I want to tell you about my experience and how my way of thinking has changed. How at first I was delighted with the ideas promoted by the cult of Viktor Davydovich Stolbun, and how then I realised what was really behind them.

My story is about at what price a person learns to think, not so much critically as independently. It is not difficult to criticise, but the ability to find the best solutions requires not only a good education, but also a lot of courage.

This is a story about how much ignorance costs us. It is about how not to bring up children. It is about what happens in the soul and psyche of a small child.

I want to tell the truth, the truth about a cult that did not disappear with the collapse of the USSR, that larger “cult” which had made it all possible. I want to tell the truth, as true as any memory or life experience can be.

This book is not fiction. It contains only facts from the childhood I spent in a cult.

For many years I held an internal discussion about whether it was worth publishing this truth. I kept expecting one of the “adults” would do it – after all, I was a child when I was there. But no one came forward, and the cult continues to exist to this day in the very centre of Moscow. Even in Switzerland, where I now live, there are followers of Stolbun’s “teachings”.

Now it is headed by another person, Vladimir Vladimirovich Streltsov, the son of Stolbun’s wife, and its members actively promote themselves on Russian social networks and continue to attract new clients. Previously, they “treated” mainly alcoholism, drug addiction and schizophrenia, but now they also say they treat tuberculosis.

There is a lot of information on the Internet, but it is scattered and sometimes fundamentally incorrect. I decided to collect between the covers of one book what I know myself, using people’s real names.

WHO THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FOR

For my husband, to tell him the story of my childhood, which differs significantly from his own. People say things like: Europeans are so pampered, they are completely unaware of the hardships of life. They say: there’s no point even trying to tell them, they still won’t understand. I disagree. It probably depends on the person. It’s possible to be pampered and never face the problems I did, and at the same time remain a person with not only curiosity but also a big heart – a heart with enough space for both my stories and the feelings associated with them… Might this attitude even be the expression of true love?

For my daughter, for her to know the conditions in which her mother grew up and developed as a person, and thereby better understand me.

She said recently,

“Mum, sometimes I catch myself thinking that I’m afraid of growing up and becoming different from you…”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you had such an interesting life, you say such interesting things… But many of my friends have mothers who are… well, there is absolutely nothing to talk to them about… And nothing dramatic has happened in my life either, and will probably never happen. I have everything, no problems… unlike your life, so rich and interesting! I’m afraid my life will be boring and I won’t be able to tell my children anything interesting about myself.”

“So I’m protecting you from the trials that fell to me. Now I know what the price is! It means a lost family and loneliness. It means wasting many years of effort serving other people’s interests. It means ruined health. It means a short life. You will definitely have other stories, and I hope they will be warm-hearted, funny and, not least, instructive for those who have less experience than you.”

This book is also for anyone who would like to hear the truth about how people lived once upon a time in a cult in the USSR, and what it meant to be a child in such a commune.

Finally, the book is for me myself, to relive the experience, to rethink it, and ultimately to let it go and to step back, having turned over this page of my life.

I tell the story from two points of view: that of a child growing up in a cult and that of an adult who has experience of both parenting and emigration. I remember what I faced and how I felt as a child, and I share my present thoughts about the past. I track the evolution of my attitudes and thoughts to show how easy it is when you are young to fall into a trap, and how difficult, and sometimes impossible, even over the years, to get out of it.

Everyone will see something of their own in this story. I am a philosopher by education; I like thinking, reasoning and looking at things from different angles. Write to me and let me know what you think about all this!

1. Before the cult

NOTHING IS SHOCKING IN CHILDHOOD

Everything that happens in childhood seems normal. Children have no choice: adults decide everything for you and you can only go with the flow, trying to adapt and survive. As the years pass and you grow up, your memory returns time and again to episodes from childhood, and questions start welling up inside…

What was the point of that? Why would they do that?

When you compare your own experience of being a parent with that of your own parents, you start to wonder:

Would I have acted like that with my own child? What about with someone else’s?

You come to see more and more that there is no difference between your own child and others, especially when you grew up with other children yourself, without your family —although you knew you had one.

A PRISON FOR ACADEMICS

I was born in Dushanbe and spent my early years there, until my parents left to live and work in Leningrad. My memories of my birth town are childishly picturesque, symbols of home: my grandma, warm air, aroma of fruit, flies in the kitchen, traditional pechak sweets, the “Green” bazar, cool linoleum on the floor, vinyl records, the smell of books, our loggia with its huge mirror, babbling irrigation channels right in the street, the asphalt melting, our hip bath, whole alleyways of roses, weeping willows, vines hanging over your head, tea with mulberry, fragrant flatbreads with sesame, cherry orchards, sandstorms, and of course, the opera! Grandma often took me to the opera, which was considered the heart of the town (at least that’s how I remember it).

Tajik State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre named after Sadriddin Aini. Founded in Dushanbe in 1936.

The Russian-speaking circle in Tajikistan at that time was mainly members of the intelligentsia, forcibly exiled from the major Russian cities. This included my relatives. My grandfather was the son of an enemy of the Soviet state, who was shot during Stalin’s reign of terror, and the whole family was now living under this stigma. My mother’s side of the family weren’t allowed to live in Leningrad, where they were actually from. For a while the family lived just outside the forbidden 100-kilometre radius which stretched around the desirable cities, but after that we were packed off to the most remote Central Asian republic to “colonise the virgin lands”. My grandparents, as academics and professors, were sent to found and build a local university in Dushanbe. For this they received a meagre salary and an adobe shack with no amenities, right in the university’s internal courtyard. My mother and uncle grew up there. Nobody complained (it just wasn’t done in the Soviet Union), and to this day my mum is convinced that the family chose to live in Dushanbe of their own free will. Back then everyone was obliged to be happy and grateful to the Communist Party, whatever happened.