Doubtful About Democracy

The neighborhood was Lyublino, an area of iron foundries, oil refineries and railway depots since the Soviet era of rapid urbanization. The students were just a generation or so removed from the grinding peasant poverty of their grandparents. "Village kids," the teacher called them, though they lived on the rim of the modern Moscow of 13 million. There were no great post-Soviet success stories among their parents. Most households made do with less than the city average income of $600 a month.

Nearly all the 29 students in the class hoped to major in economics or computers in college. The girls wore clothes as fashionable as they could afford and flipped through Cosmopolitan when they were bored. The boys affected poses of disinterest and blared music from a boom box during breaks. They all had cell phones. "They're very practical," Irina Viktorovna said.

Tanya had just a short walk from school from the three-room apartment where she had lived since she was born. Her mother worked at a factory producing medical equipment. Another student, Lyudmila Kolpakova, known by her nickname Lusya, was the only child of a truck driver and a nurse. Anton Tretyakov, a perennial cutup with a streak of intellectual curiosity, was the son of a jack-of-all-trades father currently working as a plumbing distributor.

At 45, Irina Viktorovna was the same age as most of her students' parents. She had risen to deputy director of School No. 775, whose 800 students crammed into a decrepit former hospital where no more than 500 were meant to learn. Even as a top administrator, she earned just $200 a month.

But she believed her job was crucial, preparing students to be citizens of a Russia teetering between democracy and the leftovers of dictatorship. She planned not to bother them with tests or essays and blamed herself if they were passing notes or dozing off.

"For me the most important thing is that they can find their place in political life, so they know what things are happening in public life," she said as the year began. "I want history to serve them for the future."

'A New System'

One day in late October, the class was caught up in a fast-paced discussion of why totalitarianism arose in 20th-century Europe: social inequality, global economic crisis, the post-World War I settlement.

Tanya interjected with the word she often employed when talking about the Soviet Union, or Joseph Stalin, or socialism: "Genius." Fascism and communism, she said, "were systems of genius."

Irina Viktorovna tried not to overreact. "What was so genius about it?" she asked.

"One person managed to restore the country, was able to rule it," Tanya replied, "and that was a new system for the world."

Lusya, Tanya's curly-haired rival for leadership among the girls, interrupted from the front-row seat where she always sat. She considered herself a moderate compared with Tanya, but also confided after class that "if you have complete freedom, there will be chaos."

Lusya said totalitarianism was not a "system of genius." But, she added, authoritarianism was. In an authoritarian state, she insisted, "you can think and say whatever you want," as long as you never directly challenge power.

Irina Viktorovna thought this was a teaching moment if ever she'd seen one. She decided to talk about the forest and the trees.

In a democracy, she said, it is the individual trees in the forest that matter. Under totalitarianism, it is the forest that matters and the trees are an anonymous mass. "Now tell me, please, where you would like to live: in a society where you are a mass or a society where your interests, individual interests, are respected?"

"Where are such societies?" Anton and Lusya interrupted in one voice. "Societies where interests are respected don't exist," Lusya added.

"Will you stop that?" the teacher said. "What you are doing now is called demagoguery." She called for hands to be raised, for all those "who think they would rather live in a society where their interests are respected." Most, the silent majority, raised their hands.

"And now those who think it is better to live in a society where your interests are lost, ignored, and where you turn into a mass?"