Never Fear

Opening Day

Glasnost had drawn the ire of the bureaucratic hardliners who were trying to destabilize Gorbachev, mute dissidents, and intimidate journalists. But Albats had secured a first-person account from a torturer working in Stalin’s prisons. Oh god, her editor said when she showed him. This is the last thing I need. Still, he published what she wrote, and it was a sensation. In a country that had never known anything like a free press, where thoughts were policed and ideology was controlled, Albats was inaugurating investigative journalism. And her subject — the KGB — was one that no one had ever written about. 

“It was pretty easy to write something no one else had written about because everything was forbidden,” she says. Albats wrote about drugs, HIV and AIDS, and about being pregnant in Moscow, then a city of almost nine million people, that had only one maternity clothing store. After giving birth to her daughter, Olga, in a state-run maternity hospital, she described its conditions: all of the showers and bidets were broken, and there were no disposable syringes. And, as was the policy in all the state’s maternity hospitals, husbands were not permitted. 

“I got 15,000 letters from men who really couldn’t believe their offspring were born in such awful conditions,” Albats says. “They were just shocked.” The articles were reprinted in European newspapers and magazines, breaking open the seal the Cold War had placed on the Soviet Union. “The stories helped Europeans realize Soviets had their own intimate lives,” she says, “and that these lives were awful.” 

Albats’s experience and the insights that come from bridging Soviet life to the world outside it are exactly why LSA’s International Institute is so excited to have Albats as its inaugural fellow for its new Masters in International and Regional Studies Program (MIRS).

“With her Ph.D. from Harvard and her experience as a journalist, Albats brings an incredible breadth of knowledge to our students,” says Pauline Jones, director of the International Institute and professor of political science. “She runs the only independent NGO media outlet in Russia, and she’s an award-winning author. Her lived experience paired with her academic training offer a perspective on Russia that’s unparalleled.” 

Albats believes the most important understanding she can offer her students is not which events were the most important in Soviet history but where the Russian people have come from. American institutions, universities, and people from private businesses invested billions in Russia, she says. “They did a hell of a lot, but they were operating under the assumption that Soviets were just like Americans, and that we just spoke another language. They thought of Russia as the country of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov. That was true and not true. Yes, great pieces of literature were created in the Russian language, but we had no political philosophy except for Marx and Lenin. 

 “We never went through a period of European enlightenment that was extremely important for Europeans to move out of the Middle Ages,” she continues. “When I went to Harvard, I was stunned to see the wealth of knowledge that had been developed by Western civilization that was totally unavailable to us in the Soviet Union. Political science and sociology — they didn’t exist for us. And that, unfortunately, also extended into ethics, morals, to the whole understanding of the common good.”

People from the International Monetary Fund, economists from Harvard, and political scientists that had helped liberate Poland and Germany all believed they could do the same thing in the Soviet Union, Albats says. “But in Poland and in Germany, the job was to liberate the country from Soviet rule and the institutions of Soviet power. We Russians had to liberate ourselves from ourselves, and that’s a much harder, much more painful task.

“Fifty-six million Soviets were killed between 1917 and the end of the Soviet Union,” she continues. “According to the latest polls, almost half of Russians see Stalin as Russia’s greatest leader. It’s hard to understand. I’m very honest with my students: I don’t have all the answers. I know some of the answers, but I am still trying to understand my country. “ And so she does what she has always done. “I’m just trying to tell them the story.”