As you might have heard, Nastya Krasilnikova recently made a new season of her podcast about sexual abuse in Russia. The first season of her podcast uncovered multiple instances of harassment and rape at Summer Ecology School, a summer camp for high school students where I went every summer during my high school. The new season, about the School 57, an elite Moscow school, also touched me in a very personal way. In my previous post I wrote about harassment from Sergey Arkhipov though I don’t consider this experience particularly traumatic, especially compared to my other experiences. Now I want to tell you about what it was like to grow up in an environment where sexual abuse, “relationships” between students and teachers etc were a norm. I don’t know if many people will read this post but I feel the urge to tell my story. If you want to repost it, please do.
First, a little background. School 57 is one of the best, if not the best school in Russia when it comes to math and humanities. Take any mathematician from Moscow and most likely they graduated School 57. I’m not from Moscow and I didn’t study in this school but a lot of my college friends were from there. So I’m not really in a position to tell you what it was like to be a student there. However, I’ve been part of similar communities like Summer Ecology School and the math department of the Higher School of Economics (HSE), where most recent graduates of math classes of School 57 studied. SES is (or at least would be in the ideal world if students weren’t harassed) a perfect place for any highschooler interested in math, science or humanities. It’s a camp where students attend very advanced classes and interact with great scientists in a very informal manner. Too informal at times. The same is more or less true about School 57, although the informality aspect is of course not as prominent since it’s a school, not a summer camp.
I was raped by a guy called R, who was then a teacher at SES and a student at the HSE math department, when I was 16. It was at my own birthday party at my own place. Before some you roll your eyes and ask me why I invited him, I have to say that I never invited him and didn’t even consider that because he seemed creepy. Another guy E. (also a teacher at SES and his friend) invited him without informing me. E hit on me when we were at SES, which made me extremely uncomfortable but I was unable to say no to his advances. Later he continued to visit my hometown, which is about an hour and a half train ride from Moscow, from time to time. Back then I was in love with an amazing person G with whom I shared lots of interests ranging from molecular biology to Joy Division and Nirvana and whom I dreamed of dating one day and move to the US together. It never happened. I felt so ashamed of my so called “infidelity” (i.e. not rejecting E’s advances) that I stopped talking with G and probably hurt him a lot. I felt insanely ashamed that I didn’t like E, so ashamed that I literally forced myself to fall in love with him. I cried and cried and cried while convincing myself that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t like him and eventually persuaded myself that I did.
Back to the notorious birthday party. R, the uninvited guest, harassed almost all girls at the party and took me in bed with him. We didn’t have sex, I don’t think he was interested in that. But he was definitely interested in feeling power over me, just dull physical power. He was strong. No matter how much I resisted, he wouldn’t let me go. I think it was the moment when I learned to be helpless.
Later, R and I started “dating”. He announced that the second time I found myself in bed with him. I didn’t resist and just went on crying. By the time I became a student at HSE, I managed to break up with him. That didn’t happen easily. The first attempt was unsuccessful. Soon after it he harassed me at an outdoor Scriabin concert in Gorky Park so that everyone could see us. I remember how much I was excited about this concert, Scriabin was and still is one of my favorite composers. This concert became one of the worst memories of my high school years. E was there too and obviously didn’t do a thing except mocking me.
When I enrolled in HSE, I continued hanging out with R. Crazy, right? I absolutely agree. And you probably want to know why. The answer is that I had literally no understanding of the simple idea that if someone makes you suffer and harasses you then you need to cut this person off. I learned helplessness. If you listened to the podcast (if not go ahead and listen), then you heard similar stories. One experience of being raped makes victims much more vulnerable to being raped again. That just becomes a norm of life. It will sound crazy to people who were lucky not to live through this but that’s just how it works. A trauma rewires your brain so much, that you just won’t take any action to defend yourself and will treat suffering as a part of your identity. I recommend to everyone a book by a Dutch-American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk called “The Body Keeps the Score” if you want to understand better how it works. The summary is that trauma creates fallible circuits in your behavior that make you feel in danger in safe circumstances and not react in real danger.
That’s what happened to me. My college years were marked by multiple unhappy relationships, some of which I didn’t want to start in the first place, and multiple hospitalization in psychiatric institutions which traumatized me even more than any cases of sexual abuse before. Doctors never treated these experiences as relevant to my so called disease. I don’t even know which disease I suffered from because I never even got a diagnosis but instead got tons of antipsychotics.
Could I get help from someone at my college? Hell no. My undergraduate adviser, Misha Verbitsky, a prominent mathematician, former member of the ultra right (or ultra left, it’s a matter of debate) Nationalist Bolshevik Party (Natsbol), regularly criticized the awful American cancel culture and is absolutely convinced that all rape victims expose their rapists just for the sake of getting more attention to themselves and constantly falsely accuse their abusers. He was probably the most charismatic professor at the department and is a pretty famous blogger in Russia. Later he went on to rape me, which I don’t want to elaborate on in this post. Just want to say that I could and should have escaped while it was going on and I didn’t because I simply couldn’t envision a life without abuse for myself.
What about other students from SES or HSE? I never ever discussed it with any of them. Some girls were in similar situation as me. Some dated and even married their former teachers. Some have been raped by strangers. Some were repeatedly admitted to psychiatric hospitals like me. We were all in this together but we could hardly talk about it. When you live in a world where sexual abuse is normal, it becomes… normal.
Not only I was a victim of sexual abuse but went on to support my friends when they did it and did abuse others myself. There’s not a long distance between being a victim and an abuser, as you can see from the story of Masha Nemzer from the podcast and in my own story as well. I feel deeply ashamed for what I did to A. and M. and don’t think that my experience makes me less responsible for what I did. I ask for their forgiveness.
This was a f*ked up world and I’m happy that I escaped to New York for my PhD. I still can’t completely get my head around of my experience but I’m trying. That’s painful. Memories of being raped and memories from the psychiatric hospital still regularly haunt me. I still have big trouble bonding with people.
How can I end this? Russian intelligentsia, if you think there’s nothing wrong with molesting students, go to hell.