Darya Apahonchich: The Accusative Case

Hi, everyone! The Russian Federation put me on the wanted list today. Why? Because first I taught Russian to foreign students and because of that I became a “foreign agent,” and then, apparently, because I didn’t fulfill the requirements of the law on “foreign agents”: I drew anti-war comics on [“foreign agent”] report forms to the Justice Ministry.

Oh well.

Source: Darya Apahonchich (Facebook), 7 February 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

(A chapter from a forthcoming book)

To Accuse

(A story in the guise of a Russian language lesson)

“The accusative case is the object case: it answers the questions whom and what. For example, whom do we love? What do we love? A friend, mom, a city. Whom do we hate? What do we hate? The weather, the rain, the snow.”

I point out the window. A disgusting Petersburg sleet is coming down outside, and the class laughs. We often joke about the the city’s atrocious weather. All my students hail from warm countries: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan. Adults between the ages of twenty and fifty, they are people who are commonly called migrant workers. Tired, in black jackets, they apologize verbosely. They know Russian slang because they learn it on the street, at the market, and at work, but they don’t know what a noun is, because they have had little schooling even in their native languages and have been working since they were children.

“Remember we were talking about the dative case, the case of the addressee? To whom do we give something? To whom do we say something? To a sister, to a friend.’

(Here I want to make an aside about the verticality and horizontality of Russian grammatical cases, but I stop myself because I realize it’s superfluous, although I find the explanation felicitous: the dative case is horizontal, while the accusative case is hierarchical and vertical.)

I say this to my students, but my dean is sitting at the back of the classroom, listening attentively, and next to him sits an FSB officer whom my rector dragged into my class. The FSB officer is also listening attentively. It’s hard to say whether I hate anything in my life more than this situation and those two.

“Unlike the dative case — the case of the second subject in an exchange, where I talk to someone, for example, to a person or to a friend (the person is involved in the exchange: they hear and understand me) — the accusative case indicates the object of an action: I eat a pizza, I read a book.”

A few days earlier, my rector had telephoned me and asked me to ask one of my students to come in, ostensibly for a test. I asked him why this was necessary, if the woman had already taken the entrance exam. He said that an FSB officer would come to my lesson, because the student was person of interest to him, but that she should not know the FSB officer would be there.

I said that it was not part of my job description, that I never lie and would never lie to a student. I also told the rector that my class was a class, not an FSB office, and that I was opposed to anyone being spied on in my class, to which the rector replied that he had the right to come to my class with whomever he saw fit and that he would telephone the student himself.

‘What endings can we use in the accusative case? For masculine nouns, we use the zero ending if it is an object (a what?), for example, ‘I know this film’, ‘I read the text’, or -a/-ia if it is a person (a whom?), for example, ‘I know the [male] teacher’ [uchitelia], ‘I see the [male] student’ [studenta]. For feminine nouns, the ending is always -u, for example, ‘I see the book [knigu], ‘I see the [female] student [studentku].

I don’t see the student in class. I haven’t seen her all week since that phone call and I don’t know what to do. Should I call her and tell her that the dean wants to talk to her and that the FSB is interested in her? If I called her on my mobile phone, then the FSB would be interested in me. All week I have been trudging round the city: it’s autumn, November, the weather is disgusting, my feet are wet, I’m working ten hours a day, I don’t see my children, I don’t see the sun. How come I took it all on myself, this job, this workload? Why do I have to bear it alone? Who’s to blame? I guess it’s my fault. But I can’t afford not to work even on my birthday. And then there’s this student. God, what am I going to say to her? Flee the country? Maybe they’ll just ask her questions. It’s not like they’re going to bring a paddy wagon to the university to arrest her…

“What? Yes, there’s no difference between objects and persons: sister [sestru], girlfriend [podrugu], teacher [uchitel’nitsu], street [ulitsu], hand [ruku].

Why are the two of us — two women in a patriarchy — again getting screwed over for everything? Men have invented the patriarchy, that drug for their delicate egos which comes with wars, exploitation, violence, and control. It messes with your head and then blames you for everything being wrong.

“Yes, that’s right. Oyatullo, please come up with sentences using the verbs ‘read,’ ‘write,’ and ‘see’ with nouns in the accusative case.”

When I came to work today, the dean and the FSB guy were already in the classroom. While I was still thinking what to do, everything had already happened, so I started the lesson. Why aren’t future language teachers warned that their profession will involve this? There was pogrom at my last job, a year ago. They came from the FSB, from the migration service. They blocked the doors from the inside, tore my folders with the students’ documents inside, yelled at me and at the students, and those courses were shut down. Then a year passed, and I found a new job: the cultural capital of Russia, beautiful St. Petersburg, Liteiny Prospekt, the Yusupov mansion, stucco, gold, chandeliers, cold, dust, red carpets, students in their jackets and hats. It was sad but mentally manageable. It seemed like things would be decent now, but no, the cops have shown up here too. Now things are just as they should be, the whole nine yards.

“Okay, great! Now let’s do some exercises from the textbook.”

The thing I hate, the vertical in the back row, is slowly segueing into a diagonal. The FSB guy is sitting next to the radiator. You can tell by his flushed mousey face that he’s spent a lot of time outside today and now, in this warm room, he’s gone limp and snuggled up against the wall.

“Page 218, exercise 8, Munisa, please!”

I’ve been working here for a few months now. I have been telling the students about grammar, and they have been telling me about nationalism. They’ve told me about a lot of things — for instance, about the cop who confiscated one’s student’s sack of apples when he realized she didn’t have the money to pay him a bribe; about how they hid in cement bags; about how the neighborhood beat cop visits them once a month to collect 3,000 rubles from each their flats, just because he can; about how landlords refuse to let flats to them; about what people say to them on the street.

“Okay, now let’s turn the page.”

The FSB guy at the back desk is asleep, while the dean sits with his eyes half closed. I think that’s probably what the peak of your career looks like: when you have an FSB officer asleep in your class. Or, depending on how you look at it, maybe it’s the bottom of your career. I also think that it would be good if he kept sleeping like that. Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years, so there are historical precedents. That would suit me just fine. I try to keep my voice down.

“Let’s use these same verbs now in the future tense and at the same time we’ll practice the perfect and imperfect aspects of the verb.”

On the wall of my shabby office, just opposite the blackboard, the phrase “Dasha is a rube” was written in black, but then corrected to “Dasha is a nube” in green.

The student for whom the ambush at the back desk was arranged enters the classroom. She is older than me, thin, and wears a hijab, and she has come with her grown-up son. I quickly think that this is better, that it is good she is not alone. The dean briskly rushes up and tells me and my students to move to another classroom and finish our lesson there.

We leave with our books and notebooks. We walk along the red carpet, past a portrait of the patriarch in a golden frame, past a poster against corruption (I remember how once a student tried to bribe me right under this poster), past some oil landscape paintings, past stands with pictures of the father the rector, his son the assistant rector, and his mother the dean. Then we pass the security guard who calls my students “blacks.”

How shameful.

“Okay, let’s finish this page.”

I stopped by the classroom after class. The student and her son were already leaving, and they looked very upset. I never found out what had happened there or what the FSB had wanted with her, and I never saw her again.

This job of mine ended a few months later because of the [2018] FIFA World Cup. Private universities were prohibiting from offering “pre-university” courses. Formally, this was done to reduce the number of students from Central Asia, but in fact it was done so that there would be fewer migrant workers from Central Asia in Russia’s capital cities during the World Cup, because the superpower Russia hinges not only on power but also on provincialism. What would foreigners from the first world see when they came to Russia? Other foreigners, but from the third world?

My lousy work schedule ended a little later, when I was able to find a normal job, that is, several jobs. A little later still, my quasi-marriage ended, because I couldn’t fool myself anymore, and later still my life in St. Petersburg ended in political persecution and emigration.

And only a prolonged feeling of guilt remained with me in the wake of it all: about how I should have behaved, where that woman is now, and whether she is doing well.

Source: Darya Apahonchich (Facebook), 5 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Dear friends, thank you for the words of support. Yesterday, I realized that, although I had know that sooner or later I might be put on [Russia’s] wanted list, I wasn’t ready for it.

I probably used to joke about it, and I still do. For example, there are my children: their parents are wanted because one of them insulted the feelings of religious believers, while the other taught foreign students and submitted incorrect reports to the Justice Ministry.

But this grotesque discrepancy between the gravity of the “crimes” and the sanctions masks what I see as a modern Russian form of mock execution. Remember how Chernyshevsky was put through this? He had a signboard bearing the words “state criminal” hung on his chest, and his sword was broken above his head.

In addition to that, he was sent into exile, banned from publishing books and living in the capital cities, placed under constant surveillance, and so on.

It’s a pity I don’t have a sword to break.

You know, when it happens to you, the feelings which arise are complicated. If it were only about my relations with the authorities, it would be easier. But it automatically implies that I cannot go back to Russia, and although I had not planned on doing this in the near future, yesterday I realized that it hurts me a lot.

I was on the bus when I got the call from Varya.

“I have to tell you so you don’t find out about this on the new,” she says to me.

“So, what happened?”

“You’ve been put on the wanted list. Are you okay?

(I’m not okay: I’m crying. I forgot I could cry like that.)

“Dasha, where are you now?”

“I’m on the bus, Varya. I missed my bus and the driver of another bus has let me ride for free.”

“He let you on because you could explain everything so well in German?”

“No, because he found out I was Russian. He said he was Serbian and loved Russia.”

(Varya laughs.)

“You tell him that his beloved Russia has put you on the wanted list.”

“Varechka, I still don’t have a ticket and I have to get to my destination, so I won’t tell him about this.”

As I rode in the bus, I thought that I should write down this conversation and that I too, like my Serbian driver, love Russia. I love Kamchatka, Siberia, and St. Petersburg — all three of my homelands, and I miss the people dear to me and the places dear to me, the people and places which nourished me and brought me up, teaching me to be freedom-loving and independent.

So I am sorry that thing are like this, that my country does not want to see me but puts me on the wanted list as if it wanted to see me. I would like our friendship to be mutual.

Source: Darya Apahonchich (Facebook), 8 February 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Vera Zasulich: A Dreary, Anxious State

Young people kept on rereading Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done?, but the most accessible and easily performed of the previous [responses] to the question posed by the novel’s title—starting up a cooperative—was no longer satisfying. In the previous period, cooperatives, primarily sewing cooperatives, had sprung up like mushrooms, but most of them had soon disintegrated, and some ended in arbitration courts and bitter quarrels. They were for the most part started by women well off enough to buy a sewing machine, rent an apartment, pay for the first month’s rent until the principles of the cooperative were clarified, and hire two or three experienced dressmakers. They recruited workers partly from among the female nihilists, who did not know how to sew, but ardently wanted to “do” something, and partly from among seamstresses whose only wish was to earn money. During the first month, in the heat of the moment, everyone would sew quite ardently, but very few had the patience, especially if they were not accustomed to manual labor, to sew eight to ten hours a day only for the sake of promoting the principle of cooperation. They sewed less and less. The professional craftswomen were indignant and treated the work carelessly themselves, reducing the number of orders. The best workers would soon leave the workshop, since their share of the income was less than the wages they would receive from a proprietor, despite the fact the founders for the most part refused their shares. Sometimes, the business ended with the skilled workers confiscating the sewing machines and kicking the founders out of the workshops. Arbitration hearings were held.

“Themselves constantly repeated the sewing machine belonged to the labor,” said a perky seamstress at one such hearing I had occasion to attend. “As for their labor, they didn’t do a thing. They would just talk and talk.”

The court, however, did not recognize the seamstress as the personification of labor and ordered the sewing machine returned.

Business was just as bad at the bookbinding workshops, although the work, which was less complicated and did not require long, preliminary preparation, was more amenable to cooperation.

In 1869, the standstill that ensued after the Karakozov Affair continued in full force. Some people of the 1860s quit the scene, while others went into hiding, and so the raw youth who would arrive from the provinces after the crackdown had no access to them. They were completely left to their own devices; they had to find their own way. The Karakozov Affair did not leave a core around which they could have grouped. I am speaking, of course, of the average young people who were affected by the prologue to the Nechayev Affair, which took place in Petersburg in the winter of 1868–1869. The isolation, the lack of propaganda in their milieu, the lack of contact with people of firm convictions who could have helped them in resolving the question, “What is to be done?” left the young people, who were looking for a cause, in a dreary, anxious state.

Source: Vera Zasulich, Memoirs (Moscow: Political Prisoners Publishing House, 1931)

Vera Zasulich was a Russian revolutionary and writer most famed for her attempt on the life of St. Petersburg governor Colonel Trepov in 1878. She was acquitted of the crime by a jury. Photo, above, courtesy of Wikipedia. Translated by the Russian Reader

Leagues of the Militant Godless

Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression, lying everywhere on the masses of the people, who are oppressed by eternal work for others, need and isolation. The helplessness of the exploited classes in their struggle with the exploiters just as inevitably generates faith in a better life beyond the grave as the helplessness of the savage in his struggle with nature produces faith in gods, devils, miracles, etc. To him who works and is poor all his life religion teaches passivity and patience in earthly life, consoling him with the hope of a heavenly reward. To those who live on the labor of others religion teaches benevolence in earthly life, offering them a very cheap justification for all their exploiting existence and selling tickets to heavenly happiness at a reduced price. Religion is opium for the people.

—Vladimir Lenin, in Emilian Jaroslavsky, Thoughts of Lenin about Religion (Moscow: State Publishing Company, 1925), p. 10, as quoted in William Henry Chamberlin, Soviet Russia: A Living Record and a History (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1930)

Milonov No Hindrance to Atheists
Svyatoslav Afonkin
ZakS.Ru
February 5, 2017

The ninety-ninth anniversary of the 1918 Bolshevik decree separating church and state was marked by a small group of ardent leftists protesting the current clericalization of the Russian state and Russian society. On February 5, over a hundred people attended a picket on Chernyshevsky Square in southern Petersburg. For two hours, they fiercely criticized both the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the relationship that has been built between the ROC and the Putin regime.

Members of various low-profile leftist movements gathered at the monument to Russian philosopher and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The protesters held the flags of the Rot Front, the United Communist Party, the Workers Revolutionary Communist Party, and Communists of Russia. Even truckers from the Association of Russian Carriers (OPR) came to condemn the ROC’s increasing appetite for property. Members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which holds seats in the municipal, regional and national parliaments, ignored the event, for which they were roundly condemned by their non-systemic counterparts on the podium.

Unlike liberal opponents of plans to transfer ownership of St. Isaac’s Cathedral Museum to the ROC, the protesters made no attempt to be diplomatic and did not mince their words. Some speakers declared the ROC “satanic” and compared it to Islamic State, an organization that has been banned in Russia.

For ten minutes, Ivan Lokh, leader of the Witnesses of Foucault’s Pendulum, an atheist community, fiercely and emotionally denounced the ROC’s desire to exterminate science and culture. He then quoted Chernyshevsky, whose monument was the focal point of the entire rally.

“Religion’s purpose is to inure the unfortunate and hungry to the notion they must perpetually be hungry and rejoice in their plight. That’s what religion is!” proclaimed the activist.

ROC leaders are themselves not inclined to the asceticism they popularize among the oppressed classes, and this can only indicate that the highest ranks of ROC clergymen do not believe in God, said Lokh.

“We see the indecent luxury in which ROC hierarchs live. They do not fear their own God. They don’t fear Him, because they know for certain He doesn’t exist. This is the most obvious proof He really doesn’t exist!” the activist shouted to the applause of the crowd.

During breaks between speakers, the rally’s organizers asked protesters to carefully observe those in attendance in order to weed out provocateurs. The event’s moderator explained to ZakS.Ru that anti-clerical rallies have frequently been visited by people wanting to disrupt them. In addition, MP Vitaly Milonov’s public promise to interfere with the picket had forced protesters to be vigilant.

Semyon Borzenko, a member of the city committee of the unregistered United Communist Party’s regional branch, thrilled the crowd when he called for abolishing the federal law on transferring property to the ROC, which has led to the destruction of numerous museums. Borzenko also said atheists should campaign for the adoption of two law bills, drafted by local municipal deputy Irina Komolova during the previous sitting of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. The first would protect the feelings of atheists, while the second would strip the ROC of its “totally unjustified tax breaks.” According to Borzenko, the “indecent luxury” mentioned by Ivan Lokh was a consequence of the fact the ROC did not pay taxes, unlike every other organization.

Nikolai Perov, leader of the regional branch of the Communists of Russia, focused his criticism on the “Zyuganovites,” who had welcomed the possible transfer of St. Isaac’s Cathedral to the ROC.

“It’s a crying shame that certain members of the communist movement, who sit in parliament, have retreated from the [Bolshevik] decree and Leninist principles. Shame on Zyuganov! Shame on [CPRF Petersburg Legislative Assembly member] Alexander Rassudov! Shame on [State Duma member and filmmaker] Vladimir Bortko! There’s not a single scientifically minded person left in the CPRF!” stated Perov.

Despite the concerns of organizers, the rally came off without any provocations or crackdowns on the part of law enforcement. Towards the end of the rally, human rights activist Dinar Idrisov (recently denounced by “soldier of Christ” and city parliament speaker Vyacheslav Makarov for insulting the feelings of believers) handed out pamphlets entitled “The Museum Belongs to the City.” Like a week ago, opponents of transferring St. Isaac’s to the ROC had their pictures taken, placards in hand, this time standing next to the monument to Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Photos courtesy of ZakS.Ru

P.S. Thank God for the truly militant godless, Russian society’s only real bulwark against the militant godless masquerading as god-fearing soldiers of Christ for the tax breaks, luxurious lifestyle, and other perks that come from collaborating with the regime to befuddle and disempower ordinary people. The other bulwark against the maskers is the fact, of course, that the vast majority of Russians are de facto godless, whatever they might say about themselves when surveyed by FOM or some other all-seeing blind eye of the de facto atheist pollocracy. TRR