Growing Up in Turbulent Times:
A Personal View of Russian Life from 1980’s to Present
My name is Vladimir Ivantsov. I’m 28 years old, born in 1981 in Ulyanovsk, a large industrial city on both banks of the Middle Volga. Now I live in St. Petersburg and am an assistant professor of Russian literature at St. Petersburg State University. Any person, whatever his age, who has lived in Russia for 10 or more years, can say that he has lived through great changes. What kind of changes and historical events occurred in Russia in the 20th century? The revolutions at the beginning of the century, the First and Second World Wars, periodic changes of political leadership—the death of Lenin, the death of Stalin, and all the subsequent communist leaders.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to survive those earlier catastrophic events, however during my childhood came a series of events that carried fewer physical risks than all those others of the 20th century, yet surely something with at least as much historical significance. This was the disappearance in 1991of the country called the USSR and the appearance of another—the Russian Federation. So, even at my age, I feel I’ve lived through a period of major historical changes.
My approach in sharing my views of those changes is essentially phenomenological. By that I mean that my account is primarily personal and does not necessarily reflect any definitions or conclusions about the period by historians, political scientists and politicians themselves. My account of the historical events of this period is ahistorical, a phenomenological description of daily life as it seemed to me during those turbulent times, as I was growing up, without deep reference to the historical context and its implications.
This then is a strictly personal look back at the contours of recent Russian history, its waves and tides as I felt them, rather than how they moved through the full life of the Russian nation.
The existence of that previous country, the USSR, in the consciousness of the majority of its citizens was imbued with a mythological, quasi religious foundation. If one looks for a hero or primary moving force in this mythological narrative, there is surely one dominant personality— Vladimir Ilych Lenin. His mythological identity through the years became endowed with various heroic qualities in all forms of art—from the fine arts to folklore, in song, sculpture and of course in that creative form in which Russia claims special achievements—literature.
Everyone born from about 1920 to my birth year in 1981 knew Lenin as a kindly grandfather for all children, as the flowering of spring, as a figure who “lived, is alive, and will live forever, “ in the mantra that accompanied his image in whichever of the millions of forms that constituted the cult around him. Lenin merged with my own consciousness as a child. I didn’t quite understand who this god-like figure really was; I knew only that he was an invisible presence always with me. I remember asking my parents when I was about five years old what kind of job Lenin had. It seemed to me that he, too, must have had to earn a living in some capacity. They explained that Lenin was not a worker in any sense that I understood, not like my father, who was a communications engineer or my mother, who was a teacher of music, but that Lenin had governed and managed the entire country.
This was hard for me to understand, but when I learned that we lived in Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s home town—renamed for him upon his death from the previous Simbirsk—I felt special pride and considered myself honored and privileged to have been born there. This grew even stronger, especially after we moved to the center of town and I went to the very same school where Lenin himself had studied. Two parallel, but incompatible parameters defined my consciousness as I grew up – that I lived in a wonderful, generous and bountiful country where everyone could achieve whatever he wanted, and on the other side, that there were concrete limitations, even contradictions in personal family circumstances – that while my parents both were respected professionals, their income was modest. Our budget was not enough for everything we might want. Certainly not enough for a car, as some folks had, but even not for the toy cars that children could sit in and pedal around like some of my schoolmates had. It began to seem to me that everything had been better before—maybe before I was born. I longed to go to the Black Sea, for example, where my parents used to be able to go, but in these years their salaries weren’t sufficient for such luxuries.
However, there existed an active new shadow economy. Instead of buying with money, there were exchanges of apartments and elaborate schemes for acquiring what a person wanted through influential networks—in Russian “blat.” Vladimir Makanin, the writer I have written about, describes those times and before him, half a generation before, Yuri Trifonov wrote his masterful novella “The Exchange” on this topic. Rationing coupons for butter and meat appeared. Strange trade practices became prevalent, essentially forms of barter rather than the use of cash.
About this time, when I was six or seven, I became conscious of the city of Ulyanovsk in itself. It was not beautiful, but in its monumental urban architecture structured around the figure of Lenin, it took on a special character for me. Still it was largely an unconscious perception of the city. Later, at about age 15 or 16, I began to compare Ulyanovsk with other cities. Ulyanovsk didn’t create any special feelings in me, however, and I took an interest in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Ulyanovsk was not a major city; Moscow was much greater, richer. But then, in the middle of the 1980s, for me as for many Soviet people, it was important that Lenin’s body lay in his mausoleum in Moscow. The clock tower in the center of Ulyanovsk began to seem to me like a parody of Spassky tower of the Moscow Kremlin, where hung the great clock that kept time and rang in the New Year’s for the whole country—the Russian Big Ben. Clearly, we lived on the periphery, and I started wanting to see the capital and finally we went to Moscow. I tasted Pepsi, Fanta, and Eskimo ice cream, for the first time. The first McDonald’s on Pushkin Square in central Moscow was still a few years away. It seemed that these childhood joys could exist only in the big cities. I came away with a still stronger feeling that I lived in the provinces.
In 1985 Gorbachev came to power. My parents said that now something new will happen. The word perestroika appeared. Literally, the word means “rebuilding.” To me, this sounded as if some buildings would be torn down and others built in their place. A little later I heard, in part from my parents, that maybe Lenin wasn’t such a god as I had thought. At that age it was time for me to enter the Pioneers, the children’s organization of the Communist party. But I decided not to join. It was an act of rebellion. Then, one teacher pressured me and at the last minute I joined.
By about 1990 everyone began to like Gorbachev. He was doing some good things. He became President of the USSR, not just General Secretary of the Communist Party. If times were tough, the situation was tolerable. My father’s relatives in Kishenev, Moldavia, became refugees after that country’s independence from the USSR. I had always wanted to go with my father to visit Kishenev, but this was not to be. The 90’s were a difficult time, but for me this mainly took on family impact. The relatives who fled from Moldavia were elderly and in poor health. The historic spatial reductions in territory of the USSR were transformed in my world into a reduction of personal space in our apartment. My father’s relatives from Moldavia occupied the apartment where before, my mother’s parents had lived—a second apartment that we had in the family. Now it became someone else’s, crammed with their possessions.
But in general life went on in the same old way. My parents continued working as usual, I was studying. Of course at a certain point - 1991, when I was 10 – I realized that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. This was extremely difficult for me to understand (it was supposed to be indestructible, after all). If not the USSR, then what would there be? They said – SNG, the Union of Independent States: a change of name. Gradually, very slowly, it became clear that all the different republics were now separate countries. This was remote and meaningless for me. At the time I didn’t see any great positive changes.
One of the major changes which I could recount from my own experience during theseyears is the changed relationships to organized religion beginning in the 1980s. My parents were not religious people. In their own childhoods they did not go to church, although it was possible to do so. My first impression of religion came through my great grandmother. She was born in 1900. And despite the fact that her youth coincided with the peak of Soviet power, she preserved her Orthodox faith until her death at age 91 in 1991. It was exactly through her that I saw for the first time some religious objects – icons, crosses, and religious writings. I noticed how she crossed herself at times and said prayers. I asked my mother what this meant, and she explained that my great grandmother believed in God and that churches exist for praying to God. She explained that while, before, in our country this was not considered good, now it was more acceptable and that each person could decide whether to believe or not. Then it seemed to me that I, too, should decide whether to believe or not. I became conscious of wanting to be different, to assert my own identity. About this time I decided that it was more interesting to believe in God. At first I pretended to pray, without knowing any of the proper forms. I made a conscious choice, without going through any formal ritual. This coincided with regular trips along the Volga and I saw in many cities beautiful churches, unlike in Ulyanovsk where churches had been torn down. After all it was Lenin’s hometown and the authorities did not think churches were compatible with its historic identity, but also there were no churches of special architectural value. Seeing other cities with their churches along the Volga heightened my interest, even during late Soviet times not all churches had been restored or functioned as such. Aesthetics itself played an important role in influencing my thoughts and increased my respect for religion and the Orthodox Church. But my actual knowledge of religion did not increase.
In 1989 my mother had me baptized, with a friend of hers who became my Godmother, but that didn’t change anything very much. I didn’t start going to church or studying Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church still seemed to me remote, complicated, even too grandiose. Yet I remained attracted to religion. So when, early in the 1990s, a Methodist pastor, a missionary, appeared in Ulyanovsk and started a church, I took an interest. He was an American. This was something interesting and different. For me America was remote and unreachable. The Methodists had a definite program for young people, with games and social events, without that severity and discipline which the Orthodox Church represented. So I began to participate regularly in the Methodist mission in Ulyanovsk. There were English lessons, Bible lessons, Sunday School.
Even my homeroom teacher attended, so there was a connection to my school. Eventually I gradually moved away from Methodism as I realized that, nevertheless, the Orthodox Church represented something native for me. For all the upbeat and happy music and friendly encouragement contained in Methodism, Russian Orthodoxy was more serious: it had the force and presence that fits Russia’s particular spiritual needs.
But let me return to the historical calendar: the year 1991 arrived. In late August a small group of highly placed political figures attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR. In Russian it was called a putsch, essentially a coup d’etat. This set in motion a series of political developments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev leaves the political stage and Boris Yeltsin becomes President of the Russian Federation as other republics of the USSR become independent states. This was the culmination of Gorbachev’s attempts at reform and led to certain radical reversals of the political and economic life of the country, now reduced in size to approximately its borders during tsarist times. I was disappointed that despite the putsch, school started on September 1 as usual. That told me that nothing serious had happened.
In fact, of course, changes had occurred. People remember this as the very hardest period in recent times: neither wages nor pensions were paid on time or in full, the stores were empty, there was hunger and a sense of acute social crisis. My main memories are a bit different. I was 10 years old and what got my attention was the appearance here and there of Western products. Private stores sprang up. It was easy to start up a business, stores or services. Private business became a real option. In Ulyanovsk the first new kind of stores appeared, offering mainly goods from Poland. Some people began work as importers, making regular trips to Poland or Turkey and bringing back consumer goods. Snicker and Mars bars, chewing gum. All of this was unfamiliar and struck my adolescent mind.
Significant economic differences began to be noticed – some people had money to buy these new things and others didn’t. Foreign toys turned up for sale in massive numbers. All these goods were authentic imports, not made in Russia or China with foreign labels.
My parents, like most of the intelligentsia, viewed the new economic developments with condescension, calling it commercial speculation. My own view was contradictory because I saw that the people who engaged in this new form of trade were prospering. I began to see money as an important aspect of life, without which all the other values could weaken and become sickly. Sometimes the new business people could provide benefits, and there was a bright side to this new life. For example, at school things began to change in small ways. I went into the 5th grade, the equivalent of junior high, with separate teachers for each subject. There I encountered an especially progressive teacher, who with her husband, a noted ornithologist, started an ecology club for kids, meetings held at their apartment since the school itself didn’t provide a room. She went on to organize a month-long expedition through Ulyanovsk province, tracing the route of an 18th century scientist brought to Russia by Catherine II. One of the new businessmen was recruited to sponsor this trip, providing a horse and wagon to carry our tents and camping equipment and paying for our food.
A certain romantic culture grew up around our Ecology Club. At night on our camping trip we would sing traditional songs—about the beauty and harmony of nature, harmony between people. After a while I developed certain skepticism about the simplicity of this adolescent romanticism. It seemed like too simple a view of life, with all its contradictions and complexities. I saw a dark side to life, with philosophical pitfalls and chasms, a place with human dilemmas and unresolved problems. At this time I became acquainted with underground Russian rock music, then in a stage of dynamic development with the songs by Yegor Letov. And I became acquainted with others in Ulyanovsk, many somewhat older than myself, who listened also to Western rock music and had a generally free and progressive intellectual point of view. Even in Ulyanovsk a counterculture emerged, marked by long hair and beads. Participants in this underground culture were dubbed in Russian “neformaly” (non-conformists). Some of my friends composed songs and surrealistic texts. My inner world was changing fast, parallel but separate from the changes in Russian economic and social life.
About this time I realized that besides all the famous new Russian Rock groups (Grebenshchikov, Tsoi, DDT), all with interesting lyrics but rather a bit “smooth” and cautious, there also existed a huge Underground Rock/Punk culture, dating back to the early 1980’s. This movement was no less talented, but their songs were more radical and their language came directly from the street, a lexicon outside social norms. The major figures in this alternate culture were Yegor Letov (and his group Civil Defense – Grazhdanskaya oborona), Yanka Diagelev, and Aleksandr Bashlachev.
I realized that not only within the sphere of dissident literature, which began to reach the ordinary reader in the 1990’s, but also in the area of nonconformist musical culture, protest against the social and political totalitarian system was powerful, maybe even more than in literature. That system was called Communism, but in the texts of the Rock poets that word became a metaphor for the suppression of human freedom, of the individual personality and of normal social life in general. The Underground Rock/Punk sang not just about concrete political events, they also sang about the tragedy of human individuality caught up and put face-to-face against the machine of power. As for official Soviet mythology, which war firmly planted in our consciousness since childhood, this was an anti-mythology: Lenin, Stalin, the Hammer and Sickle, the Red Banner—there were the symbols.
Behind them hid a hellish and destructive world. The Rock/Punk lyrics of that time formed an art that essentially was existential. But it radiated a sense of enormous power, concealed with the individual person. Because the individual person—the itinerant Underground Rock singer—was capable of conveying this alternative world. By becoming familiar with such a new culture we were able to deal with the existing and deadening social reality, with all its monotony and restriction. It was the world young people in the Russian provinces – those just finishing high school and about to start college – found themselves in. We, ourselves, tried to join in this creative process: we composed our own songs and avant-garde musical compositions with our own texts. I should point out that we, in Ulyanovsk in my circle, were intellectually minded, protected by our parents’ upbringing from letting our “nonconformist” activity sleep into using drugs or in fact any kind of criminal directions, as sometimes happens in just such a social context. Of course, we drank beer and cheap wine, but not more than that.
The texts of Yegor Letov and others stood out for their critical, intellectual content and poetic mastery. Letov was a smart, erudite man, and often in order to understand many of his lines, one had to know the literary texts of others that inspired him. His poetry referred us to the books of Dostoevsky, Leonid Andreev, Mayakovsky and other Soviet classics, as well as exciting new foreign like William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez , to cite a few of his sources. It was no doubt at this time that I began to feel a true attraction to literature. Unfortunately the school curriculum itself had not stimulated this in me. But now, thanks to Yegor Letov, I began to read literary works outside the school program. In fact, I even began to read the school assignments themselves. I now saw a new side to the Russian and the foreign classics. In the middle of the 1990’s I had no idea what profession I would pursue, what major in the University I might try for. Out of inertia from my old Ecology Club I thought I might become a biology teacher. Then about 1997—these were the Yeltsin years—it suddenly became clear to me that my calling was to read and analyze texts, all kinds of them from Rock’n Roll to Dostoevsky. That’s when I decided to apply and take entrance exams for the Filologichesky Fakul’tet – the College of Philology or Language and Literature—of Ulyanovsk Pedagogical University. The end of Yeltsin’s rule—and the beginning of Putin’s—were still three years away.
The late ‘90s were a period of relative economic stability in my view. I don’t remember that there were as many serious problems as at the beginning of the decade. My parents’ salaries were paid regularly, there were no shortages of food and other goods. But there remained one important problem: the standard of living of the intelligentsia (ordinary doctors, teachers, engineers) left a lot to be desired. Their salaries were still too small, for example, to allow them and their children to travel and take meaningful vacations. In this respect, it seems to me, during all these years almost nothing had changed. Despite the fact that in 1999 BorisYeltsin stepped down as President and appointed Vladimir Putin to the post and he was to be re-elected for two terms. In real life, for those of us from families of the intelligentsia and ourselves entering similar professions, virtually nothing has changed during all this time, despite outer appearances and the occasional rotation of the faces and voices of power. In reality, as before, intellectual and spiritual values are in opposition to the material ones and stand out in stark contrast. We, as before, feel very little support from the government, and it seems, the government is least of all concerned about those who would work genuinely for it and for the common good—for the future of the nation. Probably for that reason, neither I nor the majority of my colleagues and friends ever seriously take an interest in politics. From a distance this might seem to be a paradox. If serious changes in the political life of one’s country are taking place, and political and government leaders are changing, how can one not take an interest, how can we not take this to heart, not try to figure it all out?
But farsighted and intelligent people have become convinced that the major Russian politicians are not at all interested in the “little man.” In this respect nothing has changed in the course of a century. It’s no accident that the “little man” is one of the most basic figures in classical Russian literature. Now the “little man” in Russia pays state power and the government system back in return – by an absence of interest, a refusal to understand or help the State.
Moreover, people are convinced of one thing – that they can have no influence on Russian politics. For example, we have elections for President, but for some reason it turns out that the result of these elections is known in advance. The practice of predetermined succession and the appointment to higher office of every new ruler for Russia seems continual and inevitable. So it was during the time of the monarchy, as it was during the Soviet system, and so it continues in the present. Each ruler names his successor, and then huge resources are organized through propaganda and the media to implant the idea in the mind of the public that the new ruler is the only possible one for the future. So it happened with Putin, named by Yeltsin to be his successor in 1999, and the people believed that there could be no other President. So it happened with Medvedev, named by Putin when his turn came in 2008, as the worthy proponent of continuity, even though prior to his appointment no one knew who Medvedev was.
However, from that moment on it was clear to everyone that Medvedev would become the next President (since in spite of the wishes of various supporting voices, Putin did not attempt a change of the Constitution to allow himself a third term.) In this way, it’s evident to many that Russian politics lives its own kind of life, so in that case why should we take an interest in it?
At the present time our country, like the whole world, is living through a financial crisis, and for many of us this is a predictable new test of survival skills. In the context of the Russian 20th century, it looks only like a recurring chapter in that painful history. We all now have been confronted by a loss of jobs, often a reduction in salaries. Again we are not sure of our future, after a certain confidence and rising expectations appeared during Putin’s presidency.
Yet nevertheless, to my mind, the changes of the last 25 years –a modern “time of troubles”—has brought us many positive developments. To be specific, I now have the possibility to read any book of literature I want and to analyze with any methods I choose (not just those prescribed by the party ideology, as it was from the 1930s through the 1980s). I can publicly speak my mind on any issue in the life of the country, without fear of being pursued by the powers-that-be. And, finally, I, an ordinary professor of a Russian university, can come freely here, to the United States, and tell you about all of this, which, of course, would have been virtually impossible during the long years of the Soviet Union.