Russians: The People behind the Power

5 Intimates

Visiting friends is good, but home is better.

—Russian saying

The crushing uniformity of Moscow’s dingy Soviet-era residential districts seems to lessen after sunset. The glow from countless windows, although generated mostly by ceiling lamps that cast an unflattering light inside the blocks of cramped apartments, can convey an almost cozy feeling. However illusory, they signify the haven of private life away from the gritty trials of the daily grind, especially because many of the apartments seemed lavish when they were first assigned to families that had been previously crammed into single rooms of dreaded communal apartments. Each abode became a testament to its occupants’ resourcefulness. Every decoration—garish wallpaper, cheap lamps and gaudy velour furniture—represented a victory.

Of course there’s far more variation today. Many of the apartments boast the latest foreign appliances to go with their Evroremont makeovers, as European-style refurbishments are commonly called (Evro for Europe and remont meaning “repair”). The new luxury heightens the sense of refuge, especially in winter, when streets layered with snow and ice are often barely passable, not to mention filthy. The patina of domestic tranquillity also belies the unimaginable suffering of recent memory.

Very many Russians have a dramatic, often appalling story of survival. Despite a current vogue for Stalin, the lawlessness of Moscow’s streets is reminder enough of the violent, vindictive forces of human nature that continue to corrode society. Ubiquitous shopping malls and sushi chains give a gloss of Western-style normalcy to many districts, but step outside those oases of cathartic consumerism and there’s no mistaking why Russians tend to believe that the individual is frail and security feeble. All the more reason the family was and remains a warm sanctuary that serves to widen the great cleavage Russians feel between themselves and the hostile outer world, despite many men’s wretched treatment of their women at home.

Relatives of mine inhabit a little Soviet-era flat in a particularly smoggy Moscow district named Chertanovskaya. It belongs to my mother’s second cousin Gera Kiva, whom I’ve mentioned, a mild-mannered, silver-haired man who lives with his wife, a gentle woman named Lucia, and his very elderly mother, Olga Sergeevna (my great-grandmother Polina’s niece, whom everyone calls by her name and patronymic as a mark of respect). Now in her late eighties, Olga Sergeevna is canny, hardy and very frank. When she talks about her past, it’s without rancor or regret. Her mentions of difficulties that would be intolerable to most Americans are no doubt offhand because they’re nothing out of the ordinary for many Russians.

As I’ve noted, Olga Sergeevna’s grandfather was a grain merchant in Kazan. Drafted in 1932, her husband was sent to southwestern Siberia as a food buyer for the Red Army and settled in the industrial city of Novosibirsk. Those years were among the worst of the Soviet famines, which were caused mainly by the collectivization of agriculture, and they were especially brutal in Kazan and other Volga River cities hit hard by Stalin’s ruthless tactics and punishments. Since living was cheaper in Novosibirsk, where the chances of survival were also significantly greater, Olga Sergeevna soon joined her husband there.

In the late 1930s, they moved to Moscow, at first staying in the two-room apartment of my grandmother Serafima and her husband, Zhora, their lone family connection in Moscow. After World War II, when Serafima returned to Moscow with her new daughter, they, in turn, stayed in the Kivas’ single room. Serafima and my mother may not have survived those years without such family ties, usually the most critical lifeline in a state that supposedly provided everything for everyone.

Of course, having the wrong connections could get you killed under Stalin, whose regime disrupted communication even between family members crammed together in single rooms. “No one ever discussed where you came from,” Gera, a young boy at the time, recently remembered. One of his grandfathers had been a priest and other relatives were merchants. Worst of all, in the eyes of the authorities, part of the family had descended from gentry. “I knew almost nothing about any of that,” he told me. “God forbid anyone had found out.”

Travel abroad, work for international organizations and many other aspects of globalization have lessened the Bolsheviks’ terrible legacy. Still, in some ways, family remains more important in Russia than it does elsewhere, even today. Although the Kiva family is not as tightly knit as it once was, Gera and Lucia’s two grown sons spend much of the summer together at another Russian institution, the dacha, where Gera and Lucia help care for four grandchildren. Family ties remain central for them and most others in a country where institutions function poorly, the rule of law is weak and merit counts for far less in getting ahead than in other industrialized countries—all of which means it’s often unwise to trust strangers. As in the past, practical considerations are more likely to dictate Russian behavior than differences in emotional makeup or beliefs.

It goes without saying that the Stalinist era wasn’t the first time Russians or their ancestors faced an unrelenting threat to their existence. A need to overcome tremendous odds against survival has helped shape the Russian character since the first millennium CE, when the East Slavs, who gave rise to today’s Russians, first migrated from Central Europe into the inhospitable northern forests around Moscow. The soil is poor in that region, swamps are numerous and winters bitterly cold. It is rarely mentioned that after settling in those forests, it took the Slavs many centuries to move south into the famed fertile Black Earth region. Crucially, that expansion came only after the foundation of their culture had been laid.

Scratching out a living from subsistence agriculture for many centuries provided the “womb” of Russian culture, shaping almost all aspects of life, as the Harvard historian Edward Keenan observed.¹The Slavs—who quickly subsumed the indigenous, largely hunter-gatherer Balts and Finns—relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, chopping down trees, burning them and using the ash for fertilizer. That inefficient, wasteful method, which nourished crops for no more than a few years, required regular migration to new parts of the forest. One theory has it that slash-and-burn left an indelible mark on a people who have swallowed more territory than any other in the world.

No one family, let alone a single individual, could have survived very long under the brutal conditions in which the Slavs found themselves, according to Keenan, whose patient, rigorous dismissal of conventional wisdom about Russian history was a revelation for me and the many others who attended his lectures. A flooded field or the death of a cow could easily mean the difference between destruction and survival, he explained. Viable life required a larger basic social unit: the village, where relatively successful peasants could be forced to assume more responsibilities—such as taking care of a widow—while the less successful were saved from falling into complete ruin.

The central role of the communal village has made Russians hold “less confidence in human nature and its individual articulations than we do,” Keenan has written about the effects of a millennium of subsistence farming. “They have learned that the individual is vulnerable and fragile.”² Generally more pessimistic than their Western counterparts, Russians tend to be especially skeptical about “taking gambles on humans’ moral virtue.”³ They’re happier when group sanctions curb individuals’ “harmful impulses.”

Russia’s perennial technological backwardness compared to countries further west kept reinforcing the tradition. The three-field system that laid the foundations for Europe’s agricultural revolution in the twelfth century did not reach Russia until the second half of the fifteenth century. Mercantile towns became important only in the nineteenth century.

In the 1920s, idealistic Bolsheviks took the concept of the collective to its highest level by seeking to construct a utopian state that would serve as a new “family” for everyone. That required breaking apart the bourgeois family. Children would be educated not by their parents but by nurseries, schools and universities that would suppress reactionary, egotistical views about familial love left over from the old regime, instilling them instead with good communist ideals. The ideology originated abroad but grew well in fertile Russian soil.

The family structure faced its greatest threat under Stalin. Keenan believes the dictator’s characterization of the state as the new basic unit that would supposedly protect the group from the harmful impulses of individuals remained within traditional ways of thinking. It was an all-encompassing endeavor. Art, literature and journalism were harnessed to shift self-identification from families to the Soviet collective. Stalin became the image of everyone’s father, and the Motherland (Rodina) became their mother. People were instructed to forsake their own parents, as did the notorious and legendary Pavlik Morozov, the thirteen-year-old son of poor peasants who lived north of the Ural Mountains city of Sverdlovsk (now once again named Yekaterinburg).

Although there were countless other such cases, generations of Soviet schoolchildren were raised on the story of Pavlik Morozov, supposedly a model student and committed communist who headed his school’s Young Pioneers group, roughly equivalent to the Boy Scouts. In 1932, he turned in his father to the OGPU, predecessor to the KGB, for forging documents to sell to “enemies of the Soviet state.” The father, who headed the village soviet, or communist council, was sentenced to labor camp, then executed. Soon afterward, Pavlik’s uncle, grandfather and other relatives took revenge on him and his eight-year-old brother by hacking them to pieces in the woods. All the perpetrators except the uncle were soon caught and shot as reactionaries.

Pavlik became lionized as a communist hero. Statues of him appeared throughout the country, composers wrote songs and even an opera about him and Sergei Eisenstein made a film about his story, cementing his status as a Soviet icon. For decades, teachers held him up as a model for the lesson that loyalty to the state must supersede loyalty to one’s own family.

Virtually the entire story was invented. Details of the real one emerged only after the collapse of communism: Morozov wasn’t a model student, a Young Pioneer or even called Pavlik, relatives said; rather, his name was Pashka, another diminutive for Pavel. As for his motives, one version has it that his mother may have compelled him to denounce his father after he’d left her for another woman. It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, not least because the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, continues to deny access to the relevant documents because it considers the case still open. The likeliest explanation is that the secret police or its agents murdered Pavlik and his brother to create a myth that would glorify informers and frighten residents of a region that was staunchly resisting the disastrous policy of collectivization.⁴

The building into which my mother, Tatyana, moved in 1945, when she was a toddler returning with her mother from wartime evacuation, housed doctors, senior nurses and other top personnel from my grandmother Serafima’s tuberculosis dispensary. Built for wealthy bourgeois families, it had a splendid main entrance leading to a sweeping marble staircase and an elevator encased in ornate cast-iron latticework. The structure became a metaphor for life under communism. Its elevator, like many in Moscow, no longer worked—not that it mattered because the entrance, whose doors had been hammered over with boards, was irrelevant. As in countless other buildings, residents came and went through the “black” entrance in back, originally built for servants’ use. That was partly because nighttime arrests were easier and less visible on narrow back staircases, which also made escape more difficult. The dusty main stairs were used only as a playground by Tatyana—Tanya—and her friends, who would sneak in there and pretend they lived in a mansion where they received guests in grand style.

Serafima and Tanya’s apartment had four rooms, each occupied by a family, and a communal bathroom, a communal kitchen and a large entrance hall. Exposed pipes and wires ran everywhere. The families took turns cooking and hanging laundry to dry on lines over the stove in the depressing, grimy-looking kitchen. With no refrigerator or icebox, food was kept cool between the inner and outer windowpanes. Waiting lists dictated each room’s occupancy; as Serafima gained seniority, she was rewarded with slightly larger quarters as they became available. By the time Tatyana was sixteen, their room was sixteen square meters—roughly 170 square feet.

Tatyana eventually stopped screaming, but she hated the institutions where she had to stay while Serafima was working long hours. She spent much of her first years in nurseries and state-run boarding schools called internat, where she would remain for several days running. After lunch, children would be put on cots outside for naps, swaddled in heavy sleeping sacks against the cold. Little Tanya found it torture—it was impossible to move, even to scratch an itch—but she quickly understood that protest brought worse punishment, therefore her displeasure poured out only when she was safe with her kindly, doting mother. However, dangers for the rebellious little girl lurked at home, too, including in the person of a new arrival she took to calling “the apartment hooligan.”

Almost every communal apartment housed at least one usually feared and hated stukach, or snitch. The word comes from the verb meaning “to knock,” itself a euphemism for informing derived from the supposed practice of knocking at officials’ doors to deliver information. In Tatyana’s flat, the informer occupied the largest room. Soon after his wife died, when Tatyana was in her midteens, he married a corpulent cleaning woman who moved in from her grim basement quarters in a nearby building. She was the embodiment of a peasant woman, a baba—the equivalent of a fishmonger’s wife—with a large mouth from which issued very coarse language in a very gruff voice. Hardly believing her luck in having been elevated from rags to relative riches, she lost no time wielding her new power over her neighbors.

When hemlines began rising in the late 1950s, the stukach’s wife mocked Tatyana and her friends in colorful village dialect. “What’s this?!” she’d bellow, standing in the kitchen. “Look at them walking around town, flashing their pussies!” (She used the term pukhovka, meaning “puff.”) The girls proceeded to scribble caricatures of her holding a sign reading PUKHOVKA, which they scattered in the kitchen cabinets and on the stairwell. Livid, the apartment hooligan complained to the dispensary’s director, which luckily for Tatyana had the effect of only spreading the mockery.

Tatyana’s and Serafima’s friends and relatives provoked hot fury from the stukach’s wife when they visited. Although Tatyana’s father, the military surgeon Mutakhar Khuzikhanov, returned to his family in the Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria after the war, he maintained contact with Serafima and visited occasionally. His youngest brother, Shamil, a gifted pianist who was almost certainly gay—and, needless to say, was tightly closeted in those days—studied at the Gnessin Institute, a musical college second only to the famed Moscow Conservatory. On graduating, he was assigned to the relative backwater of Yaroslavl, a city several hours northeast of Moscow, where he directed a choir. Desperate to return to the capital, he had little hope of doing so officially without obtaining a residence permit after his mandatory stint. Serafima’s cousin Olga Kiva, who worked for a construction agency, eventually used her connections to procure him both the coveted documents and his own apartment. Meanwhile, he often stayed with Serafima and Tatyana.

The stukach’s wife castigated Shamil in archaic provincial speech at every opportunity. When he snuck into the kitchen to cook, she hustled in to bawl, “Oslaboni gorelku!” (literally “Weaken the burner!”—meaning turn down the stove). But it was jockeying over the single bathroom that caused the greatest friction between neighbors. In the rare instances when it was free, Shamil would hole up inside for long baths. Alerted to his presence there, his nemesis would lurk outside the door and growl, “Moisia, moisia Tatarin, v poslendii ras!” (“Wash yourself, you Tatar, for the last time!”). “Tatar” in itself was a derogatory term. Shamil, who liked to imitate the accents of the archetypal peasant characters who populate the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, roared with laughter at her.

Privately, Shamil’s fierce hatred of the Soviet order generated a steady stream of risqué and risky sarcasm and humor. And although he rarely thanked Serafima for her hospitality, he lavished praise on her cooking, especially her shchi, or cabbage soup. Her rice was never merely good, but “like white Persian lilac!” Eventually, he reciprocated by teaching Tatyana to play the piano.

Socialist realist literature, a term coined in 1932 to describe what had emerged as the single genre acceptable to the state, extolled privation in private life. Its protagonists—“positive heroes”—epitomized the ideal “new Soviet man,” who recapitulated the official version of history, which invariably led to the triumph of Marxism-Leninism.⁵ One of the classics, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), tells the story of a young Bolshevik wounded in the October Revolution. Overcoming his handicap, he becomes a writer who inspires workers building the new state. In Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, an earlier novel that served as a template for the standard socialist realist plot, the protagonist, Gleb, returns from the Russian Civil War to discover that his previously submissive wife has become a committed communist who sets an example by sacrificing her personal happiness. The couple leave their daughter at a crumbling children’s home so they can help rebuild a destroyed cement factory. When Gleb wavers, his wife, Dasha, asks him whether he prefers “pretty flowers to bloom in the windowsill.”

“No, Gleb, in the winter I live in an unheated room, eat in a communal kitchen. You see, I’m a free Soviet citizen.”⁶ The daughter eventually dies.

Under the strictures of socialist realism, the individual’s freedom is inseparable from the fate of the state. Novelist Andrei Sinyavski, who castigated socialist realism in the 1950s, wrote ironically that absence of freedom posed no dilemma for people who believed.

When Western writers deplore our lack of freedom of speech, their starting point is their belief in the freedom of the individual. This is the foundation of their culture, but it is organically alien to Communism. A true Soviet writer, a true Marxist, will not accept these reproaches, and will not even know what they are all about.⁷

Socialist realist art—some of it very good, especially when created by former members of the avant-garde—served the same purpose. Private interiors, the domain of bourgeois selfishness, were rarely depicted. Instead, crowds dominated, often outside the home, as they engaged in productive labor, harmonious street life and Soviet parades. As Harvard professor Svetlana Boym argues, one of the better-known exceptions to the rule illustrates how the distinction between public and private was minimized. Alexander Laktionov’s The New Apartment, a painting completed in 1952, shows a beaming mother and son standing on the threshold of a new neoclassical Stalin-era apartment. The image of the proletarian salt of the earth, the mother has her head wrapped in a kerchief. Her hands are on her hips, and her son wears a Young Pioneers uniform. The boy is holding a portrait of Stalin, the eternally present father figure and benefactor. Around them lie some of their meager possessions, including stacks of books and a rubber plant. It’s a scene of almost complete transparency: all the books, their titles visible on the spines, are by classic Soviet writers, and all the doors are open, so there’s nothing to hide. Neighbors or the apartment’s fellow residents—we don’t know whether it’s communal—look on. However, even that seemingly exemplary Soviet painting wasn’t appropriate for the regime; it was censored after critics deemed the rubber plant too bourgeois.⁸

Communal living was one of the state’s most effective tools for undermining traditional relationships. Besides the value of its economy when people were flocking to cities where housing was incredibly scarce, the communal apartment was intended to serve the ideological purpose of supposedly freeing women from the dictatorship of the kitchen by enabling them to share duties. In fact, the tight proximity bred suspicion and hatred. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the wife of poet Osip Mandelshtam—who died in prison in 1938—observed that the Bolshevik regime cut social bonds between everyone. “Nobody trusted anyone else and every acquaintance was a suspected police informer,” she wrote.

Every family was always going over its circle of acquaintances, trying to pick out the provocateurs, the informers and the traitors. After 1937, people stopped meeting each other altogether, and the secret police were thus well on their way to achieving their ultimate objective. Apart from assuring a constant flow of information, they had isolated people from each other and had drawn large numbers of them into their web, calling them in from time to time, harassing them and swearing them to secrecy by means of signed statements. All such people lived in eternal fear of being found out and were consequently just as interested as regular members of the police in the stability of the existing order and the inviolability of the archives where their names were on file.⁹

Boym, who grew up under Soviet rule in Leningrad, describes the resulting practice of speaking “with half words.”

What is shared is silence, tone of voice, nuance of intonation. To say a full word is to say too much; communication on the level of words is already excessive, banal, almost kitschy. This peculiar form of communication “with half words” is the mark of belonging to an imagined community that exists on the margins of the official public sphere. Hence the American metaphors for being sincere and authentic—“saying what you mean,” “going public,” and “being straightforward”—do not translate properly into the Soviet and Russian contexts.¹⁰

My grandmother Serafima had a very small circle of friends who—thanks to the lack of restaurants and cafés, not to mention money to spend in them—would take turns hosting each other for tea and gossip in the relative safety of their rooms. Among the visitors was Serafima’s childhood friend from Kazan, whom Tatyana called Aunt Rita. The visitor supplemented her income by sewing dresses for her friends, a service much needed during the clothing shortages, and for her own part took pains to wear lipstick and high heels.

Another frequent guest, Aunt Shura, was married to the brother of Serafima’s husband, Zhora, still imprisoned after his arrest for being a member of the Tupolev aviation team. Anatoly Leimer, Zhora’s brother, had also been arrested and almost certainly died. Aunt Shura, his wife or widow, lived in a small basement room with her teenage daughter Ella, a dark-haired beauty who had many suitors, including a boyfriend who later engaged in illegal “speculation”—trading goods for profit. This enabled him to provide Ella with foreign clothes that heightened her appeal to her admirers.

Although Tatyana knew very little about her mother’s personal life, she did know that Serafima barely talked to anyone outside her little core group. When one or more friends gathered over zakuski and the occasional cake, there was much complaining. Whenever a voice raised itself in a hint of outrage, another voice shushed it with “Careful, the walls have ears!” At one point, Tatyana earnestly examined the walls to try to find them. Later, my mother would remember that “no one knew whether there were listening devices, but despite wanting to know what went on in every room, of course Stalin couldn’t bug every apartment. But all of them had a stukach, and everyone knew who he or she was.”

When Tatyana’s father Mutakhar visited from southern Kabardino-Balkaria for several days once every year or two, he would appear in his military uniform, smelling of tobacco and bearing presents and otherwise unobtainable food he’d bought from shops for military officers: caviar, sturgeon, Georgian wine and sparkling water. Tatyana would race down the hall from her room into his arms at the apartment’s entrance beside the kitchen. Tall, athletic and outgoing, Mutakhar died in 1954 from cancer.

Serafima as well as Mutakhar’s younger brother Shamil, the cynical musician, were also close to an army colonel and his wife who, despite his status—or perhaps because of it—shared Shamil’s barely hidden hatred for the communist regime. Alexei Panfilov had served in Vienna at the end of the war, when Soviet soldiers looted whatever they could lay their hands on. With utensils from a lavish pilfered silver service along with fine porcelain and other trophies, his wife, Tamara, taught Tatyana how to properly use a knife and fork.

Tamara took Tatyana under her wing partly because she had no offspring of her own and also because children were considered a special category of people, to be protected from the outside world even by strangers. Youngsters were a vessel of private life; shielding them from the state’s manipulation and repression was the surest way to pass down alternative traditions and values. Even people who didn’t see them that way treated them as a common good.

However, although Russians tend to treat other people’s children well, anecdotal evidence is now emerging that many young Soviets suffered far harsher punishment and more neglect than commonly believed, according to some of the testimony from educator Marilyn Murray’s moving columns in the Moscow Times.¹¹ I’ve seen mentions on Facebook of working parents leaving their children alone for hours and preschool teachers’ threats to punish misbehavior by administering injections or forcing children to clean toilets. That’s not surprising in a country where parents on playgrounds often act more kindly toward strangers’ children than their own, whom they admonish as if they were exasperating, slow-witted adults.

Another member of Serafima’s close circle, her cousin Olga (Sergeevna) Kiva, rarely displayed outward affection for Tatyana on the days she agreed to look after the mischievous girl. Beginning with stern lectures about what was allowed and what wasn’t, Olga Sergeevna spent much of their time together suspecting misbehavior. That didn’t stop Tatyana from violating rules by jumping on her relative’s bed when she was away in the kitchen.

Olga Sergeevna behaved differently when it was her turn to visit Serafima’s room. There she would exclaim, “Tanichka, Tanichka!” upon entering and Tatyana would be forced to kiss the woman, for whom she had no particular liking. Failing to display kindness to children in Soviet Russia raised suspicion. It was a signal that a person couldn’t be trusted with the secrets of a family’s private life. In a dangerous society where trust among family members was crucial for survival, exclusion could make life even more perilous.

No doubt Serafima’s highly cautious nature, especially after her husband’s arrest, made her especially protective of Tatyana. Her frequent warnings to be careful, to bundle up and to not get hurt often had the opposite effect on her rebellious daughter, whom she told nothing about the outside world and gave no direct hint about whether she believed Soviet rule was good or bad.

When Tatyana began school, she was bombarded with typical propaganda. Taught to be grateful to the Motherland, children were also inducted into Stalin’s cult of personality. Like most, Tatyana believed Lenin was everyone’s grandfather and Stalin was their father. On the most important official day of the year, the anniversary of the great October Revolution, Serafima—a woman who had suffered her share of privation and anguish under the communist system—presented her daughter with books inscribed with congratulations. “Perhaps she thought I was one of those with ears behind the walls,” my mother said later in wistful reflection.

Other families hid far more: stories are legion about people lying to their spouses for decades. It was a matter of survival; the Soviet regime forced them to deny their thoughts, identities and histories to the extent that they began to doubt themselves, a widespread psychological trauma that has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone dealt with. No wonder the culture of lying remains deep-seated today, when the daily denial of reality provides fertile ground for Russia’s staggering corruption.

Some areas of normality existed under the Soviet Union, however. Although indoctrination was supposedly critical in Young Pioneer summer camps, many were surprisingly free of propaganda beyond the usual ideological songs, and even ardent anticommunists remember them fondly. Not all camps were the same. Tatyana initially pressed her mother to enroll her in one of those established for workers’ children because that’s where many of her school’s bullies and rule breakers went, and she didn’t want to stand out by being different. “They were bandit types,” she said. “Their families drank heavily, the men swore, they were very crude and uncultured, and I was horrified by the children.” Other summer camps were little different from their American counterparts: oases where boys and girls hiked in the woods, played volleyball and enjoyed their first crushes.

Lives in communal apartments continued more or less unchanged until 1961, when Khrushchev began erecting cheap five-story apartment blocks to alleviate the housing shortage. The structures were later called Khrushcheby—a spin on trushcheby, “slums.” Serafima and Tatyana’s move into their own apartment in one of those buildings occasioned great joy.

Although deep suspicion of strangers persists, attitudes toward personal relationships as well as the state began changing soon after Stalin’s death in 1953. One of the qualities my father liked most about the Soviet Union when he traveled there in the 1960s and ’70s was the nature of friendships, which led him to share an affection for Russia with other foreigners who also had some of their closest friends there. Ironically or not, George Kennan, the architect of the American policy of containment who served five months as a US diplomat in Moscow before his expulsion by Stalin, also loved Russia, a country he described in his memoirs as “in my blood… There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.” For my father, there was nothing mysterious about the people he liked, the Western-leaning ones who read the same books and had the same political and cultural instincts. He once characterized their naturalness as a kind of freedom from fear of making fools of themselves. If Americans in restaurants hesitate to complain because they’re afraid of appearing foolish and the English don’t even dream of arguing, Russians wouldn’t hesitate to plunge right in. On top of that, they were willing to do virtually anything, and at the drop of a hat, to help their friends. Like private life in general at the time, friendship was more important than work. And because most people were oppressed more or less equitably, meaning that ordinary striving rarely got you anywhere (unless it was done according to the Party’s rules), Soviets seemed to value love and companionship, even if by default, more than most Westerners did.

There was also a very practical reason for the importance of friendship. As the authorities relaxed their grip on private lives, many people increasingly looked to turn the tables on the state by exploiting it for their own benefit. Growing nepotism, theft and other forms of corruption gave rise to networks and distribution systems for goods and services. Sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh described the exploitation of state resources for personal interests as essentially “privatizing” the state, and he believes everyone came to assume that everyone else was partaking.¹²

Friends and family played the central role in what emerged as the Soviet “second economy,” Shlapentokh writes.¹³ You beat the system with the help of your friends. After the state confirmed people’s right to own private plots of land in 1977, the dacha—an oasis away from urban life and Soviet strictures—became a center of leisure life. Because building materials often couldn’t be obtained in stores, scrounging and stealing them from wherever they could be had became a key activity. Their disappearance from construction sites that were left unguarded caused work stoppages on many buildings, or so people said at the time. That channeling of state resources into private hands was illegal but accepted. And as more people bought cars—at the time, the only ones available were of Soviet manufacture—the constant need to service the rusting little disasters on wheels increased the importance of personal connections for acquiring spare parts.

Art and literature reflected the change. A new, more casual tone that arose during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign in the late 1950s and early ’60s idealized individual pursuits instead of the state. Poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Vosnesensky and guitar-strumming bards Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky provided personal voices that undermined totalitarian generalizations and ideals.¹⁴ In films, the nomadic geologist traveling vast expanses of empty land for the sake of furthering Soviet knowledge became an archetype. And for many citizens, travel within the Soviet Union and camping in the countryside became expressions of officially approved romantic individualism.

Although the Soviet Union had undergone a sea change by the time I first visited thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika, friends and family were still very much how one usually got things done even then, or perhaps especially then, since as I’ve described many store shelves were literally empty.

My cousin Ulugbek, who abandoned his promising academic career in 1993, and his wife, Natalia, relied on connections to survive. For example, a friend of Natalia’s who worked in a grocery store would set aside a box of about twenty frozen chickens when deliveries arrived. “We’d thaw them, cut them up into pieces and try to figure out how long they’d last,” Natalia explained. Such typical “under-the-floor” schemes of course made store shelves even emptier.

Many Russians had long made jam from fruit gathered or bought in summer so it would last until winter. However, a critical lack of sugar—much of it was used for making moonshine—meant that was no longer possible. Obtaining large quantities of food when it was available therefore necessitated freezers, which were in especially short supply. Unable to buy one in Moscow, Ulugbek used his connections to obtain something else, a new television set. After driving four hundred and fifty miles east to Kazan, he exchanged it at a freezer factory. “If you had a head for commerce,” Natalia said, “you could get by.” Another friend of hers who worked for a shoe company was paid in shoes—a common practice in the mid-1990s, when the economy was starved of capital, many wages were unpaid and barter transactions accounted for up to half of industrial output.¹⁵ Natalia took some of her boxes of shoes to sell at factories and schools.

I’d already seen some evidence of the importance of connections when I met several Russians during a year I spent at Dartmouth College. They were among the first wave of ordinary Soviets who traveled abroad more or less freely, meaning no reason had been found to deny them permission to leave after they’d gone through the very onerous application process. At Dartmouth, they slept on the couches and floors of classmates they’d met during the Americans’ semesters abroad in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called.

They stayed and stayed. Those who were thrown out moved to rooms of new friends and acquaintances. The guests appeared to have not one iota of concern about their imposition and distracting effect on college students who couldn’t easily afford either the time or the expense of caring for essentially helpless visitors. (With little English and no money, the Russians survived largely on food snuck from cafeterias.)

They succeeded because there was something infectious about their warmth, their eagerness to please and embrace of hedonism. I befriended one of them, a ne’er-do-well with long blond hair and a brilliant wit in his late thirties named Yuri, who after a few weeks had adopted the look and studiously unhurried manner of a California surfer. Thriving on company, he was game for anything, including swimming in the Connecticut River and especially guzzling beer at the parties held in one or another reeking fraternity basement most evenings. After I invited him to visit for a couple of weeks that summer, already knowing better, he stayed for months and became a devoted friend. I felt certain that if our roles were reversed and I were penniless in the Soviet Union, he’d do the same for me. In any case, no American I ever met had a tenth of Yuri’s nonchalance or fatalism.

It was a friend of Yuri’s, a waiter who had never previously heard of me before I showed up on his doorstep, who put me up when I arrived in Leningrad during the coup d’état attempt in the summer of 1991. He also used his connections to get pain relievers from a hospital because I was sick, then procured train tickets to Moscow that would have been impossible for me to obtain. However, those kinds of ties to friends of friends who were otherwise strangers began dissolving almost immediately with the Soviet collapse. Once the state’s intrusion into private life more or less ended, so did the bonds engendered by the common plight. With everyone having to go out and hustle, there was far less time, energy and concern for others.

Although some found the new freedom to legally wheel and deal liberating, many couldn’t make it in the new Russia. After spending almost a decade in the United States drifting from one job and/or friend’s house to another, Yuri returned to his hometown, once again called St. Petersburg. Growing up under a system that provided most people with little incentive to work—unless you wanted to climb the Party ladder—he, like almost every other Soviet citizen, had developed a kind of passive resistance that consisted of doing as little as possible. Given a job to do—splitting wood in New Hampshire, for example—he would go at it until the job was done. But although he was brilliant with his hands and conscientious about even the most demeaning work, he seemed incapable of planning his future or otherwise acting to improve his lot. Russians have a special word to describe such behavior: avos, a desire to avoid hassles while maintaining blind hope for the best.

Back in Russia, Yuri took computer classes but couldn’t be bothered to look for a job as a programmer, then tried trading money on the foreign exchange until he had none left. Unable or unwilling to hold down a real job for more than a few months, he continues struggling to make ends meet.

Like Yuri, the country itself is adrift in many spheres besides politics, its authoritarian regime sustained thanks mainly to the high oil prices that enable it to lavish money on whatever it wants. The American writer Richard Lourie calls it Zombie Russia.

Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was no question about the nature and identity of Soviet Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russia has failed to forge a new identity for itself. It has no vision, no symbols and no values but to make hay while the sun shines. No single defining adjective has yet to adhere to its name—like Muscovite, Tsarist or Soviet Russia. No name has even been found for the 20-year period itself, like Thaw or Perestroika, which had caught on quickly in the past. No one believes in the country’s future past the end of oil. There is a void at the core of today’s Russia.¹⁶

In this Russia of little to offer apart from opportunities for the ambitious to grab whatever they can get, many rely on what’s left of Soviet-era institutions, one of which is the grandmother: the babushka. Under communism, writes sociologist Shlapentokh, the housing shortages that forced young couples to live with their parents, combined with strict rules that pushed people into retirement at sixty-five and the need for financial and physical support from older relatives, enabled many young people to “exploit” their parents by imposing the care of their children on them. More than 40 percent of urban babies were cared for by their grandmothers, whose levels of activity increased after they retired, according to one study.¹⁷ Although no statistics about current levels of grandparents’ involvement exist, I have noticed that the parents of the majority of my friends spend much of their retirement helping bring up their grandchildren.

Among those friends is Kolya, the fellow journalist with whom I was traveling in Lithuania in 1991. Born in 1967, he was raised in an outlying Moscow neighborhood called Kuntsevo, in a typical apartment made of prefabricated concrete slabs. Six people, including Kolya’s parents, sister, grandmother and great-aunt, lived in eighteen square meters—190 square feet. Like so many other boys, he grew up playing and fighting in the courtyard of his building, where residents gathered and talked. After his mandatory two-year army service, which he spent driving trucks at an air base near Moscow, Gorbachev’s reforms enabled him to unexpectedly enter one of the Soviet Union’s top universities, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. MGIMO had been known for grooming future KGB officers and children of the Communist Party elite. After Kolya married in the 1990s, he sold his late grandmother’s small apartment to help pay for a new one in Moscow’s unfashionable outskirts, where his new wife’s parents would live. Kolya’s in-laws had given up their central Moscow home to his wife, a lawyer. Soon, in their new apartment, they took in Kolya and Olga’s large dog. Several years later, they added Kolya’s daughter. Despite having her own bedroom at home, that daughter—a precocious, energetic twelve-year-old—has grown up living with her grandparents. They take her to her nearby school and, in summer, to their dacha outside the city. Kolya and his wife usually see her only on some weekends. They are now divorced, far from unusual in the country with the world’s highest divorce rate. According to the UN, five of every one thousand Russians are divorced.¹⁸

Although his salary is lower than those of his Western colleagues, Kolya unquestionably belongs to the Russian middle class. A well-educated urban professional with disposable income, he owns real estate and vacations on the Mediterranean—exactly the kind of person the Kremlin’s critics hope will someday help support democratic reform. Despite the widespread signs of growth, however—including the mushrooming number of relatively affordable hypermarkets and sushi restaurants that cater to the demographic—definitions of the middle class and its size vary widely.

Signs of a post-Soviet middle class in the Western sense—very generally defined as including those with enough discretionary income to be able to afford consumer goods, health care and provide for their children’s education—first surfaced in the mid-1990s. However, expectations for its rise were suddenly cut short by the economic crisis of 1998, when the precipitous drop of the ruble’s value decimated people’s savings. The numbers seemed to recover by 2002, when a benchmark study put the middle class at a quarter of the population.

But after a decade of steadily rising wages, stalled for two years during the global financial crisis of 2008, official figures still put the middle class—defined as consisting of individuals who earn at least the equivalent of twelve thousand dollars a year (or families earning that amount per individual) and also own a car and an apartment ¹⁹—at 25 percent of the population, compared to around 60 percent in the United States. However, independent surveys put the figure at anywhere between 10 percent of the population when people are categorized by education and income to more than 80 percent when Russians are asked to identify the class to which they belong. Pollster Ludmilla Khakhurina told me that statistics issued by the state committee that compiles them may not accurately reflect real income, thanks to widespread tax evasion and the black and gray markets that continue to make up a large part of the economy. “Our social structure isn’t clear because the criteria are changeable,” she said. Russia’s peculiar economy also differs from those of Western countries because housing was essentially distributed free after the end of communism and utility payments remain subsidized. Khakhurina prefers to look at consumer preferences and people’s own evaluations of their status.

Russians’ political apathy during the first decade of Putin’s rule, when, judging by Western standards of engagement, the masses appeared to support a system that worked against their interests, led some to reject the term “middle class” altogether. “Consumer class” seemed more accurate. Comparisons to the West are also misleading because many Russians’ lifestyles are made possible by enduring Soviet-era institutions and arrangements that provide stability in the face of upheaval by giving them a stake in the going system, as I’ve tried to describe. Although he doesn’t support Putin, Kolya Pavlov also doesn’t feel compelled to protest. Neither does his mother-in-law, who has often complained to me about her lot. Often tired and generally upset about having to bring up her granddaughter, whom she loves, she acquiesces nevertheless. Unlike grandfathers, who tend to be far more remote figures, grandmothers often accept their fate because it is expected of them, as it was under Soviet rule.

In other ways, babushki are anachronisms. Every block of apartments has its phalanx of them sitting on broken benches, where they while away hours with gossip and often dispense admonitions to anyone committing what they consider to be a folly, such as not wearing a hat in the cold. Women are sometimes upbraided for sitting on cold surfaces, which is believed to freeze their ovaries. The babushki are usually ignored. Despite their hard lot in life, they get very little respect.

The elderly have never had it easy in Russia, even when they’re not dismissed as senile and weak. In the Soviet Union, life for most included not being able to travel abroad, speak freely, or even—usually outside of Moscow—find toilet paper to buy. But all citizens could count on at least one thing then: the state would fully provide for their retirements. No longer, that support having all but vanished with the communist collapse more than two decades ago, leaving many to fend for themselves with little idea of how to get by, let alone experience at it. In the early 1990s, many thousands of elderly and very elderly people lined Moscow metro entrances, holding up clothes, household possessions and anything else they might sell, until they were banned from doing so. Although the average pension has more than doubled since 2002, many elderly are still forced to improvise.

Seventy-two-year-old Muscovite Lydia Kuznetsova, a former defense industry engineer, supplements her $130 monthly pension by selling clothes she sews. A widow, she also grows her own vegetables at a Soviet-era garden plot outside the city and pickles them for winter. Kuznetsova says she preferred life under the Soviet Union “because we grew up under that system. What’s happening now is that prices are always rising. If pensions are raised even a little, prices for everything rise again.” Kuznetsova shops at a special market on the city’s outskirts, where prices for bruised fruit and defective goods are lower than elsewhere, a stark contrast to the conspicuous display of wealth on central Moscow’s traffic-jammed streets.

The officials who acknowledge the discrepancy include President Putin, who occasionally gravely announces that society owes the elderly a debt. After he said that helping them was a top priority, he oversaw comprehensive pension reform in 2002, standardizing payments throughout the country and indexing them to inflation. Still, the average pension remains barely above the official subsistence level. The system, which runs at a deficit of more than forty billion dollars a year, faces crisis thanks partly to Putin’s campaign promises to continue raising payments. Although the elderly continue to scrape by, falling oil prices or another financial jolt may leave the government unable to afford even the current level of help.

Older people aren’t the only group to suffer en masse. Like many aspects of life, much rearing of young children is governed by superstition and tradition. Most babies are still swaddled at birth without being washed, then kept tightly wrapped for weeks. Often explained as necessary for the safety of infants who would otherwise hurt themselves, the practice reflects traditional views about individuals’ harmful impulses. An old saw has it that swaddling helps explain Russia’s outbursts of frenetic activity between the long periods of submission. Whatever truth lies in that, Russian children wave their limbs for all they’re worth when the swaddling cloth is removed.

The popularity of a recent book titled America—What a Life!, which interprets American customs for Russian readers, highlighted the insularity of Russian life together with the success of state propaganda that depicts Americans as brutish imperialists. Written by Nikolai Zlobin, a political analyst who’s provided some of the most trenchant criticism of Putin’s Russia, it tapped a rich vein of general interest by explaining the American preference for teenage babysitters instead of babushki, the relative lack of lying in polite society and the preference for seeking out professional services—from plumbers to lawyers—based on ability instead of their closeness as friends or relatives.²⁰

However, globalization is changing many aspects of life, including childhood. Hollywood films, American cartoon characters and pop music are helping assimilate new generations to a greater degree than ever before, at least on a superficial level. That will have a huge effect on a future Russian society that may no longer feel as alienated from Western culture (whatever its merits) as it has in the last decade. But while television and the Internet may be making that true for many children even in remote provinces, others are still suffering the consequences of a Soviet legacy that doesn’t appear to be changing very much at all: the orphanage.

Moscow’s Internat No. 8 is an unusual place. Housed in a neatly painted four-story concrete building in a leafy, residential part of town, the state boarding school for orphans is clean, its teachers are dedicated and the children, who sleep many to a room, appear genuinely happy. It’s also open to visitors, which is why it’s one of the very few such places I was able to observe.

Inside, every child has a heartbreaking story. A sensitive-looking thirteen-year-old boy named Sasha told me that he ran away from home at the age of six because his parents “behaved badly.”

“They drank and took drugs and didn’t take care of me,” he said. That’s a common story in Russia, where many of the nearly eight hundred thousand children identified as orphans have living parents. Another student, a smiling twelve-year-old girl with long red hair named Tatyana, was abandoned at birth. She said she liked drawing and sewing and wanted to become a doctor. She has a chance: the students at Internat No. 8 are incredibly lucky compared to most orphaned and abandoned children, and they know it. By all independent accounts, most other such institutions are depressing places that provide very few opportunities.

Despite Russia’s vast number of institutionalized children, the government has only recently begun to encourage adoption. But very few Russian families want to adopt orphans because they are often seen as sick or otherwise damaged. Half of the fifteen thousand children adopted in Russia annually have been taken in by foreigners—many of them, until recently, Americans, who have adopted more children from Russia than from any other country except China and Guatemala, despite Russian policies that have made foreign adoption very difficult. An Education Ministry official named Sergei Vitelis told me the hurdles exist because Russian children should stay in Russia. “Adoption by foreigners isn’t right,” he said. “Any normal state should create conditions for children to grow up in their own country. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

Children’s rights advocates say such disapproval of foreign adoptions is more about national pride than any genuine concern for child welfare. In late 2012, Putin banned all adoptions by Americans as a response to President Obama’s signing of the so-called Magnitsky bill, a human rights measure that instituted travel bans and other sanctions against Russian officials connected to the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Russian legislators settled on the adoption ban—part of a series of new restrictions aimed at reducing Russian cooperation with the United States—because it was one of the few measures that would have an impact on Americans. It followed public pressure prompted by several high-profile cases of abuse and death of adopted Russian children in the United States. There’s “no need to go out and make a tragedy out of it,” said Pavel Astakhov, a celebrity lawyer who is Russia’s child rights commissioner and a major supporter of the ban, after announcing the new law would block the departure of almost fifty children already approved for adoption by Americans.

Although Astakhov has overseen a program to encourage foster care and adoption, the adoption ban’s many critics say the attitudes behind it are condemning a growing number of children to a system of Soviet-era institutions desperately in need of reform, where they are living—and dying—in wretched conditions. The problems begin at birth, when hospital staff often try to persuade parents of babies with disabilities to give them up to state care. Poverty and alcoholism drive many other parents to abandon their children. Sergei Koloskov, who founded the Down Syndrome Society after a daughter was born with the condition, told me that far from providing support to disadvantaged children, the state hides them. Even normal children are at serious risk, he insisted. Contrary to government figures, he said, the number of orphans in Russia is growing and overloading the state’s orphanage system.

Koloskov elaborated: “Healthy babies are lying in hospital beds all day as if they were sick, sometimes for months or longer. They’re completely ignored. No one plays with them or provides any kind of stimulation. That happens because the orphanages where they’re supposed to go after birth are full.” I spoke to him after my son, a colicky baby, had just been born—perhaps the reason I found his testimony especially upsetting.

Of course the lack of attention at such an early age seriously harms child development. Elena Olshanskaya, a forceful young woman who has become one of Russia’s most active children’s rights activists, started a group of volunteers to help children in hospitals after she discovered abandoned babies in a room adjoining the one where she gave birth. “I was stunned,” she told me. “They were completely alone. They were fed several times a day and that was it. After a while, they just stop crying.”

Another new mother in a central Russian hospital happened on a room of abandoned babies who had their mouths taped shut to stop them from crying. Broadcast on national television, her mobile phone video shocked the country. Reports of babies tied down in their cots are also common. Bedsores and other wounds are ubiquitous, not least because hospital staff are seriously overworked. A veteran activist, Boris Altshuler of the group Rights of the Child, said the very few visitors who were able to trick or otherwise find their way into such places reported abandoned babies being left to “rot alive.” “First of all there’s the smell,” he said. “The smell of unchanged linens or even children lying on bare plastic. The terrible smell because nobody changes the children’s diapers, nobody cares.”

Women give birth in maternity wards, where babies who are abandoned spend three days before being moved to nearby hospitals, which aren’t equipped or staffed to care for them but are the only option available. Healthy children are then sent to so-called baby homes, institutions where they stay until the age of four before being moved to orphanages. There, their experiences differ widely. Unlike the relatively happy children at Internat No. 8, most end in establishments that are closed to the outside world. That’s a legacy of the Soviet Union, which tried to isolate everyone not considered normal from the rest of society. “Many orphanages stand behind high walls and big gates, often somewhere on the outskirts of town,” Olshanskaya explained. “People who live in such areas and pass by every day usually have no idea what’s inside.”

Children considered mentally or physically disabled are sent to special psychiatric institutions, where they can be twice as likely to die as children in regular orphanages, according to Human Rights Watch. Altshuler describes such places as “terrible.” Evaluations deciding children’s fates are often cursory. Misdiagnosis is common and sometimes even doled out as punishment for misbehavior. Altshuler described the recent case of a fifteen-year-old boy who began misbehaving after his divorced mother remarried. When she permitted a diagnosis of mental disability, he was taken to a psychiatric institution, “isolated from society.” Children’s rights advocates say such treatment is common and incomprehensible in a country facing a demographic crisis in which the birthrate has been decreasing for years.

Valentina Pavlova, who heads the Moscow office of Kidsave, an American organization that runs foster-care programs in Russia, told me that even in standard orphanages, the lack of contact with the rest of the world leaves children utterly unprepared for adult life. “When children leave those institutions,” Pavlova said, “they enter another world they’ve seen only on television. Very few are able to cope because they’ve never owned anything of their own or experienced normal relationships. Above all, they’ve been deprived of love.”

Many teenagers run away to live on the streets. “They don’t like the life of hunger and starvation, boredom and cruelty,” Altshuler said, adding that many still feel they have little choice. Most Russians’ interaction with those children is limited to seeing them begging at train stations. Orphans who have children also tend to abandon their own offspring. Little surprise that the suicide rate for children, led by those who pass through orphanages and internat schools, is Europe’s highest. Pavlova agrees with most other experts who say the only way to help abandoned children break out of lifelong cycles of isolation and lack of education is to put them in the care of adoptive or foster families.

But Altshuler believes officials in charge of the country’s state orphanages are obstructing new foster-care programs because they want to keep their state funding. “They don’t use the best-known practices because institutions aren’t interested in losing children.” He describes the current system as an “orphan industry.”

“We know only the tip of the iceberg because there’s no government inspectorate for orphanages,” he said, adding that the situation won’t improve without public pressure. As long as the state keeps hiding orphans from society, he continued, attitudes about them won’t change. “We know who Russia’s real master is: the selfish, greedy bureaucracy, which is killing our country because it wants to make money from everything. From children’s tragedies, orphans, anything.”

As countless parentless children remain mired in lives of misery, the Kremlin is busy with other concerns, including indoctrinating young Russians to become loyal supporters of the government. For that, as for so much else, it looks to the Soviet past for inspiration. There has been no more visible, or absurd, example than a summer camp for thousands of teenagers and young adults located five hours northwest of Moscow. Situated on large, beautiful Lake Seliger in the Tver region, amid pristine pine and birch forests, it was started in 2007 by a pro-Kremlin youth group known as Nashi, or “Ours,” which until then was best known for staging loud demonstrations outside foreign embassies. Under an earlier name, the group had conducted public book burnings.

The camp is a hive of activity on a typical day: campers kayak, play volleyball and sit around campfires at night, but there’s a big difference from similar camps in the West. When I visited, large propaganda posters lambasting opposition figures hung from tree branches between campers’ tents. One display compared the US president to Saddam Hussein. Some of the claims were clearly false, including one condemning European democracy by asserting that German police had killed eighty antiglobalization protesters during a G8 summit in 2007. In fact, one protester was injured. Elsewhere, slogans proclaimed Russia’s greatness, some printed below pictures of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In another part of the camp, the faces of Russian opposition leaders had been superimposed over lingerie-clad female bodies and dubbed “political prostitutes.” The whole affair would have smacked of the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneer camps except that those much-loved institutions actually imparted relatively little ideology. In any case, the tactic appeared to be working on at least some participants, among them a baby-faced nineteen-year-old camper named Kostya Kudinov, who informed me with no trace of irony that the government’s critics are “fascists.”

“These people are against our Motherland. They’re ready to do anything to cheat our country. We’re against that. We’re here to show our concern for Russia and discuss what we can do to improve its future.”

But as campers drank tea around their campfires under the tall pines and posters celebrating Putin’s manliness, it became clear many others weren’t buying the messages. Twenty-three-year-old Irina Chechikova complained about the cult of personality the camp’s mandatory political lectures were helping build around Russia’s “national leader,” Putin. Campers were also obliged to make career plans; state-controlled companies had set up tents where recruiters offered internships to the politically loyal teenagers. The camp organizers pushed a social message, too: alcohol was banned, and some displays exhorted campers to counteract Russia’s alarming population decline by propagating.

That was the only message that appeared to be seriously taken to heart. Some of the campers described nights of promiscuous sex between participants who almost tripped over each other during their visits to various tents. The following year, Nashi’s leader failed to dispel rumors that he had taken part in the escapades. But despite the camp’s comic amateurishness, it was no isolated, crackpot endeavor. Although the same leader insisted it was solely the creation of his group, it had substantial government backing and no doubt funding as well. Putin, Medvedev and a host of other leaders paid visits.

Their laughable attempt to create an updated model of a Soviet-era institution for instilling values in young Russians reflects life under Putin, some of it a hollow shell. Despite his recent divorce, the president presents himself as an honest family man of action, a teetotaler in the mold of the young Soviet men communist propaganda upheld as models for an empire of huge drinkers. However, the camp was truer to its precedents than it would seem. Just as it did under communism, its propaganda masked a radically different reality: in Russia, corruption is the rule and mere lip service is paid to the notion of family values.

If Stalin wanted the state to lord over every aspect of private life, Putin is in many ways his opposite. The government that still grants cradle-to-grave social welfare on paper provides virtually nothing in reality, obviously not caring how people live in their own homes. While Russia remains a country where individual will is suspect, now no group represents the common interest. The state’s interests are almost entirely Putin’s. He manipulates public opinion to strengthen his power while Russians are left to fend for themselves in daily life. The family is still important for getting by or ahead, more so than in the West. But the leaders’ essentially nihilistic attitude is helping perpetuate the sexism and violence that is tearing at the social fabric.