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  I had seen families living nearby, crammed into old wood-and-stucco tenements near the railroad station, sharing the same dirty kitchen and a smelly toilet in the courtyard. So I was happy my parents were engineers and we could live in a nice brick building.

  The kitchen of our apartment, not school, was where I learned to read and write the year before I began first grade. My mother valued education highly, I imagine, because she had had to struggle for her own. She was the only child from her street to go on to a professional school. And I had been born while she was still in the technical institute. So she took great pride in her engineering degree.

  But my mother understood the value of hard work in the classroom. “Sasha,” she would often say as we sat at the kitchen table with my schoolbooks open before us, “the people who get ahead in life are the ones who work honestly and hard.”

  My mother was then a person of great optimism.

  Her belief in the benefits of working hard in school had a direct impact on me. While other parents in our building made sure their children completed their lessons each night, Lydia Zuyev sat patiently at the kitchen table verifying that her son Alexander completed all of his calligraphy and arithmetic exercises letter-perfect. For her, no errors were permissible, nor was I allowed to cross out mistakes and start again on the same page. “We have sufficient paper,” she would tell me, ripping up the half-complete sheet from my exercise book. From her I learned to concentrate on the task at hand.

  In kindergarten my first classroom had been dominated by a large framed painting of “Dedushka,” Grandfather Lenin, smiling warmly down on the children. We’d first learned to sing songs about our patriotic duty from a book with pictures of “Valodynka” Lenin, a child just like us with golden curls above the starched white collar of his school uniform. Once, my mother had taken me on a long riverboat trip to Ulyanovsk, another port on the Volga, where we had visited the Lenin Home Museum. I was happy that Valodynka had been raised in such a nice big house, but surprised that his father had been a schoolteacher, not an engineer.

  I was a pudgy boy, not at all athletic. On Sundays my mother would often take me on the long trolley ride out to my grandmother’s house in Bezimaynka on the eastern edge of the city. Anna Vasilyevna Khatuntseva, my mother’s mother, was a typical Russian babushka. She was stooped by years of hard work, but had a bright smile and kind eyes. Like many women of her generation, she smoked, and relished the luxury of a quiet cigarette.

  She believed it was her duty to feed her grandchild as much as he could eat. To her, blinchik dipped in melted butter and filled with sugar, honey, or raspberry jam, or a steaming plate of piroshki filled with spiced minced pork, shredded cabbage, and hard-boiled eggs, were meant to be eaten right down to the last crumb. Naturally I loved going to her house. Even though she had no running water and heated her room with a wood stove, I never thought of her as poor.

  She was close to her neighbors. On summer afternoons the old people would set tables under the shade trees, and the women would bring food. Everyone shared, everyone was equal.

  I enjoyed all the attention I received at these picnics. I was the first grandchild in the family, and had come late in the first postwar generation. Children my age were doted on because we were the visible continuation of families that had been almost extinguished in the war.

  And the war was a very strong presence in my childhood. At school we all learned Red Army songs, and the most exciting movies were all war films. One of my favorites was The Chronicle of the Dive Bomber. At the end the heroic young pilot dove his crippled plane right into a column of panzers and sacrificed his life for the Motherland. Sitting in the warm darkness of the Torch Cinema, watching those powerful old fighter-bombers howl through the sky of the Ukraine to blast the invaders, I felt deep pride to be a Soviet citizen. Then, riding home on the trolley, I gazed at the actual Shturmovik that sat atop the pedestal in a neighborhood memorial near one of the new microrayon apartment complexes. Its wide green wings and rugged tail were emblazoned with the red stars of the Soviet Army. That airplane had been built right here in Samara. It had crashed in a Baltic swamp and been carefully restored as a memorial. To me, it was a tangible link to a truly heroic time.

  But there were stronger links to the war within my own family. My mother’s father, Mikhail Stepanovich, had driven a truck before the war, then had become a chauffeur for a Party official. Like my father, he must have had some other talents, because he had apparently been fairly well-to-do. Grandmother had a framed photo of him standing on the porch of their own small wooden home, dressed in a handsome leather coat. In 1941 he had gone to war. At first, she told me, his letters had come regularly. Then, during the worst of the fighting in 1942, they had stopped. For months she received no news. She had joined thousands of other women, boys, and old men on the emergency construction of the aviation factories that had been moved east from Moscow and Leningrad after the Nazi invasion. Although she had been a village schoolteacher in her teens and had never before endured hard manual labor, Grandmother worked for months, hacking the frozen ground with a pick, digging foundations for the factories that were soon producing the Shturmoviks.

  Those were terrible times, she told me. My mother and her brother, Vladimir, had only one pair of shoes to share between them. Then in the middle of the harsh winter of 1943, a dishonest salesclerk stole the family’s three-month food ration book from my mother one day when she had gone to buy bread. With that ration book, the family was entitled to a basic allotment of bread, flour, and cooking oil. Without it, they faced starvation. That winter and spring my grandmother led my mother and uncle far out into the countryside, digging beneath the snow for damaged potatoes in the fallow fields. They had survived on rotten-potato cakes and a kind of soup Grandmother made from grass and willow buds.

  But despite these hardships, she retained her basic humanity. She was assigned as a guard at a camp for German prisoners of war. Many of these POWs were hardened Nazis, but others, she told me, were just boys who had been drafted straight from school. One prisoner, she said, played the harmonica beautifully, and she rewarded him by sharing her own meager bread ration.

  Then in the spring of 1944, they finally received official notification that my grandfather had been killed at the front. As sad as the news had been, this official notification meant the family was entitled to a small survivor’s pension. And as war orphans, my mother and uncle also received a special food and clothing allotment from the American Red Cross. My mother was given a pair of yellow shoes with strong rubber soles. Uncle Vladimir received plaid wool knickers. Once a month the family was given a large can of powdered eggs, canned pork, and several thick chocolate bars.

  “Sasha,” my grandmother told me, “your mother and Uncle Vladimir thought it was New Year’s when they opened those packages.”

  I understood why making sure children were well fed was so important to my grandmother.

  But being a chubby boy of nine had begun to bother me when we lived in the old neighborhood near the center of the city. I could not run in the park or climb trees with the other boys. They laughed and called me “fatso.”

  Out in Microrayon 8, my new neighborhood, however, I discovered that being a pudgy, overfed kid was more than simply unpleasant. This district was a cluster of seven-story prefabricated concrete apartment blocks standing like dominoes among open parkland and playing fields. Few families knew each other here, so older boys could prey on kids like me as we walked to school each morning. My mother always gave me fifteen kopeks for sweets at the school buffet. But I often had to hand those three copper coins over to bigger kids who ambushed me along the way. They knew I couldn’t defend myself.

  Finally Grigori, one of the guys in my building who had rescued me several times, gave me some good advice. “If you’re going to live out here,” he said, looking around the open fields, “you’re going to have to learn to defend yourself.”

  But I didn’t know where to begin to learn th
is important skill. Then, that summer, I almost drowned while wading in a pond. My mother decided that I had to learn how to swim, even if I didn’t seem otherwise athletically inclined.

  She entered me in a swimming program for boys and girls offered at the SKA, Soviet Army sports complex, not far from Samarskaya Square in the center of the city. To get there, I either had to wake up early and ride in with my mother on the shuttle bus to the Hydroelectric Institute, or take the trolley. I almost drowned again before learning to swim. But within three months I was the best underwater swimmer in my group, which included boys as old as fourteen. I could dive in at one end of the long pool, swim underwater 150 feet, then turn and swim halfway back, all on the same breath. The coach, a pretty young woman, was impressed.

  “Sasha,” she told me one afternoon, “I could make a decent swimmer out of you.”

  I was selected for the advanced group, which trained for competition. But there was a problem I had not anticipated. At the SKA complex the boys and girls were expected to be well behaved and obedient to all rules. But I had discovered a real aversion to mindless discipline. One of the rules was no jumping from the high board, even during our twenty-minute “free” warm-up period. But I loved to jump from the board. Before I could make a name for myself as a swimming champion, I was caught leaping from the board and dismissed from the program.

  “At least you learned how to swim, Sanya,” my mother said.

  I had learned to swim so well that I felt like a fish in the water. But I had learned more than just the skill. Although I was still pudgy, I knew that I had the coordination to be an athlete. And on my way back from the pool that afternoon, I had spotted an interesting poster from the trolley window. There were openings in the boys’ wrestling program at the Spartak sports complex, which was administered by the city’s trade union association. This complex, in a new building not far from the river, was a well-equipped sports center. At Spartak hundreds of boys and girls were taught wrestling, boxing, gymnastics, rowing, and team sports like volleyball and basketball. In the winter there was Nordic skiing and ice-skating.

  My first day at the Spartak center was almost my last. I found the strength test to qualify for wrestling classes too challenging. The coach, Alexey Karanov, lined up all the ten-year-olds and had us attempt pull-ups, rope climbs to the echoing ceiling above, and tumbling on mats. He watched us like a peasant examining livestock. One of the most difficult tests was kneeling on a mat and bending backward until the top of your head touched the mat behind your ankles. Every time I tried, I collapsed. But I did manage the tumbling better than most boys. It was my natural limberness, which had developed during my swimming, that kept me in the program.

  After I had fallen backward in a heap for the sixth time, Coach Karanov took me aside. He was a stocky, well-muscled young man in his late twenties with a wide, open face and the patience of a natural teacher. Alexey Karanov had been one of the city’s best wrestlers and an honor graduate of the local Institute of Physical Culture. “You’re just not strong enough to benefit from these classes,” he said. “Go home and practice the back bend. Return in a month.” He smiled to reassure me. “If you can pass the physical test then, you’re in the program. If not, you’ll have to wait until next year.”

  That summer my family moved again, to Microrayon 7, a raw new suburban neighborhood. The five-floor apartment blocks were surrounded by treeless, muddy lots. It was up to the people themselves to do the landscaping. Each building was organized around an individual podyesd, or entrance. On summer evenings and weekends the residents planted trees and grass, and dug ponds, which would one day be great for fishing and ice-skating. We now had a two-room apartment with a balcony and a kitchen you could actually walk around in. And we had a nice Caucasian rug with bright geometric patterns to decorate the living room.

  It was on that oriental carpet that I practiced the Spartak back bend, hour after hour. I was clumsy but determined. That September, while other kids shoveled dirt outside after school or studied in their kitchens, I worked alone in our apartment, my knees planted firmly on the carpet, my arms arched behind me as I bent, the muscles of my gut stretched taut. At first I piled pillows behind me to break my fall. Then I struggled without them.

  Finally, after three weeks, I managed the back bend without falling. Two days later I could do three repetitions. But the test required five successful back bends. My month had expired. I rode in by trolley early one Saturday morning, then nervously walked the streets until the Spartak wrestling students assembled at nine. I felt ready for the test. But when Coach Karanov led me out to the middle of the gym, with the other boys lined up across from me, I was overcome by nerves. Then I forced myself into the exercise. To my amazement, the first three back bends went perfectly, and I flipped up each time with my knees still in place. On the fourth repetition, though, my right knee slipped and the leg gave way. I was on my back, staring up at the distant wood-paneled ceiling of the gym. I had failed.

  Then something strange happened. I heard applause. The other boys were walking toward me, grinning and clapping as they came. They helped me up. Coach Karanov slapped me on the back. “Sasha,” he said, “I’ve never seen anybody try so hard. If your knee hadn’t slipped, you would have made your five. Tell your parents you are in the program.”

  Only later did I learn that it had been my mother who had convinced the coach to give me a second chance. She realized I was a boy who needed a healthy outlet for my restless energy. And she had been worried what kind of influence I could come under from the boys on the street.

  Once I was in Spartak, my life changed. I was in the fifth year at School Number Two now, on the afternoon class schedule, which left my mornings free. So three mornings a week, and all day Saturday, I spent at the gym. The coach demanded a lot from us, but he was not a mindless disciplinarian. Wrestling, he taught us, was much more than the brute physical domination of a weaker body by a stronger one. The sport required a complete union of mind and body, brain, muscle, reflex, and tactics. That was a rather mature concept for eleven-year-old boys to grasp, but it made perfect sense to me from the outset. There were almost seventy juniors who began the program that autumn, and many were two years older than me. We were told that the final team cut in the spring had room for fewer than fifteen.

  I was determined to work as hard as I could on my physical conditioning and to master all the basic match moves required of us that first year. To do so, I had to be in the Spartak gym when it opened at nine each morning. Coach Karanov had a rule, one of his few inflexible requirements: Morning instruction began at nine. To reach the city center from Microrayon 7, I had to ride with my mother on the institute bus that left our apartment complex at six-thirty. I hated waking up at that hour, when it wasn’t even light yet. But my mother insisted.

  “Lydia Mikhailnovna,” my mother’s colleagues would tease her, “why do you torture your son?”

  But she would only smile, knowing the sport was helping shape my character. She realized I had found a sense of purpose in my life that many adolescent boys in our neighborhood clearly lacked.

  And this was especially important now. For several years I had realized there were problems between my mother and father. I had come to understand that my father had been overcome by the turmoil of his life, and had found a solution in alcohol. The war had disrupted his schooling, and he had had to complete his engineering studies at night school while working days in the aircraft factory. This left him no time to acquire the Party affiliation and draw the notice of the factory’s apparatchiks, all requirements to advancement in his career. Although he was professionally qualified for a better position, he was stymied. More and more he turned to vodka to ease his shattered pride. The year after I began the Spartak wrestling program, my father moved out, and my mother filed for divorce.

  Although she felt equally frustrated by the politics that controlled her institute, she had not yet lost her Socialist optimism and surrendered to bitter despair.
Year after year, she dutifully renewed her application for Communist Party membership. She sincerely believed that the Party was leading the Soviet Union and the world to a bright future of justice and universal equality. She also understood that the only way to improve conditions for herself and me was through professional advancement. The key to that advancement was held by the Party. But her application was formally rejected each year, supposedly because she had not yet achieved the proper level of “political maturity.”

  This was simply not true. She had studied Marxism-Leninism just as hard as solid geometry and physical chemistry. But the Party remained closed to her. Although theoretically open to all Soviet citizens, Communist Party membership was rigidly controlled. Eighty-five percent of members were industrial workers or kolkhozniki from collective farms. Because of their political naivete, they were easily controlled by the ten percent of the Party members drawn from reserved positions among the military and government apparatchiks. Only five percent came from the intelligentsia, which included professions such as medicine, law, and engineering. The practical effect of this unofficial Party caste system at a large industrial complex like the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute was that my mother stood little hope of membership.

  Perhaps because of her experience, she never encouraged me to become active in Party youth groups in school. Anyway, by my second year at Spartak, I was far more interested in wrestling than in the Young Pioneers. And as my athletic skill increased, I saw no advantage to joining the clique of smug and ambitious young politicians who controlled the Komsomol branch at School Number Two.