“Mum, sometimes I catch myself thinking that I’m afraid of growing up and becoming different from you…”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you had such an interesting life, you say such interesting things… But many of my friends have mothers who are… well, there is absolutely nothing to talk to them about… And nothing dramatic has happened in my life either, and will probably never happen. I have everything, no problems… unlike your life, so rich and interesting! I’m afraid my life will be boring and I won’t be able to tell my children anything interesting about myself.”

“So I’m protecting you from the trials that fell to me. Now I know what the price is! It means a lost family and loneliness. It means wasting many years of effort serving other people’s interests. It means ruined health. It means a short life. You will definitely have other stories, and I hope they will be warm-hearted, funny and, not least, instructive for those who have less experience than you.”

This book is also for anyone who would like to hear the truth about how people lived once upon a time in a cult in the USSR, and what it meant to be a child in such a commune.

Finally, the book is for me myself, to relive the experience, to rethink it, and ultimately to let it go and to step back, having turned over this page of my life.

I tell the story from two points of view: that of a child growing up in a cult and that of an adult who has experience of both parenting and emigration. I remember what I faced and how I felt as a child, and I share my present thoughts about the past. I track the evolution of my attitudes and thoughts to show how easy it is when you are young to fall into a trap, and how difficult, and sometimes impossible, even over the years, to get out of it.

Everyone will see something of their own in this story. I am a philosopher by education; I like thinking, reasoning and looking at things from different angles. Write to me and let me know what you think about all this!

1. Before the cult

NOTHING IS SHOCKING IN CHILDHOOD

Everything that happens in childhood seems normal. Children have no choice: adults decide everything for you and you can only go with the flow, trying to adapt and survive. As the years pass and you grow up, your memory returns time and again to episodes from childhood, and questions start welling up inside…

What was the point of that? Why would they do that?

When you compare your own experience of being a parent with that of your own parents, you start to wonder:

Would I have acted like that with my own child? What about with someone else’s?

You come to see more and more that there is no difference between your own child and others, especially when you grew up with other children yourself, without your family —although you knew you had one.

A PRISON FOR ACADEMICS

I was born in Dushanbe and spent my early years there, until my parents left to live and work in Leningrad. My memories of my birth town are childishly picturesque, symbols of home: my grandma, warm air, aroma of fruit, flies in the kitchen, traditional pechak sweets, the “Green” bazar, cool linoleum on the floor, vinyl records, the smell of books, our loggia with its huge mirror, babbling irrigation channels right in the street, the asphalt melting, our hip bath, whole alleyways of roses, weeping willows, vines hanging over your head, tea with mulberry, fragrant flatbreads with sesame, cherry orchards, sandstorms, and of course, the opera! Grandma often took me to the opera, which was considered the heart of the town (at least that’s how I remember it).