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waved him down for a ride. He gets a pension of four hundred dollar a month and looks
for potential passengers on the streets to supplement that income. When I asked how tough
life is, he turned around and stared at me in the backseat. “Here I am, giving a ride to an
American journalist. What do you think? Is this a good thing?” With that he turned to face
the windshield again, I shut the door, and he drove off. From him, from the guys in Tver,
from Ivan, I detect a determination to feel strong, and appear strong. But from Ivan I hear
something more: a respect for the predicaments that molded his strength—and the
people
.
Russians “want a tough hand,” Sofia Pinsker once told me. She's a twenty-two-year-old
college student in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk who said even younger Russians dis-
play an old tendency—to look for role models, leaders, who exude strength. “Even if he
was bad or cruel—for example, Ivan the Terrible—it didn't matter and it doesn't matter. He
is our father, our king, and that's all. We are supposed to do what he tells us.”
Ivan says his harsh military training made him “Russian”—which I take to mean strong
and impenetrable. His words bring to mind Orlando Figes's book,
The Whisperers
. In it he
described interviews the historian Catherine Merridale did with Russian World War II vet-
erans. “These men's vocabulary was businesslike and optimistic, for anything else might
have induced despair . . . It would have been easy . . . to play for sympathy or simply to
command attention by telling bloodcurdling tales. But that, for these people, would have
amounted to a betrayal of the values that have been their collective, pride, their way of
life.”
“What do you think of your government, Ivan?”
Ivan, having lost both his parents and endured a punishing year of military service,
doesn't play for sympathy. And he's businesslike.
“There are not enough honest people running this country.”
“In America people might say then it's time for a protest.”
Evgeni laughs out loud. “Ochen interesno [Very interesting]!”
“People get used to living in difficult situations here,” Ivan says. “If the cup of anger
gets filled? Then you have 1917.”
Evgeni is still holding on to my protest question.
“In our family” Ivan's friend says, “it works like this. Husband comes home, wife gets
angry, husband gets up and goes to work; then it repeats. That is the only kind of 'protest'
we have. You just think about the hard life we have. You think there's time to think about
revolutions? You think anybody's worried about a revolution?”
Ivan is starting to tear up, and I'm not sure why. It doesn't seem that the conversation
about politics took him here. Maybe he was holding it in when he spoke about his parents.
But this tough young man is suddenly vulnerable in a way I never expected.
“Our government oppresses us,” he says. “But we love it. Our country—we love it.”
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