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Did leaders at Sambation know one of their colleagues was allegedly abusing children? Nastya speaks to one former teacher who accuses her of prying into the private lives of others.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Adults in the Room?
Nastya Krasilnikova is an investigative journalist who covers sexual violence against women and children. A year and a half ago, former students associated with one of Russia’s most prestigious schools approached her with allegations of serial abuse by teachers. Her investigation has uncovered a network of harm and complicity in a tight-knit circle of Russian intelligentsia.
The story spans many years and multiple countries. It asks what happens when a community refuses to atone for the violence of its leaders. As Russia wages a senseless war in Ukraine, that question couldn’t be more pressing.
For additional materials visit our website: https://adultsintheroom.libolibo.me/
For feedback: adultsintheroom@libolibo.me
This is a podcast by Libo/Libo
Sambation called itself a creative community for people interested in Jewish culture. They were sponsored by international Jewish organizations like סוכנות and Genesis Fund. Sambation offered educational programs for adolescents, including 2 week trips to Jewish cultural sites. Participants and teachers usually lived in hotels. Adults with adults.
Nastya:Teenagers with teenagers. Rivka Lvova went to Sambation camp in the summer of 2012. Her father, Alexander Lvov, was a teacher there.
Rivka:Yes. I really loved it, mostly because of the people that I've met there. Because, like, people were very open and fun and weird in a way, which was fun. And, like, being weird was something that was very supported there, and, I really loved it.
Nastya:But the feeling wouldn't last. From Libo Libo, you're listening to The Adults in the Room. My name is Nastya Krasilnikova. This is Episode 3: Everybody Knew. Rivka was born in Saint Petersburg and now lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a programmer.
Nastya:In October 2022, when my schoolgirls podcast came out, Rivka shared it on her Facebook page with a comment. I wonder when Sambation will be investigated.
Rivka:There was a lot of sexual abuse there that I knew about. And it was like went under the rug, like it never happened. There's a were different people. One of them was about Rivka.
Nastya:Rivka is referring to the other Rivka in this story, Revekka Gershovich. The 2 Rivkas became friends on a Sambation trip to Ukraine. And Rivka remembers her friend's relationship with a Sambation teacher, Mark Gondelman.
Rivka:It was something that I saw and, like, was, like, sure about it. And what happened is they dated when she was 14, I think, and he was 20 something till she was 16 or or something like that.
Nastya:And how did you understand that there was something wrong with them dating?
Rivka:There were a few things. One of them was that we were friends and sometimes we were talking and she was like, oh, this Mark, he done that, and I really feel bad from what he's done to me. And she was complaining to me about him. It was like something constant that happened between them. But also, like, it was weird that they were together as she was my age and he was a teacher.
Rivka:It seemed a little bit strange to me, but since for everyone else, it was okay, I was like, okay. Maybe it's it's okay. It's normal.
Nastya:Why do you think this kind of relationship were considered normal at the time?
Rivka:I'm not sure. Just people were like, okay. Love is love, I guess. At least, like, some of the people, they were, like, wanted to believe in the good or something of people. Like, they wanted to believe, okay.
Rivka:They're just loving each other, but they're, like, not touching or something like that.
Nastya:But that was false.
Rivka:Yes.
Nastya:So do I understand correctly that people organizing Sambation were aware of Mark having previous relationship with Sara, who was 12 at the time, and they still called him to be a teacher for teenagers.
Rivka:I'm pretty sure, yes. Really, you need to be, like, unable to see and hear anything for not knowing that they were in a relationship, or like at least not wanting to not trying to check at least a little bit what's happening, what are the people that you are inviting to teach doing in their life.
Nastya:So do you think this the that these people are responsible for sexual abuse that happened to Sara and Rivka?
Rivka:Absolutely. Yes.
Nastya:Did you try to share your concern about them dating with any other adults around you?
Rivka:Yes. I was upset and I went to my dad who was also a teacher there. And I told him that, and he was like, yeah, you shouldn't, like, be in between the relationships of other people.
Nastya:So your dad, he wasn't concerned at all?
Rivka:No.
Nastya:Do you think that your dad will be willing to talk to me?
Rivka:I don't know.
Nastya:Alexander Lvov did agree to talk to me, but only under certain conditions. He was already familiar with my work. He seemed to have listened to my 'Schoolgirls' investigation and developed mixed feelings about the way I confronted the people responsible. So he said I could only use the recording of our interview after showing him which clips I planned to use, and what I'd say before and after them.
Nastya:Usually, I decline a request like this, but this seemed like an exceptional case. First, his daughter was accusing him of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse, and I owed him every chance to respond. 2nd, it felt important to understand how a man like Lvov, a Russian man of a certain generation, thought about abuse allegations like these. I agreed to his terms, and we recorded an interview. But when I sent him the clips I planned to use, he backed out.
Nastya:I will honor that agreement. You won't be hearing Alexander Lvov's voice, but I want to share a few general points about our conversation. He told me he didn't remember his daughter approaching him with concerns about Revekka and Mark, and that he was unaware of the relationship. But he made another point. Lvov is 67 years old.
Nastya:A significant part of of his adult life was spent under the Soviet regime. Back then, schools and workplaces held collective meetings at which the moral character of a particular person was discussed by his colleagues or fellow students. Each team member's moral failings were the business of everyone else. If someone was bad at his job or drunk in public or unfaithful to his wife or plotting to emigrate, he was publicly shamed. These meetings were called проработка, literally working over.
Nastya:As a result of such a meeting, a person could be reprimanded, expelled from the university, or fired from work. Those meetings traumatized people. They were a symbol of Soviet oppression and of one's inability to have a private life. So, what's that got to do with Revekka and Mark? First, Lvov acknowledged he would have felt uncomfortable prying into the private affairs of a colleague.
Nastya:2nd, he compared my style of work to those collective meetings. That's a comparison I get quite often, actually. He went on to say that he doesn't approve of relationships between teachers and students in general, but thinks maybe there is room for an emotionally mature student to be happy with a relatively immature teacher. Sure, it might be unlawful, But Alexander explained to me that his generation believed that following the rules was, and I'm quoting, fascism. We also discussed the so called changing of cultural norms since he was young in the seventies and eighties.
Nastya:After we part ways, he sends me a link to an interview with Samantha Geimer. The famous director Roman Polanski plead guilty to raping Samantha in the seventies when she was 13 years old. In that interview, Samantha admits that she had sex with Polanski at the age of 13 but denies that she was traumatized by it. At the time, even as teenagers, we were already adults, she said. I asked Rivka, Lvov's daughter, if she would encourage parents to send their kids to Sambation.
Rivka:I wouldn't suggest it. It's also connected to the fact that, like, my father is still one of the people who, like, teaches there, and I don't trust him.
Nastya:Alexander Lvov of course, was not the only person at Sambation who could have done something. Another name came up repeatedly in my investigation. Here is Revekka Gershovich.
Revekka:I think the people who really had the power to stop it were, like, Dvorkin and people who organized that camp and, like, people who could have intervened in that context.
Nastya:Ilya Dvorkin has been the director of Sambation for many years. He was responsible for the safety of adolescents who were studying there and for selecting teachers. So I wanted to ask him if he knew that at least one of the teachers was allegedly molesting students. Ilya Dvorkin, like Alexander Lvov, agreed to talk to me.
Nastya:In either case, I still don't really know why. He actually came to the studio in Jerusalem on the same day as Lvov. But Dvorkin, also like Lvov, had conditions. When he walked in, he handed me a piece of paper. It was an agreement I had to sign.
Nastya:It said I didn't have the right to record our conversation and to quote it, I must obtain in the Ilya Dvorkin's written permission. It was the first time something like that had happened to me as a journalist, and I hope it was the last. We talked for about an hour. It was heated. Afterward, I was reluctant to go ask him for his permission to quote from the conversation.
Nastya:But a few months later, I emailed Dvorkin to identify the points I'd like to bring in the podcast. He too refused. So I can't tell you what he said, but I will tell you what he didn't say. He didn't acknowledge witnessing anything improper at Sambation, and he took no responsibility for what might have happened. There is something from Ilya Dvorkin that I can quote.
Nastya:After Rivka Lvova posted my Schoolgirls investigation to Facebook with her plea that someone investigate Sambation, a long chain of comments appeared underneath. Some were from Ilya Dvorkin. He was very direct. He called the allegations about Sambation slander.
Nastya:Here is what he wrote, also read by our producer, Sam.
Dvorkin (read by Sam):I was at all the camps and worked with all the teachers and didn't see anything like this. In a camp through which 100 of teenagers passed, anything could theoretically happen. But if such an incident occurred and became known to anyone, then immediately all the participants would be sent home.
Nastya:Revekka Gershovich replied:
Revekka:Slander, you say? So you didn't know that Mark has slept with me when I was 14 and 15? We even came to visit you in Jerusalem as a couple and you didn't know that everyone called him Gondelfuck? You're no better than him. Moreover, in a sense you are even worse than Mark was doing and subjected many of these children to emotional and physical abuse.
Revekka:Thank you for teaching me what vibrating colors during panic attacks are. Thank you for teaching me what inescapable depression and fear are. Thank you for teaching me how to look at the ceiling in order to abstract myself from the fact that someone is doing something horrible to your body. Thank you for everything and burn in hell.
Nastya:So that's about everything I can tell you about Ilya Dvorkin, the director of Sambation and a respected Jewish philosopher. I tried other Sambation teachers. I didn't succeed in finding anyone who tried to stop Mark Gondelman from molesting children. But at the time, even he likely knew that he was doing something illegal.
Rivka:I do think that he deserves to jail at least for what he've done. Because when he was in a relationship with Rivka, he knew what he was doing. Like, I remember we were friends at some time, and, like, I remember coming to him a few times, and he was, like, had a collection of pictures of, different women naked, almost naked, and, some of them were grown up. And also from Rivka, he was, like, giggling about it that he has them. And, then he was like, but don't tell anyone.
Rivka:And I was like, why? He was like, because, like, it's a teenager, and I can get jail. So he kinda understood what he was doing, but he still was doing it.
Nastya:As you probably remember from our last episode, Revekka Gershovich dumped Mark Gondelman when she was 16. She was already a student at School 57 by that time. But even at that point, she still thought there had been nothing wrong with the gap in age between her and Mark.
Revekka:I did not see any problems with differences in age, and I thought that, we were all very progressive and novel and modern, and we knew what we were doing. And initially, that idea started perpetuating my kind of psyche when I was in but later it took even stronger hold in 57 School. In fact,
Revekka:that idea was reinforced at School 57 by one person in particular, a history teacher called Boris Meerson.
Revekka:And I remember that, I once met, Meerson in a cafe after school, and he just spent the whole time telling me about sexual revolution and
Revekka:how it was the liberation and how now we're living in a different age and how people who are against relationships such as ours are conventional, complacent people who don't want to accept the new reality, the new movements, and that, and he would, like, come up with, a 150 reasons for why his position was correct.
Nastya:Boris Meerson started his career at school 57 in 1990 and was fired in 2016. For 26 years, he had been a very important figure in that very important school. We've heard about him already in this podcast. In the first episode, Rose was telling us about her first day in high school.
Rose:And our teacher, our history teacher, told us School number 57 is the intellectual elite of Moscow, and Moscow is an intellectual elite of Russia. And that's what he told us on the first day we come.
Nastya:Alexandra Kuvshiniva, one of the School 57 alumni, met Boris Meerson in 1999 at the age of 14. What was your impression of him?
Alexandra:My impression was more of a subject that it's, much more interesting than, than I used to think. Our historian in the previous school was also male, but very Soviet and boring. This one was not Soviet and not boring at all, had a ponytail, was wearing some, casual clothes, and, seemed really smart.
Nastya:Would you say he was a talented teacher?
Alexandra:I think when you pick up very talented children who in 9th grade being 14 are able to study in the lecture form most of the effort is to pick the children, and then they have to work hard. So was is he a talented teacher? He had nice ideas, and his teaching was far more progressive than the usual textbook history classes, but I also think that it's picking the talented children, which played a big part.
Nastya:Yegor Osipov Gipch was 14 when he met Boris Meerson in a classroom, and he remembers him as
Yegor:A strict man with a low voice and a commanding tone. He seemed like someone who possesses knowledge and knows what you should know. But it is someone who you try to be cautious with. Right? You don't want to annoy that person.
Yegor:You don't want to make them angry. And so therefore you want to study well and not even study. Right? You want to exhibit that you are as interested in getting knowledge as he is interested in putting that knowledge into you, supposedly.
Nastya:And here is Rose again.
Rose:First, I was, like, really freaked out by him because, he was not like any other adults I knew because adults, well, in my 14 year old brain, they were, kind of, very uptight. They were all about the rules and they were all about, like, suppressing and forcing and stuff like this. But his Myr son would smoke and drink. And in our class, we had a we had school trips with our class every short holidays. So, on in spring and in autumn, we would go to on short trips to different cultural sites.
Rose:And on our 1st, school trip, I was surprised by the fact that he was, like, drinking and smoking and doing all of those things openly. And I don't think I had initially a super negative reaction, but I was definitely, like, a bit freaked out. But then you get used to that. You know, he would allow us to be ourselves, I guess, to a certain extent. Obviously, he wouldn't control us as much as our parents did on the school trip.
Rose:And he was smart, and he could support the conversations that we wanted to have.
Nastya:A smart and strict teacher with a ponytail who smokes and drinks during school trips, Boris Meerson was a very prominent person at the school. He was what we call a class teacher in the humanities department, which meant he did not only educational, but also administrative work. He organized and supervised school trips and other activities like school plays. Boris Meerson was also friends with the principal, Sergey Mendelevich. Moreover, Boris's wife was also a history teacher in School 57, and his son was a student there.
Nastya:Being a very busy man, Boris Meerson still found time to spend with his students off campus. Here is Revekka Gershovich.
Revekka:I got transferred to 57 School, and after a while, I started liking it. I liked that there were that history was really good, that there was like English literature and a lot of humanities generally, and it was in the center, and it felt like you were in the center of all the events in Moscow. And that was cool. And I was still with Mark back then for a while, like, my 9th grade and I think part of my 10th grade. Everybody in my school, like, in my class knew about this relationship.
Revekka:Nobody was particularly hiding it. I'm pretty sure that Meerson knew about it too. I don't know if they've ever met each other. I know that they knew of each other. Mark definitely knew about Meerson, and Meerson definitely knew about Mark.
Nastya:Mhmm. And did you ever, speak to Mark about Meerson?
Revekka:Yeah. I definitely did. I actually continued communicating with Mark after I kicked him out of my apartment and when I was already, well, for the lack of better word, dating, Meerson.
Nastya:Boris Meerson was another teacher who allegedly abused and violated Revekka Gershovich. In fact, he allegedly abused and violated children from School 57 for at least 16 years. More on the next episode. The Adults in the Room is produced by Libo Libo Studio. All episodes are out now, so you can play the next one right away.
Nastya:This podcast has a website where you can find additional visual materials collected throughout our investigation and contact information for feedback. The link is in the description box. This show is hosted, reported, and written by me, Nastya Krasilnikova. A huge thank you to my colleagues, researcher and fact checker, Vica Lobanova, producers and editors, Nastya Medvedeva, Sam Colbert, and Dasha Cherkudinova, composer and sound designer, Ildar Fattakhov, and the head of Libo Libo, Lika Kremer. Legal support is provided by Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir from Michael Sfard Law Office, and Sergey Markov, managing partner of the law firm Markov and Madaminov.
Nastya:Thank you for listening.