One day one of the grown-up women, Natalya Yevgenyevna, called me into her room and said she was going to give me a treatment. Everything was so absurd that I didn’t even question what I needed to be treated for. Indeed, would any child question authority, when they are totally abandoned and there is no one trustworthy to ask? She sat me in front of her, looked in my eyes and began in a confidential tone:
“Ania, I know you are angry and that you have resistance. Where would you say your anger is, on a scale of 1 to 10? And your resistance?”
Later I and all the other members of the cult were asked this question all the time. I always answered that my anger and resistance were somewhere between 7 and 10 on the 10-point scale. If the adults were so convinced that I was angry and full of resistance, why should I disappoint them?
Then Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to close my eyes and put both my hands face down on the table. Over the course of several minutes she tapped out a set rhythm on the table with a special wooden knocker in the shape of a mushroom, and I had a minute to copy the rhythm with my palms, keeping my eyes closed. For one tap I had to answer with the right hand, for two the left. The right hand corresponded to the left half of the brain, and the left to the right. It was considered good if you made mistakes with both hands, the more the better. Skewed results, where you made many more mistakes with one hand than the other, were evidence of brain dysfunction. If you made hardly any mistakes at all then it meant you were practically stupified from anger, aggression and resistance, and you needed active treatment right away. At this the educational psychologists would confer among themselves, concede to the authoritative opinion of the Chief, and then what ususally followed was a huge dose of therapy: speeches, mechanotherapy, and layering (explained below).
To sum up, it was with the help of this tapping that they measured a person’s level of aggression.
Besides this test there were others. They were all intended to measure the current condition and potential of the brain. There were auditory tests (where you had to remember and repeat combinations of words at speed), visual (remember combinations of cards, and then reproduce them, also under time pressure), and tactile (they would bend each of your fingers, and you had to remember and repeat the order, with eyes closed). These tests were all known as evidence, that’s what people would call it, “making evidence”.
Chloroethane
After that first test, the tapping one, Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to take my pants off and lie down on my side. She started to pour liquid chloroethane over my buttocks, first on one side then the other, and on special points on my toes. It was sore and I felt an unpleasant burning sensation on my skin. After the procedure you weren’t allowed to raise your head so the best thing was to make yourself fall asleep or at least lie with eyes closed.
Later the skin would itch like crazy where the chloroethane had touched it, and would come out in small crusty burns. But with the years I got used to it. After that first time I got this treatment almost every day for six years. I never noticed any change. Everyone there got this same treatment all the time, adults as well as children. It was known as layering; “to layer a person”.
I should say that at least there was never any sexual subtext to any of this treatment. No one ever touched my genitals.
Much later I read that chloroethane is a strong drug and that even small doses can have a strong intoxicating effect. People can even become addicted to it. But we never knew that and never noticed any special effect from it. At least I never did.
THE POINT OF ALL THIS
Soon I found out there was a Chief orchestrating all this confusion: Viktor Davydovich Stolbun. He was an elderly man (at least he seemed so to me, although in reality he wasn’t more than 50), short, with a big meaty nose, dishevelled grey hair and small eyes, and everyone respected and feared him. To be on the safe side I also started to respect and fear him.
We referred to our commune as the collective. It was made up of people who wanted to build true communism, to save a world perishing from widespread schizophrenia.
As the Chief saw it, humanity’s main problem was that most people in the world were suffering from schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug addiction and other serious psychological aberrations. “Children are suffering and perishing!” he would cry pathetically, gesticulating dramatically. From his point of view, absolutely all physical ailments, including cancer, infectious diseases and broken bones, stemmed from psychological deviance, that is from impure mindsets and ways of thinking. For a person to recover, they had to correct their psyche and restructure their personality.
The main reason for a deviant psyche was the corroded system of family relations. Psychological correction was therefore only possible with the involvement of the whole family. Thus, people came to the collective (or rather, were forced to come) with their whole family. Any relatives who refused to join the collective for whatever reason were considered traitors and potential enemies. Anyone who left the collective for any reason was also automatically put in this category.
My whole family, with the exception of my grandfather, was completely in thrall to this ideology.
This meant there were whole family clans in the collective. In turn the whole collective was split into two groups: adults and children. I was in the children’s category, obviously. We lived separately from the adults, and differently. Sometimes we wouldn’t see the adults for months.
The Chief took on patients for “treatment”. Applicants included certified alcoholics and schizophrenics, as well as those without any formal diagnosis but who were having difficulties in certain areas, for example in child-rearing. There were also assistants to the Chief: these included his wife, amateur enthusiasts, and people who had already been successfully “cured”. They called themselves educational psychologists.
The main form of treatment was speeches. This was a form of brainwashing: you stood in the middle of a crowd of people who would all try to prove you totally worthless. Eventually the moment would come when you’d no longer have a single doubt on the subject. Then they would patronisingly indulge you with handouts in the form of promises: “Fine, if you beg us, we might help you get better”. Then you understood what happiness means. You might not be getting better (as if you were even sick in the first place) but for all that you’d always be part of the cult.
It was mainly women who became clients of the cult. If you were very lucky, you might even get impregnated, and then you’d have the chance to bring a psychologically healthy child into the world – since the Chief was the only healthy person in the world, his seed was healthy too. Thus the Chief came to father many children. Thank goodness I was only a child, so personally no one touched me in that way. That was a rare piece of luck.
The speeches were accompanied by procedures. The patient was first tested for levels of aggression and tension, then evidence was collected, to investigate the brain and its potential, its stronger and weaker areas (to this day I remember the terms: the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes); and finally chloroethane was dripped on or electric shocks were applied to various parts of your body to act on your brain. In some ways it seems similar to acupuncture. The expected effect was that the treatment would help you become kinder and more relaxed, free of the negative thought patterns that gave rise to illnesses like cancer and tuberculosis, among others.
The cult found a psychosomatic explanation for absolutely any ailment, offering to solve the problem through psychotherapy and chloroethane. For example, the psychosomatic effect of cancer was a loss of faith, as well as deep hopelessness and despair. So if someone got cancer, they’d be asked, “Well, why are you such a wimp?”. Basically any psychotherapy began with these words.
I myself thought like this for many years, until I moved to Switzerland. Here many problems that in Russia had seemed insoluble – because I never managed to “get rid of the aggression causing the illness” – are solved simply by judiciously applying the right medicine or surgical intervention.
In the cult there was another important condition for treatment: the person had to ask for treatment themselves. They had to beg, preferably on their knees. This meant they were already broken, had lost all hope, and would therefore agree to any conditions. All that remained was to restructure their personality. I was a frequent witness of how the educational psychologists would wait until the patient had reached the condition they needed to condescendingly offer their help. Nobody saw this approach as inhumane; on the contrary, it was one of the main elements of the method.
If someone was close to death, the idea was that treatment would only be effective in one situation: if the person themselves came and asked for help. The fact that a dying person was physically unable to do that was explained as unwillingness to change in order to live. In other words, it was a personal and conscious choice.
For example, this is how Natalya Sergeevna Karapetova, who had several children by Stolbun, passed away. My grandmother, Dina Mikhailovna Chedia, also died like this.
WHY “CHIEF”?
I want to explain why I prefer not to call the Chief by name.
Firstly, I can’t bring myself to say his name. He doesn’t deserve that honour.
Secondly, the Chief is a manifestation of the extreme narcissism and immorality that is enabled by absolute impunity. Unfortunately, there are many people like him on the planet. I write not about him as an isolated case, but about the situation as typical. It’s not important what he was called or who he was personally. What is important is the occurrence itself, and what effect it had on specific people such as myself.
These memoirs do contain the real names of many adults. I consider them the Chief’s accomplices, real accessories to the crime. They took sides with him and so proved themselves corrupt and rotten. They are criminals too.
THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH WE WERE RAISED
The biggest mistake most parents make, according to the Chief, is spoiling their children. Coddling delays development of the brain and so the child becomes sluggish, passive and dependent, with weak cognitive faculties like imagination and memory. Families with an over-solicitious parenting style only produce spoilt, capricious children with pretentious behaviour. Smothering children causes psychological problems, followed by physical ailments. Children need to be given as much independence and freedom of choice as possible. Parents need to ensure the family has a congenial psychological atmosphere, with goodwill and “pure relations” between the sexes.
Another problem arising from over-parenting is overfeeding, or allowing regular overeating. Spoilt children will stuff themselves silly.
The Chief also often railed against philistinism as the dominant value system, symbolised by hot water and an orderly house. In these sorts of families children grow up as stupid bourgeoisie, concerned only with achieving material comfort.
Relations between parents and children also needed serious correction. Parents who talk down to their children hamper their development. If they don’t treat the child as an equal but only wield their authority and power, then it humiliates the child and lowers his self esteem so he can’t develop freely. The whole idea was that all childhood illnesses are the direct result of attention seeking. When children demand care and attention they “throw their toys out the pram”, thus feeding their egocentrism. This is the only reason children ever fall ill.
MESSAGES
Children who came to the collective had to be isolated from their parents. This was considered necessary to break them out of their familiar environment and show them a different system of relationships.
Meetings with parents were only allowed very rarely and under strict supervision. Letters were also strictly regulated. We were supposed to bring any letters to be checked by the educators, and letters from parents were always opened before we got them. Sometimes we never received them at all. Letters were known as messages. We weren’t meant to have time for letters: we were busy fighting our good fight, so why would we need letters? However, we were encouraged to write postcards to our parents on public holidays (the anniversary of the October revolution, Victory Day, International Women’s Day, Defenders of the Fatherland day, New Year). We didn’t really celebrate birthdays – that would have been way too individualistic. Any cards we did write were formulaic: “Dear mum! I am glad to be here in the collective with my friends and companions, and to be fighting together for our dedicated cause”, and so on.
It would never enter anyone’s head to use the normal postal service. Outside was all a conspiracy; besides, we never had any money for stamps or envelopes. So any messages had to wait for the right opportunity and could only be passed on personally by our members.
I have kept a few letters from that time. None have envelopes: they are almost all just folded notes with the recipient’s name on the back. Some are reproduced as pictures in this book. You can infer a lot from them: the values we lived by, the principles we followed, even the air we breathed.
I always preserved my grandmother’s messages with special care. By some miracle I still have a postcard I wrote her. I probably wrote it in the third class when I mastered joined-up writing, but apparently I didn’t give it to her, probably because of all the inkblots. I kept it to myself, safe in my “box of treasures” (the only personal item I was allowed). It is particularly telling how I don’t know how to address her: I started off with a pet name and crossed it out, I swivel between the familiar and formal forms of “you”, and even exhort her to “be mother” (sic).
Grandma Dina! With all my heart I congratulate you on Victory Day! Many thanks that you sent me such warmth and soul. Many thanks that you will never forsake me in a difficult time and will always come to my aid, like a true friend. Thank you. I hope you will always be just as kind, tender, warm and mother.
Many kisses. Till we meet.
From your granddaughter Ania Chedia.
GRANDMA
My grandmother was an emotional and impressionable character. She was famous in academic circles as an excellent researcher and educator, and her students worshipped her. This clever and vivacious woman, so capable of independent thought and picking things up on the fly, was so zombified by Soviet propaganda that she turned out unable to filter information in favour of common sense.
The reason for my time in the cult had basically been pulled out of thin air.
Grandma had been born under a dictatorship and was exiled to central Asia. She had passed through fire and water, like everyone in those days, especially women. Giving birth in such unsanitary conditions was hellish. Dushanbe had grown out of semi-nomadic settlements so you can barely imagine the state of its medical facilities. In what passed for maternity wards you couldn’t even see the walls and ceiling, so covered were they with blood and flies. Grandma had given birth to my mother in Leningrad, but my uncle (mother’s brother) was born three years later in Dushanbe. Soon after birth he fell ill with polio, hardly surprising in those conditions. The whole family nursed Kotka, as he was affectionately known, from a spoon and dropper, and he miraculously survived. Since then he obviously occupied a special place in the family’s affections. When Kotka reached legal adulthood, Grandma decided there was something wrong with him, either because the Chief she had not long met put the idea in her head, or because there really was something strange about him. As I’ve mentioned before, in those times it was just not done to be out of the ordinary. Carmen and Don Jose only existed on the stage.