Doubtful About Democracy

Outside the classroom, Russia's elections were approaching and this, too, meant a question Irina Viktorovna could not avoid. Before the March 14 balloting they all knew Putin would win, she told the class she would vote for Irina Khakamada, a presidential critic who didn't even have backing from her own Western-oriented reform party.

The students were surprised. "They kept asking me, 'Why do you not like Putin?' I said he does not even pretend to be a democrat," Irina Viktorovna recalled.

A show of hands revealed that most of their parents planned to vote for the president. Many were like Lusya's parents, who told her, "Why should we vote against him when he will win anyway?" They were "like the mass in Russia," Lusya observed.

Tanya's parents exercised an option on the Russian ballot to vote "against all" rather than for Putin. She thought that was the right choice. Despite her belief in the Soviet Union, she saw today's Communists as a pale echo of their predecessors, "embarrassing for Russia because they've lost their ideology."

A few weeks after the election, which Putin won in a landslide, Irina Viktorovna circled back to the past, returning to the enduring imprint of Soviet life on today's Russia.

"What is conformism?" she asked.

The class was silent. All year, Irina Viktorovna had heard Tanya idealize a Soviet society she had never lived in. Now, for once, Tanya had no ready answer.

So the teacher told them what it had been like to be a Young Pioneer, about parades where children stood in huge ranks, "such a beautiful line of identical white blouses, a line of identical red Pioneer ties and ribbons!"

She told them how it was to stand in that line, about the feeling "that comes up from the very depth of your soul. You feel almost happy that you belong to this huge power. You have this feeling of security and a feeling of, if not happiness, then something very close to it, because you think that you can rely on this huge power.

"But what if you do something wrong? They pull you out of this rank, put you in front of the other Pioneers and start scolding you. All the other kids stare at that one Pioneer in the middle, their eyes saying, 'Shame on you.' Imagine what this one person must feel, being alone face to face with this huge mass. A kid starts crying, ready to promise anything, to do anything only to have a chance to get back to his place in the rank, to blend in and be the same as everybody else. For that, he is ready to give anything away."

For once, the class was spellbound.

Irina Viktorovna quoted the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Soviet icon now known mostly to them as the name of a subway station in downtown Moscow. He had written glowingly about Soviet society as "a hand of a million fingers, squeezed in one wrist smashing everything."

She tried to explain. Soviet society was powerful, but an individual "couldn't be but 'one-millionth fraction of a ton,' " she said, quoting Soviet exile Yevgeny Zamyatin. "Do you understand the difference?"

Splitting the Difference

"Tanya's really changed," Irina Viktorovna said as sunny late April turned to a blustery May. On the eve of the high school graduation, Irina Viktorovna thought that Tanya was listening more and advocating less.

But Tanya pronounced herself unmoved. "Irina Viktorovna tells me I'm not right. I would just say I'll only change my mind when I really see I'm not right," she said after class. She was sitting on the hard bench next to the window that looked out on a gritty field of hastily built new apartment towers in pastel colors.

She still said Stalin was "a person of genius" and she still planned to major in economics. "Putin is not moving Russia ahead," she said. "We're just swimming with the current."

Tanya said she "loved" the chance to speak her mind freely in Irina Viktorovna's class and knew she wouldn't have been able to do so in Stalin's time. "It's a plus," she allowed, "but only a very little one."

As Tanya held firm, Anton, Lusya and many others were determined to split the difference, to find an acceptable middle between their classmate and their teacher, "something of democracy, something of authoritarianism," as Lusya put it.

No longer the optimist of September, Irina Viktorovna now said she had a more modest goal in mind, "to move their brains in certain directions." She knew Tanya believed she hadn't changed but still thought her lessons had made an impact. "She's not as categorical as she used to be," the teacher said.

In a way, Irina Viktorovna was glad the students could only idealize Soviet life, that they had never experienced the repressive system. Maybe, she said, Russia would embrace freedom, in three generations or so, assuming nothing terrible happened.

"They are not really for democracy," she said. "But at least something is going on in their minds."