LYOSHA
lyosha grew up not quite at the opposite end of the Soviet class spectrum from Seryozha but at a great, unbridgeable remove. His family, too, had privilege, and Lyosha was aware of this growing up. His grandfather, a collective farmer, had had a local Party career. This would have meant several years of added pay for serving a term in the regional Soviet, a putative legislative body, and, later, some informal privileges of access. When he died in 1978, at the age of sixty or so, he had a bit more than others in the village: he left his family a cow. His widow, Lyosha's grandmother, sold the cow a couple of years later so that one of her five children could go to university in Perm, the nearest big city. Higher education in the Soviet Union was free, and students who had consistently high grades received a monthly stipend, yet with the food shortages, and the shortages of most other things one needed for living, no young person could reasonably expect to survive without help from home.
Lyosha's mother, Galina, the fourth-born and the smartest of her siblings, was lucky to get the help. Her older brother had gone to a military college after his compulsory service, but their mother had not had the money to send any of the rest to university or even so much as to help them leave the village. Two sisters married out, though both would soon be widowed. Then there was the cow, and the sale of the cow, and Galina went to Perm. After university she became a history teacher. She did not have to move back to the village: she was assigned to work in the town of Solikamsk, where, as a teacher, she qualified for a room and later even a small apartment of her own.
Solikamsk was one of the oldest settlements in the Urals: salt was mined there starting in the fifteenth century. In the 1930s and 1940s the town swelled with labor camps: tens of thousands of inmates were brought in from elsewhere in Russia and, later, from the occupied Baltic states and from defeated Germany.14 By the time Galina came here in the late 1970s, the camps were gone but the town, like so many Soviet towns, seemed bloated: many of its roughly hundred thousand residents lived like temporary settlers, in makeshift accommodations.
By the age of thirty-one, Galina was working as the vice-principal of a trade school and seeing the principal of another trade school in town. He was married. She became pregnant and planned to have an abortion. It would not have been her first, and this was normaclass="underline" in the absence of methods for pregnancy prevention—hormonal contraceptives were unavailable in the Soviet Union and condoms were of abominable quality and in short supply—abortion was a common contraception method. In 1984, the year Galina became pregnant, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births.15 There was nothing shameful about having an abortion, so there was no reason to keep the plan secret: Galina's family knew, and her brother-in-law talked her out of it. He pointed out the obvious: she was over thirty, still unmarried, and if she had an abortion this time, she might never have a child at all. Statistically speaking, he was right: more than 90 percent of Russian women were married by age thirty,16 and few had children after that age.17
Galina agreed. She would keep the baby and raise him alone. This, too, was an ordinary path. For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, without forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility. "The new project was designed to encourage both men and women to have non- conjugal sexual relationships that would result in procreation," writes historian Mie Nakachi.— When Galina's son was born on May 9— Victory Day—1985, she gave him her own last name, Misharina, and the patronymic Yurievich, to indicate that his father's name was Yuri. Lyosha's full official name was thus Alexei Yurievich Misharin.
Galina became the principal at what was called a "correctional school." The name was misleading: the school was less a correctional facility than the state's attempt to compensate for any number of things that had gone terribly wrong with its students. Correctional schools were created to serve children deemed incapable of succeeding in mainstream schools. Most of these schools provided boarding during the week or year-round; some had special services for children with disabilities.
Galina worked at a correctional school of the most common type— the type for children whose parents failed to take care of them, often because they drank. Her students came from the neighborhood that lay between Lyosha's childhood block and the schooclass="underline" while he and Galina lived in a regular concrete-block building, this neighborhood was made up of wooden barracks left over from when the Gulag exploded Solikamsk's population. They called it the barachnyi district. Walking through it, as Galina did on her way to and from work six days a week, was considered dangerous; she carried a knife to protect herself. Sometimes she had to take Lyosha with her to the barachnyi district, usually when she was looking for a student who had gone missing. Lyosha found the barracks impressive and terrifying. The ceilings looked like they might cave in. There was a stench that was stronger and more offensive than anything he had ever smelled. Most of the inhabitants, including the parents with whom Galina occasionally had long conversations, were drunk. Lyosha was aware that this was somehow a function of poverty. He also made a mental connection between poverty and the word "suicide," which Galina used with some regularity when talking about her students. Other words included "pregnancy" and "alcohol" and, later, "drugs." These were children—older than Lyosha but children nonetheless, she made this clear—who drank, got pregnant, and killed themselves. Lyosha understood that the fact that these words did not apply to his and Galina's world was a function of privilege.
One did not have to go to the barachnyi district to see extreme poverty: it was found on Lyosha and Galina's block as well. A woman who lived one door down drank heavily, and her kids went to the correctional school. Some nights she passed out and the kids were locked out. Those nights, they often slept on Galina's landing— Lyosha figured they chose it because they knew she would not hurt them. Unfortunately, this meant that some mornings when Galina opened the door to take Lyosha to preschool the landing stank: the children went to the bathroom there. Eventually, in the 1990s, the building's residents installed a lock on the front door, to keep these and other interlopers out.
Lyosha's preschool days were long: he was dropped off at six,
before his mother walked the half hour to her own school, and was often not picked up until ten, when only the night guards remained on the grounds. This was just the way it had to be, because Galina was raising Lyosha alone, she had a demanding job, and her own mother lived too far away to help on a daily basis. Galina told Lyosha that his father lived in the big city of Perm, where she had gone to university. Perm was 120 kilometers* away, but for how often people went there, it may as well have been a thousand miles. Sometimes, a nice man stopped by and spent time with them. Galina told Lyosha to call him Uncle Yura.