Tag Archives: by Clio Flikkema

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

Interview

An Interview with Elizabeth Brainerd, Professor of Economics at Brandeis University

Elizabeth Brainerd’s office is located directly off the busiest hallway in the International Business School at Brandeis University. Although a buzz of student voices leaks around the corners of the closed door, Brainerd’s quiet, serene voice easily dominates the space as she describes her research and voices her concerns about the future of Russian-American relations. Russia experts are rare in academia, and becoming even rarer as Russian studies shrinks in favor of scholarship about China and the Middle East. Economists who focus on Russia are even more scarce. The prestigious Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies at Harvard University (of which Brainerd is a member) lists only about 10% of the participating faculty as economists.

As the only Russian Area Studies major in my class at college, I was particularly interested in Brainerd’s decision to pursue this niche topic within economics. Although she had no familial connection to Russia, Brainerd explained that as a child, she was fascinated by what life might be like on the other side of a curtain, which in her imagination was actually constructed of iron and divided West and East. She signed up for introductory Russian during her first semester at Bowdoin College and went on to pursue a double major in Russian and Economics. After graduation, she lived in Moscow before returning to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. Several years later, in 1992, the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was advising President Boris Yeltsin about post-communist economic reforms, gave Brainerd the opportunity to travel back to Russia; there she collected Russian data that became the basis for her dissertation.

Brainerd’s work today spans a vast range of topics, but many of her projects revolve around women in Russia. Brainerd believes that conditions for women have improved in Russia lately, but also notes that despite the Soviet Union’s effort to improve women’s education, gender discrimination in Russia is still much more prevalent than it is in the United States. She cites the low numbers of women in high-ranking roles in business and government, as well as the large percentage of women who still stay home to cook and clean. Her channels of investigation into women’s lives in Russia range from divorce rates in pre-revolutionary Russia to unbalanced sex ratios resulting from sex-selective abortion in the Caucasus. Even when she discusses some of the most surprising results from her research, her tone is that of someone who is accustomed to being surprised. She speaks about Russia as endlessly fascinating, “There’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.”

Brainerd speaks matter-of-factly about her pessimism regarding America’s relationship with Russia. She laughs quietly as she mentions that her husband’s prediction of President Vladimir Putin’s assassination has failed to come true for the last ten years. Brainerd comments on the apparent lack of Russian dissatisfaction with the current system of governance, but does not attempt to explain it. She is an economist, and this is not her area of expertise, but even sociologists and political theorists sometimes struggle to understand the ideology of the Russian people. Brainerd, like all the best Russia experts, seems to have accepted that even when one thinks one knows Russia well, some things will always remain mysterious and unexplained.

Clio Flikkema: I understand that you double-majored in economics and Russian. I was hoping you could start by telling me a little bit about what lead you to two such different fields of study as an undergraduate.

Elizabeth Brainerd: When I got to college I was taking lots of intro courses. I took intro to economics because it fit into my schedule, and it turned out it had a really great teacher, Peter Gottschalk, who is now at Boston College. It was inspiring and I found the economic way of thinking appealing. It was also challenging, it was harder for me than what I thought I would major in, which was politics or history, which came to me more easily. I actually liked the challenge of economics, so that was not that difficult a decision. Russian…I’d always been interested in Russia, I don’t know why, I don’t have family from Russia. I think it was because when I was a little kid, I thought that the iron curtain was real. I thought there was really a true, literal iron curtain that divided east and west, and I thought it was really fascinating what it might be like to live on the other side of the iron curtain. In college, I needed a fourth class, and very much randomly, I took russian and had a really great teacher. I ended up majoring in Russian, and then I went to live in Russia after I graduated. I worked there, this was 1986 when it was still the Soviet Union, as tutor for a deaf American boy. I was actually living in a Russian apartment in Moscow, it was pretty unusual.

CF: Has learning the Russian language influenced your decisions about your area of research?

EB: Oh, absolutely. Knowing Russian has been critical to what I have done.  When I went to get my Ph.D. in economics, I actually didn’t intend to study Russia, but I started my Ph.D. in 1991, and then in 1992 Jeff Sachs went to Russia, famously, to advise the government. The way he operated at the time was to take a bunch of graduate students with him to be on the ground and be his eyes and ears. He convinced me to take a year off from my Ph.D. program and work for him in Moscow, and the only reason he did that was because I spoke Russian, and my Russian at the time was pretty good from having lived there. When I was in Moscow, I was able to get some household survey data that was all in Russian, that no one else could get, since I was physically there and making contacts. That became the natural thing for me to write my dissertation on. One of the things they teach you in Econ 101 is comparative advantage, and I realized that I definitely had comparative advantage in studying Russia. Plus this is what I understood and what I was motivated to learn more about from my experience living there, so learning Russian was just critical. Even now I use it whenever I do research because a lot of the data I use is written in Russian. Now it’s easier, they print a lot of their yearbooks in English and Russian , but some of the archival work I do is all in Russian. Some of it I just couldn’t do without having learned Russian, you can’t get google translate into the Soviet Archives.

CF: How is the availability of data coming out of Russian about the economy today?

EB: It’s much better than it used to be. Is it reliable? I think it’s reasonably reliable. It’s frustrating for me as a microeconomist, there’s not much in the way of household surveys. Most developed and developing countries make the micro data from their censuses available, and Russia still doesn’t.

CF: You’ve done a lot of research about women in Russia and the Soviet Union, especially in terms of labor market outcomes. How do you think the issues women face today differ in the United States and Russia?

EB: I think there’s a lot more gender discrimination in Russia than here in the US, even though Russian women tend to be highly educated and skilled, they’re still discriminated against. There are more pervasive gender roles, it’s been more difficult for the gender roles to evolve. Not that they’re completely evolved in the US. Women in Russia still take on a much larger share of housework and childcare and so on than men do, it’s very unequal. Women are discriminated against in that, but I think in the workplace too. You don’t see women reaching really high levels in business, or even in the government. There’s still much more gender segregation in occupations in Russia than here.

CF: Аs a scholar of Russia, what do you think are the most common misconceptions that we as Americans have about Russia?

EB: I think people perceive Russia as being more monolithic that it is. I think it’s more heterogeneous than people appreciate. Even I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking Moscow is representative of the rest of the country. Especially going there, you tend to think that the standard of living is pretty high and that people are doing reasonably well, but it’s not the case in the rest of the country. But people tend to think of Moscow being the same as Russia, when it’s not.

CF: Where do you see Russian-American relations going in the future?

EB: It’s hard to be anything but really pessimistic about it, as long as Putin is still in power., and there’s so much corruption, and such a lack of democracy and basic human rights. It’s hard to imagine that US-Russian relations are going to get much better without a change in the top leadership. My husband has this theory that someone’s going to just assassinate Putin, and he’s been saying that for a decade and it hasn’t happened. Even if it did happen, it’s not clear that democracy is going to be the norm, or basic human rights for that matter. I’m pretty pessimistic, especially because Russian people, although this is a stereotype to some extent, don’t seem to be willing to affect change at the political level. They seem willing to accept what they’re given. It’s a lot better than it used to be in many ways, but they seem to be reasonably satisfied with the lack of a basic democratically functioning system.

CF: Do you have a theory about why scholarship about Russia is so much less common than other areas of cultural study?

EB: It used to be much more popular during the cold war because Russia was our main antagonist and everything seemed to revolve around nuclear treaties, NATO and so on. Now our attention has really turned towards China as an economic partner, and to the problems in the Middle East. I think it’s just faded as something that’s in the headlines all the time, and also Chinese just seems so useful, whereas perhaps Russian doesn’t seem so useful anymore.

CF: What do you think about language requirements at universities? Are they helpful in rounding out a student’s education?

EB: I support them, yes. I think students need to learn not just the language, but another culture. Learning the language really opens your eyes in way that reading the literature in translation doesn’t quite convey, and it also motivates you to actually go to that country. I think it adds another important dimension to a student’s liberal arts education. I think it does something in your brain too, I’m not sure what, but it seems like it helps you think in a different way to learn a new language.

CF: Through your research on Russia, has there been anything you discovered that you found really surprising?

EB: One thing I’ve studied is unbalanced sex ratios, and the original motivation for that was how the loss of men in World War II affected Russian women. As a part of that research, I’ve read a lot about other countries that have unbalanced sex ratios like China. I was looking at the former Soviet Union, and although I didn’t discover this myself, I started doing research on this incredible increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. They are using sex-selective abortion to abort girl fetuses, and it’s as extreme as in China and India. To me that was just shocking, because I thought I knew this place reasonably well, and there was never any outward evidence of son preference. Especially since, although the Soviets did many negative things, one of the positive things they did was require equal education for boys and girls. They did do a lot to promote gender equality, not always successfully. Given that women are relatively highly educated, relatively engaged in the workforce and able to earn an independent living, it was shocking to me to see this happening in these countries. This happened right after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and my first line of research into that question was whether this was something that pre-dated the Soviet Union, something ancient that goes back a long time, or was it something about the collapse of socialism and the transition to capitalism that made boys more valuable. It’s hard to answer that question, but the research I’ve done suggests that it goes way back. This region is always fascinating. That’s one reason I keep doing research on it, there’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.

 

Gaps in Knowledge

Letter to the editor

Re: “Don’t Send Your Kids to College. At Least Not Yet.” (The New York Times, Opinion, April 5, 2016)

To the Editor:

In a recent piece, Abigail Falik argues that one way to improve the American university system is to encourage students to take a gap year after high school. She cites issues like high stress levels among college students and increasing freshman dropout rates. Although gap years can be very beneficial for some students, they are not the solution to these specific problems. Students who are unprepared to succeed in college are likely to be just as unprepared to benefit from real-world experience during a gap year.

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Whoever said it was impossible to ruin hard-boiled eggs clearly did not take a gap year.

During my gap year I struggled with time management, budgeting, and self-care while trying to hold down a job, and I wish I had had the opportunity to learn these lessons in an environment populated with my peers and with resources at hand to assist me. Falik mentions some universities that have developed ‘bridge year’ programs that provide guidance for students (as well as financial assistance) during gap years. However, in addition to needing more support during my gap year, I felt that the time off caused some of the skills I perfected in high school, such as exam taking, to evaporate entirely. This negatively impacted my grades during my freshman year and has already limited my employment opportunities. Until labor market outcomes post-graduation are less dependent on grades, gap years may come back to haunt students later in life.

College should be a safe space where students can develop from teenagers into working adults. Growing up is stressful wherever you are and whatever you happen to be doing. Let’s let kids finish the process in each other’s company, while getting the education they need to succeed in the real world.

What I Think About When I Think About the City

Op-Ed
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Above ground in Prague

People in Europe are on average much more attractive than in the US. Well-groomed, fashionable, not overweight. Just comparing my T ride to the airport in Boston to walking around Munich today was eye-opening. Just saying, there are a lot of attractive German women……

An ex-boyfriend wrote this gem in a letter to me from Germany shortly after I dumped him. I usually tried read his letters with the passive eye of a long-suffering but loyal friend, but when a man who once wore orange sneakers with a tuxedo attempted to compare me unfavorably with my German counterparts, he managed to finally catch my attention. Even more irritating than the personal dig was his assumption that the difference in appearance between women on the T in Boston, and those promenading around downtown Munich was a consequence of nationality.

I could imagine what he was seeing in Munich, likely very similar to what I have seen in Paris and Moscow. Women my age in Paris seem to favor strappy sandals and strapless dresses, and in Moscow enormous fur coats and high-heeled boots are all the rage.  The glitz and glamour of these European metropolises is evident in the way women carry themselves as they walk along the Champs-Elysees, or across Red Square. Boston is no different. The maze of streets fanning out from Downtown Crossing and anchored by the Prudential Center to the west and the Charles River to the North is populated by a female elite just as chic as their European sisters.

But in any city, I enter another world as I push through the turnstile into a metro station. Here you see all the women: those who live their city lives behind the scenes, who staff the expensive boutiques, and scoop gelato or мороженое. They carry bags of groceries or chunky toddlers. Their customers don’t shun public transport either, but here they appear somehow diminished, slouching into their seats with sighs of relief, and perhaps slipping feet out of high heels to furtively rub their toes. Here the similarities overpower the divide between these two groups of women. At the end of the day, we are all worn-out and vaguely, habitually frustrated.

To be taken seriously in shops, restaurants and offices, those who can do so don a disguise and hide behind lipstick and hairspray. It’s more than good grooming and exercise; the culture of the city demands both fashion and glamour from the young female elite almost regardless of occupation. The ‘beauty premium’ is a name given by economists to the improved labor market outcomes of people considered attractive. It doesn’t only affect women, but expectations of women have evolved far beyond the baseline standard of appearance for men in identical positions. Women grasp at the beauty premium to gain a little bit more of an advantage in a world where women still do not compete with men on a level playing field.

It’s exhausting, frustrating and expensive. Women who have the money shell out about $15,000 in their lifetime on makeup alone, and this pales in comparison to expenditures on clothing, purses and shoes. Trips to the salon for complex haircuts and coloring gobble up both hours and dollars. It’s a luxury to be able to take time out of your schedule to utilize a gym membership, and healthy, good-quality food is pricy and time-consuming to prepare. The ‘pink tax’ inflates these expenses even further: women who choose to buy into the beauty premium get charged on average 13% more for products marketed to them than for identical items marketed to men. All over the world a subset of the women are left behind, lacking the resources for a cosmopolitan woman’s costume. In Boston, where half the population lives on less than $35,000 a year, it’s a big subset.

But anywhere in the world, the women on the subway are different creatures from the women strolling between the high rise buildings. When we go underground, those of us who have the resources to buy the appearance of a successful women let the image fade. Suddenly we are all the same again. As my ex-boyfriend observed, we are no longer well-groomed after the wind has disheveled our hair. We are no longer fashionable as we shed blazers and scarves in the heat of the bodies packed together in the train. We may not look or feel particularly fit after those doughnuts eaten to make up for missing lunch. Dismayed at the change, we look at the men who examine us as the metro carries us homeward. We close our eyes, and try to remember that we can do anything they can do, as long as we can figure out how to do it in high heels.

Ida Remembers

Film review

In a film with little dialogue and fewer than a dozen characters, director Pawel Pawlikowski does a remarkable job portraying Poland’s complex and fragmented memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the post-war government. Ida follows a young girl as she unravels the threads of the many perspectives that existed in Poland in the early 1960s and decides which ones to weave into her own identity.

The film begins with Anna, a novice at a Catholic convent in the countryside, about to take her vows and become a nun. The Mother Superior orders her to visit her last remaining relative, an aunt, before she makes her final decision. Wanda Gruz opens the door of an untidy apartment filled with cigarette smoke and empty liquor bottles. Once a scantily clad man has removed himself to the bathroom, she informs her niece that her name is not Anna but Ida, and that her family is Jewish.

These first few scenes explore the post-war identity of the Polish Catholic church and the remainder of the Jewish population, and reflect on the magnitude of the damage each suffered during the war. Particularly in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany, the Catholic clergy was persecuted  and many convents were closed. Ida shows a convent in disrepair, yet still standing, as the nuns go about their lives much as they did before the war. While the convent may be damaged, Wanda Gruz’s entire way of life is destroyed. Agata Trzebuchowska’s portray of ‘Red’ Wanda, former Soviet prosecutor and dedicated communist, reveals a lonely, disillusioned, and conflicted character.  When Ida appears on her doorstep, her memories of the Jewish community’s fate come rushing back and she begins to relive the pain of her past.

As Ida and Wanda investigate the fate of Ida’s parents, Pawlikowski confronts the troubled relationship between Polish Jews and their Christian neighbors during the Nazi occupation. It is left up to the viewer to decide why the man who was hiding Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son suddenly turned on them and killed them. The man, Feliks, now living in the home of Ida’s parents, displays signs of deep-seated guilt over his part in the death of the previous owners. However, when Feliks makes a deal with Ida to show her her parents’ final resting place, he makes a clear reference to one incentive that caused Poles to turn on their Jewish neighbors: lust for their wealth. In exchange for letting Ida say a final farewell to her parents, he extracts a promise from her never to make a claim on her parents’ property. In spite of his apparent shame and regret, he still falls victim to the same prejudice and greed that likely caused him to become a murderer years before.

Both Feliks’ confession in the graveyard and Wanda’s abrupt suicide bring to the surface the painful process of remembering the terror of wartime. Feliks and Wanda have both blocked out the past and moved on with their lives, only to have their memories brought back to haunt them years later by Ida. Ida also struggles to regain a sense of herself after discovering the split in her identity caused by the war. When she returns to the convent with the intention of taking her vows, she is unable to put aside what she has discovered, and no longer feels ready to become a nun. It is only after a few wild days of high heels, liquor, and intimacy that she feels she has made peace with the part of herself that giggles in the silence of a convent mealtime. All these realizations parallel the conflicts and pain present in Poland even today, as the past continues to resurface and challenge the beliefs of the descendants of an entire generation: Jews, Catholics, and former Communists alike.

Ida gives such complexity to its few characters that it is able to tell many stories and fully express that people can be both good and evil in a myriad of combinations. The film forces the viewer to judge the motivations of the characters through pure observation. We must rely on facial expressions, movements, and whispers instead of dialogue. Those who lived through the war staked their lives on fragmented information, and similarly Ida does not present the viewer with clarity about whom to trust, whom to hate, and whom to love.

Ida is an extraordinary film because of the realistic and understandable way it tells such a complex story. Condensing Polish memory of World War II into 82 minutes and making it accessible to audiences outside Poland is no small task. Every element of the film and every second of the screenplay further the impact of the story. The black and white color scheme, the stationary camera, and the two hairpins holding the wisps of Ida’s hair out of sight under her habit are all imbued with the same question. A question that Poland is still asking as we move into the 21st century: What happened here, and what does it mean for me?

Don’t Move, Just Sing

Feature article

In Moscow there are six different opera companies, but while I was visiting only one was performing Eugene Onegin. Wanting to see this quintessentially Russian opera, my friends and I ventured out one cold snowy night to the small (only 250-seat) Helikon theatre in the hip, artsy district of Арбат. Eugene Onegin is based on a poem by Russia’s most beloved poet, Alexander Pushkin, and the score is by the legendary Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. It is incredibly popular with Russian audiences, and is one of the most well-known Russian operas abroad. I had been to an opera once when I was ten years old, and slept peacefully through at least half of it. I was excited to see Eugene Onegin, because I was very familiar with Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and ballets, and I wanted to hear his work in an entirely different setting.

The theater was packed, even though it was a frigid Wednesday night in January. Families with kids, young couples on dates, older women with opera glasses, and businessmen in suits crowded into the narrow aisles. I scanned the program briefly as I sat down, and decided not to translate and decipher the long synopsis, which I was vaguely familiar with from discussions in my Russian literature class. I leaned forward in my seat eagerly as the lights went out and the orchestra began the overture.

During the first act, Tatyana, the heroine of the opera, falls madly in love with a friend of her sister’s fiancé, Eugene Onegin. Unable to sleep, she stays up all night, singing as she composes a passionate letter to him. During this scene, I began to cry, carried away by the surge of emotions captured by the melody of Tatyana’s aria. As I searched in my purse for a kleenex, I noticed that I was reacting to the production very differently from the rest of the audience. People were shifting in their seats, whispering, gesturing toward the stage, and shaking their heads. When the curtain fell after Act I, the applause was muted.

Confused, I turned to my friend Laura during intermission and asked what she thought of the production. Laura, who was studying to be a director, explained what she and the rest of the audience were seeing that I had missed entirely. “The staging is terrible. The set is all wrong for the size of the stage. The singers have to work around it, so the movement and blocking look strange.” Once Laura had enlightened me, I couldn’t unsee all the problems I had overlooked before. In the second act, when Onegin shot his friend in a duel, the shot was mistimed with the actor’s fall. The patterns in the mazurka in the ball scene brought the dancers so far downstage that they weren’t lit properly.

In the final dramatic scene Onegin returns several years after cruelly rejecting Tatyana, and begs her to forgive him. Tatyana, who is married at this point, tells Onegin that although she loves him, she will not be unfaithful to her husband. While performing the climactic duet, the two singers in this production dodged around the central piece of the set, obviously focused on carrying out their assigned movements.

The audience remained unimpressed for the greater part of the production, and was not afraid to show its displeasure. The whispering and gesturing continued and applause was rare. But in the third act, the singer playing Tatyana’s husband walked downstage with no elaborate gesturing or overly dramatic motions, and blew the audience away with his glorious bass voice. When he finished, the theatre exploded with enthusiasm. That one aria got more applause than the rest of the opera put together. When the cast bowed at the end of the production, Tatyana’s husband (a minor character) received a warmer response than either Tatyana or Onegin.

As we walked back to the metro through the snowy night, I mulled over how such an educated theatre-going public had developed in Russia. Laura and the other members of the audience (including quite a few small children) were somehow conditioned to pick out the flaws in the production. By the end of the show, I had begun to develop the same kind of awareness that Laura had learned through coursework and the Russians had learned through exposure.

In Russia, ballet, theatre, opera and music are very much part of the rhythm ordinary life for the middle and upper classes in large cities like Moscow. Parents bring their children. Those children grow up and purchase widely available student tickets, and then when they start families, they bring their own children. Going to the theatre is a special occasion, but a special occasion that happens on a regular basis, similar to going to the movies or to baseball games in America. Familiarity with the arts brings with it the ability to distinguish a mediocre production from a good one, and a good one from a great one.

Curious, I began looking up youtube videos of other productions of Eugene Onegin when I got back to my dormitory. By the time I went to sleep that night, I knew that I preferred Anna Netrebko to Renée Fleming in the role of Tatyana, and realized why the aria that had finally captured the audience was one of the most beautiful in the entire opera. Almost absentmindedly, I began to hum the melody of Tatyana’s letter scene as I got ready for bed.

 

The List

Blog Post

I dug in my purse for a pen and discovered that the ink had frozen. It was six o’clock in the morning on my last day in Moscow and I stood at the door of the Bolshoi Theatre box office. The box office would open in ten hours and sell forty student tickets to the ballet that evening for less than the cost of a small plastic cup of instant coffee from the vending machine in my dormitory. To improve my chances of getting one of the tickets, I needed to sign The List.

I spent much of my childhood either in a ballet studio, or watching grainy youtube videos of the greatest ballet companies in the world. I had dreamed about seeing the Bolshoi live for years, but it was a dream that I never expected would actually come true, like seeing the inside of Willy Wonka’s mythical chocolate factory.

Regular tickets to the Bolshoi had sold out months before I knew I was coming to Moscow and I had been warned over and over again about the enormous demand for the inexpensive student tickets. A tour guide, several of my professors, and a fellow student who was a Moscow native had all attempted explain The List. Convinced I had misunderstood them, I Googled it and confirmed that there was indeed a formal system for getting these tickets that is enforced by the students themselves.

The List is set up to reward those who show a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of Russia’s artistic heritage. If workers at the Hermitage could protect priceless paintings during the siege of Leningrad and ballet students could perform on a diet of turnip soup after the revolution, the least I could do was stand in the cold for a few hours holding The List.

On the day of each performance, the first student who gets to the box office starts The List and guards it until someone else comes along to add a name and take a turn standing outside in the snowy January weather. You can sign The List until thirty minutes before the box office opens, when it is read out loud by the student who began it. Those who sign the list are given the first spots in the ticket line, in the order in which they signed.

At five o’clock in the morning I had hopped out of bed and ridden the still-quiet metro down to Theatre Square to put my name on The List. I waited for an hour but there was no sign of any list, nor anybody to guard a list that I began myself. But I had come this far. Giving up on my frozen pen, I dug deeper into my purse and found a stubby pencil. In large Cyrillic letters, I printed the transliterated version of my Dutch last name.

I stood for a few more minutes, scanning the shadowy predawn cityscape. The red walls of the Kremlin were barely visible across Tverskaya Street and behind an enormous Christmas tree covered in neon flashing lights. The theatre itself was quiet, but already the immense façade was lit expectantly, ready for the big evening ahead. It was snowing softly and although I was standing at one of the busiest crossings in Moscow, there was no sound and only my own footprints led from the metro station into the square itself. I pulled out my phone to check the time, realized that I was already late for my first class and that the temperature was up to a balmy -8C from yesterday’s -20C. I crumpled my list and shoved it into my pocket as I headed back to the metro station, deciding to let someone else begin it and come back later to sign.

I hurried back to Theater Square that afternoon as soon as my classes finished, with a sandwich in my pocket and wearing many layers of socks under my theatre-going boots. There was a crowd on the previously deserted steps, but I had no trouble finding the girl with The List. I wrote down Фликкэма again and then asked her, in halting Russian, when she had begun it. She told me that she had been there since noon. Then she climbed to the top of the steps and began calling names. All the students lined up in an orderly fashion.

At exactly four o’clock two guards came out of the box office. Instead of letting us in as I expected, they had a leisurely smoke and chatted for several minutes about the size of the crowd and the ballet being performed that night. My toes were numb. Eventually one of the guards motioned for the first five people to enter the citadel. A few minutes later, five more. Finally I was hurried through a metal detector and then I pushed my one hundred ruble note through the slot under a ticket window. The ticket was as large as my two hands, printed on cream colored paper with elaborate lettering. I felt as if I had received a golden ticket to my own dream world.

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