When Alexander Krylov was in elementary school, he and his classmates toured the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. “The female museum guide told us that Communists are genuine heroes,” he recollected years later. She said that “we no longer need to invent gods for ourselves; we divinize the proletarians next door.”
The guide went on to explain that communists sacrifice themselves day and night for the people, undergoing privation and even death on their behalf. Here’s what happened next: “The museum tour made such an impression on me that I ventured to ask carefully a very human question. ‘Do Communists ever go to the bathroom, too?’ The surprised museum guide first took a deep breath and then said, ‘Yes, they have to go, too, but not as often.’”
Throughout this memoir of his boyhood in the Soviet Union, “How I Became a Man: A Life With Communists, Atheists, and Other Nice People," Krylov relates incidents like this one that bring a chuckle and even outright laughter. Though today he is middle-aged—and a Catholic priest to boot!—he tells most of his story through the eyes of a child.
Despite the subtitle of his autobiography, Krylov is anti-communist and certainly not an atheist, yet many people he knew in the 1970s and ‘80s were, at least on the surface, fervent believers in the ideologies propounded by Marx and Lenin. His teachers and the youth leaders in the Pioneers, a Soviet version of the Boy Scouts, in particular touted the glories and benefits of collectivism.
Boys Will Be Boys
In many ways, Krylov grew up like boys everywhere. He disliked school. He and his friends played games in the street and on sports fields, hiked, engaged in various kinds of mischief, joined or formed different clubs, and slowly became aware of the meaning and ramifications of the world in which they lived.To these accounts, Krylov often brings wry humor and a gentle sense of irony. In his chapter “Harmful Chewing Gum,” for instance, he recounts how he and his friends, who had seen people chewing gum only in the movies, would share rare sticks of Western gum whenever they became available. By share, Krylov means that they passed the same stick of gum from mouth to mouth.
When Soviet chewing gum became available for the first time, Krylov bought several packs and distributed it among his school friends. “People today can only imagine the feelings of the teacher who came into the class afterward,” he writes. “Never in her life had she herself seen chewing gum before, and at first she could not cope with us chomping, lip-smacking boys.” The teacher then collected all the gum in a bag, and over the next few weeks the students received several lectures on the dangers of chewing gum, including one from a health inspector who told them that gum would rot out their stomachs and change the shape of their jaws to resemble those of horses.
The Other Side of Adolescence
The indoctrination into communism began in kindergarten and remained ongoing and relentless for all of Krylov’s time in the classroom. The reverence for Lenin was ubiquitous—a visit to his tomb was at the top of the list for anyone traveling to Moscow—and teachers repeatedly stressed the ideas of the state and commonality. When someone forgot to flush a toilet in Krylov’s school, for instance, the entire student body was summoned for a lecture on collective consciousness. In summer camp, the collective “We” was emphasized in all activities.Citizens kept an eye on each other, sometimes in a healthy way, as in helping a lost child, but often behaving more like spies. Sometimes these observations touched Krylov directly. One of the coworkers of Krylov’s mother warned her that her son’s “development was cause for great concern,” meaning that while other boys played soccer, planted potatoes, and went fishing, he often wasted his time reading books.
Though the state had banned both his Catholic faith and the Bible, with the collapse of Soviet communism Krylov gradually discerned the “many parallels between the Communist Party and the Church.” Marx, Engels, and Lenin were the Trinity; people sang what amounted to Party hymns; pictures of leaders were carried like icons in processions. Various rituals and certain holidays were set aside for celebration just like those in the Christian tradition.
Saving Graces
When Krylov was 7 years old, his father, ill for months in a hospital, died. Krylov continued living in the apartment with his mother and grandmother, who acted as a religious counterbalance to the ever-present atheism of the communist regime. His grandmother in particular, who was of German descent, which already set her apart from the others around them, was also Catholic and continued as best she could to honor and observe her religious faith.It was Kyrlov’s grandmother who prayed her rosary, kept track of the dates of the Catholic Church’s movable feasts, talked of Jesus to the boy, and frequently sprinkled the apartment with “homemade holy water,” once with hilarious results when in the night she confused the holy water with a bottle of blue ink. The family also gathered with Christians of other denominations, Orthodox and Protestant, for secretive celebrations of banned holidays.
At one point, wishing to learn more about the Bible, Krylov read the anti-Christian books he found in the library, which critiqued, often sarcastically, Christian beliefs. He ignored the criticisms and instead focused on the passages where the authors had found it necessary to quote Scripture.
Mirror Images
Though Krylov makes few direct comparisons between the beliefs and practices of Soviet communism and those of the Left in the West, the similarities are plain to see. Thought control, censorship, school classrooms as bastions of propaganda and indoctrination, the belief that the government knows what’s best for all, the mantra “We’re all in this together”—these ideas were core to the Soviet state at that time, and they live on, in mutated forms, in the West today.Here is just one example of this likeness. In his chapter “Dangerous Courage,” Krylov describes a school meeting where he defended a classmate for unruly behavior. The class spokesperson denounced Krylov as socially immature for this viewpoint, by which she meant that his socialist ideals were flawed, and he was summoned to face the class, where several of the others criticized him for his faults. Krylov writes: “An altogether ordinary class meeting taught me how fast it can happen and how it feels to be judged and abandoned by everyone.” This same practice of shaming regularly occurs on today’s social media.
Several times, Krylov writes that a society which provides for all wants of its citizens and strictly controls speech and thought creates a nation of kindergarteners, that is, grown men and women who exchange individuality and independence for security. This is the primary reason why “all over the world, there are people who find socialist ideas, Communism, or other authoritarian or totalitarian world views attractive and would like certain ideological concepts to be adopted.”
A Book for the Young
Krylov ends “How I Became a Man” with this thought: “May the encounters with Communists, atheists, and also nice people that are related in this book help us to become grown up, to learn to appreciate freedom and democracy, and to give God more room in our lives.”
In his poignant memoir, Krylov achieves those goals. With its many amusing takes on Soviet life and its insights into communist ideology, “How I Became a Man” offers an excellent education about the evils and banality of totalitarianism. Its simple prose and short chapters should appeal to teenagers as well as to adults, providing a much-needed corrective to today’s collectivist philosophies.
If you’re looking for a holiday gift for the young person in your life, try Alexander Krylov’s “How I Became a Man.”
