The Writing on the Wall: Sketchbook of a Soviet Journey
Lourie, Richard
What strikes you first, and shocks you, is that no one knows how to work. In the land of the workers, people are at best semiliterate in labor. They work reluctantly, irritably, listlessly....
...American newspapers do not publish long articles based on current events that also take a broader and more engage point of view...
...It is the Russian people who have paid the heaviest cost in suffering...
...But the question still remains: Why are women falling on the sidewalks in the capital of a superpower that is contemplating a mission to Mars...
...Would you like to read some of their literature...
...It is a simple enough sentence, though it does tend to boggle the American mind...
...We enter a Vilnius courtyard through an arch that makes you duck your head instinctively...
...exclaims the poet Oleg Chukhontsev pacing his old Moscow apartment in a dressing gown that has a nineteenth-century air to it (the mantle of Russian literature...
...Four slats in a small, gray steel box, a flophouse mattress, sheets clean but old and tired, the bathroom another gray steel box that reeked of carbolic acid...
...His favorite piece of recent publitsistika was an article called "Whose Pies Are Tastier...
...This allows me to compare bathroom sinks...
...People drift in and out of each other's meals...
...He swears he dreamed it, but when I tell it to other people they say it's a well-known story...
...Or, more to the point, why are they even cracked at all...
...In search of it I go to the Sunday market that surrounds the Ryzhsky Metro station in front of which is a heroic statue of a young man holding up a satellite to the sky...
...Pamyat is discussed often and considered dangerous, not so much in and of itself but because, though extreme, it is not isolated...
...All I do is read newspapers...
...Why are they both cracked in the same place...
...For the English-reader the kiosks still offer only Canadian communist tabloids...
...The boy in the middle has a pear, and he's sharing it freely with his two friends...
...The danger is, of course, that it can go to your head...
...You get about two pears a pound...
...Pears cost eight rubles a pound...
...We've gone from a Pharonic society to the Middle Ages all in one leap...
...But where, oh where is perestroika...
...And Kosharovsky is also disturbed by the rise of anti-Semitism in the USSR, particularly by the fringe group known as the patriotic association, Pamyat ("Memory...
...This, he knows, is perfectly doable— in principle, as the Russians are extremely fond of saying...
...I remark that Stalin isn't the problem, but Lenin...
...The sounds of American rock are in the air: cassettes are a hot item, almost a means of exchange...
...But people are tired of waiting...
...Soviet newspapers may be exciting but the situation with foreign newspapers is still abominable...
...They are laughing and talking madly, stopping only to take a good munch of the pear...
...SUMMER • 1988 • 281 The line at the first store proves too Longwell over an hour...
...Some resort to fundamentalism...
...I smile at them, no longer in Russia but in the eternity of childhood...
...Its derangements are only magnifications of what the Russian psyche has undergone in its terrible twentieth century...
...Stalinesque in its grandiosity, dreary as Queens, the Hotel Kosmos is a madhouse that brings to mind Henry Miller's Cosmodemonic Telegraph Agency...
...The young couple's life is centered entirely on the family and the Russian Orthodox Church...
...Under Stalin, the sidewalks were shoveled," sighs a Moscow poet with mock nostalgia...
...The airport official overseeing the arrival of foreign tourists is a man of the Gorbachev era...
...Russia still has its secret sweetnesses...
...You must see this," said the Lithuanian historian, taking my elbow in a pincer grip...
...He opens the cover and flutters the pages, which are all loose...
...Glasnost hasn't come to Lithuania yet, not to mention perestroika...
...Only the press can keep pace with the change: Bukharin rehabilitated...
...Under Stalin credit cards would have been compulsory...
...Too bad Marx didn't write anything on the transition from socialism to capitalism," I say...
...The newspapers are the opposition that has broken, as always, into various factions...
...Distribution is a giant, shifting, mysterious force spilling out random jackpots of beer or sausage...
...Her deepest wish is that the USSR have open borders, and she toasts that wish with tragic sincerity...
...No, it isn't...
...But what does it really mean...
...They felt compelled to tell me fairly soon in the conversation that Vilnius had been the site of a particularly "barbaric" act...
...There is blood in the air, just a tinge, but a sufficient reminder of the usual cost of open conflict here...
...Working with modern calculators instead of the still prevalent abacuses, the young women at the currency exchange have made an error and the transaction must be repeated...
...But can the contradictions between political power and economic growth, empire and democracy, be resolved...
...Staunchly Catholic, the Lithuanians also take pride in having been the last nation to accept Christianity, the last pagans in Europe, whose many gods are depicted in a new mosaic at the university...
...The operative word now is samookupaemost, meaning the ability to cover expenses with revenues...
...A single act, a double desecration...
...According to Pamyat, the Russians are tired of waiting too...
...For us, work has always been . . ." he looks away in search of the right word, "a punishment...
...Or did the story in fact originate in his dream and then spread as a joke...
...As one Russian remarked with a combination of utter seriousness and utter sarcasm: "But look, it's tremendous progress...
...The whole country is trying to learn to do business, be businesslike...
...That's possible in Russia, where, as Berdayev said, consciousness and unconsciousness have a different relationship than they do in the West...
...No one can understand how it all happened...
...They seem perfectly sane when they take an unequivocal stand in favor of open borders...
...In Gorbachev she sees her dream of open borders...
...By that definition, nearly all of Soviet society is engaged in one or both of the two worst things in the world...
...To put it in plain English, the USSR is trying to learn how to at least break even...
...The subject turns from crime to work and I ask why he thinks Russians work so poorly...
...A luxury hotel with cracked sinks...
...With a look of genuine bafflement on her face, a woman in her sixties says, raising her glass: "I want to drink a toast to Mikhail Sergeyevich's health...
...So the reality must be that the Soviet Union is a country where the average worker's son simply does not eat a pear...
...The director asks the visitor, "How long do you think we'll be behind you...
...which did everything but advocate capitalism...
...The wait there looks like less than an hour, the best you can hope for...
...It's the light-blue issue of Novy Mir that contains Joseph Brodsky's poems...
...shouts one woman and everyone laughs heartily...
...She has two daughters who both live abroad...
...treasure trove of diamonds and gold uncovered as Uzbekistan party officials are indicted for running criminal empire...
...Now the snow and black trees racing by the window seemed to be making a sort of visual music, of Russia and railroads and winter...
...This is a point they prove by quoting Dostoevsky and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...But he is worried that the refuseniks have become a "forgotten people," an issue that the West found as disposable as a razor or cigarette lighter...
...The workers breaking up the ice with long steel poles seem to be waiting for spring to do their job for them...
...That is the fear, but in the early spring of 1988, the balance was tipped toward hopeful expectation...
...Nobody expects the current Dark Ages to be over soon...
...Human hangers, a one-person, one-item store...
...Neither the historian nor I could read the Hebrew letters edged in black, which only made their dying sigh more audible...
...Some of the market is enclosed but most of it takes place outdoors on a series of treacherously icy slopes except where the snow and ice have melted into leg-breaker puddles...
...Able, dynamic, in his early forties, he simply wants life to be better, to live in a "normal" society...
...Things always come slowly to Lithuania...
...They wear their little school cases on their backs, European style...
...Finally, after hours and hours, I get to the last question: In what activities did you engage during the period of so-called perestroika...
...The country is collapsing, but the intelligentsia are excited, high on glasnost champagne...
...The Lithuanian intellectuals with whom I met were the best of the breed—courtly, long-haired, warmhearted, fiercely pure...
...Stepping carefully, I walk behind three school chums, nine-year-old boys...
...The Sunday, March 6 issue contained an interview with Mikhail Misko, head of the Inturkart firm in Moscow, which is working with VISA to introduce credit cards into the USSR...
...The newspapers haven't changed...
...It was too much...
...On the other hand, Moscow News, published in English and other foreign languages and once the dreariest of sheets, has become so much a part of Moscow's vibrant intellectual life that there is now even a Russian edition...
...The writing is probably already on the wall, but no one can read it, any more than I could read the last Hebrew letters on that courtyard wall in Vilnius...
...The official winces at every instance of bumbling and inefficiency, which is to say he winces rather often...
...SUMMER • 1988 • 279 Moscow's sidewalks are impacted with treacherous black ice...
...I am reminded of Poland in November 1981, in what turned out to be the twilight of Solidarity...
...Like everything else here, it will have to be decoded, tested...
...We go back into the kitchen, where pots are boiling, children are crying, and the KGB man is replacing a container of yogurt in his refrigerator...
...They seem embarrassed, even shamed by what they are doing...
...His stance is that of defiant optimism, that being, in his opinion, the most difficult and exhilarating challenge of all...
...Startlingly, a few days later a resolution is passed by the Supreme Soviet seeming to make travel a routine affair...
...You read Sovetskaya Rossiya to see what the rightists are thinking...
...Yuli Kosharovsky has also been waiting...
...That's how it works here...
...Both are navy blue, and both are cracked in exactly the same place...
...Suddenly I come across a line of a dozen Russian grandmothers, country women, most of them hefty, all of them bundled up and looking incredibly sad...
...All the stones of various colors are solely from Lithuanian fields...
...The personnel manager says, "Before I couldn't say this to you...
...The typical crime is a break-in, but when the addicts are desperate, they put in emergency hospital calls and rob the ambulance of its drugs the minute it arrives...
...If this is the top, how deep the bottom must be...
...To Marx...
...This book was sent to me a page at a time, enclosed in letters...
...There are four refrigerators in the kitchen, two stoves, two tables...
...There will be more than one type of card, depending on the currency of credit, ruble or hard...
...It's an age of publitsistika," says Chukhontsev, using one of those Russian words that are untranslatable simply because they refer to something we don't do...
...Vast, mighty, unwieldy, Soviet society has gone hurtling from the stability of stagnation into the unknown...
...They must wait...
...The two toasts are of course connected...
...Or is this the school of the marketplace, a kindergarten of commerce...
...He says: "I dreamed I was going somewhere and had to fill out an endless form...
...In Vilnius, a professor at the university says with the pride of a connoisseur: "I know two places that might have beer today...
...Now he can stop wincing...
...I can tell by the Polish written above the Hebrew that this had once been a sign for an ordinary shop where things were made and sold...
...His wife had recently slipped on the ice and fallen, badly bruising her hip...
...Once again, for a second I suffered a sort of sociological vertigo, sensing the distance a Soviet citizen could fall...
...He tells me that most crime is committed by narcotics addicts, and, with a mixture of sadness and shame, he reports that pickpocketing is rare—"It's an art, it requires talent, discipline, training...
...Glasnost is easy to find...
...And this was said by a woman who had recently been refused membership in the Writers' Union, one of a group of eight or ten that proved nearly entirely Jewish...
...But now we have glasnost and I can openly tell you that I'm not hiring you because you're a Jew...
...Because of certain minor foulups, I have to change rooms after the first night...
...As a relic from another age, a symbol of devotion to what is best, and a warning that what had often been the case could well be the case again...
...They are doing it because it is the order of the day and everyone should pitch in, and also of course because a few sorely needed rubles can be made...
...Democratization has to move from the center out, from the top down...
...Once known as the Jerusalem of the North, Vilnius is no longer the city it once was—a high-minded tranquil backwater, a multi-ethnic city where a certain benign indifference created harmony among various peoples who did not live so much together as side by side...
...With his shock of gray-brown hair, his gray-brown goatee, and sharp eyes behind pince-nez-like glasses, Kosharovsky looks every inch the Russian intellectual, a strict violin teacher, a professor of chemistry...
...In 1961, the Jewish cemetery was dug up and some of the gravestones had been used as building materials...
...Then the man in charge of our car makes tea from a samovar heated by coal that gives off a rosy, old-fashioned glow...
...The tea is strong, bracing...
...The level of public discussion has reached near "normal" limits, there is an air of intellectual freedom...
...Never...
...In 1946, Stalin exiled the entire nation of the Crimean Tartars, infants to aged, and they have been longing to return home for more than forty years...
...A man is applying for a job...
...he says in a half whisper...
...Russians are masochists," sighs the wife, then adds with a defiantly gleaming smile: "Sadomasochists...
...There isn't much SUMMER • 1988 • 283 buying going on...
...For that reason, he has begun to contemplate steps even more extreme than a hunger strike...
...And this does bring him a modicum of satisfaction, which lasts until the next snag arises...
...The money will have to be rereexchanged...
...And perhaps that is why our silence is more genuinely reverential than it had been in front of Vilnius's sole surviving temple...
...There is nothing more beautiful to see than people enjoying newly won freedom...
...Six or seven a day...
...that they reveal their fundamental derangement...
...I keep it that way...
...Those who write for Pamyat seem perfectly sane when they discuss ecological problems or their success in preserving old churches, thereby winning the grudging respect of some intellectuals and the open admiration of others, like the "village" writer Valentin Rasputin...
...A man receiving an average salary must therefore work half a day so that his son may eat a pear...
...Perfect concentration is required to navigate them...
...The tea is served in glasses, in holders ornate as the Russian alphabet...
...But the sidewalks were shoveled under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, so the reference to Stalin is meant to have symbolic rather than factual meaning...
...The other tenants include a man who apparently works for the KGB, which is headquartered just a few blocks away, a simple old country woman, and another entire family living in a single room...
...The first time the addict and the artist saw each other there, they looked into each other's eyes and came to a tacit agreement: Don't bother me and I won't bother you...
...Gorbachev has raised their expectations and roused their impatience all at the same time...
...The husband, tall, bearded, sardonic, also has a passion for Russian crime...
...the crisis is past...
...Informed that he has made the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest refusenikseventeen years—Kosharovsky smiles with an irony whose finest subtleties he alone can appreciate...
...Three hours later there is a hysterical phone call to the Hotel Kosmosboth calculations were wrong because they were for some reason figured in pounds and not dollars...
...Something about the happy chubbiness of the boy with the pear makes me think his father is doing better than average...
...Maybe...
...Theirs is a Dostoevskian life of searching for God, ragged poverty, and passion...
...Blood has already been shed in Azerbaijan...
...Look," he says, pointing to the gold-brown Hebrew letters edged in black...
...284 • DISSENT...
...We zoom to the second in a Zhiguli, a stripped-down Soviet Fiat...
...it is Russian culture whose monuments have suffered the worst desecra282 • DISSENT tion...
...Deluded...
...I'm being ruined as a writer...
...Is Gorbachev trying to save the Soviet economy with rummage sales...
...You decide if you want to use one or not...
...In Vilnius, the capital of Soviet Lithuania, the local intelligentsia nibble on matzoh while pining for the Jews...
...A story making the rounds...
...His little son brings him bottle after bottle of Borzhomi, a cloudy Georgian mineral water...
...He laughs, then pauses on the bridge over the Neva to point out the cathedral marking the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by bomb-throwing terrorists...
...Misko concludes the interview by saying: "One other thing, we wouldn't want Muscovites to get the idea that the introduction of credit cards is compulsory...
...The average salary is a ruble an hour...
...The USSR today is a crisis on the move...
...Some had gone into the monuments to Lithuania's national heroes constructed after the war as a gesture to local pride...
...Not us, not our generation," says a twenty-year-old university student who is majoring in Lithuanian language and literature...
...If the answer is to throw out the socialist economy created by the revolution, that means throwing out the revolution and Lenin...
...The hope was that the Soviet Union was in the process of becoming a relatively normal society, one with the normal unhappiness of life for which Nadezhda Mandelstam yearned during the madness of the 1930s...
...Each one holds a dress or lace work for sale...
...says a Moscow writer referring to the clamorous demands being made by the USSR's various ethnic groups...
...Out on the back staircase for a smoke, he shows me where a dangerous narcotic addict sometimes sleeps, on the landing in front of an internationally known artist's studio (who is, in fact, away at the moment, in Vienna...
...the Russians are just practicing shopping, a remedial course in the market...
...A story making the rounds of Moscow: A Japanese technician inspects a Soviet facility...
...The Kosmos Hotel is billed as Moscow's finest, and the fact that it was foreign-designed is flaunted with something of a perverse pride...
...Art, crime, and God-seeking all on one cracked and crumbling Moscow staircase, the "black way" as the Russians say...
...It is only when they analyze the root cause of Russian suffering and ask, Who is the enemy...
...A young couple lives in a communal apartment in Moscow, two rooms for them and their three children...
...The Lithuanian strategy is to preserve what is essentially Lithuanian, as monks protected what was essentially Christian in the Dark Ages...
...Was he lying...
...The intelligentsia enjoy seeing their lives played out against an operatic background of Russian history and in two weeks' time I heard more than one reference to the Mongol invasion of 1240...
...The cause of all Russia's woes, past and present, is an international conspiracy of Zionists and Masons...
...some return to the fundamentals...
...The visitor looks around and answers, "Forever...
...Gorbachev is truly liked and respected by the intelligentsia, who always refer to him warmly as "Mikhail Sergeyevich...
...My host rises to retrieve something from the other room...
...Discussing glasnost with a Leningrad intellectual, I adjust my pace to his, slow, with frequent turns and full stops to make important points...
...Grandmother's favorite reading, year of her birth, social background, where buried, cause of death, on and on...
...Once again, the mysteries of distribution—the longest refusenik hands me a stack of pathologically anti-Semitic articles...
...it is the Russian land that has been blighted with the worst pollution...
...It is Marx who has to be thrown out...
...It is no secret that at a certain point ethnic tensions boil over into bloodshed...
...The thought occurs to me again while traveling from Vilnius to Leningrad on a first-class sleeper...
...The newspapers have become a parliament 280 • DISSENT of opinion...
...Aside from the temple, this is the last written trace of the Jews on the walls of the city...
...There's a Russian saying that goes: The two worst things in the world are waiting and trying to catch up...
...It is that very issue that is used to whack a Borzoi after the dog has grabbed meat from the table: "You want glasnost in your face...
...Maybe the next one...
...No," he says, "I would go even further back...
...And, you know, I have never drunk a toast before to any Soviet leader...
...Forms must be filled out again, resigned, restamped, refiled...
...The beer is drunk later that evening at a table where the conversation is boisterous, rueful, witty...
...The newspapers are the splashes of glasnost on the surface of daily life, the wave that might yet grow into a tsunami of history...
...He speaks softly because he is in the eleventh day of a hunger strike and must conserve his energy...
...Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow is the gateway not only to the mystery of Russia but to the enigma of the Soviet economy as well...
...Touched by his sincerity, I try to reassure him that, for sheer chaos, Moscow's airport can't hold a candle to Rome's...
...Then, unbidden, certain statistics come to mind...
...It is a copy of Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography, Native Realm, the Polish edition published in Paris...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
