made Seryozha wonder whether the love had been a part of his assignment.
seryozha was a grandchild, not a child, of a top Party functionary, so some of his early life passed in what he thought, then and later, were regular Soviet conditions. His family, like other families, faced shortages of food and other consumer products, from toilet paper to wall paint. Little Seryozha took his turn standing in line with his number written in ballpoint pen on his palm—when lines went on for hours and days, assigning numbers became an additional measure for maintaining self-organization and what passed for fairness. But the place where Seryozha lived with his parents was known in the vernacular as tsarskoye selo—"the Czars' Village." The original Tsarskoye Selo—a real place that was officially named the Czar's Village—was the site of Peter the Great's summer residence in the early eighteenth century. Under the Soviets, Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Pushkin, for the poet who had been educated there, but the name "the Czars' Village" began attaching itself to blocks and small neighborhoods that housed the Soviet elites.
The stores here were better stocked, even though they were affected by the shortages. The buildings were better designed and constructed.7 The air was better than anywhere else in the city: the neighborhood in the west of Moscow contained less industry and more parks than any other.8 A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen. It began when the first Bolsheviks moved themselves into the palaces and the luxury hotels. Within the first few years of Bolshevik Russia's existence, the main mechanisms of privilege were defined and created. Even before the October Revolution—a few months before—Lenin had written that "the first phase of Communism" would not bring equality for alclass="underline" "differences in wealth will remain unjust differences." Just a week after the Revolution, Lenin wrote that highly qualified professionals would need to retain their privileged position "for the time being." While the idle rich had to be stripped of their possessions, the highly trained had to be enticed to work for the new regime. The Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was replaced with the more pragmatic approach of paying what the state could pay for extracting the maximum from those with high ability. Over the next few years, the list of those whose labor the state valued most highly was established, as were the mechanisms of compensation. The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.
The reasons were not only pragmatic but also ideological. "The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party has, from its early days, been profoundly elitist in its attitudes," Mervyn Matthews, a British scholar of Soviet society, wrote in the 1970s. "It has regarded itself as an enlightened band which understands the march of history and is destined to lead the Russian people—indeed the whole world—to communism. In daily life it has always ensured for itself and its close associates privileges commensurate with these awesome demands."9 The Soviet privileged were entitled to higher salaries and a set of additional financial rewards; bigger and better apartments; favored access to consumer goods; and certain education and travel privileges.10 The privileges grew in value and scope during the three decades of Stalin's rule, as did the wealth gap. In the Khrushchev decade, which saw a giant residential construction push, the gap narrowed slightly, but when Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the old tendency of growing differentiation resumed.11
Paradoxically, the peculiarities of the Soviet economic system made the borders between differently valued groups of citizens only starker and harder to penetrate. Taxation was minimal, and redistribution of wealth was not its goal.12 Because most of the extra compensation for the privileged was non-monetary, and because all of it was centrally administered, members of a given caste were grouped together socially and geographically. Members of the
Politburo lived in the same building as other members of the Politburo, procured consumer goods at the same distribution centers, sent their children to the same schools, got treated at the same clinics, were given plots of land on which to build a wooden dacha—a weekend or summer house—in the same area, and took the waters in the same sanatoriums. The same was true for members of the Academy of Sciences, who had their own special infrastructure, and for members of any of the "creative unions," such as those of the writers, artists, or cinematographers.
The quality of the construction and the comfort level of apartments varied from building to building: members of the Politburo were granted more square meters per family member but also larger windows, higher ceilings, and flooring made of harder wood. Academics got less, "creatives" less than that, engineers less still. Menial laborers often lived in dormitory rooms with linoleum flooring and shared bathroom facilities.
Those at the very top, whether out of a sense of shame or a residual longing for the security of a fortress, shielded their lives behind tall solid fences. Alexander Galich, the dissident singer- songwriter, had a song called "Beyond Seven Fences." Its narrator, an ordinary Soviet citizen, encounters the fences that surround the Communist leaders' estates and begins to fantasize about what the fences conceaclass="underline" fresh, untrampled grass, clean air, hard-to-find chocolate-mint candy, birds of different kinds, shish kebab consumed in the security of knowing the fence is guarded, and at night, to top it all off, "they show films about whores." The narrator cannot take it anymore, heads back to the city, and the whole way back, he is subjected to a lecture extolling Soviet egalitarianism, broadcast over the train's radio system. He thinks of the leaders again: "Back there, beyond the seven fences, / Behind the seven locks, / they don't have to listen to this lecture, / they can just eat their shish kebab." The imagination painted a picture of the ultimate Soviet privilege: living in material comfort—and watching Hollywood films instead of listening to the leaders' own propaganda.13
Much of Seryozha's life passed behind the fences. On weekends, a black government Volga—the top model among Soviet-made cars— equipped with flashing lights that entitled it to ignore traffic regulations carried Seryozha's family out of the city. They took Rublyovskoye Shosse, a smooth and narrow road effectively reserved for use by the Soviet elites. The Volga turned off at Kalchuga, a village of solid fences. An automatic gate would open in one of them, and the car would drive onto the grounds of a government dacha reserved for the use of Alexander Nikolaevich. On weekdays, a similar Volga carried Seryozha to a different fence along the same road. This was a preschool for the offspring of the very top of the Soviet elite—a cut above the Central Committee preschool to which Masha's mother had bought access. In the city, the building in which Alexander Nikolaevich lived served as its own fence: it was a city block in which all entrances faced a large courtyard. Uniformed men guarded the gates between the building and the outside world. Seryozha found the men interesting and tried to charm them by talking to them. He knew he was charming—everyone said so, everyone agreed that he was wonderfully cute and fat and blond. But he could never get so much as a smile out of the men.