The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

lyosha's mother encouraged him to enter a citywide history essay contest. It was the sort of thing she did—she was, after all, a history teacher, and she expected her only son to do much better than she had, just as she had done so much better than her own illiterate- peasant mother. The essay topic was "My Family Story in the History of the Twentieth Century." Lyosha had a sense that this was a trendy topic—the heady days of media revelations about Stalin and the Gulag were over, long since overshadowed by economic reform and political conflict, but recently people all around Lyosha and Galina seemed to be talking about their family histories. The teachers at school had also suggested that researching one's roots was a good pathway to winning student competitions. Except Lyosha had hardly any family and certainly no history. He did not even carry the family name anymore: when his mother married Sergei, in December 1991, she had changed Lyosha's last name from Misharin to Gorshkov, and his patronymic from Yurievich to Sergeevich, as though Lyosha had always been his new stepfather's son. It had been a horrible wedding, during which Lyosha was told not to get in the way of the adults while they celebrated, and he had decided then and there that he hated marriage and would never marry as long as he lived. His stepfather, who had seemed so fun before the wedding, when he would spend hours watching pop music performances on television with Lyosha, now appeared to be a quiet, lazy alcoholic who simply vegetated in front of the television. Lyosha decided that he hated everything about him, especially the way he ate—as though he would never eat again. Lyosha hated his new patronymic and surname too.

Galina said that she could tell him a bit about family history. Lyosha's great-grandparents, she said, were part of a large German- speaking community that had settled along the Volga River in the late eighteenth century.¹ By the standards of the Revolution, the family were kulaks—peasants who owned land and livestock, which made them class enemies. Lyosha's great-grandfather was stripped of his belongings and disappeared. His great-grandmother and her children lived in abject poverty as members of a newly formed collective farm. Two years after the disappearance of the husband and father, Lyosha's great-grandmother and her children were loaded into a cattle car, along with other ethnic Germans, and shipped off to the Urals, to a remote rural area outside Solikamsk. Here, reunited with Lyosha's great-grandfather, they had to start from scratch at a new

collective farm, on previously uncultivated land. Lyosha's grandmother was ten years old. When the family was being herded onto the train, a soldier had taken away her only toy, a wooden doll. In the Urals, authorities changed her name from Emma to Serafima. She received no schooling after the deportation, which was why she was functionally illiterate: before the disaster, the family had spoken German exclusively, and the girl had learned to read using the German Bible.

Everyone in the new village was German. This sounded familiar to Lyosha—there was a part of Solikamsk that was called the German Settlement, though the ethnic Germans who lived there had all emigrated during perestroika. They left behind neat little village-style houses they had built themselves, and a ghost of clean and ordered living that Lyosha found seductive. When Serafima was eighteen, a young man from a neighboring village decided to make her his. In Galina's telling, his resolve was unilateral and final. He was Russian. He moved Serafima to his village, where she was hated for being a German and a Catholic. Her new husband was an atheist and a Communist, but his own mother was Russian Orthodox, and she refused to accept Serafima as her daughter-in-law in the absence of a church wedding. There was no wedding at all, in fact—this was the early 1930s, and marriage was still a bourgeois anachronism.

Serafima's new husband drank, had numerous affairs and relationships—at least one other woman considered herself his wife— and built a career in the Party and on the collective farm. He would eventually become chairman of the collective farm and a member of the Supreme Soviet. In 1935, a voronok—a black prisoner-transport car—pulled up to the house: someone had denounced Serafima's husband for stealing the bricks he had used to build his house. Fortunately, it was Serafima's habit to maintain order in all things, including receipts for the purchase of bricks, and her husband escaped being jailed.

In 1941, Serafima's husband went off to war to fight the Germans, and Serafima herself, left alone with a small baby—her first son— went from being an outcast to being the enemy. Her own brother-in- law came around, drunk, in the middle of the night, to smash all her windows, screaming, "German!"