Only now, having left Russia forever, am I beginning to realise that all those sectarian attitudes have spread everywhere, and continue to spread, like mould…

We left the cult, we condemned it in words, but it remained in us and with us; we continued to live according to its principles. We judged things in the same way, we treated ourselves in the same way, we thought in the same categories, we acted with the same attitudes and built our lives in accordance with them. Our fear of the unknown, of what we cannot control – mental disorders, physical illness and death – is primordial and nurtured by a system inherited from the concentration camp conditions of the Soviet Union.

And every time I tried to dissociate myself from this, to simply physically move further away, I was “kicked out” from the team, as if making it clear:

“We don’t need another you. If you are not completely with us, then you are against us. So you are the enemy.”

A 40-YEAR JOURNEY

The first time I made notes about my childhood in the cult was when I was 23, just so as to not forget the details. I already knew then that it would be something of a thought experiment on myself. And I also knew that what I wrote down as memories was true, but what I wrote down as evaluation was not true. But back then I didn’t know other words. I didn’t know how to name my emotions, or how to cope with them. I couldn’t label them. I was only 23, and there was no one around to help me sort out my feelings. I was driven by a desire to recall at least something good about my family, about my parents who had sent me to the cult. I tried my best to find an excuse for them.

Now I’m 45. I no longer live in the USSR, I no longer even live in Russia. My daughter is already 15. My family is now also completely different; it is Scandinavian and Swiss. My husband is Norwegian and we live in Switzerland. My husband has his own business, his own private university and business school, and I have my own business in publishing books. We are committed to educating people.

I moved to the West not only physically, but also mentally. And now I only ever look East out the corner of my (narrowed) eyes.

Sometimes an insignificant event can suddenly turn your view and interpretation of your whole life upside down. The way you used to define your life – how you set priorities and inferred causal relationships – suddenly changes radically. Quite unexpectedly you see in each of your past decisions and actions some kind of mistake, which only now acquires systemic status. Previously, when it was your implicit belief, it was impossible to even see it, let alone understand it.

And now you watch as everything you guarded and clutched like a precious jewel through storms and hurricanes suddenly collapses like an avalanche, smashing to useless dust all those intellectual constructions you naively considered the foundation, the cornerstone of your personality – in a word, that on which your self-esteem and dignity were based. You always thought it was what gave you the strength and right to walk the earth with your head held high and your shoulders squared. And then – that’s it. You no longer have a foundation. It’s all dust. Zilch.

Do many people go through this? How many times in a lifetime? And how long does it take for a reasonable person to learn what is dust and what isn’t?

It so happened that for me the turning point was emigration: a change of country, environment and culture. Emigration let me look back at the past and see it in a new way, as if from outside. And, of course, meeting my future husband was the catalyst that set off this whole sequence of changes in my intellectual perspectives and perceptions.