Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Nastya tracks down Boris Meerson’s home address in Israel. Recorder in hand, she turns up unannounced to put the allegations to him.
Visit our website for photos and other materials referenced in the story: https://adultsintheroom.libolibo.me/
Support investigations by Libo/Libo on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/libolibo or by subscribing to Libo/Libo+ on Apple Podcasts https://cutt.ly/adu05epap
Feedback email: adultsintheroom@libolibo.me
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
A quick warning. This episode contains descriptions of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. Please take care while listening. School 57 never publicly acknowledged the abuse, and none of the board members came forward to express remorse for the students' suffering.
Nastya:As you might remember, not all the board members believed students suffered at all. Several people told me about comments by deputy principal Ekaterina Vishnevetskaya at a staff meeting in September 2016. She said that she herself had a romance with her own teacher and that she didn't suffer. Never responded to my invitations to comment for this podcast, but that teacher she was talking about at the staff meeting did.
Lev:My name is Lev Iosifovich Sobolev. I teach literature at School 67, but my current position is lecturer and teacher of extracurricular activities.
Nastya:Lev Sobolev has been working in School 67, another prestigious school in Moscow for 47 years. He's been given the title of honored teacher of the Russian Federation. He's also quite famous as a philologist and literary critic. Lev Sobolev is 77 years old now. And right at the beginning of our interview, he admits he's had relationships with ex schoolgirls.
Lev:You see, the temptation is extremely great. I'm not talking about coercion. Any kind of coercion is illegal. But there is this unacknowledged feeling that maybe exists in many of us, 'Who will this hurt?
Lev:Who will be harmed by this? If she wants it and I want it, why is it bad?' And only afterwards, even if everything is good, everyone is happy, and he and she aren't bothered. Only then you realize it is still bad.
Nastya:I asked him how he came to understand that what he was doing was bad.
Lev:Well, first of all, because the girl may have, and most often does have, the hope that you will stay with her forever because we a girl who is willing to limit herself to a short experience, so to speak is an atypical case. That is first of all. Secondly, you are not on your own after all. You have a family, and you're essentially lying by doing this. And you're upsetting people close to you, making them suffer.
Nastya:I asked Sobolev whether I understand correctly that he regrets having affairs with former students.
Lev:Of course. Of course. Of course. And I wouldn't do it again if I could start it all over. That said, I realize how hard it would be to not do it again.
Nastya:Lev Sobolev insists that he only started romantic relationships with his students after they graduated. I can only take his word for it.
Lev:It's just that for me. The strict ban against relationships between teacher, a current teacher, and school girl. It's always existed.
Nastya:Do you keep in touch with these girls at all? Do you know how these relationships affected them?
Lev:Well, as far as I can tell, it was not a tragedy for any of them, neither the affair nor the breakup.
Nastya:Is there anything that you, I don't know, that you could say to yourself from those years that would have maybe influenced your choices back then?
Lev:There is. Now that my wife is no longer on this earth, I probably could have thought about her more and taken care of her more and not cheated on her and not made her sad.
Nastya:Would you like to maybe apologize to the girls who had relationships with you?
Lev:Yeah. Yes. Yes. Regardless of how they themselves view them.
Nastya:For what?
Lev:For lying, for living a double life.
Nastya:Understood. One last question, I guess, about Ekaterina Vishnevetskaya. Did I understand correctly that you had an affair with her?
Lev:Yeah. But she shouldn't have said that it was when she was a student. It was quite quite a while after that.
Nastya:I understand, Lev Iosifovich. Thank you for this conversation.
Lev:I don't know if I should thank you for bringing all of this back up. I suppose I should. Because it's best not to cuddle oneself and pretend that everything that happened was right and good.
Nastya:From Libo Libo, you're listening to The Adults in the Room. My name is Nastya Krasilnikova. This is Episode 8: The Men. I was so struck that Lev Sobolev was not only willing to talk to me, but also admitted that what he was doing as a teacher was wrong. I felt almost grateful.
Nastya:And then, as has often happened in this investigation, the most unusual thing happened. A woman called Anna, who we'd hired to translate this interview with Lev Sobolev, said she actually knew Sobolev. She was his high school student at School 67 from 2004 to 2008. And her experience there sounded very familiar.
Anna:I transferred to School 67 in 8th grade. So I was 14 years old, and I was Lev Iosifovich's student from ages 14 to 18. We were in a specialty humanities class. You had to apply specifically to that class, and you had to interview with him personally to be accepted, and I was accepted. I remember when I came to School 67 is that, jokingly I was told that graduates plan their pregnancies.
Anna:So as to have a child that is the correct age to apply to his class, because he would only take in new children 2 years out of every 4. So you had to make sure that your child was the correct age. So I learned immediately that he was adored, multi generationally adored. I knew it was different than all the other teachers at the school, but I only realized that it was maybe not normal after I graduated. He was very affectionate with us.
Anna:It was a combination of being incredibly respectful and treating us like adults, even though we were 14. For example, he would call us by our names and patronymics. So he would call us the most respectful version of our names possible, the kind of version in Russian that you only use to address elders. At the same time, he would joke with us. He would compliment us.
Anna:He called us his little chiclets (цыплята) . He would hug us affectionately. And the main thing in my opinion, that was kind of striking that was systemic in his behavior was that he would slap our asses. And not only would he slap our asses, but the ass slapping was tied to our grades.
Nastya:Anna says that Lev Sobolev would slap the asses of his female students if they failed to learn a poem by heart.
Anna:So he would he would slap our asses and this happened a lot and to everybody publicly in school. This was a known thing. Everyone knew. The other teachers knew. All the students knew.
Anna:I know this for a fact. This is not conjecture. And it was gross. And I only realized that it was gross when I graduated. And when I graduated and I realized that he would do... he would do a little twirling motion with his finger, like turn around, you know, поворачивайся типа. And he would be like, 'Anechka, do you want it on the left or the right?' Meaning my left or right ass cheek slap. It's gross.
Nastya:So when you read the interview that you translated for a podcast, did you feel like you know, what was the mechanism of those students becoming his lovers based on your own experience?
Anna:Yes, exactly. Because I was translating your interview with Lev Iosifovich And I was struck by the fact that in the interview, he seems to genuinely want to apologize. But then when you clarify what he's apologizing for, he says basically that he was apologizing for hurting the feelings of his students by breaking their hearts because he says that these, that it was very rare for girls to want a short story with him and that mostly they wanted apparently, I mean, I think the implication is they wanted to be with him for a long time and he could not offer that because he was married and he also felt bad about lying to his wife. And I was surprised because it made it sound as though he is being inundated with these high school graduates throwing themselves at him and he just can't there's just not enough of him to go around.
Anna:But in reality, the reason that was happening was that he had had 4 years to impress upon us how important and essential his attention was.
Nastya:I went back to Lev Sobolev with follow-up questions after I talked to Anna. He admitted to slapping the butts of female students. He added, 'But it's a pity if the girl you've talked to only remembered this from our lessons. Perhaps it was a girl whom I knew from infancy the children of my friends studied with me. And it could be almost a kindred gesture, which doesn't change my current regret that I made such contact'.
Nastya:He said he was grateful to me because he didn't realize any of this had been a problem until I started asking about it. From the very beginning of this investigation, I was planning to reach out to Boris Meerson. I wanted to know how he could justify years of seducing children, and what he thinks about his actions now after 8 years of his forced relocation to Israel. But first, I found everything I could about Boris online. I watched a documentary called 'My Perestroika'.
Nastya:It profiles 5 people from the last generation of children raised behind the iron curtain. One of those people is Boris Meerson. He's in his early forties at the time of filming. In the documentary, he is shown as a family man. We see his wife, who is also his colleague.
Nastya:She teaches history at School 57.
Lyubov:And my mother, just out of curiosity, once asked, what's Borya's last name? And I said, Meerson. And then she sat down sadly and said, 'I just knew some Jew would latch himself onto you'.
Lyubov:In this film, we also see their young son, Mark. Boris Meerson is shown teaching, doing chores, smoking Gauloises, and drinking vodka. He reflects on his youth and the Soviet legacy.
Boris:My friends and I felt we were non-conformists, and fighting the system is always thrilling. The adrenaline gets flowing. It's romantic. We had a negative view of the Soviet Union and probably not because we understood everything about it, but just because it was a romantic opposition to the system.
Nastya:The quote reminded me of my conversation with Alexander Lvov, who was a teacher at Sambation Summer School. You might remember him from episode 3. He claimed his generation thought following the rules was fascist. In the documentary, families like Meerson's are still opposed to the system in Russia. I wonder if Meerson sees himself not as a criminal, but merely a non-conformist.
Nastya:I wonder if he still feels a rush of adrenaline in breaking the rules, no matter the consequences. I knew that if I emailed Boris or called him, he would just decline my proposal. So I decided to visit him in person since we both now live in Israel. I put off that visit for months. I told myself it was because I first had to gather all the information I could about his alleged abuse.
Nastya:But the truth was that I also felt uncomfortable with the idea of being alone with this man. On January 7th, I finally took my recorder, a gallon of water, a power bank, and a protein bar, and took a bus to Yokneam Illit, where Boris lived. I knew his address because the survivors remembered it. All the way there, I was chatting with my co-investigator, Vica, in Russia. I was sharing my live location with her.
Nastya:Of course, my bus to Yokneam Illit broke down in the middle of nowhere, and I had to wait for another one. When I finally got to the town, I found it very peaceful and quiet. I found Boris's apartment building and waited for someone to enter so I could slip in behind them. When I found his apartment, I recognized the door. I'd seen it on Russia's Channel 1, which sent a TV journalist here in 2016.
Nastya:In the clip, Boris opens the door, looks over at the camera crew, then closes the door without saying a word. The door matched. I rang the doorbell and someone answered. Standing in front of me was Masha Nemzer. I do not know how exactly the relationship between Boris Meerson and Masha Nemzer started.
Nastya:Yegor told me it was probably around 2006 when Masha was a 14 year old student in the 10th grade at School 57. She was always around him. Masha is 32 years old now, and she's still together with Boris. Here is Revekka.
Revekka:Everybody knew about Masha because it was quite open. She would go with us to on trips and she would be, like, officially put with some other student but then she would, like, disappear in the middle of the night and there were rumors and stuff. So I've heard something about it. I wasn't particularly interested in that. I was like, well, whatever.
Revekka:He it's his business. I have nothing to do with it. Right? I don't remember if it was before or after I started having sex with Meerson, but I think before that I talked to my mom about it that, 'Oh, people say that he has a lover who is Masha Nemzer'. And my mom was, like, 'Whatever. Yeah.
Revekka:I guess that he does'. But also, like, by this time, Masha is an adult, and it didn't quite cross either mine or my mom's mom mind, I think, that she wasn't an adult when they started.
Nastya:As you might remember, both Revekka and Yegor told us that Masha played a significant role in grooming them into a sexual relationship with Boris. hen the criminal case against Boris started in Russia, Masha Nemzer was also charged with the sexual abuse of minors.
Yegor:The Russian prosecution believes they conspired. I think the charge is wrong because I do not think, Masha conspired to anything. I have no doubt she was manipulated. I mean, this, what I'm saying now, helps Masha. Boris was issuing instructions.
Yegor:He was telling what to do. He was, of all things, telling what sex is like, as if he knows. So it was very Boris dominated.
Nastya:Alexandra Kuvshinova agrees with Yegor on that matter.
Alexandra:I think she was either invited or invited herself into an interesting adventure that was supposed to go well, but didn't go well. And she didn't say no because she either wanted or manipulated, or was manipulated into, wanting it. But speaking of responsibility, I am not Maria, and I can only guess, and I am completely sure she would disagree. But, again, when a child is, making such decisions with a teacher, it's the driver driving the cab. So I also do not think that, any of, what happened should be counted, as her responsibility.
Nastya:And here is Alice.
Alice:That's also very, like, hard case of, like Masha Nemzer... I didn't receive any violence from. Sometimes I drank beer with her and Meerson at the same time. And I mean, it's very hard case because, of course, we can say that, and I agree with it, that, of course, Masha should take also responsibility. And she also made a lot of violence. But at the same time, I cannot imagine, like, how damaged she is because of all this stuff Meerson did with her for, like, more than 10 years. If it's gonna be possible also to somehow separate her from Meerson and maybe help her.
Nastya:I knew that Masha Nemzer had been living with Boris Meerson in Israel for years. But at the end of 2023, I heard the rumour that she finally left him. About a week prior to my visit to Boris Meerson, I texted her with an invitation to an interview, but she answered that she was not willing to comment. I really wanted to believe that they separated and she was getting her life back. I understood I was wrong when she opened the door of Boris' apartment in her slippers.
Nastya:I say to Masha, 'Hello. I would like to speak to Boris Markovich'. 'And who are you?', she asks. I state my name and occupation, and in that moment, Boris himself appears at the door.
Nastya:I tell him why I came. To ask him to comment on the allegations of sexual violence from former students of School 57. He says, I didn't commit any sexual violence. Then he tells me to wait. He's going to come outside and talk to me.
Nastya:In 2 minutes, he does come outside. He asks me how I found him and I explain. He asks if my recorder is running and I say that it is. And he wants me to switch it off, so I do. I talked to Boris Meerson for an hour and 10 minutes.
Nastya:He never gave his permission to record him despite my attempts. We walked out of the building and sat on a bench nearby. Every time his neighbors walked by, he would greet them and ask me to stop our conversation until they passed. Boris is 58 years old now. He still wears a ponytail, and some of his hair is already gray.
Nastya:He is still big, broad shouldered, and at least a foot taller than me. He starts by asking where I live and where I work, and then he expresses his doubts whether he should talk to me at all. I remind him that it is his decision, and he can leave at any time. He tells me that the events of 2016 were very traumatic for him. So traumatic that he wanted to chase an IDF soldier, punch him, steal his gun, and shoot himself.
Nastya:I asked him about those who suffered from his actions, his ex students, and he tells me with a smile that he doesn't know anyone who suffered from him. I press on and ask him to confirm his sexual relationships with Revekka Gershovich, Alexandra Kuvshinova, Anna, Alice, and Rose. And he confirms them, but he insists that when those relationships started, all of them were already graduates, over 16 years old. He denies ever having sex with Yegor and adds, 'I am not a homosexual'. He says Yegor had sex with Masha and confirms he saw them do it.
Nastya:Boris says that he doesn't find his behavior, sleeping with his former students, immoral. When I ask him how it was even possible to have sexual relationships with that many teens, he tells me they wanted it, and he couldn't refuse them. He said that having sex with adolescents wasn't something that he desired, but something he agreed to. He asks me why am I doing this after all this time, and I say that I find the topic of abusing power very interesting. And Boris tells me that he never abused his power and that it is I who has power over him and I am abusing it by asking him questions.
Nastya:I understand what the survivors meant when they told me about being manipulated by Boris. Several times in our conversation, Boris tells me how intelligent I am and what a pleasure it would be to speak to me if it only was about some other subject. He asks me when my investigation will be published so he knows when to buy rope. Finally, I say goodbye and walk to a bus stop. I felt like I'd been run over by a truck.
Nastya:On my way home, I recorded a voice note to my producers, Sam and Dasha. 'I also feel like I had a date with a dementer. I'm exhausted. My head hurts, and my everything hurts, but I think it was totally worth it'.
Nastya:I always wonder why men like Boris agree to talk to me. I came to two answers during our conversation. First, I think he likes the attention. And second, Boris wanted to try to control the narrative. He tried to present himself as a victim, a victim of new morals, a victim of political oppression, a victim of a journalist that wouldn't let his story go. I don't believe he is any of those things.
Nastya:I think back to Alexandra Kuvshinova, who had a relationship with Boris nearly 25 years ago. She told me she later tried to explain that what he was doing to teenagers was deeply wrong. He didn't understand it then, and it's clear to me that he doesn't understand it now. It is not my job to make Boris pay for his alleged sins, but I can make the world see that so much of this suffering could have been avoided. There were many chances to stop Boris Meerson, but adults who should have known better failed to stop him. So I can also send a message to abusers and people who enable them. What you do is wrong, and it will not be forgotten.
Nastya: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. This podcast has a website where you can find additional visual materials collected throughout our investigation and feedback contacts.
Nastya:The link is in the description box. The 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 provided by Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir from Michael Sfard Law Office, and Sergey Markov, managing partner of the law firm Markov and Madaminov. Thank you for listening.