The Cult in my Grandmother's House

2. Brainwashing

THE FIRST COMMUNE ON LAKHUTI

On arrival in Dushanbe I was taken aback. It was the town where I was born, and the house where I spent my early years, where every millimetre was my territory, strewn with my beloved toys, but – it was different. In this tiny two-room apartment with its combined bathroom and toilet there were about 20 people of various ages, all complete strangers to me. They all slept side by side on the floor, tightly pressed against each other, sharing blankets and pillows. They ate on the floor too, on a spread-out oilcloth. The apartment had ceased to be a cosy and safe place to play.

All these people were always in a good mood and with unbelievably exaggerated emotions.

In addition, they all had lice, which I soon got too.

My grandmother hardly seemed to notice me; or rather, she gave me only as much attention as she gave any of the others.

At first people were constantly rebuking me, things like

“Don’t cross your legs! It means you think you’re better than everyone else. Don’t fold your hands on your chest – do you think you’re Napoleon? Looks like you’ve got delusions of grandeur.”

A seven-year old child could hardly be expected to understand these remarks (who Napoleon was, what grandeur is, let alone delusions thereof), but I stopped folding my hands and crossing my legs.

Apparently crossing the limbs was considered a psychological defence mechanism, protection from external influence.

Members of a cult, however, are supposed to be constantly open, that is, vulnerable – so they can be controlled.

I had to learn how to plait my long hair myself, because going about with loose hair like Carmen was just not done. If I didn’t plait my hair, the adults would ask if I wanted to look like a slut. One time I asked what a slut was, and they told me it was a prostitute. I didn’t dare to ask what a prostitute was. By their intonation I had already understood it was something very bad and applied only to beautiful women and girls. After that I came to the conclusion that being beautiful was very bad. It wasn’t safe. Although, I wondered, if the beautiful Carmen was bad, then why did we still listen to that opera? Ah, but she dies at the end… does that mean she deserved it?

“TAPPING” AND “LAYERING”

One day one of the grown-up women, Natalya Yevgenyevna, called me into her room and said she was going to give me a treatment. Everything was so absurd that I didn’t even question what I needed to be treated for. Indeed, would any child question authority, when they are totally abandoned and there is no one trustworthy to ask? She sat me in front of her, looked in my eyes and began in a confidential tone:

“Ania, I know you are angry and that you have resistance. Where would you say your anger is, on a scale of 1 to 10? And your resistance?”

Later I and all the other members of the cult were asked this question all the time. I always answered that my anger and resistance were somewhere between 7 and 10 on the 10-point scale. If the adults were so convinced that I was angry and full of resistance, why should I disappoint them?

Then Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to close my eyes and put both my hands face down on the table. Over the course of several minutes she tapped out a set rhythm on the table with a special wooden knocker in the shape of a mushroom, and I had a minute to copy the rhythm with my palms, keeping my eyes closed. For one tap I had to answer with the right hand, for two the left. The right hand corresponded to the left half of the brain, and the left to the right. It was considered good if you made mistakes with both hands, the more the better. Skewed results, where you made many more mistakes with one hand than the other, were evidence of brain dysfunction. If you made hardly any mistakes at all then it meant you were practically stupified from anger, aggression and resistance, and you needed active treatment right away. At this the educational psychologists would confer among themselves, concede to the authoritative opinion of the Chief, and then what ususally followed was a huge dose of therapy: speeches, mechanotherapy, and layering (explained below).

To sum up, it was with the help of this tapping that they measured a person’s level of aggression.

Besides this test there were others. They were all intended to measure the current condition and potential of the brain. There were auditory tests (where you had to remember and repeat combinations of words at speed), visual (remember combinations of cards, and then reproduce them, also under time pressure), and tactile (they would bend each of your fingers, and you had to remember and repeat the order, with eyes closed). These tests were all known as evidence, that’s what people would call it, “making evidence”.

Chloroethane

After that first test, the tapping one, Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to take my pants off and lie down on my side. She started to pour liquid chloroethane over my buttocks, first on one side then the other, and on special points on my toes. It was sore and I felt an unpleasant burning sensation on my skin. After the procedure you weren’t allowed to raise your head so the best thing was to make yourself fall asleep or at least lie with eyes closed.

Later the skin would itch like crazy where the chloroethane had touched it, and would come out in small crusty burns. But with the years I got used to it. After that first time I got this treatment almost every day for six years. I never noticed any change. Everyone there got this same treatment all the time, adults as well as children. It was known as layering; “to layer a person”.

I should say that at least there was never any sexual subtext to any of this treatment. No one ever touched my genitals.

Much later I read that chloroethane is a strong drug and that even small doses can have a strong intoxicating effect. People can even become addicted to it. But we never knew that and never noticed any special effect from it. At least I never did.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS

Soon I found out there was a Chief orchestrating all this confusion: Viktor Davydovich Stolbun. He was an elderly man (at least he seemed so to me, although in reality he wasn’t more than 50), short, with a big meaty nose, dishevelled grey hair and small eyes, and everyone respected and feared him. To be on the safe side I also started to respect and fear him.

We referred to our commune as the collective. It was made up of people who wanted to build true communism, to save a world perishing from widespread schizophrenia.

As the Chief saw it, humanity’s main problem was that most people in the world were suffering from schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug addiction and other serious psychological aberrations. “Children are suffering and perishing!” he would cry pathetically, gesticulating dramatically. From his point of view, absolutely all physical ailments, including cancer, infectious diseases and broken bones, stemmed from psychological deviance, that is from impure mindsets and ways of thinking. For a person to recover, they had to correct their psyche and restructure their personality.

The main reason for a deviant psyche was the corroded system of family relations. Psychological correction was therefore only possible with the involvement of the whole family. Thus, people came to the collective (or rather, were forced to come) with their whole family. Any relatives who refused to join the collective for whatever reason were considered traitors and potential enemies. Anyone who left the collective for any reason was also automatically put in this category.

My whole family, with the exception of my grandfather, was completely in thrall to this ideology.

This meant there were whole family clans in the collective. In turn the whole collective was split into two groups: adults and children. I was in the children’s category, obviously. We lived separately from the adults, and differently. Sometimes we wouldn’t see the adults for months.

The Chief took on patients for “treatment”. Applicants included certified alcoholics and schizophrenics, as well as those without any formal diagnosis but who were having difficulties in certain areas, for example in child-rearing. There were also assistants to the Chief: these included his wife, amateur enthusiasts, and people who had already been successfully “cured”. They called themselves educational psychologists.

The main form of treatment was speeches. This was a form of brainwashing: you stood in the middle of a crowd of people who would all try to prove you totally worthless. Eventually the moment would come when you’d no longer have a single doubt on the subject. Then they would patronisingly indulge you with handouts in the form of promises: “Fine, if you beg us, we might help you get better”. Then you understood what happiness means. You might not be getting better (as if you were even sick in the first place) but for all that you’d always be part of the cult.

It was mainly women who became clients of the cult. If you were very lucky, you might even get impregnated, and then you’d have the chance to bring a psychologically healthy child into the world – since the Chief was the only healthy person in the world, his seed was healthy too. Thus the Chief came to father many children. Thank goodness I was only a child, so personally no one touched me in that way. That was a rare piece of luck.

The speeches were accompanied by procedures. The patient was first tested for levels of aggression and tension, then evidence was collected, to investigate the brain and its potential, its stronger and weaker areas (to this day I remember the terms: the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes); and finally chloroethane was dripped on or electric shocks were applied to various parts of your body to act on your brain. In some ways it seems similar to acupuncture. The expected effect was that the treatment would help you become kinder and more relaxed, free of the negative thought patterns that gave rise to illnesses like cancer and tuberculosis, among others.

The cult found a psychosomatic explanation for absolutely any ailment, offering to solve the problem through psychotherapy and chloroethane. For example, the psychosomatic effect of cancer was a loss of faith, as well as deep hopelessness and despair. So if someone got cancer, they’d be asked, “Well, why are you such a wimp?”. Basically any psychotherapy began with these words.

I myself thought like this for many years, until I moved to Switzerland. Here many problems that in Russia had seemed insoluble – because I never managed to “get rid of the aggression causing the illness” – are solved simply by judiciously applying the right medicine or surgical intervention.

In the cult there was another important condition for treatment: the person had to ask for treatment themselves. They had to beg, preferably on their knees. This meant they were already broken, had lost all hope, and would therefore agree to any conditions. All that remained was to restructure their personality. I was a frequent witness of how the educational psychologists would wait until the patient had reached the condition they needed to condescendingly offer their help. Nobody saw this approach as inhumane; on the contrary, it was one of the main elements of the method.

If someone was close to death, the idea was that treatment would only be effective in one situation: if the person themselves came and asked for help. The fact that a dying person was physically unable to do that was explained as unwillingness to change in order to live. In other words, it was a personal and conscious choice.

For example, this is how Natalya Sergeevna Karapetova, who had several children by Stolbun, passed away. My grandmother, Dina Mikhailovna Chedia, also died like this.

WHY “CHIEF”?

I want to explain why I prefer not to call the Chief by name.

Firstly, I can’t bring myself to say his name. He doesn’t deserve that honour.

Secondly, the Chief is a manifestation of the extreme narcissism and immorality that is enabled by absolute impunity. Unfortunately, there are many people like him on the planet. I write not about him as an isolated case, but about the situation as typical. It’s not important what he was called or who he was personally. What is important is the occurrence itself, and what effect it had on specific people such as myself.

These memoirs do contain the real names of many adults. I consider them the Chief’s accomplices, real accessories to the crime. They took sides with him and so proved themselves corrupt and rotten. They are criminals too.

THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH WE WERE RAISED

The biggest mistake most parents make, according to the Chief, is spoiling their children. Coddling delays development of the brain and so the child becomes sluggish, passive and dependent, with weak cognitive faculties like imagination and memory. Families with an over-solicitious parenting style only produce spoilt, capricious children with pretentious behaviour. Smothering children causes psychological problems, followed by physical ailments. Children need to be given as much independence and freedom of choice as possible. Parents need to ensure the family has a congenial psychological atmosphere, with goodwill and “pure relations” between the sexes.

Another problem arising from over-parenting is overfeeding, or allowing regular overeating. Spoilt children will stuff themselves silly.

The Chief also often railed against philistinism as the dominant value system, symbolised by hot water and an orderly house. In these sorts of families children grow up as stupid bourgeoisie, concerned only with achieving material comfort.

Relations between parents and children also needed serious correction. Parents who talk down to their children hamper their development. If they don’t treat the child as an equal but only wield their authority and power, then it humiliates the child and lowers his self esteem so he can’t develop freely. The whole idea was that all childhood illnesses are the direct result of attention seeking. When children demand care and attention they “throw their toys out the pram”, thus feeding their egocentrism. This is the only reason children ever fall ill.

MESSAGES

Children who came to the collective had to be isolated from their parents. This was considered necessary to break them out of their familiar environment and show them a different system of relationships.

Meetings with parents were only allowed very rarely and under strict supervision. Letters were also strictly regulated. We were supposed to bring any letters to be checked by the educators, and letters from parents were always opened before we got them. Sometimes we never received them at all. Letters were known as messages. We weren’t meant to have time for letters: we were busy fighting our good fight, so why would we need letters? However, we were encouraged to write postcards to our parents on public holidays (the anniversary of the October revolution, Victory Day, International Women’s Day, Defenders of the Fatherland day, New Year). We didn’t really celebrate birthdays – that would have been way too individualistic. Any cards we did write were formulaic: “Dear mum! I am glad to be here in the collective with my friends and companions, and to be fighting together for our dedicated cause”, and so on.

It would never enter anyone’s head to use the normal postal service. Outside was all a conspiracy; besides, we never had any money for stamps or envelopes. So any messages had to wait for the right opportunity and could only be passed on personally by our members.

I have kept a few letters from that time. None have envelopes: they are almost all just folded notes with the recipient’s name on the back. Some are reproduced as pictures in this book. You can infer a lot from them: the values we lived by, the principles we followed, even the air we breathed.

I always preserved my grandmother’s messages with special care. By some miracle I still have a postcard I wrote her. I probably wrote it in the third class when I mastered joined-up writing, but apparently I didn’t give it to her, probably because of all the inkblots. I kept it to myself, safe in my “box of treasures” (the only personal item I was allowed). It is particularly telling how I don’t know how to address her: I started off with a pet name and crossed it out, I swivel between the familiar and formal forms of “you”, and even exhort her to “be mother” (sic).

Grandma Dina! With all my heart I congratulate you on Victory Day! Many thanks that you sent me such warmth and soul. Many thanks that you will never forsake me in a difficult time and will always come to my aid, like a true friend. Thank you. I hope you will always be just as kind, tender, warm and mother.

Many kisses. Till we meet.

From your granddaughter Ania Chedia.

GRANDMA

My grandmother was an emotional and impressionable character. She was famous in academic circles as an excellent researcher and educator, and her students worshipped her. This clever and vivacious woman, so capable of independent thought and picking things up on the fly, was so zombified by Soviet propaganda that she turned out unable to filter information in favour of common sense.

The reason for my time in the cult had basically been pulled out of thin air.

Grandma had been born under a dictatorship and was exiled to central Asia. She had passed through fire and water, like everyone in those days, especially women. Giving birth in such unsanitary conditions was hellish. Dushanbe had grown out of semi-nomadic settlements so you can barely imagine the state of its medical facilities. In what passed for maternity wards you couldn’t even see the walls and ceiling, so covered were they with blood and flies. Grandma had given birth to my mother in Leningrad, but my uncle (mother’s brother) was born three years later in Dushanbe. Soon after birth he fell ill with polio, hardly surprising in those conditions. The whole family nursed Kotka, as he was affectionately known, from a spoon and dropper, and he miraculously survived. Since then he obviously occupied a special place in the family’s affections. When Kotka reached legal adulthood, Grandma decided there was something wrong with him, either because the Chief she had not long met put the idea in her head, or because there really was something strange about him. As I’ve mentioned before, in those times it was just not done to be out of the ordinary. Carmen and Don Jose only existed on the stage.

And my uncle was crazy for the stage: he graduated from the conservatory, where he had studied to be an opera director. But it was easier to declare eccentricity a mental deviation than to accept it or adapt to it. In those days, in that country, no one knew what it was or how to appreciate it.

This is precisely why operas were so popular – it was how Homo sovieticus achieved sublimation.

Grandma was a willful woman who had power over her son, and she assigned him to the collective for treatment. Elated by the idea of a panacea, she devoted her whole life to it. For in Dushanbe – this remote place on the border with Afghanistan; where there was nothing apart from hills, semi-nomadic settlements moulded from dung, and latrines where the only thing to wipe your backside with was a stone or your hand, which you then wiped on the wall; where to be female was shameful in itself; where the only chance to chat with other Russian-speakers was limited to a couple of opera trips in a year – had suddenly appeared a messiah from Moscow.

Yes, the Chief was from Moscow, with an apartment address on the prestigious Kotelnicheskaya embankment. He came with two daughters from his previous marriage, Katya and Yulia, his wife Valentina who was his faithful companion, and also two sons from his previous marriage, Vladimir and Andrei. And trailing after this gang came a flock of about 30 people known as the collective. All of them had left their homes and apartments and had come roaming over the whole USSR in search of refuge and new patients to treat. Blood-sucking parasites in search of a warm body to burrow into.

Grandma was glad to feel part of something bigger than herself, a mission to save humanity. Her apartment and all her meagre possessions fell to the disposal of the collective. As someone with influence, known over the whole of Tajikistan, Grandma immediately brought new people and resources to support the collective in its work.

A new and official clinic appeared in the centre of Dushanbe to receive outpatients.

Once the initial steps were finished and the organisation was set up, Grandma contacted my parents living in Leningrad and said something like, “Hey why don’t you send little Ania here? Didn’t you say she was having trouble at school? Her maths mark wasn’t brilliant? Uhuh. And she didn’t want to learn poems by heart! See, there’s something not right with her. Let her come here and we’ll treat her, then we’ll see.”

Grandma had become the main proponent of the Chief and his method. She was the brains and the academic core of the cult. She believed in what she was doing with all her heart. She gave lectures, published papers and ran round all the authorities getting official passes and documents. Grandma could sound very convincing. She was an established paleontologist, so it was a natural next step to bring in the idea of the human brain and combine it with evolutionary theories of organisms in general to suggest new therapies and remedial treatments.

It was the perfect combination of charlatan and academic.

Of course, Grandma was a real find for the Chief. In her turn, as an energetic and educated woman with two kids on her hands, tormented by loneliness and disappointment, exiled to the ends of the earth, where woman is nothing, where to prove the contrary you had to be able to part the clouds with your glance, Grandma tumbled headlong into the collective, like into a rabbit hole.

Everybody needs to feel like somebody. Whoever they are, everybody needs to feel like they belong to something big and important. For my grandma this was the collective.

SICK KIDS

The collective would receive children with various illnesses: psoriasis, neurodermatitis, schizophrenia (including nuclear or process schizophrenia, the type with the worst prognosis and hardest to treat), as well as the children of alcoholics and drug addicts – or as we were told, from “difficult families”. I often heard the adults say we were brought up on the Makarenko system. The prominent Soviet educational theorist Anton Semyonovich Makarenko had always been a great influence on the Chief.

Many years later I found out that nowhere near all the children at the collective were ill or from difficult circumstances. Most of them were there for totally different reasons. Either it had been easy to convince the parents their children were sick, and so increase the flock that way, or the parents themselves were already part of the collective and so brought the whole family along; or sometimes they were even the children of high-ranking officials in the Soviet Union. Children of high-ranking officials and people with connections were welcomed with pleasure as they would provide both financial support and a veneer of legitimacy. Of course, for every child there the parents paid a monthly fee, and many also donated their apartments as accommodation.

Since there’s no such thing as a person without problems, there will always be something for psychosomatic ideology and dogma to latch on to.

Once they’d got so much as a hair on your head, you were lost.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Our clinic was situated in the centre of Dushanbe. Between ourselves we called it the White House. Alcoholics and schizophrenics were treated there. It was a typical single-storey central Asian building of whitewashed adobe, with offices and corridors inside. The offices had tables, chairs and benches, where the patients were examined, and then layered.

The street around the White House was dusty and had wooden benches, under which I sometimes found stray sweet wrappers which I loved to smell and keep in my pocket.

I don’t remember anything else about the White House – I was too young then.

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGISTS

The people in the white coats were respectfully known as educational psychologists, always by their first name and patronymic. Yulia Viktorovna, Natalya Yevgenyevna, Nadezhda Yurevna, Vladimir Vladimirovich and others (including Stolbun himself): none of them had a psychological or medical, let alone educational background. The only more or less constant member of the group who had a medical education was Stolbun’s wife, Valentina Pavlovna Streltsova. She preferred to live in comfort, so I personally saw her only rarely.

I don’t want to exaggerate the quality and level of Soviet education in the fields of education, psychology and psychiatry, because those fields were generally charlatans and were far removed from science. An absence of formal education in these fields could even have been an advantage. It could have been… but in this case it wasn’t.

SPEECHES AND FAINTING

These speeches were held all the time and at any time, even in the middle of the night. This was real brainwashing. The familiar cry could come at any time: “Come on everyone” and you’d have to get up and follow everyone, like zombies, to a speech. The Chief would talk for many hours at a time, gesticulating in the centre of the circle that formed around him, and scratching his shaggy head. His shoulders were always white with dandruff. You weren’t allowed to lie down or even sit. You couldn’t interrupt him or ask questions. We had to maintain absolute silence, and listen reverently.

While talking, the Chief would look everyone in the eyes in turn, as if evaluating the impact of his words, whether people were changing under their action. Periodically he would call someone or other into the circle to be discussed.

There were times during these interminable speeches that people fainted from tiredness or hunger. This was considered a success: it meant the person had truly comprehended the Chief’s point. It meant their level of aggression had fallen and they had readjusted and relaxed to such an extent that they had lost consciousness. A truly logical chain of thought!

During these speeches I often dreamed of feigning a faint because I was so tired of standing. It was terribly boring and I wanted to do something different.

And of course I did not understand much of what was said, apart from that we were terribly sick and if we had not got ourselves into the collective then we would have died. Everything outside the collective was dangerous and corroded. There were so many enemies on the outside who wanted to harm us and even disband us, and so we had to live as if in a wartime bunker, in the trenches, and be very suspicious of outsiders. The Chief often called our enemies “Zionists”.

Later on I realised that our main enemy was not Zionists, but offical Soviet medicine, which did not recognise our methods and treatments. The collective’s activities were actually banned. Later a criminal case was brought against the Chief for child abuse.

Being a Jew himself, the Chief exhibited admirable obstinacy over many years on the issue of the Zionists who supposedly wanted to humiliate us. To this day I still don’t understand why Zionists would want to humilate Jews. Was he just paranoid? My childish imagination drew the most outlandish and terrifying pictures of the Zionists who were supposedly chasing us. I imagined them with faces twisted with hate, gnashing teeth and long twisted hands with claws, reaching out to grab me and drag me to their fearful lair, where they would drink my warm child’s blood or do something even worse, which I couldn’t quite imagine.

The Chief devoted a large part of his interminable monologues to the theme of relations between men and women. He said they should be clean, “without smut”, but that all of us had only smutty relationships. Me personally he called a whore. So to the words slut and prostitute I added another new word: whore. I had only just turned eight.

Everyone in the collective worshipped the Chief. He became like a God to me too. My parents had gone and I had no one else to worship.

Grandma and uncle acted like we were total strangers, so I was afraid to even approach them.

AUNT KATYA

In general you weren’t allowed to call the adults auntie and uncle; only by full name and patronymic. But I really felt like calling Ekaterina Viktorovna Aunt Katya. She was like family to me. She was calm, kind, clever and beautiful. She cared about me and talked to me like a human. She didn’t treat me like another adult (all the others did, it was considered normal), but like the child I was. This was why I did my homework with her and liked it. She helped me learn a lot of different poems by heart: poems by Alexander Pushkin, Agniya Barto, Irina Tokmakova and many others. To this day I can hear the perky couplets in my head that Aunt Katya and I would recite together:

Buy an onion, a green onion,

A potato and a carrot!

Buy them for our little girl,

Even though she’s a little minx!

Once we went camping by the mountain river Varzob. It was early spring, all around there were almond trees blooming and flocks grazing. I couldn’t help trying a sheep dropping, because it looked like someone had been scattering chocolates about. Aunt Katya taught me not to lean against the trees in spring: it’s very dangerous because scorpions live under the bark and spring is their mating season so they are extra poisonous and prone to stinging.

Aunt Katya often read aloud to me. Once, after that camping trip, in the collective, she got out a big art book, sat me down beside her and, moving her finger over the sculptures in the illustrations, started to tell me about gods and goddesses, retelling the greek myths. She traced the images of nude bodies with her finger, saying all the while, “Look, how beautiful, look at these lines, isn’t that lovely…”