criminals, but more vile than the criminals. How often in the Akmolinsk camp during the wild screaming of obscenities and utter lawlessness frequently ending in injury and even murder did I think to myself: “If only Zoia were here!” With her mere presence, with her calm and derisive response to hooligan behavior, she brought order and organization where there had been rampage.
I would say to her: “Zoia, in an earlier time in Russia or in the West, you would have become one of the great agents in the nation’s industry or commerce. But here they consider you a transgressor of the law, a speculator, that is, an enemy of the people.” I didn’t notice that Zoia had any repentance or wish to stop her interrupted activity. On the contrary, temporary failure and a clash with the Soviet laws strengthened her daring and desire for success despite all obstacles.
Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God
The first paragraph of this selection sets the theme. How does a child of committed communists, who feels an intense hatred for religion and believes in its eradication by force, turn to God while a teenager? Cases of this type lead to broader questions peculiar to the twentieth century—what are the psychological factors which make an individual a dissident in a dictatorial state? Originally published as “Kak ia prishel k Bogu” [How I Came to God] in
The saying “He was Saul and became Paul” applies to me. Raised by parents who were devoted communists, I was not, like most children my age, simply indifferent to religion—I hated it. I dreamed of the time when the last devout old woman would die and the last church would be closed. I was perturbed with the government for mollycoddling believers. Why wait for the last old woman believer to die? Just close the churches and be done with it. There certainly would be no believers from my generation, that’s for sure. How could an educated person believe in the flood and in a God with a beard? And if you had told me, a ten-year old boy, that in seven years time I would be baptized of my own accord, I would have laughed out loud. But that’s what happened.
With the best of intentions, my parents played a dirty trick on me, but it worked out for the best because I was led to God. With the best of intentions my parents, as did our literature, served up fantasy for reality. They believed that the truth could be harmful to a child’s developing worldview. And so they taught me that the goal they worked for, “man is a friend, comrade and brother to man,” was already achieved or almost achieved; that with rare exceptions, all of our people were good, conscientious, and placed the interests
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of society ahead of their own. But when I encountered life, I found nothing of the kind.
In my children’s books I read about child volunteers who helped the sick and elderly and about teachers who devoted their lives to children, but in life I found none of this, either.
My parents and our writers had obscured my vision with rose-colored glasses and when I removed them, my eyes hurt.
Evtushenko [Evgenii Evtushenko, the poet] wrote that a “chain of inconsistencies could lead to loss of faith.” But he put it very mildly. In fact, inconsistencies did make many lose faith. It’s no accident that among my generation, those who were sixteen or seventeen in 1956, there are so many “superfluous” people. Fortunately, my disillusionment in one faith led me to another. But that all came later. For the time being, at nine and ten years old, I only bumped into sharp corners and sustained bruises.
It began with my ethnicity. My father is Jewish and my mother is Russian. If I don’t look Jewish, than I look even less like a Russian. The first blow was when the kids in the courtyard that we moved to when I was six years old called me a short, small, three-letter word: Yid. The concept of different nationalities was a very vague one for me. Thanks to my parents, I figured approximately thus: there is the Soviet Union and then there are other countries. And those who live in the Soviet Union are all Russians, all Soviets.
When I came home and told my parents that the other children had called me some strange word and refused to play with me, my parents explained that in the dark past Jews were called that word, that my father was indeed a Jew, but now that no longer meant anything. The parents of the children who called me this name were probably just very backward. This consoled me, but then in the courtyard, at school, and the young Pioneer camp, I continued to hear that word.
For a long time I could not understand and tried to explain: “What do you mean, guys? I was born in Moscow, after all. My homeland is Russia, I don’t even know the Jewish language.”
“But you’re still a Yid, since your father’s a Yid,” was the answer.
When I finally came to realize that these kids would never accept me, that I would always remain a Yid to them, even though I was no more Jewish than Russian (and even more Russian than Jewish), and despite the fact that I did not have those character traits for which Jews are despised, I recall how I crawled under the table and cried for hours.
From then on, probably to assert myself, I started to fight with my offenders. I fought often, with all of them, and was often beaten, but the kids in the courtyard came to respect and even like me. And subsequently in every new group, I always had to prove I was bold and brave from the start.
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The courtyard where I grew up caused me to part rather early with the illusions which my parents had spoon-fed me. (I write this now on a positive note. At the time, however, the incongruity of life with my illusions was a tragedy.)
This is the sort of courtyard it was: all the older boys were thieves—some had been jailed for stealing once, some twice, some three times. Our courtyard’s past was shrouded in legends about certain big-time criminals, known throughout the Soviet Union, and about how it used to be that passers-by crossed the street to avoid our building. The courtyard resembled a well—a dark, narrow space surrounded by buildings. Not a single shrub or blade of grass, only asphalt. In the evening the older boys played cards for money and we, the younger ones, hung around, ran after cigarettes and vodka for them, listened, enraptured, to the stories of their criminal life and learned their underground songs. The air was thick with juicy profanity, and bloody fights often broke out between the card players. It’s no wonder that the seven and eight-year old boys cursed as not every adult could, and at eleven or twelve they could split a half-liter of vodka “three ways” and were somber realists. (At twelve I had a much more sober view of life than did my communist parents.)
At first I remained untainted and did not take part in any of this. After all, I had been told that none of this existed. I only looked on in horror. In the fall, I watched how boys my age stole watermelons from the produce shop, smashed them and swore. So, was it that my parents had deceived me? Or did I just have the misfortune of living in a bad courtyard full of degenerates? That was probably the case. Surely in all the other courtyards, all of them except our own, there lived good, conscientious children of good, conscientious parents. But the older I became, the more bad exceptions I encountered. As it was in our courtyard, so it was at school, the Pioneer camp
