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Mark Gondelman is a former teacher at Sambation, a summer camp for high-achieving students in Russia. He’s also been accused of sexually abusing children. Nastya confronts him at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he works as a research assistant.
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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
Before we begin, this podcast contains descriptions of violence and mentions of sexual and emotional abuse. Please take care while listening. It's 6:40, 6:56 AM, and I'm walking to the university where the conference will be held, where Mark Gondelman is having a speech tonight. It's July of 2023, and I've been trying to talk to Mark Gondelmnn for 4 months. He hasn't responded to any of my calls, texts, or emails, so I've come to Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany to find him.
Nastya:Mark is a research assistant here in the Department of Jewish Studies. He's also an alleged sex offender. He's been accused of having sexual relationships with 2 underage girls and getting away with it. I've decided that if he doesn't wanna talk to me, I'll try and reach him myself. When I first arrived in Frankfurt, I got lucky.
Nastya:I saw a poster for an upcoming сonference on campus. Mark was listed as one of the speakers. That was a couple of weeks ago. Now, I've returned early on the morning of the event and staked out the building. After 8 hours of waiting, I see him. My heart feels like it's going to jump out of my chest.
Nastya:Conference visitors have stepped outside for a break, and Mark is chatting with a colleague. As he sees me approach, his face goes long and pale.
Nastya:Sorry. Hi.
Mark:Hi.
Nastya:You know who I am, I think.
Mark:Yes. But I'm not going to talk to you.
Nastya:Why not? Why not? Come on.
Nastya:I say to him, I think you know who I am. Yes, he says, but I'm not going to talk to you. Then he turns, ducks behind a security guard, and runs back into the building. I can see him through the glass doors. He's running up the stairs, looking back at me over his shoulder.
Nastya:I am not allowed inside because I was declined media accreditation to attend the conference.
Revekka:Yeah. I'm just about to ask him if...No I don't. I'm a journalist and I'm hunting down a guy...
Nastya:My name is Nastya Krasilnikova. I'm a journalist and a feminist, originally from Russia. In March of 2022, after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, I took my family and 3 suitcases, and I left my country. I was one of many Russian journalists who couldn't stay silent about the war. Now I live in Israel.
Nastya:From Libo Libo, you're listening to The Adults in the Room. This is Episode 1: A Fortress Besieged. The story I'll tell in this podcast, it also starts in Russia, and then it goes to Israel, to America, to Germany, and to Denmark. This is a story of crime, but not of punishment. This is a story of violence, betrayal, and impunity, but of courage too.
Nastya:So how did I end up in Frankfurt? Well, I don't know how much you know about Russia, that huge cold country with an authoritarian president who started a war for his imperial ambitions. But let me tell you something about women's rights in that country. Domestic abuse and femicide are rampant, but Russian authorities again and again have shown that women’s lives mean nothing to them. Here’s an example. In November of 2016 Yana Savchuk, a 36 year old hairdresser from the city of Oryol, called the police saying her ex partner Andrey Bachkov was being aggressive towards her. The policewoman refused to protect Yana.
Nastya:The officer told her, if he kills you, we'll come and investigate. Don't you worry. Half an hour later, Yana's partner had beaten her to death. That's about when I started covering violence against women. I quickly understood the importance of investigating those crimes.
Nastya:In October of 2022, I hosted a podcast for Libo Libo studio called School Girls. It was an investigation of a summer school for talented Russian children in the sciences. Their teachers allegedly engaged underage boys and girls in sexual relationships. The investigation became a sensation for its Russian speaking audience. It felt like a sewer burst.
Nastya:Many people responsible for the safety of those kids knew teachers were seducing minors, and they did nothing to protect the kids. A year and a half has passed since the investigation was launched. None of the alleged perpetrators have faced justice. Police never investigated, and prosecutors never laid a charge. After the podcast came out, dozens of people from all over the country who had survived similar kinds of violence when they were children reached out to me to tell their stories.
Nastya:Several were associated with one school, a prestigious elementary and high school in Moscow that's produced some of Russia's most celebrated mathematicians, scientists, and writers. That school, along with the community that surrounds it, is the focus of this podcast. It's a telling case of how a culture of free thinking, dignity, and excellence can be weaponized against the very people it's meant to foster and protect. The first former student I heard from was Revekka Gershovich.
Revekka:My name is Revekka, Revekka Gershovich. And right now, I live in Boston. I'm planning to do research career in economics.
Nastya:And how old are you?
Revekka:I am 25.
Nastya:Revekka was born and raised in Moscow in a Jewish family. Her mom is a cardiologist, and her dad was a head of an energy consulting company.
Revekka:Like, my mom had me when she was, like, in her forties and my dad was in his fifties. Yeah. I mean, they're, you know, just like you would expect. They're neurotic, smart, funny. They really love me.
Revekka:I was their late child, and they still really love me.
Nastya:I'm asking Revekka what she was like when she was a kid. And the word she's using to describe herself is nerdy.
Revekka:When I was 12, for instance, I found Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's books. And I ended up reading a lot of Nietzsche's books because I found that book, and then also Gilles Deleuze's commentaries on it. And I was just obsessed and people were like, you are so weird. Why would you do that at 12? Like, you're supposed to be interested in all sorts of things, but not that.
Nastya:Revekka's family was part of Moscow's intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are Russia's liberal elite. They're writers, poets, teachers, doctors, and scientists. They are well educated and well informed on politics, culture, and the arts. Many of them are Jewish.
Nastya:They were oppressed under the Soviet regime, which never much liked being questioned by this smart and open minded class. And back then, the anti semitism was obvious. Jews had a hard time enrolling in university or finding a decent career. So when the USSR collapsed, there was hope that everyone would be treated equally. But for families like Revekka's, little has changed under this new Russian regime.
Revekka:In my 6th grade, for instance, I left the school that I was in because my mom discovered that my history teacher was falsifying my grades and it wasn't that difficult to understand why because she was kind of obviously anti semitic and Stalin loving. And I had to leave and I had, like, my classmates telling me, oh, you're a kike. How are you tolerating yourself? You know, that sort of stuff, in a very innocent manner as children do, but evidently their parents told them a bunch of things about that.
Nastya:Revekka left that school for another one where things got better. Her confidence grew. She wasn't somehow deficient, like her anti semitic teachers and classmates had led her to believe. Then, Revekka's mother heard about another school where smart kids like her could flourish. School 57 was a unique school in the heart of Moscow.
Nastya:It was, and still is, considered one of the best in Russia. Its students ace state exams, and they excel in the Olympiads, which are competitions for gifted kids in Russia. It now has almost 2,000 students across its elementary, middle, and high schools. In addition to the entrance exams, teachers there actually interview prospective high schoolers. Many of School 57's students were from Jewish intelligentsia families.
Nastya:Alumni have gone on to great international success. Maybe you've heard of some, like the New Yorker journalist, Masha Gessen, or notable economists, Ruben Enikolopov and Konstantin Sonin.
Konstantin:I'm Konstantin Sonin. I am a professor at the University of Chicago. For many years, I was a professor at the New Economics School in Moscow, then a professor at High School of Economics in Moscow. Before that, I graduated School 57 in 1989, and some of my kids also graduated School 57.
Nastya:I asked Konstantin about his experience as a student of the school.
Konstantin:It was the late Soviet years, so it was a kind of a tumultuous time. It was the time when School 57 was basically a fortress besieged. So, basically, most of the kids in our class were selected for their mathematical talent, they were somehow isolated or bullied in their previous classes. So now in School 57, we found ourselves kind of at home, and everything was different from our previous schools. It was the time when the Soviet government was still trying to destroy mathematical schools in part because there were too much Jewish kids or kids having some Jewish connections.
Konstantin:For example, I'm a quarter Jewish, but in the Soviet authorities accounting, I'm a Jew. So they tried to close our school in 1988. So I remember the doors of the school literally closed, but it was already perestroika years. So there were some public protests. Some famous academics said that the school should keep operating.
Konstantin:But, basically, this feeling of a fortress besieged and mathematics being both an escape and pleasure these were my main feelings.
Nastya:School 57 is a tight knit community. Many of its teachers are themselves former students there. Graduates would often grow up, marry other graduates, and send their kids to the school.
Konstantin:For example, my wife was a student, and we were married. Not at that time, but later, but this is a kind of a standard story.
Nastya:Konstantin sent his children to School 57. Here is Maxim Sonin, Konstantin's son, who graduated in 2015.
Maxim:So there were exams that you needed to pass. Those exams, at the courses, sort of the evening classes you took to pass those exams. My experience was much easier. I didn't go to any of the evening classes. I went to maybe 2 of the exams, and and I got in because I have I have this very privileged status in the school. And I think that's sort of impossible to overstate how much of a privilege it is to end up in the school.
Nastya:School 57 has grown beyond its reputation for mathematics and into the sciences, history, and literature. Yegor Osipov-Gipsh, another former student, enrolled in 2009 when he was 14 as part of a humanities cohort.
Yegor:There is this almost a folklore, right, that, the school was different. It was. The school was different in a sense that there was a sense of entitlement to something more, than among the rest of the society. Right? It was a school, one of the best schools in the country, but also pretty much the school to which large chunks of Russia's intelligentsia went themselves and sent their children to.
Yegor:And that certainly was palpable when you were inside. Knowledge was a status thing. Right? You were supposed to study well because not in order to get into a good university and not in order to study because study in itself was of value, but to obtain knowledge. Right?
Yegor:And having a lot of knowledge was something that was valued.
Nastya:Yegor remembers, history curriculum that went well beyond what he might have expected at a normal school.
Yegor:It's probably some boring superficial stuff about Russian, I don't know, 18th century maybe, narrated in extremely patriotic way. We, instead of that, had 4 or 5 hours of history per week. And we started with ancient Greece as detailed as you can do that when you're 14, I think. We also had ancient Greek and Latin.
Yegor:No one studied those, to be clear, so we couldn't really use that for our history classes. But we did read the the sources in translation. We analysed, the structures of of societies in ancient Greece and ancient Rome on pretty complex level for high school children. So, yes, that was very challenging, of course.
Nastya:Here is Rose, another School 57 graduate. She asked us not to use her real name. She told me about her first day in school.
Rose:The 1st September, everyone comes with the flowers and all kinds of things like this. And our teacher, our history teacher told us School number 57 is the intellectual elite of Moscow and Moscow is the intellectual elite of Russia. And that's what he told us on the 1st day we come.
Nastya:How did it feel?
Rose:Kind of funny.
Rose:Like, you know, you're at 14 years old. You're just a random kid. You don't feel like an intellectual elite of anything. But bit by bit, I think we started to believe that was actually true. I don't like the hierarchical element, but we definitely were a bunch of smart kids there.
Rose:What we were also is, are very, like, socially inept. And often the types of kids that are not actually well, maybe loved in their own way but not actually understood by their parents. And that's why I think the feeling that you are somehow better than everyone else it kinda settled into a lot of us. And this was, you know, one of the ways that we made our lives in the world work. Like, yes, you might be not understood by your parents, all of your classmates thinks you are, like, a weird nerd and idiot, but you are the intellectual elite.
Rose:And, the academic work also helped.
Nastya:School 57 was certainly different from other schools in Moscow. I studied in a regular school, and we never had Latin or 5 hours of history per week. We also had only one school trip in high school. It was a 3 day visit to Saint Petersburg in winter. I remember being cold and bored from all the museums we had to visit.
Nastya:Compare that with School 57. They would study ancient Greece by going to Greece. They took regular trips to Crimea to take part in archaeological excavations. Here is Maxim Sonin again.
Maxim:Our class traveled to Greece and to Italy and to Turkey. Those are all trips that people would not have had access to outside of the school. They would have not had access to a system, which my school employed at least at the time very aggressively, where if one student can't go because of money, no one's going, which meant that the students who were poorer got sort of an experience of a lifetime being able to travel to all these places that they would have not been able to go to before, because they ended up in a school with very rich kids, and at the same time, kids whose parents wanted everyone to travel. And so once you got in, you felt very lucky. I think I know people in my class who still, even after, like, learning about all the abuse or even experiencing abuse themselves, they still feel like "Baby it was worth it".
Nastya:Was it worth it? Revekka Gershovich passed the entrance exams for School 57 in 2012, when she was 14 years old. Revekka was not sure if she was willing to change schools. But the summer before enrolling in School 57, she went to Sambation, a community and a summer camp for talented Jewish children. Sambation was not connected to School 57 directly, but many people from intelligentsia circles were familiar with both places.
Revekka:And I would not really distinguish between Sambation circles and 57 School circles all that much, especially in terms of morality. Like, a lot of people who were in Sambation were from 57 School, like, either graduates or even, you know, people who maintain a lot of connection. And, the morality was kind of similar.
Nastya:Sambation is where Revekka met Mark Gondelman, the man I was chasing at the beginning of this episode.
Revekka:He was a teacher. At that point, he was doing his masters in the Jerusalem University in Jewish thought and in philosophy. And he was specializing, as I learned later on, in, like, all those Jewish mystics and stuff. And he would, read lectures about that.
Nastya:Mark was never a student or a teacher of School 57, but he had many friends who were. That summer at Sambation, Mark was 26 years old.
Revekka:I definitely thought that he was pretty at some point. I also thought that he looked like Jesus, but maybe that's because he kept telling everybody that he was like Jesus.
Nastya:Okay. So the guy was telling people around that he was like Jesus?
Revekka:Yeah. Kind of as a joke. I even have a picture of him somewhere on my phone, that I saved, like, a long time ago where he had the sun was shining behind him so that he kind of had a halo around his head, and he was, like, holding a book. And he really looked like Jesus in that picture. And I think it was like one of his favorite pictures or something.
Revekka:A lot of people were calling Mark Gondelman instead of his last name Gondelman. They would call him GondelFUCK. So he had some sort of reputation and people kept telling me that, oh, I am definitely his type. He's going to be interested in me.
Nastya:So that is what brought me to Frankfurt. Revekka's story of being molested by Mark Gondelman. Over the course of my investigation, Rebecca would be one of many students from School 57 and Sambation Communities to talk to me. And they weren't making allegations against 1 adult, but several. All of these adults had something to do with educating minors in this very special circle of the Russian intelligentsia.
Nastya:For years, the stories of these students were silenced. And then one part of their alleged abuse was exposed in a very public scandal. Some of the survivors told me that this scandal was as traumatic as the abuse itself. But justice was never done. That's why the survivors came to me, hoping that a thorough investigation by a journalist could be a way of holding their alleged perpetrators accountable.
Nastya:They live outside Russia now, and so do the alleged abusers. They asked me to undertake this investigation in English so it could reach the countries where the alleged abusers live and work now. More on the next episode.
Sara:He had a great habit of taking naked pictures of women that he had slept with. I was one of them. He was talking about how he really wants to have sex with me. He also was talking about how he really wants to take my virginity.
Yegor:He put her on her forts in front of me and began fucking her from behind. It was very scary.
Revekka:I felt completely helpless and I was just physically shaking the whole night.
Sara:He made me promise me that I'd never leave, which is fucking crazy.
Sara:Like, how do you say that to a child? What are you doing? What are you doing with your life? What are you doing with yourself? What is wrong with you?
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. The link is in the description box. This show is hosted, reported, and written by me, Nastya Krasilnikova.
Nastya: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.