“We send our children to School No. 57”

In the West, a teacher sleeping with an under-age pupil, is a depressing fact of life – fodder for newspapers; in Russia, it is a cause for soul searching, particularly when it happened at School No.57 …

In J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter, recently given an unexpected and smash-hit theatre airing, alongside this mundane and unremarkable world of ours there exists a parallel universe of wizards who are divided into “pure-bloods” and “mudbloods” (which in Potterland is offensive, so it’s more politically correct to say “Muggle-born”).

This fictional sociological landscape exactly evokes the state of today’s Russian intelligentsia, which is less in conflict with the authorities or the masses than it is striving for internal exile, a parallel existence, a place to lose oneself and become invisible, a fantasy land of solace and refuge.

What’s more, the Russian intelligentsia is split into the hereditary aristocracy (“pure-breeds”) and the rest (“mudbloods”). The former look down on the latter, because they tend to be provincial upstarts who fancy themselves a bit too much. They define each other according to social markers: “My grandfather worked for a prestigious literary journal,” “We have a family dacha at Peredelkino,” “We send our children to School No. 57.”

The above is a necessary, albeit wordy, prelude to a discussion of the aforesaid School No. 57 in Moscow, which presently finds itself at the centre of scandalous attention across Russia. To understand the scandal, you need to understand what School No. 57 means: it is to Russia what Eton is to England – where the quality of the education (excellent though it might be) – is not the main reason for sending one’s offspring there. School No. 57 has an aura about it, a mythology, a cachet; a parental investment, which opens doors to a glittering future that might otherwise be closed. Until now.

Journalist Ekaterina Krongauz recently revealed on Facebook that a male history teacher had been fired for sleeping with female pupils over a period of 16 years. That’s 16 years in a row; and with different pupils every year … And no one did anything about it, even though many, if not all, parents and school officials were apparently aware of what was going on.

The FB post was a bombshell. Some railed at how such a thing was possible at one of the best schools in the country. Others chose instead to direct their anger at Krongauz and similar journalists who like to “wash dirty linen in public.” A third group recalled the movie Spotlight as relevant to the situation.

The story snowballed – of course it did; there are now literally hundreds of FB posts about it, not to mention the articles and commentaries sprouting everywhere. And, as is the way with a scandal, not only does it develop a life of its own, it breeds related scandals; there is now talk of a maths teacher (male) who has been grooming schoolboys at School No. 57. And for Russians, that really is a scandal. But I digress …

The pro-Kremlin media, the terrible twins of Life TV and Vesti.ru, could not resist having a swipe at the “good faces” – journalistic slang for the Bolotnaya protesters and others in favour of annoying things like free and fair elections; the urban liberals branded by state media as blue-blooded metropolitan intellectuals, anti-popular and elitist by nature. The propaganda was so successful that even the “blue-bloods” themselves started to believe it, maintaining an aversion if not to the broad masses, then to the lesser intelligentsia, who in tsarist Russia were labelled raznochintsy (intellectuals not of noble birth). The “mudbloods” had made a big thing of sending their children to School No. 57, and what could one expect of such people …

Sure, the propagandists behaved despicably. But likewise the behaviour of the “pure-breeds,” cast into the bright spotlight of public attention, was less than admirable. They got scared. Scared that the authorities would break into their small, cosy world and trample everything under their jackboots (they did indeed arrive, and the Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case).

One might say that, for all their protestations of highbrow morality, they unwittingly proved they are essentially no different from Putin and his friends. They too prefer to solve matters unobtrusively among themselves, without attracting too much attention. Which sounds pretty much like Eton to me.