Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

5. Moscow State

101 5 Moscow State The ma in c a mpus of Moscow State University sits atop an elevated area on the right bank of the Moskva River. Once lying outside Moscow’s city limits, this picturesque area used to be known as Vorobyovy (“Sparrow”) Hills until 1935, when it was renamed Lenin Hills. The Lenin Hills campus with its main tower, once the tallest building in Europe, owes its erection to the post-World War II explosion of Stalinist Empire style. In 1999 the Lenin Hills were re-renamed, or rather their historic name was restored. Yet in my memories I keep ascending not the Sparrow Hills but the Lenin Hills on my way to Moscow University, and descending to my other life that lay beneath the Lenin Hills. Having become a university student at seventeen, for the first time in my life I didn’t feel alone among my school peers. Also for the first time I experienced real diversity in the classroom. The one-hundred-odd members of my class at the School of Soil Science made up a composite image of the ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union. The Russian element still predominated, followed by Ukrainian students (I can’t say that Belarusian classmates expressed a strong sense of identity). But the Eastern Slavs weren’t a dominant majority. There were members of at least a dozen other ethnicities in my class. Students from the Caucasus: an Armenian , a Georgian from Abkhazia, two Azeris (one of whom called himself “Turk”), a Chechen, and a Lakh (from Daghestan in Northeast Caucasus). Despite different religions and centuries-old conflicts, while away from their home the students from the Caucasus region formed (I couldn’t resist the pugnacious pun) a caucus of their own and stuck together. My classmates from the Volga basin included a Tatar and a Bashkir, while 102 | The Expediti on a Kirghiz and an Uzbek represented Central Asia. Two Estonians and a Lithuanian flew their lowered Baltic flags. Add to that a Moldovan, a Pole, and also two foreign students from Bulgaria, and you will find yourself in the cauldron of ethnicities and languages which I experienced in September 1984. While Russian served as the obvious lingua franca, many other languages were spoken. Ukrainians from Western Ukraine conversed with each other in Ukrainian, and members of the Turkic language family communicated with one another in their native tongues: a Bashkir with a Tatar, a Tatar with an Azeri, an Azeri with an Uzbek, and so forth. There was one other Jewish student in my year, Ilia Salita, also a Muscovite (and now also an American). Two classmates with Jewish mothers but Russian fathers and Slavic last names would later reveal themselves to us, the open Jews. Our year was divided into eight subgroups or discussion sections, and the ethnically savvy administration placed both of the Jews, Ilia and me, in the same discussion section. Ilia and I didn’t become close friends, but we did look out for each other. I know that behind our backs, some of the classmates referred to us as the “Jewish lobby.” Antisemitism hadn’t entirely disappeared, nor could the two of us ferret it out even if we tried. But the prejudice had assumed subtler or quieter forms. Besides the multiethnic and multilingual richness, which surrounded me at Moscow University, there was also geographic and class diversity. About half of our class were non-Muscovites. They lived not at home with parents but in the university dormitories. In terms of their lifestyle and collective identity as “provincials,” they formed a community of their own vis-à-vis the Moscow students. As was to be expected, parents of several of my classmates from the provinces were members of the regional Party elite. While some of the non-Muscovites had grown up in families of provincial intelligentsia (a high school teacher of literature in a small town; a scientist at a regional research institute), other classmates came from working class and peasant families and were the first in their families to go to university. Finally, there were students from military families, who had spent their childhood on military bases and garrisons. My classmates hailed from all over the vast Soviet Union, from as far east as the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East, as far west as Kaliningrad (the former Königsberg in the former East Prussia), as far north [18.118.227.69] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 16:56 GMT...