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By Root 1155 0

journalist in Russia to cover the topic of totalitarian sects and got hold of a unique video. I followed her with a program in the Politburo series on the same subject. We both came to the dispiriting conclusion that the Russian state was the biggest sect of all, using the people’s own money to brainwash it. Very few were immune to the influence of all this garbage. We argued a lot. The Russian “market” was another name for individual greed. She was certain that greed could be managed, and that human beings were an end in themselves. They could be independent, creative units. I believed the individual could always be controlled. The genetic memory of a slave was in you whether you had a flashing light on top of your prestigious car and a bodyguard or whether you were a down-and-out on the status scrapheap. Anna was furious but had to agree. She had studied the experience of totalitarian sects only too closely. By definition, however, newspaper journalists delve deeper into their topics than television reporters, so I didn’t always win.

Lazy celebrity TV presenters would often plagiarise her texts without even bothering to paraphrase them. Our home was a press room with an engrossing weekly review of the news programs, which we compared against her articles.

Anna came with me when I next decided to visit my beloved Kamchatka Province. We worked in parallel, examining the cheerless results of privatisation. She flew back on her birthday. Local friends laid on a birthday party at the airport before she flew out and wished her a happy longest birthday she would have in her life as she flew westward with the sun.

She sometimes seemed to move faster than the clock. In August 1991 our whole family was in Svetlogorsk. In the evenings we drank with Yury Shevchuk. He sang his new songs for us. In the mornings we tried to persuade the women to join a new party called the Hungovers. Anna invented a title for our top party functionary, “The Seventh Day Hungover.” The holiday passed lightheartedly. On August 17 the season was to reopen at the Lenkom Theatre with Grigoriy Gorin’s Prayer of Remembrance, in the last scene of which our son Ilya played the violin. I flew back to Moscow with Ilya only for us to find ourselves in the middle of the anti-Gorbachev putsch. I was relieved that Anna and our daughter Vera were far away, and that Ilya was staying with Anna’s parents, out of harm’s way. A day later I was astonished to hear from her parents that she was already in Moscow and preparing to take to the barricades in defence of democracy. Everywhere you heard Shevchuk’s “Last Autumn.” It proved not to be the last autumn, but only the beginning of things going wrong. Everything was about to become a business: management of the state, war, morality, elections, medicine, education. The real “Seventh Day Hungovers,” the secret policemen, were only getting started in the cellars of Moscow’s White House.

Two years passed and after another putsch I was asked to come to the Ministry by a certain highly placed official. The Minister himself came outside the building, gave me my documents, and warned, “Take care. Did you speak out against the shelling of the White House? Everything is just beginning.” Back home I tried to persuade Anna to take out the American citizenship she was entitled to, because she was born there. She strongly objected to my suggestion. She hadn’t much liked America after our trip there in 1991, but agreed to it after our daughter came home from school with the news that some of her friends were no longer talking to her. Society had split into people who were on side, and the others who weren’t. It was only later that emotions cooled, people started using their brains again and realized they had been taken for a ride. I was no longer allowed to broadcast. Anna raged but, as tends to happen in Russia, our telephone rang less frequently. I tried to explain to the children that their surname might cause them problems. They didn’t see that, and on the contrary were rather proud of the situation. They saw the point later, the