Tanya, Misha, Lena, and Rinat are real people (although I have changed some of their names), not fictional characters, ordinary Russians who, together with the rest of the country, have been struggling to survive. They were all my friends. This is what has happened to them since 1991.
Tanya
It is early winter, 2002. The Nord-Ost saga has just ended. Russian society, particularly in Moscow, is in a state of shock. I appeared on television, playing a small part in these events, and, as a result, old friends reappeared in my life.
The late-night call was from Tanya. Actually she had always rung in the small hours, so late that most people were already asleep.
I hadn’t seen Tanya, my sometime neighbor, for ten years or so. In those days she had been downtrodden, but now she was a queen. She looked triumphant and chic, not because she was expensively dressed, which she was, but because she was self-possessed and poised. This was something new.
In the Soviet period, Tanya’s life had been one long torment. Almost every evening she would come down to see me (I lived on the ground floor of an old block of flats, and she lived at the top). She would weep over the fact that her life was ruined.
In those years Tanya was an engineer in a research institute and thus was regarded as belonging to the Soviet scientific and technical intelligentsia, a substantial social category that no longer exists.
How did one come to belong to that stratum? At the time, a young woman from a good family—Tanya was the only daughter of well-established parents—was expected to pursue higher education; if, after secondary school, she showed no particular inclinations or aptitudes, she studied at a technical institute, of which there were any number, and became an engineer. After graduating, she was required to work for three years at the speciality the state had trained her in at its expense. Accordingly, there was a whole army of people who were deeply dissatisfied with life, young specialists who had never wanted to be engineers and who now spent their working days in research institutes producing nothing useful whatsoever.
Tanya was a fully paid-up member of this army, with the profession of engineer of communal facilities in nuclear power stations. For days at a time and without the least enthusiasm, she would design projects for drainage and water-supply systems that nobody ever built, receiving a minuscule salary in return. She was always unhappy because of a chronic shortage of money. She tried to feed and clothe her family decently, frantically ministering to her two small, perpetually sick children and her husband, a rather odd young man named Andrey, a lecturer at a prestigious technical university in Moscow.
As a result, Tanya was a typical neurasthenic, endlessly tormenting herself, Andrey, and the children with her bad moods, her hysteria, her depressions, and her constant dissatisfaction.
To make matters worse, Tanya was from Rostov-on-Don. She had managed to move to Moscow by marrying Andrey, whom she had met on a Black Sea beach. She was regarded as little better than one of the limitchiki, menial “quota workers” who, in the mid-1970s, were granted temporary residence permits in Moscow in return for working in unpopular or undersupplied occupations. At that time there were no end of female “engineers” in the capital, women from the provinces who had married Muscovites. No one wanted to remain outside Moscow, and young women from good families did their best to move there.
Tanya did not know what she wanted, but she knew clearly what she did not want: to be an engineer and to be living in penury with the impoverished Andrey. We talked about it a lot. Tanya was angry because she saw no way out.
There were often noisy disputes at home. In accordance with Soviet tradition, Tanya, not having a place of her own in Moscow, should have lived with Andrey in his flat, but he did not have an apartment either. So they ended up sharing one large flat with Andrey’s parents and his two elder brothers, each of whom had a family and a couple of children.
All in all, it was a typical Soviet beehive, but with no option to swarm and achieve independence. To make things worse, Andrey came from a genteel old Moscow family consisting of exceptional people. One, for example, was a famous professor who had taught the violin at the state conservatory. He was the second husband of Andrey’s grandmother, who had also been a professor of violin there. His grandmother had died long ago, but her husband was still in the beehive. Like Tanya, he had nowhere else to go.
Andrey’s parents were professors of physics and mathematics. The elder brother was a professor of chemistry at Moscow University who made one discovery after another, although his achievements had little material impact on his life.
The situation made Tanya more and more exasperated. She considered Andrey’s family to be a bunch of incompetent failures despite the dozens of academic qualifications they possessed, and Andrey’s family reciprocated wholeheartedly, constantly finding fault with her. Tanya, it’s important to remember, was from Rostov-on-Don, where, even in Soviet times, people traded in any available product. Illegal underground workshops flourished there. Many rich men divided their time between prison and the outside world, and no one considered it a disgrace. The newspapers called them speculators and con artists, but the young women of Rostov were happy enough to marry them.
When we first met in the early 1980s, Tanya already thought she had made a mistake in marrying Andrey. Love hadn’t come into it. She admitted she had simply swallowed the bait of residence in Moscow. She came out of herself only when she could produce pretty things she had picked up who knows where and was inviting you to buy them. She undoubtedly had a special gift for commercial persuasiveness. She could sell you a blouse of appalling quality at three times its value while assuring you, “It’s what people are wearing in Europe.” When the fraud came to light, she would not be embarrassed in the least. This talent for speculative trade was something that Andrey’s traditionalist, highly educated family despised.
Now, in 2002, Tanya invited me to her home, which turned out to be that same spacious flat in the heart of Moscow.
The flat had been magnificently refurbished. The place was crammed with the latest technology, excellent copies of famous paintings, high-quality reproduction antique furniture. Tanya was almost fifty, but her skin was youthful and healthy, her clothes bright. She talked in a loud, confident voice, very openly, and although she laughed a lot her face remained unwrinkled. Obviously she had had plastic surgery, a telltale sign that she had made the big time.
Has Andrey struck it rich? I wondered. Tanya strode through the rooms. Ten years ago she had preferred to whisper in this flat, to sit in the corner of one of the rooms, avoiding her in-laws.
“Well, where is the family?”
“I’ll tell you, only don’t faint. All this belongs to me now.”
“It’s yours? Congratulations! But where do they live?”
“In a minute, in a minute. Everything in good time.”
A handsome young man about the age Tanya’s sons must be now, I supposed, slipped quietly into the room. The last time I’d seen her boys, they’d been children, so I blurted out, “Can this really be… Igor?”
Igor was Tanya and Andrey’s elder son and must by then have been twenty-four or twenty-five.
Tanya burst out laughing. Peals of merriment, mischievous, echoing, youthful. Not at all like Tanya.