subject matter, then his motive will have shifted onto his goal. This never seemed to happen for Arutyunyan.
She became seriously ill after her second year. Her medical leave lasted another two years. She came back older and perhaps smarter, and after passing exams for one year, was allowed to resume learning as a fourth-year student. This was the year students chose their specialty and began research projects. Arutyunyan landed in social psychology, and a new life began. Graduate students led seminars, including one on attraction. The young instructor talked about the threat of castration that men perceived as emanating from highly attractive women, and his students went wild. This was no "activity theory," this was sex and the psyche and everything they had dreamed of thinking about when they applied to the psychology department. Gradually, Arutyunyan and some of her classmates discovered that the space around them was not entirely airless. Russian architecture, created as it was for a very cold climate, contains a peculiar invention called the fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one's lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.
One such fortochka was the thinker Merab Mamardashvili, who lectured in the philosophy department. He talked about Marx and Freud as intellectual revolutionaries, which was akin to heresy since Arutyunyan and her friends thought that Freud was something like God and Marx more like the Devil, but witnessing someone thinking —actually thinking—out loud proved exhilarating. Another fortochka was Alexander Luria, who lectured in the clinical psychology specialty. Luria had served as chairman of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in the 1920s,19 had survived by going into neurology, and had become a great storyteller of the mind. Across a generation, an ocean, and the Iron Curtain, he managed to inspire Oliver Sacks, who considered Luria his teacher in the art of the "neurological novel."20
The most important fortochka of all was found in the university library, which contained the spetskhran, a restricted-access collection to which a resourceful student or researcher could gain access. The spetskhran contained Freud's case studies. It was the most compelling, most engrossing, most mind-shattering thing Arutyunyan had ever read. Only years later, long after the last of the old Russian psychoanalysts had died, did she realize that what tied all the fortochkas together was not just that they gave her new knowledge and that they contrasted markedly with the mind-numbing recitations that filled the university, but that they all saw and described human beings the way she wanted to understand them.
Every school of psychology has its own concept of the person. Carl Rogers's sees people as basically good but often unlucky: they must be tended to better. The cognitive behaviorists imagine imprints that interfere with the functioning of otherwise serviceable human beings. The human being of psychoanalysis is a complicated creature, a creature capable of reflection but doomed to make mistakes in the process of reflecting, a creature endowed with huge, destructive energies. It is by no means an innocent creature, born good and merely handicapped by external forces. This was the creature Arutyunyan wanted to study. It would be years before she was able to articulate this, but for now she was writing her thesis on cognitive dissonance, thereby creating her own little fortochka. It turned out you could do that—write about Soviet people as though they could contain contradictions and inner conflicts—as long as you framed the story in requisite meaningless phrases lifted from one of the approved textbooks.
GUDKOV
what was arutyunyan going to do with all the knowledge she was hoarding? Being able to apply one's theoretical expertise was an unimaginable luxury in the airless space—if one was a psychologist or social scientist, that is, rather than a rocket one. Intellectuals aspired to and prized luxuries of a different order: an unburdensome job in a nontoxic environment that left time for thinking and breathing some fortochka air. This was a lot to want, and getting it required luck, brains, and connections. Arutyunyan, both of whose parents were sociologists, got a job at the Institute of Sociology, and this was virtually a dream setup.
An odd feature of the time—most likely an intended result of the system's highly developed ability to suppress those with deep expertise or excessive passion—was that people often had to work in fields that ran parallel to their primary interests. Ten years before Arutyunyan graduated from the department of psychology and went to work at the Institute of Sociology, a young man who wanted nothing more than to be a sociologist was writing a term paper on Freud's concept of defense mechanisms. Lev Gudkov had set out to be a journalist like his own father. Two years in a row he tried to gain entrance to Moscow's exclusive Institute of Foreign Relations, which trained diplomats and foreign correspondents, a high percentage of them fated to work for intelligence services. Both times Gudkov failed the essay portion of the entrance exams, which was graded on a dual scale: one mark for form and one for content. Both years, his form was deemed excellent and his content got a failing grade. He was not well-versed enough in what he was supposed to think. A criticism that would haunt his early career was that he lacked "critical thinking"— meaning, he was not sufficiently critical of anything that diverged from the current Party line.
Gudkov gave up and enrolled as an evening student at the journalism department of Moscow State University. This was one of the university's least challenging branches, and evening students, especially, were left to their own devices. For many of them, the department offered a nearly painless way to obtain a university diploma after six years of attending some lectures after work (the program was longer than normal because of its light course load). Gudkov realized that if he did not seek out knowledge himself, it would never find him. He looked, and eventually stumbled upon an elective lecture course offered by sociologist Yuri Levada.
The year was 1968, and the fact that thirty-eight-year-old Levada called himself a sociologist, and his subject sociology, was almost revolutionary. Sociology was not exactly banned in the Soviet Union, but the name of the discipline had been reduced to something like a curse word. Lenin himself had inaugurated it as a Soviet insult. The problem with sociology was much the same as with psychoanalysis: the field of study refused to be a "science" that could be used to create a new society of new men. A year before the Philosophers' Ship sailed, one of Lenin's closest allies, Nikolai Bukharin, published The Theory of Historical Materialism, an attempt at a sort of Marxist textbook of everything, written in a folksy language intended for the proletariat. Three things that Bukharin did in this textbook proved deadly for Soviet sociology: he included new ideas that he believed advanced Marxist theory, he subtitled it A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, and he proclaimed the supreme importance of sociology among the social sciences because it "examines not some one aspect of public life but all of public life in all its complexity."21 Lenin hated the book, and the word "sociology" took the brunt of his rage. He underlined it throughout the book and supplied a small variety of comments in the margins: "Haha!" "Eclectic!" "Help!" and the like.22 In another eight years, when Bukharin was deposed in a Party power struggle, Stalin recalled Lenin's skepticism by describing Bukharin's work as possessed of "the hypertrophied pretentiousness of a half-baked theoretician."23 Bukharin was eventually executed. Much earlier, sociology had had to go into hiding.