Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen

paused. “And then they started pressuring me to go to college.” The Moscow Institute of Power Engineering seemed as good a choice as any. It also took Yekaterina out of her dreary southeastern Moscow neighborhood for the first time since she landed there at the age of five; at least during the daytime hours she spent at the institute, she saw something other than the permanent traffic jam that had been the view from her apartment and school windows throughout her childhood.
    The summer after her first year of college, Yekaterina lived at the dacha with her mother; her father worked, splitting his time between Moscow and the countryside. One day her mother, who was standing at the stove as usual, collapsed with a massive heart attack. Yekaterina called her father and her aunt and an ambulance, but by the time anyone came, her mother was dead. Yekaterina tried not to go to the dacha after that.
    She spent six years at the institute, getting a master’s degree, and then left instead of pursuing a Ph.D. “I was disappointed to a certain extent. The department had outdated equipment, my adviser was ninety years old, and I didn’t think this was a very good sign. Naturally, he died soon, and there was no one left, literally, except for a single professor. The state just did not want to invest in attracting people to working in research. So I decided to get a job. And since I didn’t have any work experience, I just started going around from one research institute to another, looking for someplace willing to let a student in.” This was the mid-2000s; young Russians with Yekaterina’s credentials were getting jobs at Google, its hip Russian competitor Yandex, or any number of other high-tech firms that were actively recruiting engineers. But that was in a different, contemporary Moscow: Yekaterina was, like her father, still living in the Soviet city of her childhood, where engineers toiled at research institutes. Or rather, they usually worked at Ministry of Defense outfits behind the facades of research institutes—and that is exactly the kind of place where she found work.
    The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine. This particular submarine had been under construction in fits and starts since Yekaterina was nine years old and the USSR still in existence. Now, ten years past its original deadline, it was earmarked to be leased by the Indian navy—if and when it was ever completed.
    In 2007, construction of the submarine was largely finished and engineers were needed on site for the final adjustment and testing process, which was expected to last about a year and a half. Russian authorities were haggling with India—the price tag kept growing and the deadline kept getting pushed back—and the engineers were coming under pressure too. This was when Yekaterina quit.
    “I was completely disappointed there too,” she told me. “For all the same reasons: corruption, the state’s lack of desire to invest in quality military equipment. Programmers got very low pay, while project leaders, who weren’t doing anything, just watching the security clearances, got a hundred thousand rubles [about three thousand dollars] a month. And the people who never showed up but were making sixty thousand. And you went to work and you didn’t know who you reported to or what you were supposed to do.”
    What Yekaterina remembered as her first stern act of rebellion, her father remembered differently: “When she was supposed to go to the Far East for equipment testing, I wouldn’t let her go.”
    “What do you mean, you wouldn’t let her go?”
    “Well, would you have? She was twenty-five years old, a little girl—what kind of father would let a child go to the Far East for one and a half to two years? And I’ve served in the military myself. I have