Although she felt equally frustrated by the politics that controlled her institute, she had not yet lost her Socialist optimism and surrendered to bitter despair. Year after year, she dutifully renewed her application for Communist Party membership. She sincerely believed that the Party was leading the Soviet Union and the world to a bright future of justice and universal equality. She also understood that the only way to improve conditions for herself and me was through professional advancement. The key to that advancement was held by the Party. But her application was formally rejected each year, supposedly because she had not yet achieved the proper level of “political maturity.”
This was simply not true. She had studied Marxism-Leninism just as hard as solid geometry and physical chemistry. But the Party remained closed to her. Although theoretically open to all Soviet citizens, Communist Party membership was rigidly controlled. Eighty-five percent of members were industrial workers or kolkhozniki from collective farms. Because of their political naivete, they were easily controlled by the ten percent of the Party members drawn from reserved positions among the military and government apparatchiks. Only five percent came from the intelligentsia, which included professions such as medicine, law, and engineering. The practical effect of this unofficial Party caste system at a large industrial complex like the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute was that my mother stood little hope of membership.
Perhaps because of her experience, she never encouraged me to become active in Party youth groups in school. Anyway, by my second year at Spartak, I was far more interested in wrestling than in the Young Pioneers. And as my athletic skill increased, I saw no advantage to joining the clique of smug and ambitious young politicians who controlled the Komsomol branch at School Number Two.
You could always spot a Komsomol member, we joked, by the hole in the seat of his pants — worn by sitting through endless, deadly boring meetings.
At first I tried to balance my schoolwork with wrestling, mainly because there were many subjects that interested me, particularly the hard sciences. The teachers proudly emphasized the “Soviet” contributions to science, although I learned that many of the breakthroughs — such as Mendeleyev’s periodic table — had been made by prerevolutionary Russians. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by mathematics and physics. Biology was also one of my favorite classes, although the textbooks seemed to waste a lot of time straining to link the laws governing natural processes with Marxism-Leninism atheism. And these books also strained hard to avoid the one issue we were all fascinated by, sex.
The school subject that I liked the best, however, was geography. My geography textbooks and atlas were endlessly engrossing. I could spend a whole evening curled up on the Caucasian rug reading about the tribes along the Amazon River or the gold mines and oil fields of the Siberian taiga. Sergei, a friend from school who lived nearby, also loved geography. He was in a motocross club, which took as much of his free time as the Spartak wrestling did of mine. But we always found a few hours each week to “study” geography together. Many winter nights we would sit at my kitchen table with the atlas open before us, playing a game.
“Find Atlanta in America,” Sergei would challenge, staring at the second hand of his watch.
I would have fifteen seconds to find that city or river.
Playing the geography game with Sergei made me think about America. The teachers taught us that America was a large, rich country, which had been settled in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries just like Russia under the czars. I had a feeling that Americans were probably not much different from us. But then in history classes, which focused heavily on the Revolution and the Great Patriotic War, we were taught that American capitalists had tried to keep their country out of the war so that the Nazis could destroy the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor, the capitalists conspired with British imperialists to delay the Second Front until the Nazis had almost bled my country white.
In these same history classes, though, I learned that American lend-lease weapons, including the rugged P-39 Airacobra, flown by Soviet aces like Alexander Pokryshkin, had helped turn back the fascist hordes. And, of course, I remembered my grandmother’s stories about the American yellow shoes that had kept my mother’s feet from freezing, and the canned food, powdered eggs, and chocolate that had saved the family from starvation during the war. But I was taught that, although the whole world had been united to defeat the Nazis, the Americans’ invention of the atomic bomb had renewed their imperialist ambitions. And now the Socialist Motherland was the principal target of those nuclear weapons. That made me both sad and angry.
But I couldn’t really hate everything about the West, especially their music. Every Saturday night I tuned our shortwave radio to the Voice of America to listen to the rock music show. Although I didn’t understand more than three words of English, I memorized the lyrics to songs by Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Maybe the music was just propaganda, as the Komsomol leaders warned us, but it certainly was exciting.
However, politics really did not interest me much. In school we learned that Stalin had inherited the mantle of the Great Lenin and had gone on to lead our country to victory in the war. Then, we were taught, certain personal “excesses” had tarnished his place in history. Outside of school, people usually avoided talking about Stalin. And when they did, it was with a mixture of respect and fear, a strange, grudging reverence. Sometimes at my grandmother’s house, I would overhear whispered conversations in the kitchen, when the older people would talk about the Stalin years. They might mention the “Black Raven,” which was apparently a police car that had come in the night to take people away. Where it took them, I had no idea.
Later, my mother brought home a copy of Roman Gazeta that bore the yellow cardboard “Restricted” tag from her institute’s library. When asked about this, she said the issue contained the famous novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by a writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never heard of him. He certainly wasn’t mentioned in my literature books at school.
“What’s it about?” I asked mother.
“It’s not for you, Sasha,” was all she said.
She didn’t hide the book, despite the yellow label. I hoped there might be some sexy passages. So one evening when I got home early from practice, I sat down in the kitchen and began to read the book. I was shocked that my mother should choose such a work. The language was terrible, with all these crude, antisocial convicts and their prison guards exchanging foul insults like “fucker” and “shit face.”
I read enough of the book to trouble me. Why would a major literary magazine in Moscow publish this kind of thing? Then I heard on the radio that Solzhenitsyn was “a disgusting person, who has sold his soul to imperialist circles.”
But literature was less important than wrestling. I was now on the morning class schedule at school, so every afternoon I ran from the commuter train depot all the way to the Spartak sports complex. The coach had weeded out the habitual latecomers and had instituted a good-hearted punishment for those who were occasionally late. My group would line up in a double rank with everyone clutching a gym shoe. The latecomer had to run this gauntlet, once if he was less than two minutes late, two or three times if he arrived more than five minutes after roll call.