Brezhnev's Babies;In Yeltsin's Russia, an American Visits Her Old Moscow School FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Washington post
• Main Author: Klose, Nina
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post 18.04.1993
• ISSN: 0190-8286

WHEN I WAS 10, my brother and I attended Moscow Special School No. 5. This was 1977, the end of the [Brezhnev] era; it was a time when politics came before arithmetic and when No. 5 (located close to the foreigners' compound) was known as one of the three most exclusive special language schools in Moscow. Many of our schoolmates were the children of Soviet diplomats and high government officials. Five of the boys in a graduating class of 32 are now enrolled in MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations). Kolya Zorin will be a second-year student this fall in the international law department, after army service in the former East Germany. As in grade school, he is slight and very pale, which comes from a starchy diet and long, sunless winters. His monthly stipend as a student is only 900 rubles per month (about $1.50 at the current exchange rate), but during the school year, Kolya says, he and most of his classmates earned pocket money through financial dealings such as trading hard currency with foreign students. With a degree in economics, foreign journalism, international relations or law, graduates of MGIMO now, as earlier, will most likely head towards international careers. Still, though times are tough, they are getting by somehow. When I have supper with them, dessert is fresh-baked apple cake served with homemade jam. (The jam came from green apples picked in the park near their apartment building in a new suburb.) They will also pickle tomatoes and cucumbers from a small garden plot; the balcony is stacked with empty jars waiting to be filled. Isaw more people from my class: Olya Chupkova, who works at a travel agency and makes above- average wages; Masha Rudobashta, who works for a Russian-Hungarian joint-venture that pays "okay, but if it weren't for my husband I'd be having trouble"; Katya Mekhovschikova, who works for the U.S. firm Dresser Industries and gets part of her salary in dollars; and Oksana Ivoilova, known as the class brain, even in fourth grade. Oksana has given up graduate work in electronics engineering for a three-year maternity leave: "Everyone says the birth rate's dropping and that everyone's scared to start a family, but when you take a look around, there are babies all over the place."