#lenin avenue

[russianvibesblog]

Мурманск

Полярный День

01:00 AM

[txttletale]

healed ive been doing some very basic communist readings lately and. how do you cope with the fact that none of it seems particularly possible. how do you manage to put any of this theory into practice when the only two parties out there seem to be the We’re Basically Demsocs Party and the Sexual Abuse League. how do you not let it crush you and what ways have you found to like… manifest these ideas in your life? i guess one could say i was “radicalized” by recent events but having done basic reading (just beginner Lenin and Marx) has made me feel so much more hopeless. there’s no vanguard party and i don’t see what I can actually tangibly do to help proliferate communism. and it’s making me feel guilty for living my life, too, for doing things that I find fun and beautiful and enjoyable - there’s just the guilt of “this is a time-waster, this is brainwashing you”. do you have any assurance at all

so obviously the role of a marxist-leninist in a revolutionary situation (ie, one in which the conditions are revolutionary, in which the current bourgeois state is no longer tenable) is to be in a vanguard party at the head of the organized working class. but these things don't appear from nowhere--i think it follows that if you are in much of the world, where a revolutionary situation is not imminent in any forseeable near future, then the role of a communist is to help organize the working class and raise class consciousness through class struggle so that when such a situation presents itself the working class is both radical and organized, or capable of becoming such in short order.

that means that working within non-party organizations (unions, activist and mutual aid groups, grassroots campaigns) with the intent of learning the tactics of organization and radicalising the people around you is a meaningful participation in the class struggle. as much as i say 'get organized' and believe that a proletarian party is the best and most powerful vehicle for revolutionary action, that latter belief is of course to be taken and adapted for the situation.

do not be hopeless because you have read lenin--instead, be aware that when lenin was writing much of what he wrote, the situation of socialist parties across europe was dire. criminalized, divided just as they are now, replete with the exact kind of reformists you're complaining about (as well as adventurists). what lenin wrote about was not just a theoretical ideal party that did exist in his time, but instead the blueprints for the party he had a hand in creating. realize that lenin genuinely believed during periods that he would not see revolution during his lifetime.

organize with whoever you can, in whatever arena you can, and participate in the class struggle. develop the skills and understanding of the methods of struggle, even if trade unionism or climate activism alone are not sufficient vectors by which the contradictions of capitalism can be resolved, they are avenues by which your class consciousness and that of those around you can be honed and sharpened. find the most radical body around you and join yourself to their struggle--a vanguard party should emerge from the struggles of the working class, it should be an organization that serves as a vessel for effective action. you do not have to tie yourself to the decaying and rotting shambling zombie parties of the 20th century to participate in the class struggle--we as communists owe these organs no loyalty if they are not equipped for the realities of class struggle.

i'm lucky in that there is a small but dedicated group of marxist-leninists i have been able to join up with and work with. if that's not the case for you, conduct the struggle within anarchist collectives or trade unions or solidarity campaigns, while always keeping your true goal in mind. the class struggle unfolds across a multitude of arenas--as long as there's someone you can organize alongside on something, you are not powerless in your capacity as a revolutionary communist. good luck, comrade.

[sovietpostcards]

Tikhvin Church on Lenin Avenue in Moscow. Photo by V. Krylova (1970s).

[pattern-recognition]

that one post in defense of marxism leninism against anarchists who admonish us as all power hungry sycophantic warmongers, why would we ally with the oppressed if we just want power when there are easier avenues etc, is totally correct and true but also i do want to kill people. i want to do that also.

[scavengedluxury]

Santa Claus visits the Közért store on the corner of Corner of Erzsébet (then Lenin) boulevard and Rákóczi avenue, Budapest, 1957. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[pwlanier]

Belyaev Vitaly Zakharovich. "Lenin Avenue in winter." Sverdlovsk, 1959. Oil on canvas.

The only work presented at the moment in the art market.

Belyaev Vitaly Zakharovich (1926-2008) - monumental artist. The author of the panel of the "Moscow" cinema in Leningrad. In co-authorship with L.F. Venkerbets - paintings at the Sverdlovsk Theater of Musical Comedy and the Puppet Theater. Performed by the high relief "Ural epic" in co-authorship by L.F. Venkerbetz and K.V. Grunberg (to the 250th anniversary of Yekaterinburg in the historical square). The author of paintings at the Palace of Culture of the cities of the Sverdlovsk region, the bas-relief of the pedestal of the monument to the Ural Tank Corps on the Railway Station Square of Sverdlovsk, etc.

Litfund

[mariacallous]

Ukrainian officials surmise that the real reason for the demolitions is to cover up evidence of war crimes. Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor, has repeatedly claimed that many of the city’s destroyed high-rise buildings contained 50 to 100 bodies each. 

The occupation authorities demolished the remnants of the Mariupol Drama Theater in late 2022. All that remains is a portico with a pediment and sculptures of grain farmers and part of the amphitheater, basement ceilings, and the foundations. Many of the bodies of those killed in the theater bombing were allegedly left inside. “All the people are still under the rubble, because the rubble is still there — no one dug them up,” Oksana Syomina, a Mariupol resident who survived the bombing, told the Associated Press. “This is one big mass grave.”

An aerial view of the destroyed Drama Theater. Mariupol, February 2, 2023.

ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO / REUTERS / SCANPIX / LETA

Occupation officials claim they plan to turn the theater into “the most modern venue in the Donetsk People’s Republic” (Russia’s official term for the occupied territories in Ukraine’s Donetsk region). Earlier, the ruins were hidden behind fabric-covered scaffolding emblazoned with the portraits of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and poet Alexander Pushkin.

The occupation authorities have also restored the Soviet-era names of certain squares and streets (renaming Peace Avenue and Freedom Square after Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, for example), painted over the well-known Milana mural, and dismantled a monument to the victims of political repressions and the Holodomor (a Soviet-engineered faminethat killed millions in Ukraine). Occupying forces also burned and looted the library of Mariupol’s St. Petro Mohyla Cathedral, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church known for its decorative Petrykivka paintings. 

Reimagining Mariupol: A Ukrainian design team develops a new vision for reviving the seaside city Russia destroyed 

[sivavakkiyar]

okay here’s my hot controversial take: the “problem” with Dr Ambedkar’s writing, kind of like Marx and Lenin, is that he was funny. Ironic, sarcastic, witty and etc. He’s always clear about what he intends, but this opens a lot of avenues for opportunistic bullshit

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Norman leaped off the platform and began to fold it up. Some of the youngsters hastened to help him; whether or not they understood what he had been saying, they were at least ready to give him a hand. In a way you could say the same thing about Sy and Bernice, even though they swore fidelity to Norman’s faction. He had the uncomfortable feeling that with all their knowledgeable talk about the need for an American radical party, and a real break with the traditional fixation on Russia, they were smitten with him as a dashing figure, more glamorous than the Marxist logic-choppers with whom they had grown up.

Still fresh from Mexico, where he had been first pick-wielding archaeologist and then pistol-toting bodyguard to Trotsky, he possessed for them the added attractiveness of having gone to college out of town, in Ann Arbor, of having played football there, of having his own place on 113th Street. They could not possibly have understood that he still felt trapped in the middle-class and had been attracted to the revolutionary movement as a possible way out of experienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal working class like Sy and Bernie, would have invested him with an additional appeal: the man of quality voluntarily disassociating himself from his origins in order to better serve their common ideal.

Sy was pleased. Loaded down with literature, he shook hands somewhat awkwardly and then turned to help his girl friend with the dismantled speaker’s platform. Norm waved farewell to them both and hurried off to the 175th Street station of the Independent subway.

He had to change after one stop, at 168th Street, for the Seventh Avenue. Here, beneath the Presbyterian Hospital complex, he joined the walking wounded of the great city and its bastard civilization: invalids returning from treatment of banal or exotic complaints, visitors to the afflicted, sniffling relatives, and the motley mass of workers coming home from a sixth day of work downtown—or leaving home, carrying night lunch in brown paper bags, for nameless labor in deserted office buildings or sheeted and eerie department stores. Even if they had not yet been affected by the new war declared in defense of an obscure territory, they were nevertheless abstracted and unsmiling, enfolded in the private problems that bore on them more heavily than the far-off Nazis.

It was already too late, he was realistically convinced, to keep Americaout of war, no matter how many committees were formed, no matter how enthusiastically Russia’s admirers now embraced isolation. The trick would be to transform what had been learned from the betrayals and the miseries of the Thirties into a new movement that would do what no one else was doing: fight on the one hand against the war and the obviously inevitable military dictatorship and postwar depression, and at the same time against the fascist poison that had already infected the isolationists and the Stalinists.

The odds were that it was a hopeless effort. But did that make it wrong to try? You had to do what was indicated by history, as well as by logic and passion. Most painful was the quality and insufficiency of his own comrades, an ill-assorted handful of inexperienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal asset was their stubborn refusal to concede that radical politics would end with the ending of the Thirties.

They proposed to attract to their side Communists whose sensibilities were still live enough to be shocked by the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Socialists who also refused to make common cause with racists; trade-union militants who did not propose to quit fighting, simply because they might embarrass the Administration; and young idealists like Sy and his girl, overwhelmed by the clarity and inner logic of a Bolshevik Leninism, that, like Catholicism, seemed incontrovertible once you accepted its first premises—but too humane nevertheless to follow blindly the dictates of the old man in Mexico, much less the tyrant in Moscow.

It was not much—a little group of Akron rubber workers, a roomful of Chicago students, a couple of old militants on the Mesabi Iron Range, some second-generation Wobblies here and there—but it was what they had, and it included people who were not simply more good than bad, but in all honesty, he believed, far ahead of their contemporaries in intelligent self- sacrifice and dedication to principle.

…..

Ducking his head, Norm hastened over to the national office. His comrades rented a corner building in the warehouse-secondhand bookshop area south of the Square. The street floor was occupied by a plumbing-supply house, its unwashed windows half-concealing a clutter of pipe joints, elbows, and upended water closets, their dangling guts corroded and mute, as if dug up from some extinct civilization like the shards he had hunted with such assiduity only a year or two earlier.

Above this midden heap of almost-junk, the windows of the upper three floors were covered with exhortations to Build Socialism and Vote For Workers’ candidates. Already faded and curling, the posters, with their promises of a happier future, attracted scarcely any more attention from people too intent on their own miseries to look up and read portents and claims than did the flyblown plumbing reminders of a hydraulically functioning past.

The interior of the building was alive, though, from the moment you pulled open the scarred door and felt the rickety steps vibrating underfoot in sympathetic rhythm with the mimeograph’s clockety-pockety-clockety. At the first landing, a hefty young man nodded to him between shouts into the pay phone, doodling on a plaster wall already adorned with graffiti. Norm continued to climb, past the second floor where boys and girls in their teens sang and argued among themselves while they filled bundle orders and cranked the mimeograph. Past the third floor too, where he himself had a desk for his journalistic works. On to the top floor, where the national leadership, in somewhat more remote austerity, surrounded by maps of the United States and the warring world and by ancient posters of the Russian Revolution, met to plan and to scheme for their few thousand followers.

Here you had to watch your step—not only because the floor was actually giving way here and there, threatening to drop the leaders down onto the heads of the writers like Norm, who strove to publicize them and their ideas, but also because one man watched another: rumors of a split, the plague of every radical group, rent the air, and those who were already working to build a new party from elements of this one were narrowly watched by the loyalists.

Norm stopped first in the cubbyhole office of Comrade Hoover. The bald, saturnine Negro, veteran of three earlier socialist groups and early organizer for the steelworkers and then the auto workers, had declared himself for those who planned to build a new party; but because he never stooped to personal attacks and still retained certain connections within the labor movement he had a wide respect on all sides. Hands locked behind his head, Hoover regarded Norm quizzically.

“Well,” he said, “what’s on your mind?" 

“Don’t you want to know how the street-corner meeting went uptown?”

“Not particularly. I’ve been told that you do a good imitation of Dworkin.”

Norm flushed. At the same time he had to laugh: Who didn’t do a good imitation of Dworkin? Their brilliant leader’s brain, tongue, and arm moved like cleavers, chop, chop, slicing through the stupidities that he destroyed with relish, his ruthless wit terrorizing the opposition within the movement and humiliating the hecklers without.  Only a few, like Hoover, could sit back and assess Dworkin coolly—and even Hoover had chosen to associate himself with Marty Dworkin’s faction, seeing in it the hope for a new radicalism freed from the crippling attachment to rigid dogma.

“Is Marty here?”

“He’s with a man from The New Yorker. The way the kids are hopping downstairs, you’d think the barricades were going up on 14th Street.”

“Well, you can’t blame them. That’ll be a good break for us, an article in The New Yorker.”

“A good break my foot.” Hoover tilted back in his scarred swivel chair. His bald brown skull caught the light from the dusty window; the back of his head rose alarmingly, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. Even atilt and at ease, he was a man of great force and dignity; unlike Marty Dworkin, the dapper debater, with his hairline moustache and wicked grin, it was difficult even to think of him, much less to address him, by his first name. True enough, Marty was the public figure, the theoretician and writer, even the international figure; but when you thought of him or spoke of him, respect was almost always mixed with mockery.

With Hoover it was different. Neither witty or fiery, he was upon occasion sardonic, as in his deliberate choice of nom de plume. And far from being a cafeteria intellectual or street-corner hotshot, he was dismayingly tough, he knew the labor movement. For a small organization, he was as precious as money in the bank.

He said coldly, “Now Dworkin is sitting there with him, charting. And all those brats downstairs are hopping up and down because some journalist is going to write us up for a comic magazine.”

“A good press won’t do us any harm with the middle-class liberals.”

“The only thing that will do us any good with liberals or anybody else is results.” Hoover scowled and passed his palm over his skull, as if it had hair worth smoothing down. “What I can’t seem to get through you guys’ heads is that all this talk-talk, all these sessions with journalists, won’t amount to a hill of beans. Not unless you speak with authority as revolutionary workers’ leaders.”

Hoover’s surface anti-intellectualism was alarmingly like that of certain self-styled Bolsheviks—except that in his case it was not a fake hardness or hatred of mental accomplishment. Indeed he was a man filled with quiet but intense admiration for the genuine accomplishments of novelists as well as mathematicians. What he detested was pretense and bombast. What he dreamed of—if you could think of such a man as a dreamer—was a community of people who thought, decided, then acted, without further ado.

With suspicious kindliness he concluded, “Now I know you mean business, unlike some of these dentists’ and milliners’ sons and daughters we’re stuck with, playacting at being revolutionaries. They wouldn’t know a barricade from a barroom. And they’re the ones Dworkin caters to, with fancy names like the locked-out generation.”

“That’s what I’m here to talk about, with you and Marty. I’ll make it short: I want to get into the labor movement.”

“Have you got guilt feelings too?”

“Maybe. That’s not important. Now that the war has started, I have a greater sense of urgency. I have to be where the action is, working in a shop where I can contribute something more substantial than—”

“More substantial? Do me a favor, will you?” 

Norm nodded, and leaned forward, hopeful of a special assignment.

“Spend a little time learning, before you run off with a red flag in your fist and your feet going every which way, like Charlie Chaplin in that movie.” Hoover scowled. “If there’s one quality this outfit is short on, it’s humility.”

Hot-faced, Norm protested. “I don’t think you have any reason to accuse me —

“I’m not accusing. But there’s people like that all around you. Your first responsibility is to show them what discipline means. You don’t have to tell me that we’ve got to get some of these young blow-hards into the shops, and let them use their big lungs in union meetings. But we’ve got to do it in an orderly fashion, and we’re not going to strip the national office of people with skills like yours. Who’s going to put out the paper, the youth? They don’t even know how to give it away, much less sell it, much less edit it. When the time is ripe, you’ll hear from us.”

“In the meantime …”

“In the meantime I thought you were serious about becoming a labor journalist. Well get on with it, man. And if you’ve got heartburn, talk with Lewis, not me.”

He had been hoping too to discuss an article with Hoover before sitting down to write it up for the paper, but now he felt himself definitively dismissed, and he left the office with no further talk."

- Harvey Swados, Standing Fast: A Novel (1971, 2013 Open Road edition)

[bearkunin]

Outside of the Locked Tomb Fandom I'm going to inevitably end up writing a lot about political concepts, so I'm just going to kick things off by posting about my understanding (at the very least) of the historic context of some of the key movements for easy future reference. I'll kick off with a post on...

Social Democracy

Social Democracy arose in the late 19th century as a socialist movement with the aim to abolish capitalism. The first main party was the German Social Democrat Workers Party in Germany (later, the Social Democratic Party), which adopted Marxism into its platform. This was not a moderate position. A colourful quote from the revolutionary Zaichnevsky calling for a social democratic Republic in Russia in 1862:

To your axes!' and we shall kill the imperial party with no more mercy than they show for us now. We shall kill them in the squares, if the dirty swine ever dare to appear there; kill them in the avenues of the capitals; kill them in the villages. Remember: anyone who is not with us is our enemy, and every method may be used to exterminate our enemies.

Following Marx's (and Engel's) death, the two big names that emerged in Marxism were Kautsky and Bernstein. Kautsky led the school now known as Orthodox Marxism and was basically mainstream socialism until a little upstart revolutionary called Vladimir Lenin came onto the scene.

After Vladimir Lenin shot to worldwide fame with the Russian Revolution, he would have a very prominent feud with "the renegade Kautsky" about the role of violent revolution in achieving socialism. Kautsky would come to use "social democracy" and "socialism" for his movement, and "communism" to refer to Lenin's Bolshevism. Social Democracy according to Kautsky was a workers' led socialism, building up a mass party, while "communism" was dictatorial and in the vein of the Blanquists. This feud is when you began seeing a real split and animosity between "Social Democrats" and "Communists"

Bernstein, the other then-big figure but now even less known than Kautsky, is probably the person who drove the break between "Social Democrats" and "socialism" as a whole. Although a socialist, and a prominent Social Democrat, Bernstein would reject a number of key points of Marxism - most notably the need for revolution and dialectical materialism. Instead, he entrenched socialism in ethics and promoted the possibility for achieving socialism through reform. Rosa Luxembourg's *Reform or Revolution?* is a response largely to Bernstein, where she chastised his reformist approach. This marks another significant tiff in socialism.

Social Democracy then became synonymous with a reformist movement, with an emphasis on ethics rather than historical materialism, and counterposed to USSR style communism. It would quickly find an ally in social liberalism, in particular due to the shared antagonism to Soviet authoritarianism. By the 1970s, social democracy had all but abandoned its Marxist roots. It's focus on the ethical increase of workers' wellbeing, rather than transforming the mode of production, saw it adopt third-way policies and work within the bounds of capitalism. From then on, social democracy became synonymous with capitalism with a hefty welfare state.

With the triumphant economic turn around of Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's America, shortly followed by the utter discrediting of Soviet communism with the collapse of the USSR, a large number of parties with roots in social democracy embraced markets as the driver of welfare. This is essentially when social democratic parties like Labor and Labour in Australia and the UK became "neoliberal", because they fully accepted the underlying belief in the benefits of competitive markets.

This is also why you can find some political parties which are pretty clearly pro-capitalist still have references to "socialism" in their platforms or manifestos, or in some cases, their names like the French Socialist Party.

So for my purposes: social democracy is, at least now, a capitalist ideology albeit not wedded to the idea. Rather, it seeks the material improvement of the conditions of the working class, and is happy to use a free market liberal economy towards these ends. It now has many overlaps with "liberalism" broadly, but had a different starting point: not with individual liberal rights, but a more utilitarian approach to welfare.

[emiliaaaaa]

a different kind of list... I can’t write about myself without also writing about Trotsky and Lenin. Without writing about Frida and Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and White Christmas and the King and I. Without the Black Panthers and the Chicano Moratorium and Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. And Russia and the Pinkertons and Berkeley High and Transfiguration. And Gloria Anzaldua and the Great Migration and jazz and blues and Alma del Barrio and Che and Cuba and Nelson Mandela. And basketball and passing and segregation and pullman porters. And cancer and education and organizing and being an academic and dying before he could finish his dissertation. 2-7-23

[pedaalridder]

24-26 september

In Vilnius

In Goethe verblijven we deze dagen, zo heet de kamer van hotel Shakespeare. Het gebouw is meer dan 500 jaar oud, en telt geheimzinnige trapjes en gangen. De receptionist, eigenlijk meer een gids zegt in grappig Engels bij het passeren van de kamers, “and here are the other funny guys like Mark Twain or Lev Tolstoj”.

Tegen de avond is het aangenaam vertoeven op de Gedimino Prospektas. Een echte flaneer straat die wat helt en waar de herfstzon op de trottoirs danst. Een avenue met geschiedenis met vele straatnaamveranderingen. Gedimino genoemd naar Gediminas, een grootvorst van Litouwen in de 14de eeuw. Een eeuw later was Litouwen zelfs het grootste land van Europa, het reikte van de Baltische Zee tot de Zwarte Zee. Gedurende honderden jaren verviel die machtspositie totdat het in 1795 geheel werd opgenomen in het Russische Tsarenrijk. Na 123 jaar kon in Litouwen in 1918 dan eindelijk weer de onafhankelijkheid uitgeroepen worden, ware het niet dat Vilnius toen door Polen bezet werd. De straat heette toen naar Adam Mickiewicz, een Poolse dichter. Vanaf 1941 werd Litouwen door de Nazis bezet en werd het de Adolf Hitler Strasse, om vervolgens vanaf 1944 toen het land door de Sovjet Unie bezet werd, vernoemd te worden naar Stalin, en vanaf 1957 naar Lenin. Totdat de straat vanaf 1990 uiteindelijk de Gedimino Prospektas heet.

Enkele kilometers kun je er wandelen en bent meteen deelgenoot van de lotgevallen van een land dat enkele jaren onafhankelijk kon zijn, wreed bezet werd door dictatoriale grootmachten en nu bezoekers uit allerlei windstreken kan ontvangen. De drie dagen dat ik er was zijn dan ook onvergetelijk.

[counterballancing]

[sovietpostcards]

Rohat chaikhana (teahouse) on Lenin Avenue in Dushanbe, Tajik SSR. Photo by  Max Alpert (1967).

[architectureworksonline-blog]

Apartment house on Azadlig Avenue ( formerly Lenin Ave.), Baku, Azerbaijan. Buil… Apartment house on Azadlig Avenue ( formerly Lenin Ave.), Baku, Azerbaijan. Built in 1975 Architect A.Novruzi. © BACU @_ba_cu #_ba_cu…

[qqueenofhades]

i noticed that you like to write a lot of heartrender husbands from fedyor’s side of things (which makes sense cause fedyor is fun!) but i have to ask in the modern au, what was ivan thinking the whole first two months 😂??

like was he carrying the joke the whole time? did his brain short circuit around fedyor?? was he worried about what fedyor was thinking or did he just think he was shy? Did he think the first date went well ☠️?

This was supposed to be lighthearted, but then there came Feels. So here is Ivan's backstory in Phantomverse. Content warning for mentions of an abusive relationship, familial homophobia, implied sexual manipulation, and dark themes. Nothing graphic, but duly noted.

Also on AO3.

Brighton Beach, 2015

It’s safe to say that Ivan Ivanovich Sakharov Kaminsky did not ever, not in a thousand years, not in a million, imagine himself ending up here. At one point, even Moscow would have been a stretch, and that was obviously still Russia. The fact that he would be walking down a sidewalk in Brooklyn, under the elevated tracks of the Q train that rattles and bangs overhead, on a cool spring morning to do his shopping at the Brighton Bazaar – in, should this somehow not be clear, America – and then returning to his apartment and his husband is, quite frankly, something out of an alternate-Ivan timeline. One from the Twilight Zone, or whatever they are calling that kind of thing these days. Sometimes when he thinks about it too much, he gets afraid that it is in fact a dream. That no matter how long it has gone on and how good it has been, it will suddenly and inevitably end. After all, he is Russian. Sunny optimism has never been accused of forming a notable facet of the national character, and Ivan himself would never be described as the hopeful type. But God, for this, he does.

He reaches the bazaar – a bustling blue-awninged international supermarket with three-quarters of its signs written in Cyrillic – and steps inside, grabbing a basket and pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket to double-check his list. He knows what he needs, but he likes the tidiness of writing it down, and he proceeds into the crammed aisles, passing customers speaking English, Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Yiddish, and several other languages he can’t identify by ear. Brighton Bazaar stocks all the Russian products necessary to satisfy even a homesick expat like Ivan, and he enjoys being able to navigate the store with ease and read all the labels at first glance. He can get by in English, if he’s pressed, but it’s easier to leave it to Fedyor, who is fluent, and in here, he can conjure the illusion that he will walk out on the street and be back where he truly belongs. He likes Brighton Beach a great deal more than he ever expected to, but it’s no replacement for the real thing.

Ivan collects his purchases, along with a few special extras, and takes them to the counter. He is greeted in Russian by the checkout clerk, who knows him well for always turning up at the same time every Saturday morning with military precision. As Semyon Pavlovich Kuznetsov (who is called Syoma by his friends, but he has not clearly stated that Ivan can use the diminutive and therefore Ivan does not) scans his items, Ivan consents to exchange a few gruff words of small talk on the weather (nice) how the Mets did last night (badly) and the old guy who apparently died of a heart attack two days ago in the Russian bathhouse on Neck Road (making Ivan glad he did not choose said day to attend). It’s this weird Russian-American hybrid of things, since Semyon is the teenage grandson of a Red Army veteran who fought at Stalingrad, but he was born and raised in Brooklyn, loves American video games, and is fully fluent in American pop culture. It startles Ivan to realize that while this kid speaks Russian perfectly, he has probably never done so in Russia outside of a few visits back to the old country when his family can afford it. That is a very personal question to ask one’s grocery clerk, however, and he does not.

And then there’s that other thing, which he would definitely never be asked in Russia, especially not these days. Semyon hits the button to tally up Ivan’s bill, informs him that he owes $56.77, and then says cheerily, “How is Fedyor?”

Ivan concentrates on digging the exact amount out of his wallet in cash, since he never had a credit card when he lived in Russia and is still somewhat leery of them. “Fedyor is fine,” he says curtly, in the tone that makes it clear that he understands this question is an expected part of an American social interaction, but that is all the information he is willing to venture. “Here is the money.”

Semyon accepts it, counts it into the till, and rings the transaction through, handing Ivan his bags and his receipt. “Have a nice day, Mr. Kaminsky!”

“Thank you, Semyon Pavlovich.” Ivan accepts his purchases and leaves the store, taking a deep breath of the salty, sunny air and the wind whipping off the seafront. It’s still a little too early in the year for there to be many bathers on the beach, though there are always people strolling on the boardwalk. It’s only a few minutes to the apartment, which is just off Brighton Beach Avenue and overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. Ivan buzzes into the old brownstone, takes the stairs to the third floor, and as he unlocks his front door and lets himself in, wonders, yet again, at the sheer impossibility that his life has led him here.

Ivan is the third of five boys, but he was the one who was named after his father. It was not, of course, because they had some special hope for him to be the great inheritor of paternal pride, but a simple matter of logistics. His oldest brother, Roman, was named after their paternal grandfather. His second-oldest brother, Oleg, was named after their maternal grandfather. When Ivan arrived, only then was it proper to name him after Ivan Romanovich, Ivan Sakharov senior, since rushing too fast to glorify yourself as an individual, rather than your community and your ancestors, could be seen as running contrary to the collectivist ideals of the great Soviet Union. By the time his two younger brothers arrived, his parents were hard pressed for ideas; Yuri (for Gagarin) and Vladimir (originally for Lenin, though that has obviously acquired a different connotation those days) were clearly obtained by putting the names of national heroes into a hat and picking.

Five children was quite a lot for a Soviet-generation family, and Ivan doesn’t know anyone else his age with that number of siblings. After all, more children meant more time standing in line at Municipal Grocery Store #5 for food that has to be shared among more mouths, more worries about how to clothe and educate and accommodate them, more chances for one of them to go terminally astray and betray the family honor. Ivan wonders sometimes if his parents only really wanted Roman and Oleg, but decided to keep going as a matter of gaming the system, so much as it was able to be gamed.

By the early 1980s, the aging, decrepit, dying USSR, run by aging, decrepit, dying men, was in the grip of a demographic crisis so extreme that it was a contest between worrying about which one would end them faster: crazy President Reagan with his finger on the nuclear button, or the whole country just keeling over of old age. The idea of what a family even meant had been under constant challenge since the heady days of the Bolsheviks, who denounced marriage as a construct of bourgeoisie oppression and preached for free love and sexual liberation. Then it went hard back in the other direction during Stalin and the Great Patriotic War, holding up the traditional nuclear family as the highest ideal and offering rewards to mothers who had multiple children. Then it lurched away again. Abortion and contraception had been legal and freely available since the days of the revolution and most Soviet women made good use of them. Plus, of course, the obvious difficulties of maintaining a sizeable family when it was increasingly impossible to obtain even basic supplies and foodstuffs. It just made no sense.

Desperately trying to counter this slide toward self-inflicted obsolescence, the late-stage USSR came up with a number of incentives to boost the birth rate by any means necessary. They allowed mothers to refuse to list fathers on the birth certificate, to avoid social shame if he was married, foreign, a drunkard, or otherwise unsuitable, and beefed up programs to support single women with children. They also went back to the old-school plan of granting extra stipends, housing privileges, and state recognition to families that had more than two children, and Ivan himself was the third of his. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that he was almost surely conceived for the tax benefits.

Not, that is, that it didn’t work. When Ivan was born in 1984, the family lived in a tiny apartment on the tenth floor of a building with no elevator (or rather it did have an elevator, but it was always broken), crowded in with three single young men who were at the very bottom of the list for being assigned housing. By the time his youngest brother, Vladimir, was born in 1987, they had been moved to a small house of their own on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, not far from the bus that his father took two hours a day out to the mine. The cynical old joke in the USSR was that the people pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them, though in Ivan Romanovich’s case, the work was backbreakingly real, even if the money wasn’t. He would come home exhausted and filthy after a sixteen-hour shift and yell at Galina Sakharova to feed him, bark at his sons, and then fall asleep in front of the television, only to get up the next morning and shuffle off again.

Ivan Ivanovich has spent a lot of time after he left home trying to understand what that kind of life would do to a man, mostly because he didn’t do it while he was there. Of course he didn’t. He was a child, and it was simply what he was used to, the only way the world could possibly be. On the night of December 26, 1991, as Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev signed the United Soviet Socialist Republics out of existence with a single stroke of the pen, Ivan remembers his father crying and swearing and throwing things at the wall, the heavy yellow-glass ashtray that always seemed unbreakable, perched on the kitchen table to collect the detritus of his constant cigarettes, smashed to bits just like their country, their sense of self, their security. It wasn’t as if life in the USSR was so wonderful. It was just the only thing they knew. Beyond that, there was nothing but the terror of the utterly unknown.

At any rate, the world didn’t end. The oligarchs moved in and began snapping up Russia’s newly privatized economy. Ivan Ivanovich, of course, had no goddamn clue about this either, aside from overhearing his father curse about it some more. He trudged through secondary school and left at eighteen, without even trying to proceed onto university. Those weren’t for someone like him, he knew that. Instead he got a job at the ever-troubled Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant, and went straight to work on the factory floor.

It was around this time that the one disruption in his otherwise humdrum life, the one thing that stopped him from just settling into the same miserable existence as his father and going on like that forever, became too impossible to ignore. And that was the fact that no matter how much Ivan tried to squash it down, push it aside, or otherwise pretend it didn’t exist, he could no longer deny the fact that he was attracted to men, and only to men. He bought some of the cheap porn magazines from the tabak, tried to flip through them and get something out of the girls in heavy eyeliner and bleached-blonde hair, spilling out of their scanty lingerie, and just… didn’t. He wasn’t even interested enough to try a conversation with a real flesh-and-blood woman (not that Ivan had ever gotten through a conversation with another human being, especially a woman, without disaster) and see if it was different in the flesh. Nothing about the experience, even imagining it, appealed to him at all. But men…

He knew it wasn’t right, just because – well, you knew that sort of thing, you didn’t have to ask about it, you didn’t let on. But nonetheless, something, somehow, must have given him away, because one evening after the end of his shift, one of his coworkers cornered him in the back. His name was Konstantin and he was a few years older, big and bluff and constantly smelling like machine oil. He stood there, folded his arms, and said, “I will give you five hundred rubles if you suck my dick, Ivan Ivanovich.”

Ivan didn’t know how to answer. He had never spoken to Konstantin about anything aside from the job. He didn’t like him, he wasn’t attracted to him, and he didn’t want his filthy fucking rubles. He wanted to go home and take a shower.

And yet. He wanted to know. So when he went home, it was with five hundred rubles in his pocket, and a strange, indefinable feeling of something both excitement and shame. He looked it up later and found that it was barely seven American dollars, barely enough to buy a sandwich in this place he now lives. Then after that it became – not a relationship, not exactly. But he had done it once and Konstantin knew that he was at least theoretically willing, and there was no getting away from it now. Soon enough it became something of a regular thing, and then Konstantin wanted to try other stuff and not always pay, and if Ivan ever protested, Konstantin would threaten to get him fired from the factory or tell his family what they were doing. Ivan knew that he couldn’t let this happen, and besides, this was a relationship, or so he would tell himself. It was rough and it wasn’t very enjoyable and he didn’t like the way it made him feel, but it was probably the best he was going to get, here in this place, so he had no choice but to put up with it.

Until one night when his older brother came to pick him up from work, which he didn’t usually do. Something about it set off Ivan’s alarm bells, but he got into Roman’s battered old Zhiguli anyway. They didn’t head back toward the house. Instead they headed for the country, the narrow, crumbling road that led into the vast forests of Krasnoyarsk Krai. The city was often voted one of the most beautiful in Siberia, surviving even its long periods of grim industrialization with something of its soul intact. It wasn’t as cold as Yakutsk or Oymyakon, the places where it stayed at sixty below zero all winter long and boiling water froze when you tossed it out the window. Winters only got down to a few degrees below, and in Russia, that was par for the course. Ivan loved his hometown, and he was used to the outdoors. He was a sportsman, a natural athlete. He played hockey, bandy, football, rugby, and basketball (surprisingly popular in Russia). He swam and boxed. He was tall and tough and muscled and most people never bothered him. But when the car coasted to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Roman turned off the headlights, he was still terrified.

His brother said, “I hear you’re doing things, Vanya.”

Ivan didn’t answer.

“I hear you’re doing things with men.” Roman reached over and grabbed him violently by the shoulders, pinning him against the seat. “Disgusting things. I will not have one of those in the family, do you hear me? Do you hear me? If I find out that you have done it ever again, even once, I will make sure that you pay the price. Are you listening? Say that you understand.”

“Yes,” Ivan said. “I understand.”

What he really understood was that he was going to leave, when he had barely been out of Krasnoyarsk Krai in his life. Going as far as Novosibirsk for a shopping trip was unusual, and once, in school, he went to Georgia, which was the first time he had left the country (though of course, it used to be the country). But he knew that he could not stay here anymore, and in a moment of welcome serendipity, that was also when his conscription notice arrived. At the time, every Russian man over the age of eighteen had to serve two obligatory years in the armed forces (though it has since been lowered to one, of which Ivan does not necessarily approve), and his number had come up. So he quit his job, did not say goodbye to Konstantin or tell him where he was going, packed his few boxes of things, and moved four thousand kilometers and four time zones west to Moscow.

Ivan arrived in the capital trying not to present himself as a wet-behind-the-ears country boy, to act like he knew what he was doing, to show he was much tougher and meaner than any of these spoiled, pampered little children whining about how hard it was when they trudged into headquarters and presented their army notices. In that, he had a genuine advantage; he had worked hard for his whole life, he had already been through whatever could possibly endured with a father and four brothers, and he found the strict routines, harsh discipline, and predictable tasks of the army comforting. Everyone was scared of him, he didn’t need to try (though he did), and that was also gratifying. He worked hard and pleased his commanders, who tried to entice him to stay on as a full-time professional serviceman. There were many opportunities for a man of his talents, and more money than Ivan had ever dreamed of. As for his personal life, as long as he was scrupulously discreet and kept turning in good results, they would not trouble to enquire too closely. That was already better than from what he had expected with Konstantin. Once again, he thought it would be the best he got.

That was where, therefore, he met Aleksander Ilyich Morozov.

Morozov was his opposite in many ways – rich, well-spoken, well-educated, the son of a legendary KGB commander and the inheritor of comfort and privilege even in the lean last days of the USSR. He was about Ivan’s own age, but he had a self-possession and a gravitas that made him seem older. He had started training for a career in the Russian security services practically from childhood, and he had pegged Ivan as a particularly promising recruit. “You should come with me,” he said. “We would find an excellent career for you.”

Ivan was never sure how to respond when Morozov started talking like this. He admired the man and was admittedly attracted to him – not just the dark, elegant handsomeness, but the manifest air of being a person who mattered, who made the rest of the world sit up and take notice and play by his rules – and while he knew that Morozov was ruthless, he wasn’t bothered by that and was willing to do the same when it was called for. Ivan didn’t see the world as some nice candy fairy place where good deeds were always rewarded and violence was always wrong, not least since he knew full well that it didn’t work like that. He didn’t have time for these idiots who thought they would get out there and hold hands and change the world with the power of sunshine and kisses or whatever it was. He didn’t.

Then there was one night when Morozov was at Ivan’s apartment, and they had been drinking and making big plans for ruling the world behind the scenes, and Ivan forgot himself entirely and leaned over the table and kissed him. He tried to pull back almost at once, but Morozov didn’t resist. In fact, he leaned in and put a hand behind Ivan’s head and kept him there, and in that moment, Ivan knew that while this might not be personally objectionable for Sasha (his sexuality was undiscussed but evidently fluid), that wasn’t the reason he was going along with it. It was because he knew instinctively that it was a perfect way to control Ivan, to harness his attraction and his weakness and his willingness to go along with whatever Sasha wanted, and in that, despite all the big plans they had put together and the way Ivan had dreamed of his life changing, it was just Konstantin all over again, and Ivan was straight back at the factory on his knees, small and cornered and powerless. It was visceral and it was wrong and it wasn’t the best he would ever do and he wasn’t, he wasn’t taking that.

They pulled back and Sasha made an enquiring noise, like he wanted to know if Ivan was interested in sealing the deal, and instead Ivan ordered him to leave right now, get out. That was the end of their friendship; they never spoke to each other again, and when his third year in the army ran out, which he had already taken voluntarily, he left. He got a job at some Moscow industrial plant and it was there, through the friend of a friend, he met Nadia Zhabina. And it turned out that she was queer (the first time he had ever heard the word spoken in a good way, something he wanted to be, something he didn’t mind accepting, rather than as an attack), and it turned out after that that she had a friend she wanted him to meet, only it clearly meant that she thought they should go out. Like. On a date.

Ivan flatly shut her down. He did not date, he did not want to date, he did not think he would be good at dating, he did not want to meet some pansy city boy from Nizhny Novgorod who he would immediately dislike, and he was not going to do it, the end. Only Nadia really seemed disappointed, and maybe it was not the worst thing to try a little. This would backfire terribly, he would get over it, and move on with his life.

In Ivan’s opinion, the first date with Fedyor Mikhailovich Kaminsky was, at least on his own behalf, a modest success. He was unavoidably late, thanks to the bus running behind schedule, but he introduced himself, his hobbies, and made it clear what sort of person he was and what he was interested in. He even sent a polite follow-up text with an invitation to meet again. There. No questions, no confusion, everything very straightforward and clear. Nothing to complain about. That was how you did a date, yes?

It turned out, however, that Fedyor Mikhailovich was either very reticent, or perhaps confused, or maybe he did not even know that they had been on a date and Nadia had not clearly explained to him. Burned by his experiences at home, knowing how easily word could get out to the wrong people, Ivan did not want to bring up the subject explicitly, but he had to admit to a considerable confusion. Maybe Fedyor actually liked to just mince around Moscow city parks together, like something out of a Tolstoy novel, or to sit on his couch and watch bad American action movies together. (Later, Ivan learned that Die Hard is actually something of a cult classic, but it’s still slightly lost on him.) That wasn’t bad, because Ivan – to his great bafflement and wariness – liked spending time with him. Fedyor wasn’t like him at all, but they clicked nonetheless. He was the exact kind of idealistic activist that Ivan had long disdained, but it was different with him. When Fedya talked, he liked to listen, to dream about a world that really did work that way. It didn’t, but it felt closer.

Besides that, he was cute. He was well-put together. He was charming and vivacious and could talk to people that they met, while Ivan stood scowling with his hands in his pockets and wondered how long this was going to take. He really desperately wanted to kiss Fedya (and for that matter, do other things to him), and he found himself thinking about it a lot. But what if it was like with Sasha again, and it was either Ivan opportunistically taking it for himself, or Fedya selfishly trying to keep him there, to use him for his own purposes? Maybe Fedya was the idiot. He had to know they were together, right? Or were they together? Ivan suddenly wasn’t sure. Damn it! Why didn’t Fedyor subscribe to the school of just being clear about things? Ivan himself had nothing to do with the problem.

But then there came that night, and Fedya cooking dinner and stumbling through trying to ask him if they were maybe something, and in that moment, Ivan found it all so hilarious that the only thing he could do was sit there and let the whole thing play out. Then it turned out, of course, that they were together, and that Fedyor kissed him just as deliciously as Ivan had imagined, and maybe Nadia Zhabina was not so wrong after all.

Maybe she was not wrong in the least.

Ivan takes his supermarket bags to the sunny kitchen of the mostly-remodeled apartment and sets them down. Fedya has picked out all the colors and wallpapers and furniture and paint, and Ivan has done most of the work, since he is gainfully employed as a handyman and repair-person and he doesn’t want to pay some American to half-ass a job that he can do better. The apartment is really quite lovely now. The living room has been done in a pale, springy green, the white plaster moldings washed and repaired, all the junk of the previous owner finally cleared out except for one or two collectibles that they decided to keep. There’s a bookshelf and a desk filled with Fedya’s work things, a couch and a television and a coffee table and new curtains. The bedroom is big and airy, with a ceiling fan and new carpets. Framed pictures and art pieces hang on the wall. It looks like a place where real people live.

Ivan makes breakfast, cooking and stirring and brewing the coffee, and puts it all on a tray. It’s Saturday, so of course Fedya is still asleep, and Ivan pads through the apartment to the closed bedroom door, balancing the tray on his hip long enough to open it and cast a strip of light inside. It takes a moment, but Fedyor rolls over, groggy and tousled and very, very cute with his bed-headed dark hair and squinting eyes. “Vanya? What smells so good?”

“Happy birthday, my love.” Ivan sets the tray on the bedside table and leans down to kiss him, as Fedyor makes a happy humming sound and throws his arms around Ivan’s neck, cuddling against him like a barnacle. “I have made you breakfast.”

(His younger self was wrong, and he has never been so glad of it.)

(This was the best, this is the best, this was waiting for him, this kind of happiness could happen for him, and he is grateful beyond all words that he fought for it and believed it until it did.)