The Second Laugh — Intelligence Training in Kazan, 1994

Overview

In 1994, a nineteen-year-old woman named Lena travels from Nizhny Novgorod to what she has been told is a language training programme in a former sanatorium outside Kazan. The facility is clean, the meals are regular, and the instructors are precise. Over nine months she learns that she has been recruited into something considerably more specific than language training.

The programme teaches cultivation: how to make a stranger trust you completely, how to maintain two registers of feeling simultaneously, how to lie with warmth, how to become whoever is needed in a given room. The instruction is delivered with the care of a craft being passed on by people who believe it matters. Some recruits wash out. Some graduate. Lena does both, in the sense that she passes every test and loses, in the passing, something she cannot name and will not recover.

The story is less about what Lena learns than about what the learning costs. The title refers to the two different laughs she has by the programme’s end — one that she means, and one that she has been trained to mean, and the growing difficulty of knowing which is which.

Empty language-training classroom in a former sanatorium outside Kazan

Characters

Lena

Nineteen years old, from Nizhny Novgorod. Intelligent, adaptable, and quietly ambitious. She arrives at the programme with an intact sense of herself and leaves with two selves — one of which is considerably more capable than the other. The question the story leaves open is which one she is.

Galina Sergeyevna

Senior instructor with thirty-one years in the trade, trained in Vienna. Precise and exhausted, she delivers the programme’s most important lessons with the quietness of someone who has stopped being surprised by what they produce. She is not cruel. She is honest, which is worse.

Vera

A fellow recruit who washes out at four months. The reason given: she cannot say the word ‘love’ convincingly. The reason she gives herself is different, and probably true.

Olya

Lena’s friend and roommate. Graduates. Their friendship across the course of the programme is the story’s measure of what the training does to ordinary human attachment.

Places

Former sanatorium outside Kazan, Russia

The training facility occupies a Soviet-era tuberculosis sanatorium in the countryside outside Kazan — repurposed, functional, and designed for long confinement. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation on the Volga, roughly eight hundred kilometres east of Moscow. In 1994, a year after the Soviet collapse, it is a city in the process of deciding what it is. The sanatorium outside it has already decided.

Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

Lena’s home city, on the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers. Once known as Gorky — the closed city where Andrei Sakharov was exiled — it reopened to foreigners only in 1991. In 1994 it is a city of fading industry and uncertain futures, which is exactly the kind of city from which nineteen-year-olds can be recruited without drawing attention.

Overview

Characters

Places

The Intelligence Brief