collective farms. Because of their political naivete, they were easily controlled by the ten percent of the Party members drawn from reserved positions among the military and government apparatchiks. Only five percent came from the intelligentsia, which included professions such as medicine, law, and engineering. The practical effect of this unofficial Party caste system at a large industrial complex like the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute was that my mother stood little hope of membership.
Perhaps because of her experience, she never encouraged me to become active in Party youth groups in school. Anyway, by my second year at Spartak, I was far more interested in wrestling than in the Young Pioneers. And as my athletic skill increased, I saw no advantage to joining the clique of smug and ambitious young politicians who controlled the Komsomol branch at School Number Two.
You could always spot a Komsomol member, we joked, by the hole in the seat of his pants — worn by sitting through endless, deadly boring meetings.
At first I tried to balance my schoolwork with wrestling, mainly because there were many subjects that interested me, particularly the hard sciences. The teachers proudly emphasized the “Soviet” contributions to science, although I learned that many of the breakthroughs — such as Mendeleyev’s periodic table — had been made by prerevolutionary Russians. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by mathematics and physics. Biology was also one of my favorite classes, although the textbooks seemed to waste a lot of time straining to link the laws governing natural processes with Marxism-Leninism atheism. And these books also strained hard to avoid the one issue we were all fascinated by, sex.
The school subject that I liked the best, however, was geography. My geography textbooks and atlas were endlessly engrossing. I could spend a whole evening curled up on the Caucasian rug reading about the tribes along the Amazon River or the gold mines and oil fields of the Siberian taiga. Sergei, a friend from school who lived nearby, also loved geography. He was in a motocross club, which took as much of his free time as the Spartak wrestling did of mine. But we always found a few hours each week to “study” geography together. Many winter nights we would sit at my kitchen table with the atlas open before us, playing a game.
“Find Atlanta in America,” Sergei would challenge, staring at the second hand of his watch.
I would have fifteen seconds to find that city or river.
Playing the geography game with Sergei made me think about America. The teachers taught us that America was a large, rich country, which had been settled in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries just like Russia under the czars. I had a feeling that Americans were probably not much different from us. But then in history classes, which focused heavily on the Revolution and the Great Patriotic War, we were taught that American capitalists had tried to keep their country out of the war so that the Nazis could destroy the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor, the capitalists conspired with British imperialists to delay the Second Front until the Nazis had almost bled my country white.
In these same history classes, though, I learned that American lend-lease weapons, including the rugged P- 39 Airacobra, flown by Soviet aces like Alexander Pokryshkin, had helped turn back the fascist hordes. And, of course, I remembered my grandmother’s stories about the American yellow shoes that had kept my mother’s feet from freezing, and the canned food, powdered eggs, and chocolate that had saved the family from starvation during the war. But I was taught that, although the whole world had been united to defeat the Nazis, the Americans’ invention of the atomic bomb had renewed their imperialist ambitions. And now the Socialist Motherland was the principal target of those nuclear weapons. That made me both sad and angry.
But I couldn’t really hate everything about the West, especially their music. Every Saturday night I tuned our shortwave radio to the Voice of America to listen to the rock music show. Although I didn’t understand more than three words of English, I memorized the lyrics to songs by Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Maybe the music was just propaganda, as the Komsomol leaders warned us, but it certainly was exciting.
However, politics really did not interest me much. In school we learned that Stalin had inherited the mantle of the Great Lenin and had gone on to lead our country to victory in the war. Then, we were taught, certain personal “excesses” had tarnished his place in history. Outside of school, people usually avoided talking about Stalin. And when they did, it was with a mixture of respect and fear, a strange, grudging reverence. Sometimes at my grandmother’s house, I would overhear whispered conversations in the kitchen, when the older people would talk about the Stalin years. They might mention the “Black Raven,” which was apparently a police car that had come in the night to take people away. Where it took them, I had no idea.
Later, my mother brought home a copy of Roman Gazeta that bore the yellow cardboard “Restricted” tag from her institute’s library. When asked about this, she said the issue contained the famous novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by a writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never heard of him. He certainly wasn’t mentioned in my literature books at school.
“What’s it about?” I asked mother.
“It’s not for you, Sasha,” was all she said.
She didn’t hide the book, despite the yellow label. I hoped there might be some sexy passages. So one evening when I got home early from practice, I sat down in the kitchen and began to read the book. I was shocked that my mother should choose such a work. The language was terrible, with all these crude, antisocial convicts and their prison guards exchanging foul insults like “fucker” and “shit face.”
I read enough of the book to trouble me. Why would a major literary magazine in Moscow publish this kind of thing? Then I heard on the radio that Solzhenitsyn was “a disgusting person, who has sold his soul to imperialist circles.”
But literature was less important than wrestling. I was now on the morning class schedule at school, so every afternoon I ran from the commuter train depot all the way to the Spartak sports complex. The coach had weeded out the habitual latecomers and had instituted a good-hearted punishment for those who were occasionally late. My group would line up in a double rank with everyone clutching a gym shoe. The latecomer had to run this gauntlet, once if he was less than two minutes late, two or three times if he arrived more than five minutes after roll call.
My first year I’d been able to master the standard tactics of classical Greco-Roman Olympic wrestling that Coach Karanov had such trouble hammering into the skulls of many of the other boys. And the linked sequence of grips, throws, and countergrips had come easily to me, long before the other guys understood them. In fact, whenever the coach needed someone to demonstrate new tactics in the ring, he usually chose me.
But when we finally began our interclub matches against teams from SKA, Dynamo, or Trud, I was consistently defeated in the ring. I knew how to maneuver, but I was just not strong enough to make my holds stick or to toss my opponent. Most of the fellows in my weight class were my height. However, they were a lot thinner, with taut, wiry muscles.
For the next two seasons, I muddled through with a mediocre record. Then one afternoon at the Spartak complex, I overheard two boys from the Metalurg team going over the roster for the matches.
“Who’s this Zuyev?” a boy asked his friend.
“Oh, don’t worry about him,” the other fellow answered. “He’s a weakling.”
I stepped back in the hallway, my ears burning with embarrassment. And as if to prove their point, I lost both my matches that afternoon within three minutes.
That was a Saturday afternoon. All day Sunday I moped about the apartment, trying to decide what to do. I simply couldn’t face the continued embarrassment of defeat, knowing deep down that I was potentially one of the best wrestlers at the Spartak complex. Then I made my decision. The Kuybyshev Aviation Institute had an excellent gymnasium, with a complete weight room equipped with bodybuilding apparatus. The next afternoon I was there, requesting use of the facilities. Officially you had to be sixteen to work with weights, and I was not yet fifteen. But the coach there was sympathetic and signed me on.
For the next six weeks I took the electric train to the Aviation Institute every evening instead of to the Spartak complex. As far as Coach Karanov knew, I had simply dropped out, another disappointed student wrestler. But I had another plan. Before, I had never tried systematically to increase my strength, muscle tone, and endurance. Now I worked at it. My mother even borrowed barbells from someone at her office for me to use at home. And one of the first things I did was stop eating sweets. Instead of chocolate pastries and honey rolls, I ate bowls of kasha, chopped beef, and salad, and I asked my mother to stock the refrigerator with fresh fruit and milk.
At the Aviation Institute weight room, I began with light barbells and worked myself up to heavy bench
