Words Will Break Cement Read Online Free
Author: Masha Gessen
rejected” on the blank page—and I would receive a scan of that as well.
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A NDREI SHARED N ADYA’S IDEA that he had been the architect of her independence, her personality, and even her art. “I am an expert in the upbringing of girls,” he informed me. “I approach it as a total performance.” He added that he had “authored the words ‘holy shit,’” the refrain that had been the ostensible source of some of his daughter’s problems.
Andrei came out of the woods to talk to me. For more than a decade he had been living in a friend’s house about an hour outside of Moscow. He called it his lair, and he said he cleaned it once a year. Our interview fell between these annual cleanings, so he said a visit was out of the question. Instead, I picked him up by the side of the highway and we drove around looking for an eatery that had both heat and electricity: less than fifty miles from Moscow, we were on the disintegrating fringes of civilization.
Andrei was born at civilization’s true fringe, in the world’s northernmost large city (where
large
is defined as having a population over a hundred thousand). “Half the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,” Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin. In Norilsk, this was literally true. Founded in the mid-1930s, the city served as the center of Norlag, the mining-and-metallurgy arm of the gulag. Though the number of prisoners decreased in the 1950s following Stalin’s death and the Norlag was officially dissolved, forced prisoner labor was used in the mines through the 1970s.
Andrei’s father had been on the guards’ side of the prison fence. He had landed in Norilsk after World War II as a Party worker. He was, according to Andrei, a well-known and roundly hated Norilsk character. The young Andrei hated everyone back. “When I was five, I remember seeing elderly intellectuals in the streets—former Norlag inmates. Then they all died off, of course, and all that was left was
bydlo
.” Dictionaries suggest translating that Russian slang word as “cattle,” but that word does not come close to conveying the concentration of disdain and disgust educated Russians pack into the epithet for their compatriots: it is “white trash” but more derogatory, “redneck” but more frightful.
Andrei was educated as a doctor (this did not require nearly as many years or as much effort as an American medical education—and in his case, very little effort indeed was expended), but he did not feel like working as a doctor or, really, working at all. He thought of himself as an artist, though he was not sure what kind of art he should be making. He finagled his way into the Arts Institute in Krasnoyarsk, the nearest truly large city, as a correspondence student in music; he pretended to play the piano. During one of his visits to the institute, he met Katya. She was, unlike him, “an actual musician,” he told me; she played piano. She would even go on to study at a conservatory, and then to teach music to schoolchildren. She was generally more serious and better grounded than Andrei, and this pronounced difference between them might have ended their marriage sooner or prevented it altogether had it not been for one thing: they were oblivious, because they drank. Everyone in the Soviet Union did, more drunks and more drinks with every passing year. In the early 1980s, Soviet rulers came and died in quick succession—Brezhnev died, then Chernenko, then Andropov—but not before promising to do something about the epidemic of alcoholism. Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in 1985 and launched an all-out war on the drink. Andrei and Katya, then newly in love, drank. And drank. And drank. And had Nadya.
She came as a surprise, conceived on a night of heavy drinking and arriving on Revolution Day, November 7, 1989, one of the most vodka-soaked days of the year. By then, Gorbachev’s war on alcoholism was at its peak, with the
----
A NDREI SHARED N ADYA’S IDEA that he had been the architect of her independence, her personality, and even her art. “I am an expert in the upbringing of girls,” he informed me. “I approach it as a total performance.” He added that he had “authored the words ‘holy shit,’” the refrain that had been the ostensible source of some of his daughter’s problems.
Andrei came out of the woods to talk to me. For more than a decade he had been living in a friend’s house about an hour outside of Moscow. He called it his lair, and he said he cleaned it once a year. Our interview fell between these annual cleanings, so he said a visit was out of the question. Instead, I picked him up by the side of the highway and we drove around looking for an eatery that had both heat and electricity: less than fifty miles from Moscow, we were on the disintegrating fringes of civilization.
Andrei was born at civilization’s true fringe, in the world’s northernmost large city (where
large
is defined as having a population over a hundred thousand). “Half the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,” Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin. In Norilsk, this was literally true. Founded in the mid-1930s, the city served as the center of Norlag, the mining-and-metallurgy arm of the gulag. Though the number of prisoners decreased in the 1950s following Stalin’s death and the Norlag was officially dissolved, forced prisoner labor was used in the mines through the 1970s.
Andrei’s father had been on the guards’ side of the prison fence. He had landed in Norilsk after World War II as a Party worker. He was, according to Andrei, a well-known and roundly hated Norilsk character. The young Andrei hated everyone back. “When I was five, I remember seeing elderly intellectuals in the streets—former Norlag inmates. Then they all died off, of course, and all that was left was
bydlo
.” Dictionaries suggest translating that Russian slang word as “cattle,” but that word does not come close to conveying the concentration of disdain and disgust educated Russians pack into the epithet for their compatriots: it is “white trash” but more derogatory, “redneck” but more frightful.
Andrei was educated as a doctor (this did not require nearly as many years or as much effort as an American medical education—and in his case, very little effort indeed was expended), but he did not feel like working as a doctor or, really, working at all. He thought of himself as an artist, though he was not sure what kind of art he should be making. He finagled his way into the Arts Institute in Krasnoyarsk, the nearest truly large city, as a correspondence student in music; he pretended to play the piano. During one of his visits to the institute, he met Katya. She was, unlike him, “an actual musician,” he told me; she played piano. She would even go on to study at a conservatory, and then to teach music to schoolchildren. She was generally more serious and better grounded than Andrei, and this pronounced difference between them might have ended their marriage sooner or prevented it altogether had it not been for one thing: they were oblivious, because they drank. Everyone in the Soviet Union did, more drunks and more drinks with every passing year. In the early 1980s, Soviet rulers came and died in quick succession—Brezhnev died, then Chernenko, then Andropov—but not before promising to do something about the epidemic of alcoholism. Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in 1985 and launched an all-out war on the drink. Andrei and Katya, then newly in love, drank. And drank. And drank. And had Nadya.
She came as a surprise, conceived on a night of heavy drinking and arriving on Revolution Day, November 7, 1989, one of the most vodka-soaked days of the year. By then, Gorbachev’s war on alcoholism was at its peak, with the
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