Читать книгу The Cult in my Grandmother's House - Анна Сандермоен - Страница 7

2. Brainwashing

THE FIRST COMMUNE ON LAKHUTI

On arrival in Dushanbe I was taken aback. It was the town where I was born, and the house where I spent my early years, where every millimetre was my territory, strewn with my beloved toys, but – it was different. In this tiny two-room apartment with its combined bathroom and toilet there were about 20 people of various ages, all complete strangers to me. They all slept side by side on the floor, tightly pressed against each other, sharing blankets and pillows. They ate on the floor too, on a spread-out oilcloth. The apartment had ceased to be a cosy and safe place to play.

All these people were always in a good mood and with unbelievably exaggerated emotions.

In addition, they all had lice, which I soon got too.

My grandmother hardly seemed to notice me; or rather, she gave me only as much attention as she gave any of the others.

At first people were constantly rebuking me, things like

“Don’t cross your legs! It means you think you’re better than everyone else. Don’t fold your hands on your chest – do you think you’re Napoleon? Looks like you’ve got delusions of grandeur.”

A seven-year old child could hardly be expected to understand these remarks (who Napoleon was, what grandeur is, let alone delusions thereof), but I stopped folding my hands and crossing my legs.

Apparently crossing the limbs was considered a psychological defence mechanism, protection from external influence.

Members of a cult, however, are supposed to be constantly open, that is, vulnerable – so they can be controlled.

I had to learn how to plait my long hair myself, because going about with loose hair like Carmen was just not done. If I didn’t plait my hair, the adults would ask if I wanted to look like a slut. One time I asked what a slut was, and they told me it was a prostitute. I didn’t dare to ask what a prostitute was. By their intonation I had already understood it was something very bad and applied only to beautiful women and girls. After that I came to the conclusion that being beautiful was very bad. It wasn’t safe. Although, I wondered, if the beautiful Carmen was bad, then why did we still listen to that opera? Ah, but she dies at the end… does that mean she deserved it?

“TAPPING” AND “LAYERING”

One day one of the grown-up women, Natalya Yevgenyevna, called me into her room and said she was going to give me a treatment. Everything was so absurd that I didn’t even question what I needed to be treated for. Indeed, would any child question authority, when they are totally abandoned and there is no one trustworthy to ask? She sat me in front of her, looked in my eyes and began in a confidential tone:

“Ania, I know you are angry and that you have resistance. Where would you say your anger is, on a scale of 1 to 10? And your resistance?”

Later I and all the other members of the cult were asked this question all the time. I always answered that my anger and resistance were somewhere between 7 and 10 on the 10-point scale. If the adults were so convinced that I was angry and full of resistance, why should I disappoint them?

Then Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to close my eyes and put both my hands face down on the table. Over the course of several minutes she tapped out a set rhythm on the table with a special wooden knocker in the shape of a mushroom, and I had a minute to copy the rhythm with my palms, keeping my eyes closed. For one tap I had to answer with the right hand, for two the left. The right hand corresponded to the left half of the brain, and the left to the right. It was considered good if you made mistakes with both hands, the more the better. Skewed results, where you made many more mistakes with one hand than the other, were evidence of brain dysfunction. If you made hardly any mistakes at all then it meant you were practically stupified from anger, aggression and resistance, and you needed active treatment right away. At this the educational psychologists would confer among themselves, concede to the authoritative opinion of the Chief, and then what ususally followed was a huge dose of therapy: speeches, mechanotherapy, and layering (explained below).

To sum up, it was with the help of this tapping that they measured a person’s level of aggression.

Besides this test there were others. They were all intended to measure the current condition and potential of the brain. There were auditory tests (where you had to remember and repeat combinations of words at speed), visual (remember combinations of cards, and then reproduce them, also under time pressure), and tactile (they would bend each of your fingers, and you had to remember and repeat the order, with eyes closed). These tests were all known as evidence, that’s what people would call it, “making evidence”.

Chloroethane

After that first test, the tapping one, Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to take my pants off and lie down on my side. She started to pour liquid chloroethane over my buttocks, first on one side then the other, and on special points on my toes. It was sore and I felt an unpleasant burning sensation on my skin. After the procedure you weren’t allowed to raise your head so the best thing was to make yourself fall asleep or at least lie with eyes closed.

Later the skin would itch like crazy where the chloroethane had touched it, and would come out in small crusty burns. But with the years I got used to it. After that first time I got this treatment almost every day for six years. I never noticed any change. Everyone there got this same treatment all the time, adults as well as children. It was known as layering; “to layer a person”.

I should say that at least there was never any sexual subtext to any of this treatment. No one ever touched my genitals.

Much later I read that chloroethane is a strong drug and that even small doses can have a strong intoxicating effect. People can even become addicted to it. But we never knew that and never noticed any special effect from it. At least I never did.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS

Soon I found out there was a Chief orchestrating all this confusion: Viktor Davydovich Stolbun. He was an elderly man (at least he seemed so to me, although in reality he wasn’t more than 50), short, with a big meaty nose, dishevelled grey hair and small eyes, and everyone respected and feared him. To be on the safe side I also started to respect and fear him.

We referred to our commune as the collective. It was made up of people who wanted to build true communism, to save a world perishing from widespread schizophrenia.

As the Chief saw it, humanity’s main problem was that most people in the world were suffering from schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug addiction and other serious psychological aberrations. “Children are suffering and perishing!” he would cry pathetically, gesticulating dramatically. From his point of view, absolutely all physical ailments, including cancer, infectious diseases and broken bones, stemmed from psychological deviance, that is from impure mindsets and ways of thinking. For a person to recover, they had to correct their psyche and restructure their personality.

The main reason for a deviant psyche was the corroded system of family relations. Psychological correction was therefore only possible with the involvement of the whole family. Thus, people came to the collective (or rather, were forced to come) with their whole family. Any relatives who refused to join the collective for whatever reason were considered traitors and potential enemies. Anyone who left the collective for any reason was also automatically put in this category.

My whole family, with the exception of my grandfather, was completely in thrall to this ideology.

This meant there were whole family clans in the collective. In turn the whole collective was split into two groups: adults and children. I was in the children’s category, obviously. We lived separately from the adults, and differently. Sometimes we wouldn’t see the adults for months.

The Chief took on patients for “treatment”. Applicants included certified alcoholics and schizophrenics, as well as those without any formal diagnosis but who were having difficulties in certain areas, for example in child-rearing. There were also assistants to the Chief: these included his wife, amateur enthusiasts, and people who had already been successfully “cured”. They called themselves educational psychologists.

The main form of treatment was speeches. This was a form of brainwashing: you stood in the middle of a crowd of people who would all try to prove you totally worthless. Eventually the moment would come when you’d no longer have a single doubt on the subject. Then they would patronisingly indulge you with handouts in the form of promises: “Fine, if you beg us, we might help you get better”. Then you understood what happiness means. You might not be getting better (as if you were even sick in the first place) but for all that you’d always be part of the cult.

It was mainly women who became clients of the cult. If you were very lucky, you might even get impregnated, and then you’d have the chance to bring a psychologically healthy child into the world – since the Chief was the only healthy person in the world, his seed was healthy too. Thus the Chief came to father many children. Thank goodness I was only a child, so personally no one touched me in that way. That was a rare piece of luck.

The speeches were accompanied by procedures. The patient was first tested for levels of aggression and tension, then evidence was collected, to investigate the brain and its potential, its stronger and weaker areas (to this day I remember the terms: the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes); and finally chloroethane was dripped on or electric shocks were applied to various parts of your body to act on your brain. In some ways it seems similar to acupuncture. The expected effect was that the treatment would help you become kinder and more relaxed, free of the negative thought patterns that gave rise to illnesses like cancer and tuberculosis, among others.

The cult found a psychosomatic explanation for absolutely any ailment, offering to solve the problem through psychotherapy and chloroethane. For example, the psychosomatic effect of cancer was a loss of faith, as well as deep hopelessness and despair. So if someone got cancer, they’d be asked, “Well, why are you such a wimp?”. Basically any psychotherapy began with these words.

I myself thought like this for many years, until I moved to Switzerland. Here many problems that in Russia had seemed insoluble – because I never managed to “get rid of the aggression causing the illness” – are solved simply by judiciously applying the right medicine or surgical intervention.

In the cult there was another important condition for treatment: the person had to ask for treatment themselves. They had to beg, preferably on their knees. This meant they were already broken, had lost all hope, and would therefore agree to any conditions. All that remained was to restructure their personality. I was a frequent witness of how the educational psychologists would wait until the patient had reached the condition they needed to condescendingly offer their help. Nobody saw this approach as inhumane; on the contrary, it was one of the main elements of the method.

If someone was close to death, the idea was that treatment would only be effective in one situation: if the person themselves came and asked for help. The fact that a dying person was physically unable to do that was explained as unwillingness to change in order to live. In other words, it was a personal and conscious choice.

For example, this is how Natalya Sergeevna Karapetova, who had several children by Stolbun, passed away. My grandmother, Dina Mikhailovna Chedia, also died like this.

WHY “CHIEF”?

I want to explain why I prefer not to call the Chief by name.

Firstly, I can’t bring myself to say his name. He doesn’t deserve that honour.

Secondly, the Chief is a manifestation of the extreme narcissism and immorality that is enabled by absolute impunity. Unfortunately, there are many people like him on the planet. I write not about him as an isolated case, but about the situation as typical. It’s not important what he was called or who he was personally. What is important is the occurrence itself, and what effect it had on specific people such as myself.

These memoirs do contain the real names of many adults. I consider them the Chief’s accomplices, real accessories to the crime. They took sides with him and so proved themselves corrupt and rotten. They are criminals too.

THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH WE WERE RAISED

The biggest mistake most parents make, according to the Chief, is spoiling their children. Coddling delays development of the brain and so the child becomes sluggish, passive and dependent, with weak cognitive faculties like imagination and memory. Families with an over-solicitious parenting style only produce spoilt, capricious children with pretentious behaviour. Smothering children causes psychological problems, followed by physical ailments. Children need to be given as much independence and freedom of choice as possible. Parents need to ensure the family has a congenial psychological atmosphere, with goodwill and “pure relations” between the sexes.

Another problem arising from over-parenting is overfeeding, or allowing regular overeating. Spoilt children will stuff themselves silly.

The Chief also often railed against philistinism as the dominant value system, symbolised by hot water and an orderly house. In these sorts of families children grow up as stupid bourgeoisie, concerned only with achieving material comfort.

Relations between parents and children also needed serious correction. Parents who talk down to their children hamper their development. If they don’t treat the child as an equal but only wield their authority and power, then it humiliates the child and lowers his self esteem so he can’t develop freely. The whole idea was that all childhood illnesses are the direct result of attention seeking. When children demand care and attention they “throw their toys out the pram”, thus feeding their egocentrism. This is the only reason children ever fall ill.

MESSAGES

Children who came to the collective had to be isolated from their parents. This was considered necessary to break them out of their familiar environment and show them a different system of relationships.

Meetings with parents were only allowed very rarely and under strict supervision. Letters were also strictly regulated. We were supposed to bring any letters to be checked by the educators, and letters from parents were always opened before we got them. Sometimes we never received them at all. Letters were known as messages. We weren’t meant to have time for letters: we were busy fighting our good fight, so why would we need letters? However, we were encouraged to write postcards to our parents on public holidays (the anniversary of the October revolution, Victory Day, International Women’s Day, Defenders of the Fatherland day, New Year). We didn’t really celebrate birthdays – that would have been way too individualistic. Any cards we did write were formulaic: “Dear mum! I am glad to be here in the collective with my friends and companions, and to be fighting together for our dedicated cause”, and so on.

It would never enter anyone’s head to use the normal postal service. Outside was all a conspiracy; besides, we never had any money for stamps or envelopes. So any messages had to wait for the right opportunity and could only be passed on personally by our members.

I have kept a few letters from that time. None have envelopes: they are almost all just folded notes with the recipient’s name on the back. Some are reproduced as pictures in this book. You can infer a lot from them: the values we lived by, the principles we followed, even the air we breathed.

I always preserved my grandmother’s messages with special care. By some miracle I still have a postcard I wrote her. I probably wrote it in the third class when I mastered joined-up writing, but apparently I didn’t give it to her, probably because of all the inkblots. I kept it to myself, safe in my “box of treasures” (the only personal item I was allowed). It is particularly telling how I don’t know how to address her: I started off with a pet name and crossed it out, I swivel between the familiar and formal forms of “you”, and even exhort her to “be mother” (sic).

Grandma Dina! With all my heart I congratulate you on Victory Day! Many thanks that you sent me such warmth and soul. Many thanks that you will never forsake me in a difficult time and will always come to my aid, like a true friend. Thank you. I hope you will always be just as kind, tender, warm and mother.

Many kisses. Till we meet.

From your granddaughter Ania Chedia.

GRANDMA

My grandmother was an emotional and impressionable character. She was famous in academic circles as an excellent researcher and educator, and her students worshipped her. This clever and vivacious woman, so capable of independent thought and picking things up on the fly, was so zombified by Soviet propaganda that she turned out unable to filter information in favour of common sense.

The reason for my time in the cult had basically been pulled out of thin air.

Grandma had been born under a dictatorship and was exiled to central Asia. She had passed through fire and water, like everyone in those days, especially women. Giving birth in such unsanitary conditions was hellish. Dushanbe had grown out of semi-nomadic settlements so you can barely imagine the state of its medical facilities. In what passed for maternity wards you couldn’t even see the walls and ceiling, so covered were they with blood and flies. Grandma had given birth to my mother in Leningrad, but my uncle (mother’s brother) was born three years later in Dushanbe. Soon after birth he fell ill with polio, hardly surprising in those conditions. The whole family nursed Kotka, as he was affectionately known, from a spoon and dropper, and he miraculously survived. Since then he obviously occupied a special place in the family’s affections. When Kotka reached legal adulthood, Grandma decided there was something wrong with him, either because the Chief she had not long met put the idea in her head, or because there really was something strange about him. As I’ve mentioned before, in those times it was just not done to be out of the ordinary. Carmen and Don Jose only existed on the stage.

And my uncle was crazy for the stage: he graduated from the conservatory, where he had studied to be an opera director. But it was easier to declare eccentricity a mental deviation than to accept it or adapt to it. In those days, in that country, no one knew what it was or how to appreciate it.

This is precisely why operas were so popular – it was how Homo sovieticus achieved sublimation.

Grandma was a willful woman who had power over her son, and she assigned him to the collective for treatment. Elated by the idea of a panacea, she devoted her whole life to it. For in Dushanbe – this remote place on the border with Afghanistan; where there was nothing apart from hills, semi-nomadic settlements moulded from dung, and latrines where the only thing to wipe your backside with was a stone or your hand, which you then wiped on the wall; where to be female was shameful in itself; where the only chance to chat with other Russian-speakers was limited to a couple of opera trips in a year – had suddenly appeared a messiah from Moscow.

Yes, the Chief was from Moscow, with an apartment address on the prestigious Kotelnicheskaya embankment. He came with two daughters from his previous marriage, Katya and Yulia, his wife Valentina who was his faithful companion, and also two sons from his previous marriage, Vladimir and Andrei. And trailing after this gang came a flock of about 30 people known as the collective. All of them had left their homes and apartments and had come roaming over the whole USSR in search of refuge and new patients to treat. Blood-sucking parasites in search of a warm body to burrow into.

Grandma was glad to feel part of something bigger than herself, a mission to save humanity. Her apartment and all her meagre possessions fell to the disposal of the collective. As someone with influence, known over the whole of Tajikistan, Grandma immediately brought new people and resources to support the collective in its work.

A new and official clinic appeared in the centre of Dushanbe to receive outpatients.

Once the initial steps were finished and the organisation was set up, Grandma contacted my parents living in Leningrad and said something like, “Hey why don’t you send little Ania here? Didn’t you say she was having trouble at school? Her maths mark wasn’t brilliant? Uhuh. And she didn’t want to learn poems by heart! See, there’s something not right with her. Let her come here and we’ll treat her, then we’ll see.”

Grandma had become the main proponent of the Chief and his method. She was the brains and the academic core of the cult. She believed in what she was doing with all her heart. She gave lectures, published papers and ran round all the authorities getting official passes and documents. Grandma could sound very convincing. She was an established paleontologist, so it was a natural next step to bring in the idea of the human brain and combine it with evolutionary theories of organisms in general to suggest new therapies and remedial treatments.

It was the perfect combination of charlatan and academic.

Of course, Grandma was a real find for the Chief. In her turn, as an energetic and educated woman with two kids on her hands, tormented by loneliness and disappointment, exiled to the ends of the earth, where woman is nothing, where to prove the contrary you had to be able to part the clouds with your glance, Grandma tumbled headlong into the collective, like into a rabbit hole.

Everybody needs to feel like somebody. Whoever they are, everybody needs to feel like they belong to something big and important. For my grandma this was the collective.

SICK KIDS

The collective would receive children with various illnesses: psoriasis, neurodermatitis, schizophrenia (including nuclear or process schizophrenia, the type with the worst prognosis and hardest to treat), as well as the children of alcoholics and drug addicts – or as we were told, from “difficult families”. I often heard the adults say we were brought up on the Makarenko system. The prominent Soviet educational theorist Anton Semyonovich Makarenko had always been a great influence on the Chief.

Many years later I found out that nowhere near all the children at the collective were ill or from difficult circumstances. Most of them were there for totally different reasons. Either it had been easy to convince the parents their children were sick, and so increase the flock that way, or the parents themselves were already part of the collective and so brought the whole family along; or sometimes they were even the children of high-ranking officials in the Soviet Union. Children of high-ranking officials and people with connections were welcomed with pleasure as they would provide both financial support and a veneer of legitimacy. Of course, for every child there the parents paid a monthly fee, and many also donated their apartments as accommodation.

Since there’s no such thing as a person without problems, there will always be something for psychosomatic ideology and dogma to latch on to.

Once they’d got so much as a hair on your head, you were lost.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Our clinic was situated in the centre of Dushanbe. Between ourselves we called it the White House. Alcoholics and schizophrenics were treated there. It was a typical single-storey central Asian building of whitewashed adobe, with offices and corridors inside. The offices had tables, chairs and benches, where the patients were examined, and then layered.

The street around the White House was dusty and had wooden benches, under which I sometimes found stray sweet wrappers which I loved to smell and keep in my pocket.

I don’t remember anything else about the White House – I was too young then.

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGISTS

The people in the white coats were respectfully known as educational psychologists, always by their first name and patronymic. Yulia Viktorovna, Natalya Yevgenyevna, Nadezhda Yurevna, Vladimir Vladimirovich and others (including Stolbun himself): none of them had a psychological or medical, let alone educational background. The only more or less constant member of the group who had a medical education was Stolbun’s wife, Valentina Pavlovna Streltsova. She preferred to live in comfort, so I personally saw her only rarely.

I don’t want to exaggerate the quality and level of Soviet education in the fields of education, psychology and psychiatry, because those fields were generally charlatans and were far removed from science. An absence of formal education in these fields could even have been an advantage. It could have been… but in this case it wasn’t.

SPEECHES AND FAINTING

These speeches were held all the time and at any time, even in the middle of the night. This was real brainwashing. The familiar cry could come at any time: “Come on everyone” and you’d have to get up and follow everyone, like zombies, to a speech. The Chief would talk for many hours at a time, gesticulating in the centre of the circle that formed around him, and scratching his shaggy head. His shoulders were always white with dandruff. You weren’t allowed to lie down or even sit. You couldn’t interrupt him or ask questions. We had to maintain absolute silence, and listen reverently.

While talking, the Chief would look everyone in the eyes in turn, as if evaluating the impact of his words, whether people were changing under their action. Periodically he would call someone or other into the circle to be discussed.

There were times during these interminable speeches that people fainted from tiredness or hunger. This was considered a success: it meant the person had truly comprehended the Chief’s point. It meant their level of aggression had fallen and they had readjusted and relaxed to such an extent that they had lost consciousness. A truly logical chain of thought!

During these speeches I often dreamed of feigning a faint because I was so tired of standing. It was terribly boring and I wanted to do something different.

And of course I did not understand much of what was said, apart from that we were terribly sick and if we had not got ourselves into the collective then we would have died. Everything outside the collective was dangerous and corroded. There were so many enemies on the outside who wanted to harm us and even disband us, and so we had to live as if in a wartime bunker, in the trenches, and be very suspicious of outsiders. The Chief often called our enemies “Zionists”.

Later on I realised that our main enemy was not Zionists, but offical Soviet medicine, which did not recognise our methods and treatments. The collective’s activities were actually banned. Later a criminal case was brought against the Chief for child abuse.

Being a Jew himself, the Chief exhibited admirable obstinacy over many years on the issue of the Zionists who supposedly wanted to humiliate us. To this day I still don’t understand why Zionists would want to humilate Jews. Was he just paranoid? My childish imagination drew the most outlandish and terrifying pictures of the Zionists who were supposedly chasing us. I imagined them with faces twisted with hate, gnashing teeth and long twisted hands with claws, reaching out to grab me and drag me to their fearful lair, where they would drink my warm child’s blood or do something even worse, which I couldn’t quite imagine.

The Chief devoted a large part of his interminable monologues to the theme of relations between men and women. He said they should be clean, “without smut”, but that all of us had only smutty relationships. Me personally he called a whore. So to the words slut and prostitute I added another new word: whore. I had only just turned eight.

Everyone in the collective worshipped the Chief. He became like a God to me too. My parents had gone and I had no one else to worship.

Grandma and uncle acted like we were total strangers, so I was afraid to even approach them.

AUNT KATYA

In general you weren’t allowed to call the adults auntie and uncle; only by full name and patronymic. But I really felt like calling Ekaterina Viktorovna Aunt Katya. She was like family to me. She was calm, kind, clever and beautiful. She cared about me and talked to me like a human. She didn’t treat me like another adult (all the others did, it was considered normal), but like the child I was. This was why I did my homework with her and liked it. She helped me learn a lot of different poems by heart: poems by Alexander Pushkin, Agniya Barto, Irina Tokmakova and many others. To this day I can hear the perky couplets in my head that Aunt Katya and I would recite together:

Buy an onion, a green onion,

A potato and a carrot!

Buy them for our little girl,

Even though she’s a little minx!

Once we went camping by the mountain river Varzob. It was early spring, all around there were almond trees blooming and flocks grazing. I couldn’t help trying a sheep dropping, because it looked like someone had been scattering chocolates about. Aunt Katya taught me not to lean against the trees in spring: it’s very dangerous because scorpions live under the bark and spring is their mating season so they are extra poisonous and prone to stinging.

Aunt Katya often read aloud to me. Once, after that camping trip, in the collective, she got out a big art book, sat me down beside her and, moving her finger over the sculptures in the illustrations, started to tell me about gods and goddesses, retelling the greek myths. She traced the images of nude bodies with her finger, saying all the while, “Look, how beautiful, look at these lines, isn’t that lovely…”

The revered geneticist Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson wrote that a child’s personality forms under the influence of impressions, so that what has a big effect in a person’s childhood can largely define their life. I remember those moments spent with Aunt Katya very well. For my whole life, whenever I’ve come across something from antiquity, I’ve remembered what she smelled like and the light that came off her. And every time in my head I answer her: “Truly beautiful”.

But my happiness did not last long. Aunt Katya threw herself out the window. I didn’t see it; I don’t remember where I was. She simply disappeared somewhere, and then I was taken to visit her in hospital. The fact I was taken to visit her was a surprisingly humane act, because usually problems were hushed up and hidden, and no one would ever find out the truth if it didn’t fit the doctrine.

Aunt Katya survived, but had badly damaged her neck, and there was something wrong with her jaw: you could see the scar. Someone told me later that during her fall she had grabbed the vine on the second floor, which had saved her. I also found out later that she had been pregnant but as a result of the fall had lost the baby.

After that Aunt Katya disappeared from my life. She left the collective for ever, and for years the Chief only mentioned her in his speeches, calling her a prostitute and an enemy. I came to the conclusion they had had a row, but I never believed she was a bad person. There was another sceptical rumour going around saying she had become a simple tram driver, but I never understood that. We had always been taught that normal, simple, working class jobs were noble, so why were they so scathing about Aunt Katya going to work on a tram? What was shameful about it?

MY NAME

In this large group of people I was now totally alone. Over the six years in the cult I practically forgot my own name. Besides Aunt Katya, no one called me by name or only on those rare occasions when for some incomprehensible reason I suddenly became “good”, “healthy” or otherwise came into grace. Normally the adults either called me by my surname or came up with various strange nicknames. This sounded jovial, sometimes almost affectionate, but I always detected some kind of ironic derision. We children, copying the adults, also often addressed each other not by name but by various teasing epithets.

If by chance I ever heard my name, Ania, I always froze because it was so unusual. Every time I wondered what had happened, why was I suddenly Ania? Not filth, slut, arse, Chedia, Chedipops, pseudointelligentsia, sicko, evil bastard, filthy beast, or any of the things I usually got called, but Ania.

This is how children completely lose their identity. Such seemingly trivial instances soon build up and through them children lose their pride in themselves and in their name, roots, and family. They lose their pride and that means also their accountability.

MY FIRST AND LAST FRIEND

Our apartment on Lakhuti had become a commune, and more and more new children were brought there. They were from ages about 5 to 16 and were very diverse. I was never close to any of them, but I do remember one very well.

One day a boy came to us, about 12 years old. We became friends. Then I got my first slap in the face – a baptism of fire into adult life. I was told that I was definitely a whore, that I was perverting the boy, that I would drag him under the table and fuck him there.

Swearing was always encouraged: it was said to be the language of working folk, not “pseudointellectuals”.

I was the centre of long public speeches of a very harsh tone. Now I can say with full accountability that sexual awareness only appeared in me many years later, when I was approaching 20; back then I didn’t even understand the meaning of the obscene words. I fell into disgrace, and I was hunted like an animal by everyone, young and old.

I was totally shunned and treated like a slave. I prostrated myself and tried with all my might to “improve”.

I had no choice. Grandma was totally on their side. Mum and dad were far away and also very sick (so I was told); I couldn’t go back to them until they got better, otherwise I’d die.

There was also grandpa. But he had categorically refused to entertain the ideas of the collective, so I was told he was psychologically deficient and couldn’t be trusted. To be honest, I had always doubted there was anything wrong with grandpa. But I did believe what they said about my parents. After all, it was them who had put me there and never came back for me.

Since one of my first attachments was curtailed so crudely, I lost the desire to get close to anyone.

~

“Out of 10, how much anger do you have?”

“9”

“And protest?”

“9”

“Very good. Let’s cure you.”

HOW I WAS CONVINCED I WAS HALLUCINATING AND HEARING VOICES

Besides questions asking me to rate my anger and aggression out of 10, the educational psychologists who tried to cure me (which they did constantly), also asked about hallucinations and voices. I usually answered somewhere between 7 and 10 before the treatment, and after, when they did another test to observe the results, of course I gave ratings that were 2-3 points lower. I don’t remember ever being able to bring myself to say that I had no aggression whatsoever.

One of the most important components of the Chief’s teachings was the conviction that all mentally ill people definitely have visual and auditory hallucinations. I never fully knew what that meant, but since they always asked, I agreed. When they asked me to describe them, I never knew what to say. For visual hallucinations, I used my imagination. For voices, I said what sounds I actually heard, which of course were real. I remember really wanting some hallucinations, since that was what they expected of me. I listened to myself specially, but to my disappointment there was nothing there to delight the adults in white coats.

MONEY

Our parents sent money for living expenses, 60 rubles per month per child. Our parents also sent clothes. But the lion’s share of the money was not spent on feeding us or providing for us, but on something else entirely. There was no doubt that the Chief and a few other adults were significantly better fed than us. But they did it by stealing.

They said we were all equal in our fight for a bright future, that regardless of age we were all making an equal sacrifice, denying ourselves everything and working tirelessly. But in actual fact, those closer to the Chief got the choicest and tastiest morsels. This was not even considered shameful; on the contrary, we all thought it was right. Truly, if someone managed to get close to the healthiest person on earth (which the Chief was, without doubt), then it couldn’t be a coincidence. Those people deserve more. They must have good thoughts and the right attitude.

HOW SCARED WE WERE OF MEDICINE

It wasn’t just the Zionists who were our enemies, it was doctors too. The words “medical”, “pills” and so on were dirty words, almost curses. Nothing except our treatments of layering and psychotherapy (including mechanotherapy, in other words beatings) could help a person. In all the years I spent in the cult, I never once saw a normal doctor. I somehow also avoided the standard annual checkup at school. I know the Chief was terrified of dentists. Nobody to my knowledge ever visited the doctor, not for anything. All the adults had terrible teeth. In some sense it was good that I was a child and so couldn’t go totally to seed.

However, cases requiring medical attention were not all that rare in the commune.

For example, once while our children’s collective was living outside Moscow, I fell sprawling on my back from a swing; my back was so sore I could hardly move. I was taken away immediately on my own to the Chief’s apartment on Kotelnicheskaya embankment, in a prestigious part of Moscow. I stayed there alone for a while with several adults who (as normal) layered me. However, strangely, they did not scold me very harshly for having a sore back. I probably wasn’t up to it.

Once a boy managed to knock a boiling pot off the stove over himself, and he got immediately coated in panthenol as treatment. That medicine was only available nearby by chance, only thanks to the fact that we were living in the centre of Moscow at that time, in one of the parent’s apartments.

Another boy, when we were on the move somewhere, fell and scraped his whole naked torso on the hot metal grate we cooked on.

And once while working in the fields a girl was hit on the hands with a hoe.

One of our male teachers fell between the platform and a moving train, severely damaging his thigh and almost losing his leg.

One of our female teachers was attacked by a trucker who tried to rape her in the cab of his lorry.

And this is just what remains from my childhood memories.

However, to outsiders it must have seemed that we were all absolutely fine, never ill, that nothing ever happened to us and that we were always full of strength, despite our heavy labour and difficult circumstances. In fact, this was the whole point and message of our work: don’t spoil children, don’t raise them as little lords, let them work their arses off, suffer the slings and arrows, temper them in the fire!

But to an intelligent observer it was obvious that we fell sick no less frequently than other people, and maybe even more. It was just that the whole theme of illness was painstakingly hushed up around us. Whenever anyone fell ill they were rapidly quarantined, so rapidly that not even others in the cult noticed. If for some reason they couldn’t be quarantined, they were scolded for their wrong thoughts, bad attitude and behaviour.

People even died like this. As a child I was always surprised that the fact of a person’s death was so quickly glossed over. There was never any public mourning or grief, never anything special or solemn – nothing that should by rights conclude the life of a worthy person, or so it seemed to me. Somehow no one was up to it.

However, when Brezhnev died, we were obliged to grieve. But the death of the Chief’s youngest daughter’s newborn baby was put down to the cold weather. Not to the fact that his mother had wrong thoughts, or that she was a perverted woman, or that she had done something wrong to the baby, but to the fact that there was frost outside: the baby had quite simply and routinely frozen in his pram during a nap. It was the frost that was guilty. The chosen ones are excused everything.

When I was first writing my recollections (at age 23), I declared completely sincerely that, yes, seriously, despite everything, we were never ill. I really believed that. But now, with the years, remembering our life then in more detail, and through talking with other former cult members, I uncovered facts which as a child I had never even known. In fact, as often happens, much was hidden from the children intentionally.

I came to see that it is important to fact-check our childhood impressions.

WHO REMEMBERS THEIR CHILDHOOD IN THE USSR

Here in Switzerland, I know a Russian lady who is surprised every time I mention the USSR with ill will. “But what was so bad about it?” she says, “Soviet people had everything. Even if it wasn’t much, everyone had a roof over their head, free education and medicine, a job, a salary. Everything stable and predictable. Is that not heaven?!”

True, it came out later that in the USSR she had lived in her parents’ apartment, and her dad was in the army, so they were in a very privileged layer of society and had more or less enough. (They were the total opposite of our family, which was headed by an enemy of the people). That aside, her recollections of the Soviet Union are tainted with childish romanticism. Children do not see the complex relationships in social phenomena. We begin to notice and understand them only with years and experience.

This is why it is so important in adulthood to mentally return to our childhood, to reevaluate what happened then. This is why I am writing this book: I want to understand what was not right and how to make sure nothing similar happens again, either with my own children or other people’s.

THEATRE, OR ART THERAPY

There was never enough living space, and still more and more people kept joining the collective. We had to find somewhere to set up and conduct our activities. No one lived in the clinic in the centre of Dushanbe – that was where the adults worked. We lived in various apartments donated by the parents of children in the commune. My grandmother’s apartment was the headquarters, where the management lived.

Besides the speeches, layering and mechanotherapy, we also received other methods of treatment, such as art therapy: the commune had its own amateur drama group. The Chief said that theatre was a powerful psychological corrective agent. By acting on a stage, a person becomes liberated, loses their fear of appearing in public, and learns how to be sincere.

We were invited to appear on stages in the local halls where we rehearsed, and then we went on tour over the whole country. During my early days in the collective we put on Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac”. By that time we already had lots of people. They came from over the whole Soviet Union: from Moscow, Leningrad, Dmitrov, the Urals, Siberia, and of course many were from Dushanbe.

I really liked the theatre. It was interesting. Sometimes we rehearsed for days on end and simply lived on the stage and in the wings. And we received our treatments too: we were tapped and layered right there on the floor in the wings.

We had a large repertoire: we could perform about 20 different plays.

One time in the assembly hall of one school we were putting on “Dunno in the Sun City”, a story about the loveable children’s character Dunno or Neznaika created by Nikolai Nosov. I was playing Mushka. In the hall sat my parents, who had arrived for a short visit. The Chief was also watching our play. In the flow of a rehearsal he stopped us. He often did that, to start his latest speech, discussing the behaviour of this person or that person.

On this occasion the Chief was disgruntled with me. He spun a long speech, whose point I can’t remember. Then he told my parents to have a word with me. Mum and dad led me into an empty classroom, gave me a long explanation, of which I remember absolutely nothing, then sat me on a chair. Mum twisted my arms behind the chair’s back and held them so I couldn’t free myself, while my dad repeatedly beat me in the face. My nose started bleeding heavily, and my dad just kept hitting me. Later I returned home to the commune without my parents, took off my favourite dress and soaked it in a bath of cold water, but still couldn’t get the blood out. I had to throw it away.

Years later I asked my dad how he could have done such a thing to me. My dad swore he couldn’t remember anything of the sort. I believe him, now. Now I know that sometimes people simply wipe the most hideous things from their memory, because it is just as unbearable to remember as to explain.

~

“How many points would you rate your anger?”

“9”

“And protest?”

“9”

“Very good. Now let’s layer you, to remove the aggression.”

A SLAP IN THE FACE IN CHEBOKSARY

Once in Cheboksary we were appearing on stage at a boarding school. We were putting on “Terem-Teremok”, a popular cartoon of a folk tale. For the whole of my time in the collective I played the frog in that play. On this occasion I had just finished the first scene, and the curtain closed. The Chief flew up to me unexpectedly and slapped me in the face with a wide-flung arm, shouting in my face, “Will you just act normally today, you bastard?! Relax right now and stop getting angry, you beast!” I could hardly come to before the curtain had already opened. With a full hall in front of me I had to continue the play. My cheek was burning like it had been scalded. I quickly took myself in hand and acted the play to the end.

It seemed to me at the time – and for many years afterwards I was convinced! – that thanks to that slap in the face I got a wonderful sensation of release and absolute relaxation. It seemed that I started to feel, that my body started suddenly moving freely, my rhythm of motion loosened up, it became easy to speak, my fear of performing fell away, and I finished the play with aplomb. I think the Chief must have instructed my parents to do the same when they beat me after pulling me out of the play about Dunno.

What conclusion could I draw from this? Not to slack off. That every time you have to give everything, as if it’s the last time. And be prepared for the fact that it really could be the last time. Every time.

I was rarely given the roles I wanted to play. Most often I was just an extra. That was boring, especially when you take into account that we performed the same shows for many years. I was already totally sick of the monotony, and even in small roles I tried with all my might to show I was capable of more, so that someone would finally notice me and let me act something more significant. But to my disappointment, no one trusted me with the large or interesting roles. They were given to the chosen ones. For example, the role of the little bandit in “The Snow Queen”, which I fantasised about, went to the daughter of a party apparatchik. She was praised in every possible way, her talent was publicly lauded. I envied her terribly but I already understood: I would never see that role, for the simple reason that she needed it more than me. See, she was the daughter of a high-ranking official and was therefore “sicker” than me. This meant she needed treatment more than I did.

The biggest roles were given to the sickest (and therefore most talented) kids. The Chief explained it like this: schizophrenia conceals a person’s true talents, which are revealed thanks to the treatment. But the logic was still not clear to me: if I was not given any significant roles, then it followed I couldn’t really be that sick. So why were they constantly scolding me and trying to cure me? Did that mean it was a good thing to be schizophrenic? Did it mean you had talent? So if I wasn’t schizophrenic, then I must just be mediocre. Or so I reasoned as a child.

In the meantime we were performing on big stages all over the country; we were even invited to a television studio and then shown on television. This was an absolutely huge event! See, in those times, Soviet television had only three channels, and to get on it was practically impossible.

So even though I was only an extra, I was still part of something bigger than myself, and at least there were people sicker than I was. That meant I was already on the right path.

But since then, before any public appearance I am gripped by an animal fear. I need to expend huge effort to deal with it.

~

“How many points is your anger at?”

“At 9”

“And your protest?”

“At 7”

“Very good. Now let’s layer you, to get rid of the aggression. You’ll calm down, and you won’t protest any more. Lie down and get ready for the procedure.”

THE CORE AND THE FILTH

The people in the collective were constantly changing. Someone would be driven out for bad behaviour and someone else would join. Our number ranged from about 30 to 200. But there was a core of constant members, and it was a great honour to be in that core.

We lived in communes in strict hierarchy: each group had a head teacher and assistant teacher, and the children also had a chairperson and a board of leaders (leaders were reelected periodically). Everyone else was “filth”, that is, those who were being treated. That’s exactly what they called us — filth. I was among the filth.

The filth often had to undergo psychotherapy (also known as mechanotherapy or often simply facebeating). Children were also beaten on the backside with a belt. Not everyone was beaten, only those whose parents wouldn’t cause trouble, that is, who were the most blinded by the collective’s ideology. Of course I was among this group of children.

Up to 20 people would live in a two- to three-room apartment. We slept on the floor under communal blankets with communal pillows, without any bedlinen. Everyone took turns to cook. Our rations were very meagre, usually just porridge and packet soup.

It was considered that the poorer the living conditions and food, the stronger would be the spirit.

MY SECOND YEAR OF SCHOOL

When the first school year started in Dushanbe, all the children from the commune went to one school in the centre of town. I was in the second year, in the second class. There were several of us in this class, and we all lived together for a time. There were three teachers in charge of us who read us books and made sure we did our lessons.

By this time we were all so well trained that we would spy on each other, children on children. We thought we were doing the right thing, that we had to help each other so we didn’t fall prey to schizophrenia.

One time a girl from the commune ate a whole apple at breaktime and didn’t share it with anyone. One of our group noticed and quickly ran round telling everyone. We decided to meet after class and have words with that girl. We met, gave speeches, and then hit her in the face, like the adults did with us. She couldn’t even fight us because then she would have got even worse from the teachers. We weren’t even doing it out of envy for her apple, but because we didn’t want to see her ruined by schizophrenia and whoredom.

We were sincere soldiers.

~

“How do you rate your anger?”

“8”

“And resistance?”

“6”

“Prepare for the procedure. Wait, looks like we forgot to take your pulse…”

THE CASE OF THE PAEDOPHILE

When my daughter was 10 years old, we were already living in Switzerland. Once a policeman came to her class and told everyone about paedophiles: why they are dangerous, how to recognise them; and together with the teacher got everyone to practice saying “No!”. Later I asked my daughter whether she remembered everything and from her answers I understood she’d totally got it.

It reminded me of my own run-in with a paedophile, in Dushanbe, in the same school where I was in the second class. I was eight. I was sitting on the first floor in the cloakroom, probably waiting for someone. Just then a man came in and asked where classroom 3B was. I started to explain, and he asked me to take him there. I agreed, of course, thinking it was someone’s dad. On the way, he suddenly forced me into a corner, yanked up my smock, yanked down his pants, took out his penis, masturbated and ejaculated on my panties. I had frozen out of fright and shock and couldn’t give out a single sound, although I could hear a Tajik cleaner mopping the floor behind the columns right near us. Then he left and that was that.

I went home on the trolleybus with stiffened legs and wet pants, then ran home to the commune and told the adults about it. They just told me that I had “dirty sexual fantasies and lots of wrong and bad thoughts”. “Still so young, and already has such fantasies!”

Needless to say, never again did I tell adults about my problems or concerns.

Then I cleaned myself up, and washed my child panties myself. We always washed our own clothes.

Soon after that incident the skin around my mouth came out in cold sores. Now I know it was a type of herpes, because it has periodically resurfaced throughout my life. But then, as a little girl, I found it painful and frightening. No one told me how best to deal with it, and my dirty hands spread the infection everywhere until practically my whole face including my eyes was covered with awful itchy sores. For a while I couldn’t even go to school. The adults intensified their layering and, as you might guess, told me at the same time that skin problems are the psychosomatic expression of fear, and the fact that the sores appeared right next to my lips showed my “dirty attitude towards men”.

~

“How do you rate your anger?”

“9”

“How often do you have dirty thoughts?”

“I don’t know…”

“Don’t take the piss, you animal. How often do you have dirty thoughts?”

“Often…”

BECHZOD

For some reason all the groups of the commune moved out of their separate apartments and into a half-derelict two-storey building that was ready for demolition. It may have been a school or kindergarten; we called it by the strange name Bechzod. For some time we lived there all together. The building was so old it seemed the walls might crumble at any moment. The floors and ceiling shook even from children’s steps, and the plaster flaked down on us. Sometimes it even fell in whole chunks.

My small group in the second class continued going to school from there.

It was at Bechzod that I started stealing.