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Lies I Lived

MY BROTHER attended Soviet schools in the late 1940s, when the Americans were our enemies. No one had ever seen them, of course. This made them even more terrifying for simple people because, who knows, they might be anywhere, disguised as Soviet citizens in regular clothes. They would reveal all our mysteries, steal the secrets of our might, and, God forbid, become just as strong and unconquerable as we were. That's what my brother was told in school. Above all, it was strictly, strictly forbidden to let anyone know what went on in gym classes. The enemy could not be allowed to find out how many sit-ups and push-ups Soviet schoolchildren could do in a row, how fast they could climb up a rope, and whether or not they could do handstands.
    When I went to school ten years later, Stalin had died, and the mood was much lighter. But I remembered my brother's stories. Although he laughed at the paranoia of his schoolteachers, at the advanced age of seven I suspected him of a certain youthful frivolousness. I loved my country and wanted us, Soviet schoolchildren, to be strong and healthy. Let those Americans walk around grasping the walls from weakness.
    One day the spring I turned eight, I was playing in our courtyard in the sand, building a castle for a rubber hippopotamus. Suddenly an old man and an old woman towered above me. The old woman had fat, swollen legs, and the old man breathed with a slow asthmatic wheeze. "Is this the right way to the Botanical Gardens?" he asked. There they are, I thought. Enemies!
    I answered instantly, brave, very convincing, almost without a tremble in my voice: "No, you're going the wrong way. You need to go back that way."
    "Thank you so much," replied the old man. The couple turned slowly and headed back. I sat in the sandbox and watched them go, the hippopotamus clutched in my hands. My heart thumped. I had just done something heroic! I had fended off spies!
    The Botanical Gardens were in fact right behind our building. The enemies moseyed along, in no hurry, holding onto each other. The old man frequently stopped to catch his breath, and the old woman stood patiently on her swollen legs, waiting for him to move on.
    Something was wrong with this picture. I felt an acute surge of shame. Suddenly, in one overwhelming moment - a moment I shall never forget - the truth was revealed to me. This was knowledge: that comes in an instant, without words; complete knowledge, clear, indisputable, the kind of moral knowledge that requires no questions or explanations, the kind of knowledge that transforms an ape into a human being.
    I clearly saw the couple as old people who had lived a long, loving life, had survived a terrible war, gone hungry, suffered illness, been crippled; who had perhaps - in fact, even certainly - lost friends and loved ones in the recently ended massacre of peoples. I saw them descending the steep staircase of their home slowly, step by step, in order to go to the gardens, to sit on a bench, enjoy the young leaves and spring flowers on this warm day, in what might be their last spring. I saw the lies and vileness of my teachers, their paranoia, their ruthlessness, their sadism. I heard the scrape and clank of the cogs in the state propaganda machine, a machine that had forgotten why it was turning. And at that moment, burning with shame, I swore a silent oath: Never. But never what? I couldn't explain, and no one asked me.
    The idiocy of total secrecy led to the opposite result: nothing at all remained secret. For example, most Russian cities had "secret institutes" or "military factories," which were marked on maps with numbers or code names. Everyone knew perfectly well what kinds of factories these were and what was produced there. Most important, they knew how to get onto the factory grounds - not through the official entrance, where passes were meticulously checked and where a sharpshooter sat with a gun, but through a hole in the fence a mere hundred yards from the automatic gates. People climbed through the hole in the fence not to take out secret documents but simply to buy food in the store or cafeteria, for secret institutions were always well stocked. I did the same myself: I used to buy meat patties at some tank factory. No one ever stopped me.
    During perestroika the old regime was destroyed, and the system of secrecy along with it. Russians began to remove everything they possibly could from institutes and factories, and to sell everything they stole, including state secrets-actual, not imagined ones. They stole poisons, mercury, uranium, cesium, and vaccines. Even, in one instance, smallpox virus. Years of searches for invented enemies have thus led to the opposite effect: now no one can keep secrets that it might be reasonable to keep or lock up materials that might pose a danger to humanity.

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