For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

(Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians)

The background

 

I was born in 1969. Until ten years old I lived with my grandparents in a two room apartment in Chertanovo, a suburb which at that time was thought to be “far from the centre”: fifteen minutes by bus to the nearest metro station and then twenty minutes to the Sverdlov Square station. Come out and you see, depending of the exit you choose, the Bolshoi Theatre or Red Square. Quite near our modern thirteen floor apartment building began a huge forest where grandfather, a keen sportsman for all his life, and I were frequently skiing amongst squirrels, robins, and blue tits in dark green pine- and fir-trees. My nine years with my grandparents were utterly middle class and normal: grandfather brought for me various “difficult” books from the college where he taught, I attended gymnastic and drawing studios. Despite even the happiness of those years my first memory is somehow of a profound sadness, of a grey winter day. Grandfather and I are walking somewhere along the tram rails in Chertanovo. The snow and ice of the road are stained by the rusty sand – the work of street cleaners.

My time in the school there was not painful: thanks to my grandparents I read and wrote better than almost anyone in my class, the kids were regular kids, the teachers were mostly of “the older kind”, i.e., not rude or humiliating.

The extended summers were spent in our small dacha, next to the so-called “Cosmonaut Village” (yes, real cosmonauts; by the way, their dachas were very modest, not much better then ours).

 

Neither of my grandparents ever mentioned God or religion. Grandfather, a space scientist (externally a poster image of the great new breed of Soviet ever-optimistic handsome humanity) would occasionally say that “If Lenin lived longer we would already live in communism”. It sounded almost like a creed. Much later, during Gorbachev’s time I found out that in 1947 (soon after returning from the war) he was arrested as “a Trotskyite” and spent a year in a solitary confinement in Lubyanka and then five more years in “a sharashka” – a secret research laboratory where imprisoned scientists worked “for the good of the USSR” (As he maintained he was lucky: he was not executed, and in Lubyanka was tortured just with the sleep deprivation and threats). I wondered if he was really serious about Lenin.

 

My grandmother was a quietly anxious woman and avoided conversations about any “slippery” topic. However, my first religious memory is connected with her. I was about fifteen; not long before her death she asked to be taken to Sergiev Posad (Zagorsk at that time), to the huge Holy Trinity Monastery established by St Sergius of Radonezh in the 14th century. I vaguely remember her face with a rare, for her, smile – she was looking up at the cupolas and the early-autumn sky above. This memory brings another: her dry response “Do not speak of what you don’t know about” to my meaninglessly-triumphant “There is no God!” after my first days in school. I have no idea about her relationship with God or if there was any; she would make Kulich and Paskha for the Easter, in the old wooden pyramidal form inherited from her mother, but I did not know why she did it. Probably I thought that it was a kind of an enigmatic national ritual or simply took it as the given reality. The family history tells that her mother was a believer: she attended the Liturgies and fed hungry German prisoners of war when her own family had very little to eat despite these actions, of “the mother-in-law of the enemy of the Soviet people”, compromising her family even more. Occasionally we were visited by grandmother’s sister. I always was waiting for her to come: in the sister’s conversations some enigmatic supernatural events were frequently discussed as I recall. She taught me how write calligraphically in the old fashion, with many pretty spirals instead of the newest, rather blunt lettering fashion.

 

When I was nine my mother took me to live with her to the opposite end of Moscow and the layers of cotton wool began piling up. Now I lived in a very different old suburb Izmaylovo, in rough proletarian, with a criminal flavour, quarters populated mostly by “the arrived” as they were called by those born in Moscow snobs (meaning not so much the fact of arrival but a certain style of behavior). The school was an organic part of the surroundings: teachers were rude and mean, some even openly sadistic; the few exceptions to this rule were perceived as “idiots” and were teased. The majority of the school kids matched the teachers. They understood each other well, I did not. My inability to adjust took the shape of endless colds and flues which allowed me to stay at home at least half of the time. The school’s and my mutual hatred eventually symbolically expressed itself when the boys blindly running down the huge staircase rocketed into me, walking up obliviously: I flew far into the air and landed on my head on the smooth grey stone, not like Yuri Gagarin in his sputnik but more like Phobos-Grunt. A serious concussion enabled me not only to stay at home for months but also to avoid the school in the future when suffocation was too much. Unfortunately, the concussion destroyed whatever poor ability I had to understand mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

 

On one gloomy evening my step-father, a closet dissident who used to catch the Voice of America and the BBC on short waves at night and took a peculiar delight in tearing the newspaper Pravda (Truth) into the accurate squares with the Party leaders portraits, for future usage in the dacha toilet – toilet paper was in deficit), brought home an enormous Bible hidden in a bag under the layers of the graphs and working clothes. We, all three, attempted to read it from the very beginning but did not understand much (step-father said something about Eve looking at mother), and in a few days the dangerous book had to be passed to yet another person in the net of closet dissidents.

 

The life outside my mind was changing: Brezhnev’s grey years of nothingness came to an end. “Now will be the world war!” – tragically exclaimed the quietened girls at the school and cried; the teacher who told us about the death of the Party leader had shaky hands and very real tears; I was also a bit scared. This was followed by the quick succession of the General Secretaries (all successors died quickly somehow) and their portraits in our classrooms. Because of my increasing idiocy in mathematics the family decided that my only chance to obtain matriculation was to leave the school after the eighth year and enter Art College. Good students were expected to finish all ten years and then enter the University; I was among them (my mother did my math) so my decision to leave earlier was met with a surprise.

 

I am now trying to recall how I perceived all that visual and audio propaganda, red flags, portraits, speeches, newspaper Pravda. I honestly do not remember. I think I noticed how much of those flags, slogans and portraits were around only when they began disappearing. I became “Octyabrenok” (from “The October Revolution”) at eight and wore on my school uniform apron the red star with Lenin’s face in its centre, depicted as a young boy; then I became a Pioneer and the star was swapped with the scarlet triangular scarf. If I am not mistaken, we, the Pioneers-to-be, were taken to the Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square to make the vows… or were they Komsomol vows? Probably Komsomol, because I became shortsighted in my teens and my shortsightedness spared me from the sight of the dead body – all I saw was something round and yellowish glowing unnaturally like a wax candle. I was very excited to become a Komsomol member but my excitement was not shared by anyone at home. I was disappointed.

 

It is common place to say the following but I repeat it nevertheless: we did have our religion in the USSR, with the creed, icons, relics, rituals, public processions, feasts etc. And, because it was compulsory, I probably developed an immunity to this state cult just like so many people who grew up in officially Christian countries develop an immunity to Christianity.

 

A few years after receiving my Komsomol member ID I flushed it down the toilet. I have just read “Gulag Archipelago”, and rushed to my grandfather with the journal Mir (World) in my hand where it was published for the first time and urged him to read it immediately. “I don’t need to” – said the poster image of the Soviet man, smiling slightly, “I have been there”.