off his property as what would one day be the pond grew deeper. In the old days, there would have been conscripts around to do the digging and push the wheelbarrows, but now, Seryozha understood, the Yakovlevs lived like regular people, the way his grandfather had always preferred.