Free Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich

or drank, or how he spent his free time. But she did express her opinion that no one has a right to judge and condemn a genius who stood at the head of the state for thirty years, carried through the collectivization of agriculture, crushed the opposition, transformed a backward country into an industrial power and won a victory of universal historical importance over the enemy.
    In the same letter she expressed her dissatisfaction at the release from the camps of all the enemies of the people, who instead of saying thank you were now demanding all sorts of rights and privileges and shouting from every corner that they had suffered for nothing. Perhaps by some accident there had been isolated innocent victims among them, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you couldn’t just let them all out indiscriminately. “And didn’t we suffer?” Aglaya wrote. “Didn’t we go short of food and sleep, wasn’t it us the kulaks’ sawn-off shotguns were pointed at? Those who spent a few years sitting in jail were fed in there for free, but your father gave his life without hesitation for the motherland and for Stalin. Then why aren’t we complaining to anyone? See what great heroes they are! They suffered. Suffered so badly that now they want to weep for themselves. But I think that if anyone was wrongly punished, then now, when he has been corrupted in the camps and infected with anti-Soviet sentiment, there’s no point in letting him out. He’s an enemy now anyway, and he ought to be treated like an enemy.”
    To her surprise her son responded coldly. He wrote to her that none of these problems concerned him and repeated almost word for word what Porosyaninov had said, remarking that you had to take a realistic view of life.
    At the age of twenty-two Marat himself had already mastered the practice of taking a realistic view and was managing rather successfully in arranging his own affairs. Since according to Soviet notions he was of noble origin (Party workers were regarded as the advance detachment of the working class), he was studying in one of the most prestigious and exclusive institutes. He did not possess any brilliant talents, but he was quick-witted and observant. And he was very quick to note that while the general privileges he possessed as the son of Party members allowed him access to the academic subjects taught in the institute, there was among the students of the institute a narrow inner circle that was completely closed to him.
    The children of the big bosses, generals, ministers and Central Committee members lived an entirely different life and could get away with a great deal more than their classmates. They skipped classes, held drinking sessions, cruised around in their parents’ cars, arranged orgies with girls from their own circle (or not, as the case might be), sometimes even raped them, and in one instance they actually threw a girl off a balcony. It looked like there was bound to be a major scandal, but there was hardly even a murmur. The incident was very deftly hushed up by announcing that the girl student who was thrown had been depressed and threw herself off the balcony in question. And when it came to relatively minor pranks, these guys were absolutely home free. Marat knew he could never do what they were allowed to do and would never be forgiven for doing the things that they did. On the other hand, he could reach their level or even overtake them, but for that he had to prosper in other areas, pick up points where these boobies couldn’t because they took no care for the future and relied on their dads and didn’t realize that today your dad was everything, but tomorrow he would be nothing, and you would become nothing with him.
    Marat drew the correct conclusions and behaved accordingly. He lived modestly, frequented the student research club and gave boring papers, took an active part in Komsomol life and prepared