We started the evening by looking at the photos I’d taken at the Museum of the USSR, but as I proudly showed off my Pionerka selfies, Kuzina barked, “You tied the scarf wrong!” She hustled out of the kitchen, returning with a red scarf. “This is how you tie it,” she said, looping the thing around my neck. “It’s very important. Every true Pionerka knows how to tie the scarf!”
“Hey, now!” I said, “I am a proud Pionerka! Don’t insult my pionerzhnost!” This last word was made up, roughly translatable as “pioneer-ness.” I pouted, and Valera jumped in, saying, “Kakaya zhopa, eh?” Translated literally, this phrase means “What an asshole!” But what it means to Russians is, essentially, “What a fucking mess!” This quickly became the running joke of the night.
We drank like there was no tomorrow. Alisa joined us midway through dinner, but when offered a drink, she demurred. “I have more work to do tonight,” she said, shrugging. “Kakaya zhopa!” shouted Valera. We all guffawed, and Alisa, blushing, said, “OK, OK, I’ll have just one.”
Eventually, as often happens at Russian dinner parties, a guitar appeared. We all strummed and sang and danced about, ending every song with “Kakaya zhopa!” which fit a number of songs surprisingly well. “House of the Rising Sun”: “It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and god, I know I’m one”—kakaya zhopa! “Yesterday”: “Now I need a place to hide away, oh I believe in yesterday”—kakaya zhopa!
At one point, we all meandered to the living room, where Kuzina threw open a window so we could reach out and touch the snowflakes that were starting to fall. Kuzina’s apartment overlooked Novosibirsk’s main square, and we could see the massive dome of the Opera and Ballet Theater and, in the distance, the statue of Lenin. The cold air was bracing, and when we finally came back into the kitchen, our hilarity had subsided into a more reflective mood.
We started talking about Grisha. I asked Kuzina whether her ex-husband was Grisha’s first cousin, or more distantly related. “First cousin,” she said.
“But you know,” Valera interjected, “after Grisha revealed to his family that he was gay, Kuzina was the only member of the family who continued to see him.” She nodded.
“Everybody rejected him, except for her,” Valera went on. “Then, when he died, and they all came to the funeral, they all took their seats up front, but she wasn’t invited to sit with them. She sat in the back, with us.”
Kuzina wiped her eyes. “Grisha always told me, ‘Kuzina, you’re a beautiful woman, you live in the center of town. You should dress yourself well,’” she said quietly. “He would give me advice on what to wear. So, for his funeral, I dressed up, put on makeup. My husband was jealous. ‘What are you dressing up for him for?’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’
“I was so sad when Grisha died,” she went on, almost in a whisper. “At the funeral, I said, ‘My Grisha is gone. Who will call me Kuzina now?’ And Valera said, ‘I will.’ And he always has, and so has Zhenya.” Valera now moved toward her, putting his arm around her shoulders.
“Me too,” I said, raising my glass. “To Kuzina.”
I left Novosibirsk the next day, hung over and sad, but happy that we would all still be in touch through Facebook. Valera and Kuzina walked me the ten snowy blocks to the train station, and after I got settled in my kupe, they stood on the platform to wave good-bye. As the train started to pull away, they offered—in unison—perfectly angled Pionerka salutes. “This is how you do it!” Valera yelled.
“Kakaya zhopa!” I screamed back. As the train picked up speed, I looked back until I could barely see the two friends in the distance, walking arm in arm as they headed off the platform and back toward the city.
NINE
Chelyabinsk: Meteors and Missiles
On the morning of February 15, 2013, people in the city of Chelyabinsk were startled by a massive streak of flame shooting across the sky. Dash-cam videos captured a ball of fire curving low over the city, the sky flashing a blinding white. Security-camera videos showed windows shattering and people diving for cover, as the fireball exploded in an earsplitting boom during its short flight.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a spectacular cosmic show. Because it appeared at 9:20 in the morning, thousands of people saw it—and thanks to the magic of YouTube, millions more all over the world have seen it too. I was one: I obsessively clicked on all the videos I could find, unable to get enough of watching that meteor streak wildly over the city I’d first visited in 1995. Now that I was once again coming to Chelyabinsk, I couldn’t wait to ask people whether they’d seen the meteor that day.
As it turned out, I’d get to do more than just ask about it; I could see the thing for myself. The meteor had crashed into nearby Lake Chebarkul, and nine months later, scientists managed to pull a huge chunk of it out of the lake bottom. That chunk was now on display at the Chelyabinsk Regional History Museum, a short walk from my hotel, so on my first morning in town, I strolled over for a look.
The pocked, metallic-looking meteor is about the size of a stuffed-full laundry bag, but it weighs more than 1,300 pounds. It is housed in a glass pyramid, which adds to its otherworldly aura, and as I snapped photo after photo, I kept thinking, This came from SPACE! I noticed a docent watching me—a tiny, white-haired woman in a smock and sensible shoes. I went over to speak with her.
“Did you see the meteor when it fell?” I asked.
“Well, of course,” she said, as if the question were absurd. “I was out in the city, and it flew right overhead. Everything became very hot, which was strange because it was February.” She told me she was on a public bus at the time, and that everyone crouched down in fear.
“When I got home,” she went on, “my windows were broken. There were two parallel windows with a space between, and all the glass fell right into that space. But at my neighbor’s, the blast blew the glass into her apartment. Everyone experienced something different.” She raised her eyebrows and paused to let this sink in. Then, lowering her voice, she added, “People still say it might actually have been shot at us.”
“Like, a missile?” I asked. She nodded. “Do you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “But it was very strange.” Meanwhile, the actual meteor was sitting right here, under glass, not 20 feet away. Given the available evidence, this was some seriously bold conspiracy-theory conjecture.
Rumors that the object was actually some kind of missile started circulating almost as soon as it fell from the sky. The right-wing politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky declared the following day that “those aren’t meteorites falling. It’s the Americans trying out a new weapon,” adding that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had tried to call Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to “warn him that there would be such a provocation.” Zhirinovsky is a professional provocateur himself, so it was perhaps predictable that he’d try to stir things up.[1] Yet I did find myself wondering whether, if the Chelyabinsk meteor had fallen in 1995 or 2005, the Russians would have been so quick to suspect it was an American weapon.
I mulled this over as I left the museum and strolled toward Kirov Street, referred to by locals as the Arbat, after the famous walking street in Moscow. Like many walking streets, this one felt cloying and touristy, with little folk-art statues, a souvenir kiosk in the shape of a giant matryoshka nesting doll, and the requisite coffee shops and McDonald’s. There was, however, one inspiring piece of public art: the Tankist, a statue of a muscled young fighter standing atop a World War II tank, urging the troops forward with a shout and upraised arm. This was where Anya and I had arranged to meet.
1
Among Zhirinovsky’s greatest hits: his proposals to reclaim Alaska and ship the Ukrainians there; to turn the Baltic States into a nuclear waste dump for Russia; and to flood the United Kingdom by dropping nukes into the Atlantic Ocean. He has publicly stated a desire to see the Russian empire expand to where Russian soldiers can “wash their boots in the warm water of the Indian Ocean,” and, in 2014, he advocated the rape of a pregnant journalist.