Tales From Two Cities: Moscow
Pinkerton, James P.
TALES FROM TWO CITIES (II) MOSCOW by James P. Pinkerton an f you can't afford a plane ticket to IMoscow ($1,100 round trip), rent the movie Batman. You'll save about $1,097 and still see a gray...
...It is a city of broad shoulders—and broad faces, and broad bottoms...
...James P Pinkerton works in Washington, D.0 All it takes is a vacuum cleaner...
...Superficially, chess is passive and contemplative, not at all the medium of radicals and daredevils...
...Its 300,000 circulation could triple if it could get the newsprint...
...In Leningrad, amid the heroic statuary of the Champs de Mars, a guide told me that the site was dedicated to Alexander II, who had defeated Napoleon...
...A typical storefront at a dairy shows a cow...
...Maybe so they could grow up to be Gulag administrators for the Kansas City oblast after the final victory of the workers...
...No answer...
...The maids "clean" by squeegeeing dirt around, like a kid shuffling his food to convince Mom that he's eaten his Brussels sprouts...
...n my last day, I couldn't look at another green tomato or brown cold cut...
...A lot of them have learned English...
...I'm all for a strong defense—our troops should patrol the ramparts of freedom, not walk the runways of Seventh Avenue...
...And there's a non-Christian faith healer on daytime TV...
...If you walk the walk and talk the talk, eventually you'll begin to think the think...
...Or maybe, in the back of their minds, they knew their god would fail, and English would help them get jobs as door-openers for joint-venturing foreign investors...
...You can't just pick up the newspaper or turn on CNN...
...I walked in, turned left, down the steps, hung a right, and there he was: Lenin, forever in mortuary amber...
...I saw enough material for two hours of "60 Minutes": power outages, broken elevators, standing water, piles of rubble, crumbling walls...
...Such tactics seem calculated and familiar to Americans, but Soviet citizens are delighted by them...
...M y hotel had a full set of computers at the front desk, but they weren't used...
...A small example is the restaurant where we breakfasted three mornings in a row...
...In this bizarro society the clerks see you coming and walk the other way, on the antinomian paradigm that the customer is always wrong...
...And the capitalists had even thrown in meat...
...Not even a shower curtain or a stall—just a spigot...
...The first morning, the waitress handed us a check...
...it's that, suddenly inundated by the Information Age, they'll believe everything...
...E Kamarck, a fully liberated 1:, / Democratic activist from New York who would never be confused with a Stepford wife, made the profound observation that the USSR needs a woman's touch...
...You'll save about $1,097 and still see a gray city choking on pollution and corruption, where a few heroes fight for truth, justice, and, yes, the American Way...
...The system has also squandered a rich human inheritance...
...The luxury goods available to ordinary citizens come from...
...I never did see a true mop or sponge, and I mistook my bathroom towels for dishcloths...
...Most still orate...
...Bruce Springsteen could write songs about the hard ices in hard jobs, old before their time, who go to work in a silent rage and come home in a drunken stupor to beat their wives...
...As I waited in line amidst happy Soviets, it occurred to me that the old Bolshevik slogan—"Peace, Land, Bread"—was finally being realized...
...One button I bought pictured Brezhnev, with the caption "King of Stagnation...
...Although Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, and many others have established that the death tolls were comparable, we cannot judge barbarism with mere arithmetic...
...Something, perhaps, for overfed Americans to worry about, but Russians are more afraid of hunger than cholesterol...
...For 10 kopecks (about a penny), it's a guaranteed conversation-starter back home...
...Leonid was one of the lucky five percent who came back...
...Moscow is a time warp to the film-noir forties: before pollution laws, consumer appliances, and Technicolor...
...The party still controls TV news, but that won't do it any good, because Mike Deaver was right: the images flooding in from the wider and wider world shape opinion much more than words...
...Alexandra wants a new deal for the Russians, starting with changing the name of her city back to Petrograd, or even St...
...Robert Conquest writes: "All in all, these conditions reflected one main truth...
...Wait a minute .. . Wasn't it Alexander I? I asked meekly...
...A Russian woman told me she was most impressed on her trip to America by the cleanness of the carpets...
...In Pasternak's Dr...
...A Soviet battle standard was draped over one edge asymmetrically, as if the soldier had dropped the flag as he fell, and his reverent comrades had bronzed it in place for eternity...
...An old Soviet joke held that "Socialism is the road from capitalism to communism—but we didn't say anything about feeding you on the way...
...A modern variant says that "Socialism is the tortuous road from capitalism to capitalism...
...The system fails so completely to transport fresh fruit that it's profitable for farmers to fly 2,000 miles from Central Asia with an armload of cherries to hawk on a Leningrad street...
...This is gross enough—I won't record how I figured this out...
...My final observance of the Soviet creed took me to Lenin's tomb...
...As a typical zek working 12-hour shifts in the gold mines, Leonid wore rags in the 50-below winters and lived on bread...
...Zhivago, Major Dudorov, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, recalls " . . . attack after attack, mile after mile of electrified barbed wire, mines, mortars, month after month of artillery barrage...
...The stupid, brutal, literal bureaucrats who repressed writers, poets, and musicians never recognized the iconoclasm and intellectual entrepreneurship of chess...
...Leonid's daughter Alexandra recalls her late father saying that World War II, with all its carnage, was not nearly as horrendous for the Soviet people as the Stalinist Terror...
...I saw a couple of women in the scene, but this commemoration exudes testoster28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 one...
...Going to Moscow made me see that much of the brightness of Home Sweet Home comes from commercial advertising...
...Other shrines extol the dated proletarianism at the core of the Soviet ideology...
...Yet, under its nerdy surface, chess is dynamic—perpetual perestroika...
...They have no sense of the camera: how to look, where to look, what to do with their hands...
...If knowledge is power, the Russians are very weak...
...The media become visible hands...
...Flowers cascaded over the memorial, often left by newlyweds sharing their vows with the spirit of their heroic forefathers...
...She smiled and said nothing...
...In my hotel room I looked around and asked myself, "What's wrong with this picture...
...In fact, the closest analogue to Soviet society in America is the milltary...
...The third, they said we were not on the list to eat there...
...However forewarned one is about the long lines, shopping is a shock and a nightmare...
...Petersburg...
...Another depicted Stalin atop a mountain of skulls and read "King Joseph the Bloody...
...People don't merely refuse to believe what the Soviet establishment tells them, they assume the opposite is true: Russian Hell's Angels, sporting The South Will Rise Again belt buckles, are absolutely convinced that America was victorious in Vietnam...
...Other media are even freer: Moscow News is a lively rag—a cross between the Village Voice and Human Events —irreverent, and given to ad hominem attacks and exposés of Stalinist atrocities...
...Their long spiels are usually well organized and well argued, but they haven't figured out that electronic eloquence consists of snappy sound bites...
...Won't everything get wet...
...I turned to the KGB agents who were accompanying us in the back of the bus: Surely, if you flip through War and Peace...
...As I munched on my Big Mac, I thought about Phil Sokokif, the Nebraska businessman crusading against fast-food fat...
...Since the pipe infrastructure can't handle the volume of waste, Soviet sanitary engineers have developed a standby plan: they put a little can next to the potty for—ahem—used toilet paper...
...Nobody knows how much gold was produced at Kolyma, but an estimated three million people died there...
...The hottest rumor I heard was that Mary Jo Kopechne had been found, dry and alive, in East Germany...
...No tub...
...Only a minuscule percentage of the population has any decision-making power, and they're almost all men...
...I felt the information deprivation immediately, but as time passed the sensation ebbed, like hunger pangs in the starving...
...Leavenworth, the gastronomic pleasures of C-rations, and the unleashed creativity of Parris Island...
...In Moscow, the last stop on the history-ending Hegel Express is the McDonald-land Station...
...On a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Kremlin, I was moved by the words on the plinth: "Your name is unknown but your deeds are immortal...
...Russians are pathetically ignorant of their Judeo-Christian heritage: at the Hermitage the guide told us that Rembrandt's "Abraham's Sacrifice" depicts God telling Abraham to kill Isaac to demonstrate his belief in Jesus Christ...
...Strange that a monument to advanced scientific undertaking should have the appearance of a Depression-era WPA mural dedicated to coal miners...
...You could call it Gothamgrad...
...In the West, female purchasing power sets the tone for everyday life: fashion, household goods, interior design, and so on...
...Flushing such a minimalist device in America violates anti-dumping laws...
...Everyone drinks Pepsi, which is up to Soviet standards—and no higher...
...Alexandra's family of four shares three rooms, a kitchen and a toilet with a married couple and their infant...
...It's easy...
...The occult, ESP, and UFOs are as true to them as government grain production reports...
...Locked behind the Iron Curtain, they have become book-smart —with what books they could get...
...The Iranian earthquake that killed 50,000 barely registered, because I didn't see it on TV...
...In the twenties, Le Corbusier proposed razing Paris to build a "radiant city" of skyscrapers...
...T n 1937, Leonid Chekayev was arrested by the NKVD for opposing the destruction of a church in his hometown in the Urals and sent to Kolyma, an island of slave labor in the Gulag Archipelago near the Arctic Circle...
...Soviet society clanks along with the grace and sensitivity of a T-34 tank, grinding the feminine aesthetic under its macho tread...
...Generally, Soviet ergonomics recalls the glory days of carbon paper, pneumatic tubes, and steno pools...
...The monument to the Soviet space program is shaped like a ski jump pointing into the sun...
...Like everything else in Moscow, the building had seen better days: ornate high ceilings rust-colored from water damage, once-thick carpets ground thin by dirt...
...His ration left him short thousands of calories a week...
...Old Soviet leaders are having trouble with the new tricks...
...The guards kept the traffic moving, and the wait was shorter than I had expected—about an hour...
...Meanwhile, Soviet men have created a stern environment, with its own samurai intensity...
...I had to fly 10,000 miles to realize what an international disaster high-rise public housing has created...
...Men strain as they sweat and persevere, their muscles bulging under their overalls...
...His millenarian plan to improve people by destroying their neighborhoods was adopted by modernist bureaucrats on a grand scale in the Soyuz...
...If you are subject to motion sickness, don't look down into the toilet of a Soviet train—the sight of the railroad tracks underneath will undo you...
...Friezes show glorious workers, guided by the ghost of Lenin, assaulting the heavens...
...The smarter Soviet pols play by the new rules...
...The new interaction must surely shape the outlook of the leaders as well as the led...
...I didn't understand a word of the powerful Soviet documentary I watched about water pollution, but millions of Russians saw the same spewing pipes and dead birds juxtaposed with bureaucratic talking heads...
...Bulgaria...
...The country abounds with columns, arches, and temples dedicated to the pre-Information Age articles of Bolshevik faith: Agriculture, Heavy Industry, War, and Revolution...
...The second, we were told breakfast was complimentary...
...The forms of fidelity were omnipresent here, but it was hard to find the faithful...
...But imagine a whole country run like the Pentagon: the spontaneity of Ft...
...This is the vox populi, known today as feedback...
...Inevitably, apparatchikscultivate the press, get on the "right" side of the issues, and distance themselves from failure...
...Their "proof" that we won is that Pravda said we lost...
...Plumbing in buildings isn't much better...
...But any culture that writes—and more importantly, reads—thousand-page novels has a lot of raw intelligence...
...These "luxuries" are either pitiful or non-existent in the Soviet Union...
...They called our company the death squad . . . and yet . . . all that utter hell was nothing, it was bliss compared to the horrors of the concentration camp...
...This is not a society worried about subliminal seduction...
...I saw smiles and efficiency behind the counter—was this the New Soviet Man that Lenin dreamed of...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 29...
...The twisted result of the 70-year cognitive blockade is a nation of high IQs and no judgment...
...Glasnost permitted the Russian people to roll away the stone in front of Lenin's tomb...
...Yet the club had the glow of old genius and the spark of young prodigy...
...I saw items for sale that few Americans have seen since the rationing days of the Second World War—like a gizmo for repairing nylons...
...Moscow Monthly profiles Gorbachev's advisers, with a picture and bio for each...
...No shower or bath: they use a public facility two blocks away...
...In the minds of its creators and organizers the conscious purpose of Kolyma, which had originally been the production of gold, with death as an unplanned byproduct, had become the production, with at least equal priority, of gold and death...
...Perhaps Gary Kasparov, that media-savvy mix of Byron and Einstein, will popularize this silent sport and remind the world of the vast potential of a free Rus...
...They are giving up their chauffeurs, donating money to buy syringes for AIDS-ravaged hospitals, and going on live TV to take phone calls from viewers...
...They discovered that the savior had not risen, that he was still there, physically intact but very much dead...
...The psychic sanctuary of the sixty-four squares sheltered Russian grandmasters, enabling them to dominate world chess even in the darkest years of Stalinism...
...Not to worry: there's a drain in the middle of the floor...
...From the air, the miles and miles of brutalitarian monoliths arrayed in geometric patterns look pretty, like topiary...
...How do you get the truth in the Soyuz...
...The total absence of convenience and style in the state economy derives from the lack of a market...
...Russian literature provides another gauge...
...I went to McDonald's...
...The crisis of the Soviet spirit is not that they don't believe in anything...
...The Soviets view carbonation the way Birchers view fluoridation: as a dangerous foreign enemy...
...On Gogolevsky Boulevard, I made a pilgrimage to the Central Chess Club, which is to chess what Ebbets Field was to baseball...
...Foreign in-vasion was preferable to what Pasternak/Dudorov called "the inhuman reign of the lie...
...raincoats are signified by a cloud, televisions by bunny ears, etc...
...Anyone wondering why Russians still excel at chess when Soviet power has so successfully stifled most forms of intellectual achievement will find the answer within...
...The best buy, though, is a red-star lapel pin circling a tiny Gerberesque daguerreotype of Lenin as a baby...
...Soviet shopkeepers, who don't care if they actually sell anything, settle for monochrome, with an occasional dash of sepia...
...The Soviets are only slowly discovering that men can't think both for themselves and for women...
...I should know: I saw the movie and took the trip...
...Up close they are as intimidating and demoralizing as they are decrepit...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
