The Lenin Plant, an essay

This essay , The Lenin Plant, appeared originally in Shatter magazine. It is now part of the collection, How The Quiet Breathes.

It should be noted that this essay and these photos, both of which I shot, are not meant as a way for me, as a Westerner, to gloat, but as a means to instruct future generations. The Cold War lasted nearly 75 years and stands as one of the longest of its kind in modern history. The collapse of the former USSR, and all the ripples felt from it, still play a big part in today's geo-political landscape.

The Lenin Plant

I do not engage in politics. I simply portrayed one animal for another.

Paolo Trubetskoy

 

 We’ve all met at least one itinerant who after a few cocktails on the way home from the airport feels compelled to share his week or two of misadventures in a foreign metropolis, showing enough geographical expertise to launch into the findings of his own Zagat survey. After two years in Bălți, a wonderful marriage to a Moldovan woman, and return visits to family there over the past two decades, I’m not sure I could launch into a single definitive word or opinion about it.

This is not due to a lack of searching. Nor am I obsessed with any alluring secret that city may possess. I seldom experienced any pleasure there that I’d call soft, tropical, or pleasantly dream-like. It’s not a city of five-star hotels and glam evenings on the town. In 2007, travelers may have found Italian-made shoes, but they had to know where to search in the city’s center to find an ATM. In 2015, they still won’t find a McDonald’s or Pizza Hut. Not that this, for a nanosecond, bothers me.

My time in Bălți offered me lifelong friendships and joys that were often threatened by the rust and shadow play that I still feel chewing into my bones in northern industrial cities in the States. Back in the early `90s, as agreed upon by contract with the late university rector Nicolae Filip and the Peace Corps, my teaching focus was to be on American Literature and Western approaches to language acquisition. No computers, no copy machine, few books. I earned $75 dollars per month, along with lodging. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika had passed – many would say failed – the Berlin Wall had come down, and Boris Yeltsin had been commandeered by coup back into power. As one of fifteen new republics shaped out of the reduced and dismantled USSR, in 1991 Moldova had become a country that formally proclaimed and celebrated Romanian as its official state language. They would return Romanian from Cyrillic to its original Latin alphabet. For ethnic Moldovans with profound multi-generational ties to Roma and the poets Ovid, and Mihai Eminescu, it was, indeed, a heady era.

Thanks to Stalin, Moldova has no seaport. The joke as told to me was that Stalin got so drunk one day, he couldn’t find Moldova on the map, so he used a crayon to define its borders. In doing so, he drew a line around Moldova that cancelled its southern shoreline along the Black Sea and ended up connecting Romania directly to Ukraine to the south. And to the north, it forced all the Romanians of a region known as Bucovina to be part of Ukraine. In short, a disorienting of neighboring ethnic population groups on a massive scale and not a joke considering the economic impact lacking a seaport has had on Moldova.

In 1993, Moldova had ended a civil war with troops in a region known as the Trans-Dniester, a triangle of land east of the Dniester River where the city of Tiraspol considered itself the capital of an autonomous Communist country. The U.S. government did not – and to this day still does not – recognize this country formally in any way. Most Americans don’t even know this small, autonomous functioning still-Stalinist-Communist country exists.  

To the west of the Dniester River, democratic, independent Moldova elected a new president, Mircea Snegur. His parliament was mostly old Soviet party elites who overnight had labeled themselves freedom-loving Democrats. During my last visit to Moldova, I learned Domnul Snegur had published his memoirs, reminding me yet again that the early `90s felt so very far away.

I trained for three months in the capital city of Chisinau with other American teachers, most of whom would teach in schools and lyceums in Moldovan towns and villages. We were packaged to a degree, were forbidden to wear shorts, for example, or to drive a car, and had, from what I could see, been chosen with care, part of the Peace Corps many well-intentioned tax-payer-funded diplomatic agreements – one of what, in retrospect, was perhaps a too-inexpensive and low order attempt during the Clinton era to create a bridge out of the Cold War into what was then considered the developing new order of the 21^st century. This new order may have included warnings from pundits, but I, for one, heard little talk and suspicion of nearby Yugoslavia imploding into a wretchedly long war. The cant that we, as volunteers, learned and amiably soaked up was that with the fall of the USSR nearly all world governments were going to peacefully embrace capitalism to form one massive international bazar. And with this new world as one big convenience store, the U.S.A. was going to act as a benign manager.

I was fortunate in that I didn’t have to live in Chisinau while training, which allowed me with ease to keep all my doubts to myself regarding the Peace Corps so-called mission, and to stay away from American administrators, engineers and ideologues working there in ever-growing numbers for the U.S. government. I lived just outside the city in Grătieşti. During my last most recent visit to Chisinau, I heard Grătieşti referred to as a suburb, as well as something more than a wealthy village, as a jewel. In the early ‘90s, it was as poor as the rest of the country. Buses into the city were scarce. When and if they came, they were always full upon arrival.

I walked into Chisinau for a little more than an hour each morning along dirt roads, up and down soft hills past groves of walnut trees, grape vineyards and tobacco fields. I never minded those long quiet walks, seldom a car on the road. When one vehicle happened to pass, it stopped and I got a lift. I made a new friend this way. He was the head of the Grătieşti cigarette factory, which explained why he had gasoline. Not only was a rare man in the area wealthy enough to own a car, he knew which palms to grease to keep it fueled. This, essentially, explains all one needs to know about the rise of the so-called Russian mafia. Locals in villages with a small dose of influence filled every need on their own terms, established rules and procedures regarding graft, and this was practiced from the bottom right on up the food chain. They controlled shortages, the drug trade, delivery of goods over what had become overnight new borders between new countries.

Westerners may doubt and dislike Putin’s intentions and methods and style all they want, but when the man came to power, he cleaned house and purged a vast network of connected Russian mobsters that spread east to west across no less than ten time-zones. Maybe he simply legitimized all the graft and those benefiting from it, but in doing so he stabilized Russia and put it as an independent federation without any debt to America for its very survival, on a trajectory toward sustained economic growth and cultural renewal. Which citizen of any country wouldn’t want that?

I never learned the man’s name who sometimes gave me a ride. For reasons now obvious, he never offered it, but he proved to be an excellent teacher regarding my usage of Romanian grammar. He showed no qualms about silencing me with abrupt and accurate corrections.

Today, that road is paved all the way into Chisinau and it features recently-constructed gas stations with convenient marts. It’s also busy with cars, and inside city limits it’s often congested with rush hour traffic, though closer to the village those walnut trees, grape vines and tobacco fields remain.

I seldom failed to arrive on time to a remarkably clean Americanized training classroom in a former hotel one block from Chisinau’s notoriously poor and sometimes dangerous Old Post Office neighborhood. I was covered in dust and smelled like a blend of chicory and manure, but this fed my affection for the honest dirt of ancient foreign lands. As things stood then, none of us Americans bathed more than once every two weeks. None of us saw much hot water either. It wasn’t the military, of course, so those who couldn’t adjust were allowed to go home, and many of them did.

I wouldn’t dare speak for the other Americans there at that time, but my experience was one of full-blown immersion. After a couple of months, having studied Spanish in college, I spoke Romanian well enough so that even Olga – my host mother in Grătieşti who cooked incredible breakfasts for us each morning – summoned the courage to confess one evening in her countrified Romanian that she thought I was an American spy. Maybe CIA. The money the Peace Corps was paying Olga’s family for putting me up didn’t make a difference. I still had to insist I was no such thing. She said she wanted to believe me, but even though I was a guest in her house, she couldn’t be sure. I should understand this and know many Moldovans would not be sure. Because of this, I had to be smart and careful.

I kept this in mind when I arrived to Bălţi in September to begin my teaching, and, with time, benefited from the wisdom of Olga’s advice. I met other older women like her, wary and yet glad to meet an American for the first time, excited about connecting with the West, but unable to get past their fear and skepticism. I began to see it would take me a while; I did not take offense at their paranoia.

At the time, there were no functioning banks and there was no currency to speak of – only coupons. The old Romanian lei and the old Russian ruble were now worthless and had rendered many a Romanian under Ceausescu, as well as many a Soviet citizen’s life savings, worthless overnight. I was fortunate. I could exist outside these economic hardships because I had brought with me some American dollar bills. They went a long, long way at that time. For a dollar, I bought a Russian rabbit-fur hat. They’d cost me about $100 dollars today, if I could find one. For five dollars, I could have bought a mink coat. I was offered a small house in the village of Dondușeni for a thousand dollars. I don’t exaggerate. The only stipulation was that my bills were clean, crisp and no more than five years old.

Excessively over-cautious and ill-informed, I’d brought traveler’s checks with me. It would take me four months before I could manage the time to ride by train two days all the way to the one bank in Bucharest, Romania, where I would cash them in along with a lot of my old, creased, soiled American greenbacks that nobody in the former USSR would ever take.

This has all changed, of course, but let’s not forget how recent a past it was. An entire hemisphere, all the former Soviet bloc countries, as well as what is present-day Russia was undergoing a re-invention of their economic system according to rules set by the International Monetary Fund. The on-the-ground elements of completing this massive financial venture were assigned to visiting accountants from Price Waterhouse. To the victors went the spoils. Now and then I’d see one of those accountants in Chisinau, buttoned down in a fine suit, toting a briefcase, stinking of the imperialism of the New World Odor that is now casually referred to as globalization.

I learned with time, and with the help of such books as John Perkins’ Confessions of An Economic Hitman, that these bean counters were Ivy-league educated, elitist errand-runners for self-serving bankers who would never set foot in the countries whose future economic system they had so covertly appropriated and were now redefining. According to Perkins, who identifies completely as one of these bean counters, the whole trick was to put emerging countries around the globe into debts they could never pay back. Russia’s elite leaders must have seen this coming, and at least gotten their hands into the till from the outset. As did China’s leaders, no doubt, but who can say in an age when information rather than knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips. What astonished me at that time was seeing just how poor so many people were in the Eastern Bloc countries, and how cavalierly and with so much seeming indifference accountants representing global banking juggernauts were determining their economic fate.

Witnessing this process play out left a rotten taste in my mouth which two decades on is still there. Whether we Americans like it or not, anything that happens in Eastern Europe, Ukraine or Russia stems from our actions or inaction in that sphere during this hinge point at the end of the 20^th century. There was no running water in the cities of Ukraine, for example, no natural gas of any kind, no monetary system. Food and amenities were scarce, and unannounced electrical blackouts lasted days, months, years at a time – nobody could be sure of anything. Instability ruled and the only leaders that globalizing financial interests preferred were weak or drunken ones easily exploited.

Yet prices for goods were set at standards comparable to those in the European Union, or in California. Yet wages, if extant at all, were a fraction of what they were in the already developed countries. In villages there had seldom been expectation that utilities would function, so contingency plans were a way of life. Ephem, my host father in Grătieşti, drew his family’s drinking water from a village well one mile down the road. He kept all his non-potable water in barrels atop the flat roof of a garage that covered his pride and joy – a Czech-built motorcycle with a sidecar that the gasoline shortage had rendered useless.

Bălți lacked the sultrier Turkish and Mediterranean influences that gave Chisinau its charm. It was also still holding to its identity as a model Soviet city, proudly blue-collar working class and heavy-metal industrial, planned and built according to the Stalinist model. Think urban northern Ohio or Erie, Pennsylvania, in their worst economic periods. Many long-time city residents had been sent there from other regions of the former USSR, making it a primarily Russian-speaking city of factory workers and engineers. The city was also celebrating its birthday. It had just turned 572. There I was, all of 33, single, with a Master’s degree in English and about six years of teaching experience.

Who was going to teach whom?

***

The landmark that for me which defined the city’s passing glory and its generally bleak mood was the massive Soviet-era conglomerate known as Zavod Lenina, the Lenin Plant. Like an edifice out of Orwell’s 1984, it covered about five city blocks and was sealed off from pedestrians by walls of dirtied limestone blocks that over the years had begun to bulge and lose mortar along crumbling seams.

I could not climb those walls and they were impossible to see over. What I could see – or, rather, what saw and studied me each day – was that huge mural of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s face. Made from a mosaic of small black and white tiles against a high pale-blue wall, Lenin’s goatee, white forehead and tiny black eyes were my stern disapproving companions whenever I walked or rode the trolley bus through certain quarters of the city.

I feared this visage of Lenin, despite knowing his hey-day had passed. In 1989, the plant had changed its official name to Răut, after the river that Bălţi had been built on. Yet from 1992 to 1995, every Moldovan I spoke to insisted on referring to it as the Lenin Plant. None of them knew what was being made there or whatever fate courageous investors from the EU had in store for it. The most reliable information I heard was that in its new, much diminished form a small group of underpaid and resentful workers were making umbrellas.

In a factory city considered by many as Moldova’s northern capital, the Lenin Plant symbolized how far the Soviet mantle had fallen. I learned from Tolik, one of my only friends who did not attend the university, that one does not live anywhere near Russia without learning how to drink. He also taught me that in Brezhnev’s time everything made at the plant was considered top-secret information. Yet Tolik had learned from his father that throughout the Cold War the plant was the number-one manufacturer of Soviet sonar equipment and underwater parts for Soviet submarines.

If this was such a Cold War secret, how had Tolik’s father, who was a retired truck driver, known this? With a sarcastic chuckle, Tolik explained that his father had learned to read German while living in East Berlin after surviving World War II, and he’d read in a Berlin newspaper a friend had smuggled to him about how the American CIA knew throughout the Brezhnev and Khrushchev years what was being made in the plant, even though citizens of Bălţi had no idea.

If true, which was likely, I found this story to be tragic and disturbing. Tolik didn’t think so. He found it hilarious and derided me for my overwrought sense of concern as a typically naïve American.

“You see,” he said, keeping his Russian simple for me, “we Soviets learned from your CIA what our government was making in our city.”

Tolik laughed and laughed about this in only the way a wise pure-blooded Russian can. His blood-lines ran from Eastern Russia, so he stood tall with bold Asiatic features, bright blue eyes and shining black hair that ran nearly to his waist. To me, he resembled American Navajos I’d gotten to know during time spent in the Southwest.

“But nobody,” he added, “will tell you what they made there, back then. Only now, they will say they make umbrellas.”

Though this all struck me as tragic and disturbing, and I could not laugh about it the way Tolik did, it turned out to be true. I asked a variety of Moldovan students and fellow teachers, and none admitted to knowing what had been manufactured at the Lenin Plant.

Angelica, who is now my wife of 24 years, but at that time was a fellow English teacher who I’d become friends with, confided in me on this topic. She glowed a little when I told her what Tolik had said. Her mastery of English, gleaned from cassette tapes and reading Somerset Maugham, was polite, very British. I found her accent as charming as I found her intelligence formidable. “Tolik is right,” she explained. “No one will tell you. Even if they know. But be fair with our people. Even those who say they know are not sure if they know. That is why they don’t say. You must remember our old joke that says Russia is the only country where the past is unpredictable.”

“But we’re not in Russia, we’re in Moldova. Why don’t they call it by the new Moldovan name, after the river Răut?” I asked.

Angelica’s face softened and she looked at me with sympathy. “Please try to understand. It’s because the people love Lenin. He was a great thinker. A genius of his time. In its day, the Lenin Plant had what you Americans call a day care center for the children of factory workers. It had a medical clinic. It had a cultural center and a cafeteria. I will take you there.”

“I can go inside?”

“But please remember it is not what it was,” she said.

We went, one day, for lunch at the cafeteria. A large drafty space, unadorned, it had electricity on an afternoon when most of the city did not. It was cold in there and dimly lit. The dirty tile flooring and dented silver metal cafeteria trays said it all. For about half a dollar, there was no choice of food. We drank cold compote of stewed fruit from a glass tumbler that looked unwashed. I gnawed on a cutlet of meat and some cold and greasy fried potatoes. Angelica didn’t mask her disappointment.

“I know it is horrible,” she said, bundled in her thick black coat, her fur hat on. It was winter and any woman lucky enough to still own a fur hat from the good old days was wearing it. “It is all so bad now. But it was good once. For the people. They had work here. Good work. Now, there is nothing.”

She looked distraught. I remembered how she’d told me that she’d been a Soviet Pioneer once, and that growing up she and all her friends had believed in work, in solidarity, in the Soviet Union and all that it could be. She, like so many of her generation, had started out life in one country and by the time she’d reached her twenties had learned it was another one altogether. The daughter of a Soviet military epidemiologist, she had been raised on bases throughout Siberia and she wasn’t finding it easy to accept the new realities of perestroika. Yet she was young, intelligent, flexibly minded. All around her she saw the older ones, the generation that had defeated Hitler, who’d lost everything. Across the street from the entrance to the cafeteria there stood a small park and memorial, one of many in the city, for the hundreds from there who’d died in that war. She admitted her parents didn’t recognize the city and country they once celebrated, marching in parades, challenging the capitalism of the West.

I had been in Moldova long enough to accept that as an American I’d not been adequately prepared for how deeply the rift between old and new had cut into the lives of average Soviet citizens. I could say I understood this, but I really didn’t and I was at least smart enough to know I never would.

I apologized for asking her to take me. She said it was okay, that she’d wanted to see for herself just the same, and that I should understand and believe that this factory had once been a special place. It had represented cutting edge advancements in the communal dream that had defined Soviet society. Like every other piece of that dream around her, it was falling into blight and ruin.

I shared words of comfort, both in Russian and English, but as the sole American resident of a city founded in 1421, I had no authority. The majority of the city’s population had lost their jobs after the Soviet Union’s break-up. I didn’t have to look for alcoholism, heroin abuse, growing street crime and despair. It was everywhere I turned, even though some of my Moldovan teaching colleagues would adamantly dispute this. Let them, I thought. I know what I see, and I’ll write about it. At night, without streetlights or cops, the narrow city streets teamed with packs of wild dogs, and groups of drunken young men. After dark, I never went anywhere alone. Nobody who cared about me would even let me.

What did I really know about this place, or what Angelica and her once hopeful generation were going through? I felt like a fraud, yet Moldovans I met hung on many a word I said about American culture, literature and business. They wanted to be part of something new and better. I represented a link, in the flesh, to that possibility. If I left them, I’d be admitting that I’d given up on them.

Many of the other once idealistic American teachers began to leave. As the year went on, I learned piecemeal that our initial group of Peace Crops teachers had dwindled to half its original size. We were down to about fifteen in total. One by one, those teachers who remained suffered some form of physical assault. One young man from Michigan had most of his teeth knocked out in a mugging. He was flown home, but he promised to return. Eventually, he would. Another young woman from California had gone jogging in spandex along the edges of a pasture only to have been chased down and raped by a shepherd. She never returned. Why would she?

***

A couple of the city’s cognac factories were still putting out a product, White Stork, as well as Divin, the latter smooth and both inexpensive at roughly a dollar a bottle. Not that I ever paid for liquor. No Moldovan male would dare let a foreigner leave his domicile without sharing the best wine, cognac and moonshine he had. This usually meant multiple bottles (all emptied), much food, and an unplanned sleepover for said guest, namely me.

At the same time, men like Tolik, who at 25 was the same age as Angelica, were having a difficult time. Tolik was so much wiser than his years, but there was no work for him. Angelica lived with her parents, and she was at least employed as a lecturer at the university, where she’d been a student. Tolik lived with his old and ailing father. He had no university education, but he was resourceful, had an appealing personality and a zealous entrepreneurial spirit. His biggest problem was staying out of trouble at the hands of organized crews of chain-smoking hooligans in sweat suits who managed to have gasoline for their beat-up German-made cars when nobody else did. Tolik, strong and smart, figured out ways to survive. He’d jump on a train to Moscow, sit on the floor and drink vodka with other travelers for three days until the train’s arrival. Once there, he’d run certain errands he’d been tasked with, meeting with certain individuals as part of a scheme to make a little money.

He never told me the details. I never asked for them. I suspected he dealt heroin and he bought and sold stolen goods and he transported money, but I couldn’t prove any of this and I didn’t want to know about it. The friends he introduced me to, and who I was thrilled to drink with, were often young men cutting loose for the last time because they were slated to ship off to the war in Chechnya, where it was very likely they’d end up dead. At the time, that war was raging, and all Moldovan males of age were required to serve a minimum of two years in the military. There was no Moldovan military yet, so the former Soviet military would have to suffice. It was not an easy time to be in one’s late teens and to know the future looked bleak indeed.

I also knew Tolik owned or had bought and sold a couple of Kalashnikovs and that maybe he’d even used them to help kill people. He liked showing them to me. I didn’t ask questions. Over the years, I’ve learned one way to help curious American friends understand what Tolik’s existence was like at that time is to refer them to a popular 1997 film, Brother. Directed by Aleksei Balabanov and starring the Russian actor, Sergei Bodrov, Jr., it’s the highest grossing Russian film of the `90s. Bodrov, Jr., as he did in most of his films, brilliantly portrayed an archetypal Russian boy next door. In the case of Brother, which he reprised less successfully in a sequel, Brother 2, he played a trained military specialist who’d served in Chechnya, but he was a rootless young man, sensitive, willing to do anything for not just money but for self-esteem, just to survive with dignity.

This, in my opinion, is what the average American who has never lived overseas struggles with or refuses to comprehend regarding people from countries, no matter their size, that have lost big. They’re still in the good fight, want to feel dignity, believe it’s worth fighting and dying for and much more important than money and what it can buy.

What kept Bodrov Jr.’s character going was his passion for the music of Russian rock group, Nautilus Pompilus. Bodrov Jr.’s character could have been Tolik, who was equally rootless and willing to do anything, though he lacked the kind of special-op training that Bodrov Jr.’s character displayed so cleverly. What Tolik lived for was a passion for music from that time. Not only Nautilus Pompilus and other rock groups, but the angst of Viktor Tsoi and his group Kino, whose lyrics and songs are etched deep into the collective memory of so many Russians from that generation. Some might argue that Tsoi, not just his music, is that generation. It was a thrill for me in the spring of 2016 to visit the tunnel in the city of Yekaterinburg where graffiti artists have painted a series of murals as homage to Tsoi and his influential music. Seeing those murals, photographing them, I was brought back in time to nights of drinking with Tolik and listening to one cassette after another, Tolik glowing as he tried to explain to me in Russian the complexities and poetry of the lyrics.

Tsoi alone deserves his own essay, if not an entire book, and a few more monuments somewhere in Russia to match those of Vysotsky. I have Tolik to thank for turning me on to his darkly elusive and brooding songs. For me, his lyrics are the bleakest and most surreal from that era, set to music I never tire of. His songs not only moved Tolik, they fueled him throughout so many anxiety-ridden nights in the `90s.

Bodrov Jr. starred in another seminal Russian jewel from the `90s, Prisoner of The Mountains, a film that examines the Chechnya conflict, but is based on a 200-year-old Tolstoy fable. I recommend this to anyone curious about potent contemporary Russian cinema. Russia lost an incredible talent when Bodrov Jr. died in 2002 at the age of 31 in the Caucasus mountains while filming The Messenger. Along with the rest of the film crew, all of whom died on set that day, he was buried alive under ice. There’s something horrible yet compelling in the depth of tragedy that I find in both Bodrov Jr.’s work and his untimely death.

I must cheer myself up, so I’ll tell you a little about Angelica, who was a divorcee when I met her, which meant at age 24 it was unlikely she’d marry again. As a woman, she didn’t have the choices, for better or worse, available to Tolik and other young men, many of whom did not survive the dangers and desperation of that era.

Choices or not, young people were leaving Bălţi. Every male student I taught was learning English because he expected to flee the country as soon as he graduated. I wrote reference letters. I proofread documents that would act as introductions to help set families up with Jehovah Witness missionaries in Hungary and Germany. Not one male student wanted to stay in Moldova and help it move ahead as a newly independent republic. They wanted to get out, along with any opportunity and money doing so might bring.

It wasn’t any different with women, but their choices were limited. Some married through mail order or else fled to Moscow, Turkey, or former Eastern bloc cities. If they were unlucky, they ended up imprisoned in what still exists as a thriving trade in human trafficking and prostitution. Those who stayed had to keep their family’s household clean and functioning. They performed staggering amounts of work each day, on their hands and knees scrubbing floors. Moldovan village homes lacked indoor plumbing. City apartments on, say, the ninth floor, were not accessible by functioning elevators. The hallways and stairwells of the many limestone block buildings were caverns where sessile water formed in pools, junkies lay passed out and mangy rabid cats chased rodents. As I’ve stated, some Moldovan and Russian colleagues would dispute me and argue that it was never this bad. I would argue that, of course, conditions have changed, but what I’m sharing is a glimpse of what I saw with my own eyes.

On a daily basis, lonely old women lugged sacks of potatoes and onions up these steps. I lived on the fourth floor. My neighbor, a babushka named Irina, a true peasant, wore each day a kerchief on her head and the same soiled wool skirt, leggings and brown wool vest. She tied a wooden chair to her back while she lugged in each hand a big galvanized bucket filled with black sunflower seeds. She sold these seeds, which are a popular snack in Moldova, in any kind of weather, usually on one corner of Pushkin Street.

Irina once insisted I visit her. I balked at first, ashamed of my wealth, but it did me good, it humbled me to see how she lived. She sold those sunflower seeds in the bitter cold each day and yet she shared her apartment with four other old women. They had no furniture. A stack of four mattresses lay piled like a layer cake against one wall. Irina explained how each night the women put out the mattresses so all of them could sleep. If there was electricity to heat water for tea, Irina used a coil that plugged into the wall. She’d insert the coil into a speckled ceramic-painted metal cup full of water. The only cup she had, she shared it with the other women. They got along together, huddled to stay warm, like peasant women out of a tale by Gorky.

I tried to give her money. This insulted her sense of decency and she vehemently refused to take any. She also refused to sell me sunflower seeds. In the morning, she’d leave a handful of them for me wrapped in stiff paper in front of my door. She never said it, but I knew she genuinely liked having me as her neighbor. Why? I was nobody special. I didn’t deserve such unconditional acceptance. During the holiday season, both Christmas and New Year, she’d leave for me a plate of cold chicken gelled in aspic, a staple known in Russian as kholodets. When I was in Khabarovsk in 2015, I was asked often if I’d ever tried this dish. I said yes, but I never said how often or how grateful I’d been all those years ago to my neighbor Irina who, in spite of her extreme poverty, showed me just how generous and warm-hearted a person could be.

Dear Irina represented the future that my students were looking at. Many of these students, village-raised women, were incredibly patient and courteous. They had once wanted to become teachers and return to work and to raise a family in their native villages. Now, they’d do anything if it meant avoiding the poverty their parents and grandparents endured. I fell in love with one of them at least once a day. How could I not? We had no heat in our classrooms. In one room, glass was missing from two windows. More often than not, we had no electricity.

            Still, when winter came, they showed up to my class in their fur hats, mittens and scarves, ready to learn. Steam vapors from their breath kept the classroom air shining.