Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Georgia, protesting Russia’s attempt to inflict control of their country. Watching the protests I was reminded of a New Year’s Eve in 1993 that I spent with a Georgian family living in a Stalin era high-rise on the outskirts of Moscow during the Georgina Civil War.
—Kira Brunner Don
Irina was a Georgian and a good communist. She was in her mid-30s but looked years older. Her blond hair was dyed one too many times, and there were thick dark rings under her eyes. She believed in the grandeur of the Soviet Union, but now that it was dissolving all around her at an alarming pace, she was not sure what to believe in. Georgia was in the midst of a civil war and every day, she thought of returning to the country of her childhood.
It was 1993, and I was in Moscow working as the assistant teacher in Irina’s English class where she taught 16-year old trade school students in a drab suburb. I had gained the job by just showing up and asking for it. This was in the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, when simply being an American could create a kind of spectacle of interest. From the moment I set foot on Russian soil I received special status. People went out of their way to talk to me or they stole glances and scoffed at me with their friends. But either way, whether hated or revered, I was never ignored.
In the classroom Irina was a tyrant. She scolded and mocked her students mercilessly; then with just as much enthusiasm, she’d break into a girlish smile when they got something right. From the first, Irina made me her pet. She’d whisk me back to the teacher’s lounge, even if we only had 5 minutes between the bells. “Who cares if we’re late?” she’d say tossing her hand out towards the hall full of students. “They most certainly don’t.”
In the lounge she’d sit back and smile as if this room, carpeted in orange and smelling of smoke and home-cooked lunches, was the most lavish place in the world. She talked incessantly, but hardly cared what we talked about. It was as if just speaking English was in-and-of-itself a ticket elsewhere, a passport to New York or London; a portal to a place where English was something more than a thing to torture bored teenagers with.
It is incorrect to say that Irina was a good communist. She was the best kind of communist. She hated the Soviet Union, but loved socialism. The first week of class she gave me a card with a painting of Lenin speaking to a crowd of hungry factory workers. It would still be weeks till she admitted to me her real love and reverence for Lenin. That day she only handed the card to me with a hopeful glance. “You might find this interesting,” she said trying to act casual, and then watched my face intently as I thanked her. Perhaps it was Irina’s idealism that drew me to her. The dream of the revolution had long since crumbled, but here, this overworked woman held on to its early ideals.
The 1990s was a decade of unpredictability and chaos. The transformation from a communist economy to a capitalist one was marked by wild bouts of inflation and the breaking up and selling off of the state-owned resources such as oil, gas and timber. While most people suffered losses of income, pension and stability, a new class of corrupt oligarchs swooped up the state resources for themselves and became incredibly wealthy.
The first time I went to Irina’s house was on New Year’s Eve. I carried a bottle of champagne I’d bought at the wooden kiosk in the parking lot of their building. It had cost the equivalent of about $3. It was not the most expensive bottle they sold—that was $5. I rode the elevator up to the eleventh floor of the Stalinist era high-rise where she lived. In the dim hallway, only one of the large glass bulbs meant to illuminate the corridor worked, and it was covered in filth and dead moths. I knocked at the door and watched as the peepholes sprung open and then clamped shut. A dark older man in a green military uniform opened the door and extended his arm with force. “I am Georgian” he said, tightening his chest and clicking his heels together. I’d never actually seen a man in uniform click his heels together before. It was magnificent. I held out my hand to shake his, but rather than take my hand he repeated, “I am Georgian.” This was meant more as a provocation than a declaration, as if to say: “I am Georgian, not Russian. You must acknowledge this fact before you can enter my home.”
Irina’s blond head popped up behind the man. “Father,” she laughed, “let her come in.” As I walked through the door she whispered in English, “He did not think you would come.” But she eyed me keenly. In the same way she’d watched my reaction to the Lenin painting, she now watched my reaction to her Georgian father. Had I shown enough respect?
I handed Irina the bottle of champagne. She grabbed it and held it up to her father’s nose, “Look, see, she brought champagne!” Then holding it up to everyone in the room she sang out, “Champagne from the American!” I was immediately ashamed I hadn’t brought the better bottle.
Her father nodded approvingly and led me from the front hall into the largest of the three small rooms that made up the flat. The living room was simply decorated, with white lace curtains and a bookshelf teaming with porcelain figurines and a collection of postcards from a spa in western Georgia. In the middle of the room, a makeshift table made from a large piece of plywood was set for 14 and filled the entire space. The small beds usually used by Irina, her husband and their two boys were pushed against the window and now did double duty as chairs for the New Year’s table. There was a kitchen off to the side large enough for a small table to cook but not large enough for the family to eat its meals together. And down the hall was a bathroom and a small bedroom where Irina’s parents slept.
By the time the champagne was corked, the kid’s end of the table was bubbling with giggles, twitterings and arguments about when Father Frost might make his appearance with gifts. The day before, Irina had shown me the “new Western toys” she’d bought for her sons; each boy would receive a plastic cowboy gun, a holster, a pair of handcuffs and a silver sheriff badge all polywrapped in hard clear plastic. “It’s hideous,” she’d told me, “but they’ll love it.”
Irina was sentimental. She missed the small things that she’d already noticed were disappearing with the end of communism. “The chocolates!” she complained to me. “Our chocolate was the best in the world and now the stuff I get at the kiosk tastes like chalk.” But worse, she said, were the young men. They had no manners anymore. They used to stop when they passed and say “good morning and “good afternoon.” Now, Irina told me, they sulked and scowled and acted like “MTV teenagers.”
After the feast, a neighbor from the building arrived dressed as Father Frost and distributed gifts from a sack: a coconut, a pineapple and the cowboy guns for the two boys. It was close to midnight and time to walk to the center of the small block of Soviet houses to gather in the square and sing around the tree. I set off with Irina, her parents and her husband. The children galloped ahead with their new plastic guns holstered at their sides.
As we walked, Irina began to boast about what we’d find: “A huge tree all lit up,” she beamed. “It’s wonderful! The local pioneers spend all week decorating it. Oh—and the singing and dancing, it is lovely!” As we walked on in the cold winter air, I was full of Christmas sentimentality.
But when we turned the corner to the street that leads onto the square there were no Christmas lights. There were no lights at all, even the street lamps flickered pathetically, giving only the dimmest yellow waning glimmer. It was hard to make anything out.
“It’s not here,” Irina gasped. Instead there was only the steady murmur of what sounded like hundreds of people milling around in the dark, all talking in low whispers.
We approached the old pine tree that grew in the center of the square, waiting all year for its one night of illuminated glory. The tree was a sad and stately mess. Its dark dreary branches were strewed with nothing more than a few rolls of toilet paper that some kids had thrown up as a joke. No one spoke louder than a whisper as if afraid that if they spoke too loud even worse things would happen to New Year’s.
“There should be candy and lights. Where is it?” Irina’s face was ashen. Her sons had dashed out weaving into the crowd. “I don’t know where the boys went,” she said. “They are going to get lost. It’s too dark.” I said nothing. Irina was crying.
Already her teacher’s salary had been rendered obsolete by the wildly unpredictable rolls of the market. Thanks to inflation, her weekly income was now equivalent to the price of half a loaf of bread. “Not even a whole loaf,” she had laughed.
But she wouldn’t dare quit her job. Without it, she would be taken off the waiting list to receive her own apartment in the building across from her parents, her biggest hope. “Sleeping in one room is humiliating,” she confessed to me in the teachers’ lounge one afternoon. “I’m never alone—not at home, not at work, not walking in the streets. It’s unbearable.” Her fantasies were very simple. She wanted to cook in her own kitchen, to take long walks in the evening with her family before coming home and going to bed in her own room alone with her husband.
Now she looked up at the tree draped in toilet paper. Her kids had dashed away from her and were running through the crowd shooting their pistols in the air.
“Where are the pioneers?” she asked two middle-aged women to our left. They wore tight polyester “holiday” suits, their hair dyed that generic Soviet bottled red. All three women began comparing notes on New Year’s parties past. The chores of singers, the folk dancing, the candy for the children, the magnificent tree that the pioneers spent all week decorating. “Who’s in charge here?” Nobody seemed to know. It could only be conjectured that no one had sent the check that paid a man who met every third Thursday to train the pioneers to dance, and that he had not ordered the annual decorations or brought out the ladder and the lights and the tinsels to decorate the tree.
I looked around the little suburban square where my students and their parents stood nervously laughing and shrugging their shoulders. I remembered the first page of the English composition book I taught at the Technical School with Irina where there was an image of an oversized bust of Lenin looking calm and magnificent. Under his floating head, written in both Russian and English, were the words, “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will always live!” Everyone knows there’s a dustbin of history, but nobody wants to end up in it.
Contributor
Kira Brunner Don is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide. She worked as a magazine editor in New York for seventeen years and as a journalist in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She studied philosophy at The New School’s Graduate Faculty and worked at a think tank at Columbia University before joining Lapham’s Quarterly, where she was Executive Editor for eight years. She has received two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in her role as Editor-in-Chief of Stranger’s Guide and one National Magazine Award in Photography for her photo curation. In 2022 she was named the FOLIO: Eddie and Ozzie Award’s Editor of the Year. She is co-editor of the book The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention and was the co-founder of the Oakland Book Festival. She lives in Oakland, California with her two children.
