Correspondents' Correspondence The Other Russians
HOPKINS, MARK
Correspondents, Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAUNTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The Other Russians Moscow—Volodya and Anna, both in...
...The Other Russians Moscow—Volodya and Anna, both in their late 30s, both university graduates who read Hemingway as well as Tolstoy and know what the London Times has to say along with Pravda, have just moved from their tiny apartment in a housing development on Moscow's outskirts...
...It's nonsense, he argued, to think as outsiders do that the KGB is watching each of the USSR's 260 million citizens and everyone else who enters the country...
...Anna, sympathizing with her husband's tiredness, added with a smile: "I have my own job, and not only that, I take care of the house and our son...
...Yet if you refuse the promotion, well, you know how it is, they think you're not interested or responsible...
...there are always explanations Soviet enterprises accept for long absences during the day...
...Then you have to get everything delivered...
...In addition to being larger, it is closer to Anna's mother, and since Anna works—as do most women here—she and Volodya look forward to a less hectic existence: They will no longer have to travel across Moscow twice a day to drop off and then pick up their son...
...But then," Anna went on, "I kept listening and he seemed to say the same thing all the time...
...I didn't want it, really," he confessed...
...You [in the West] can go to one department store, order what you want, and there it is...
...So I accepted...
...Before the move Anna began spending an increased amount of time away from her job...
...Even Volodya, a self-acknowledged male chauvinist, seems to be adjusting to the fact that there is a problem...
...I just want to sit and watch television and relax...
...When I countered that moving was still merely two days out of one's life, Volodya feigned grief and replied, "No, one month...
...These people would no more think of signing a dissident petition, though, than an American Jaycee would think of supporting the local Communist party.—Mark Hopkins...
...As we sat around the kitchen table eating cold meats, cheeses and onions, and drinking white wine and Georgian brandy, Volodya reflected on his promotion to a new job...
...I ask myself, what's it all for...
...Yet that is not what troubled her...
...For four years the couple and their young son occupied a flat consisting of a living-sleeping room, kitchen and entrance hall—the whole of it no bigger than two 9x10 rugs...
...You watch the drama on the stage, but you don't understand what is happening...
...More annoying was the effort required to furnish the place...
...Leaving Anna and Volodya's new apartment, I thought of evenings spent with other couples very much like them...
...All seem to feel that Soviet life is intolerably inconvenient, that services are terrible, that work gets to be a grind...
...The press has begun discussing the subservient role of Soviet women...
...The new apartment was acquired in a complicated fashion through Volodya's work-place, which like other Soviet offices and industrial organizations receives an allotment of housing to ration out to employes...
...But the kitchen appliances are sold on the other side...
...Aware that the two of them listen to foreign radio broadcasts, by now a regular source of information among many Soviet urban dwellers, I asked rather pointedly how they felt about Andrei Sakharov...
...You foreigners in the Soviet Union," he insisted, "are like a theater audience...
...I'm tired at the end of the day...
...There wasn't much new...
...The store selling living-room furniture is on one side of the city," Anna complained...
...I don't see my son much, and here I am almost 40...
...The observation led to some banter about women's lib and whether Anna might become the first female general secretary of the Soviet Communist party, but Anna was not altogether joking...
...They both answered that they of course knew from the shortwave broadcasts and from friends and colleagues, some of whom are highly enough placed to travel abroad, what Sakharov had said concerning human rights violations, political prisoners and the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime...
...But it turns out I work longer hours...
...Besides," Volodya chimed in, "life isn't like that here...
Vol. 60 • April 1977 • No. 8
