If you ask a foreigner who knows anything about the Russians what the most common name is in the Soviet Union, he will confidently answer “Ivanov.” That is undoubtedly the right answer. But even the Ivanovs themselves are probably not aware that their last name is also the most common one among the Chuvash people, which is the result of their having been forced into the Russian Orthodox Church. All new converts were given Russian names when they were baptized, a process that began in the sixteenth century, when the last remaining faction of the kingdom of the Kazan Tartars collapsed, overrun by the army of the victorious Czar Ivan the Terrible.
To commemorate this event, Ivan built St. Basil’s Cathedral, the church with the colonial onion-shaped domes in Moscow’s Red Square. Some unpatriotic tourist guides have been known to mention that the thankful monarch blinded and cut off the hands of the creators of this architectural masterpiece, so that they would never be able to re-create the design for anyone else.
While chewing on my chicken and drinking my lukewarm tea I was excitedly telling all this to sleepy Liberman, who also held a piece of chicken in his hand but would forget to take it to his mouth, as he was not fully awake yet. It was 1:30 A.M., and the empty central square of the town of Kstov, where we were having our early breakfast, floated in a haze.
We arranged our food on the hood of our car under the only functioning streetlight in town, and ate standing up, as though we were at a reception à la fourchette. We failed to notice several silhouettes emerge from the cold fog. They turned out to be four teenagers of different sizes, dressed in quilted jackets secured with wide military belts with stars on their buckles. One of them looked like a girl. They stopped at some distance, regarding us like naturalists examining fauna, and then the eldest croaked, “Hey, what are you turkeys up to?” Liberman and I glanced at each other.