Doubtful About Democracy

Tanya and Lusya raised their hands.

Irina Viktorovna was still thinking about trees. "You can't chop wood without making chips fly," she said. So who wants to be a wood chip? she asked. No one volunteered. "Then I do not understand where this wish to be dissolved in the mass is coming from," she said.

Tanya replied: "I personally have not seen an example of the first type of society and I know examples of the second type."

Said the teacher: "Even if you haven't seen such a society, don't you want to try to create one in your own country, or shall we continue to live like we used to?"

"It will not work out," Tanya said. "If we can do whatever we want, it's going to be a disaster."

Anton was stuck on the trees, and how the metaphor related to his teenage life.

"Have you ever thought that this saying about the trees and the forest is very harmful to states that are not morally or socially ready for it, like Russia for example?" he asked. "Let's say I just decide that I will not go to class, I just decide as an individual that I do not feel like going and I don't care, but maybe my future depends on this particular class. We won't be able to do anything if some firm hand doesn't take us all and lead us to our goal.

"So I think to speak about democracy in our society, well, it is premature. Our country needs this strong hand to establish order."

"That means repressions," said Irina Viktorovna.

Anton nodded.

"So," said the teacher, "are you ready to become a wood chip?"

"Yes," he said, "if it is necessary. If it is for the sake of the people."

Flawed Textbook

Irina Viktorovna didn't like the textbook the Moscow authorities had supplied to School No. 775. "Russia and the World," she thought, was flawed by omissions and oversights.

The famine resulting from the Soviet Union's forced collectivization policy, which killed an estimated 7 million people in 1932-33, was covered in one paragraph. The deaths of tens of millions in Stalin's labor camps was omitted -- because, the book's co-author said in an interview, he couldn't say for sure whether 15 million or 50 million had died.

Still, the textbook mentioned facts withheld as recently as the late 1980s. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 was there, as was the American Lend-Lease program that provided the Soviets with key military aid during World War II.

Anton was so shocked to learn about that, he went home to tell his mother. She didn't believe him. All her life she had heard that the bloody sacrifice of the Soviet Union had won the war. He told her that "the U.S. played a huge role." Not so, she said, "it was 90 percent because of the heroism of Soviet soldiers."

With Tanya, too, such facts failed to persuade.