Nina Petrovna

Of all my mediocre classes this past semester, my Newspaper class has consistently been the most dreaded. It was really just insanely frustrating. Nina Petrovna would stand in the front of the classroom with her fists out in front of her and bellow out some nonsense about Putin being the savior of the world. She'd say a single line over and over and over and we would have to repeat. Every time she asked me a question, she'd either looked at me like I was speaking Swahili for all she knew, or she would interrupt me in the middle of my answer to tell me exactly what I should be saying instead. It was infuriating. There was no room to breath in there. She is probably in her late 60's and made no bones about being a radical communist. She taught during the soviet years and the American brain simply cannot comprehend her methods. If there is a question, there is only one right answer. If there is only one right answer, then there is only one correct way to say it. The class consisted entirely of repeating her own answers to her own questions, and "without mistakes". The whole concept sort of goes against everything that American college education is based on. It is difficult to say this now, but I really just hated her. I mean really. This is partly because she made me feel stupid, partly because of her methods in general, and honestly, partly because she was a communist. But throughout these past four months, little parts of her story have pieced together and somehow I am now entirely crippled with love for this woman. 

If you catch her in the just right moment and ask her a question about herself, she has stories. I asked her once if she lived in a communal apartment during the soviet years. She talked a bit about that and said it was wonderful, that they were like a big family, and then somehow we worked our way back to her childhood. She said that as a child she lost all her fingernails and her hair from starvation and malnutrition. I'm assuming this was during the Blockade. She said has always loved Americans because her family got a hold of a can of ham that had been brought in by American aid. Every two hours she was given a tiny little cube of it to eat. She would just sit and watch the clock all day long because she didn't have strength to do anything else. She said that ham was the best thing that she had ever tasted. There was something about the way that she made the shape of an invisible cube with her fingers that revealed the sadness that has ruled her life. When she visited America she ate every different kind of ham she could to find it again, but nothing was quite the same. The other day someone asked her what her parents did and she told us rather matter of factly that her father was the financial director of a car plant and, as she wrote the word "abortion" on the chalk board, that when she was five years old her mother died from an underground abortion with her third child. Her father remarried a woman with two children who more-or-less ignored Nina and her brother. She said she had a very difficult childhood, but life got better. 

I never thought I could even vaguely comprehend someone's support of a controlling, dictating regime, that first starves you and then saves you, but I find that I simply can't hold it against her. I can understand now how she found some kind of security in the Soviet Union. She was promised food. She always had a job. Her life was not about freedom. It was about survival. Anything else is to unpredictable. And that is a concept that Americans simply cannot understand. And I don't know if my new found love for her has somehow effected my opinion of the quality of the class, or if I have fallen prey to some sort of manipulative communist teaching method, but I think I've learned a lot. I will forever hear those strong, exaggerated, repetitive, grammatically perfect, complete sentences in my head, and see her fist pounding the air. But despite the pounding fists and the general heir of Soviet strength and superiority, she turns out to be a scared little child just like the rest of us. Of all my teachers, I will miss her the most.