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