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.