Reversal

In early 1994 I moved back to Moscow. My grandmothers argued about my move, told me that it was a terrible idea but welcomed me and proceeded to worry that I would change my mind and leave again. Once, I almost did. When I moved, I set a limit for my stay in Russia, one that aimed to calm my own fears, as well as my father’s and my friends’. I said I would stay as long as the country did not go back to what it had been. It was an unintentionally vague standard: certainly the process of breaking away from the Soviet past would sooner or later be reversed, and just as certainly, the Soviet regime as we had known it would never be restored. I would have to decide for myself whether the reversal went so far that I had to become an exile again. In January 1995, standing in the shower in my grandmother Ruzya’s Moscow apartment, where I was living the first year back in Russia, I considered whether in the week-old war in Chechnya meant I should end my love affair with the country and go back to the United States. Was there a way to remain in Russia without entering into a compromise with the state, which was killing people? This was how I became a war reporter.

I did not tell my grandmothers I was going to Chechnya that time – or any of the dozen or so times thereafter. They would have worried too much. Whenever I was in Moscow, they called me at least once a day to check on my whereabouts. They worried about my safety and sanity and otherwise tried to take up grandmothering where they had left off. I pushed back gently, securing my independence. And I went over for tea and asked endless questions. In return, they told me their lives – and the confusing story I am trying to write. The story of a country that does not know when to forget and when not to forgive became the story of two women. There is also the story of Jakub, Ester’s father, who made his own choices and his own compromises, living in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Bialystok. And there is my own story. It is all of a piece.

Masha Gessen, in the introduction to her book Ester and Ruzya – How My Grandmother Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace (2004)