“The Genius Under the Table” Shows a Child’s Perspective on Surviving the USSR

One day, when Eugene Yelchin was just a child, his parents were discussing whether or not Mikhail Baryshnikov would defect from the Soviet Union, where they lived. Suddenly, their neighbor Blinov, a KGB informer, revealed that he was eavesdropping in on the conversation, and implied that he was going to report Yelchin’s parents to the authorities. 

“I was scared myself,” Yelchin writes in his new book, “The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.”  “What if Blinov sent us all to prison? Something had to be done, but what?”

In an attempt to ease the tension, Yelchin made a Baryshnikov-style leap across the kitchen floor – only to slip, accidentally splash his mom head to toe with dirty water and get yelled at by his father. 

In his new memoir for young adults, author and illustrator Yelchin channels his childlike self to describe what it was like growing up in Cold War Russia. He purposely doesn’t include analysis about the times or insights he learned when he got older.

“The book is written in the first person of a young boy figuring out confusing social and ideological structures of his family and his country.”—Eugene Yelchin

“The book is written in the first person of a young boy figuring out confusing social and ideological structures of his family and his country,” he told the Journal. “No explanations from the present are given so that the young readers are figuring out that complicated world along with the protagonist.”

“The Genius Under the Table” is a heartbreaking, yet amusing, exploration of what life was really like as a child, citizen and Jew in the Soviet Union. Despite the turmoil that Yelchin and his family went through, the book, which includes exaggerated caricatures of his story’s subjects, is also hopeful. 

Like everyone around him, Yelchin was constantly scared of the government. “In our lives, the KGB was ever-present and terrifying, even though as a boy I did not know yet the full extent of the violence that the KGB was capable of,” he said. “My parents would never tell my brother and me of the atrocities that the secret police had committed against the people of our country, or what happened to some members of our family during the Stalinist purges. It was safer for my parents to reveal nothing to us.”

Things were made worse by the fact that Yelchin, who also wrote the novel “Breaking Stalin’s Nose,” came from a Jewish family. His great-grandparents died during the German occupation, his grandfather was a Moscow engineer who was likely executed during Stalin’s 1928 engineers purge, his grandmother endured numerous pogroms and his parents survived the antisemitic purge of 1948-1953. 

Yelchin’s schoolmates beat him up daily, his neighbors called him a Yid, a swastika was occasionally chalked on his family’s door and a slogan appeared on the courtyard wall of his building that read, “Beat Jews, save Mother Russia.” 

“The worst of all,” he said, “was the effect that the state-sponsored antisemitism had left on the Russian-Jewish identity of my family: my father changing his first and middle Jewish names to Russian ones, my mother proudly declaring that my brother and my father didn’t look Jewish (she and I did), as well as a feeling of shame and inadequacy I felt as a kid, wishing to be like everyone else—an impossible goal for a Jewish boy with artistic leanings.”

Even though life in the USSR was difficult, Yelchin found a way to positively spin his experiences. He concludes the book by writing that while he saw fear in the eyes of his family members and strangers he passed in the streets every day, there were also “eyes that shone with curiosity and passion, eyes starved for something more than our drab existence. I had seen such eyes in lines waiting for Baryshnikov to dance, and I had seen such eyes in our libraries, our theaters, our museums and our concert halls. Those curious and passionate eyes made me happy. Yes, in spite of everything, I was happy.”

When people read his book, Yelchin, who now lives with his family in Topanga, wants them to learn how important it is to become politically involved.

“In the dictatorship, we were dependent on the whim of the dictator,” he said. “In a democracy, we depend on the strength, honesty and clear-sightedness of the elected officials. If reading ‘The Genius Under the Table’ will move some of my readers a little closer to becoming active and fearless defenders of our democracy, I will be extremely gratified.”