Russia Revisited
KENEZ, PETER
A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Russia Revisited BY PETERM KENEZ Almost a decade ago, as a participant in the Soviet-American Exchange Program, I spent a year in the USSR. I returned recently for a...
...As we drove into the city, I asked her whether there were any good films playing in Moscow...
...This created enormous confusion and caused cars to be backed up for miles...
...His pictures, smaller than Lenin's yet larger and far more ubiquitous than those of other members of the Politburo, are everywhere...
...As far as fashion is concerned, Russia's face is turned to the West, and the people have become very fashion conscious...
...Under normal circumstances this speeds traffic, but to reach one's destination it is necessary lo go out of the xxay so of (en that on balance, I am convinced, far more lime is lost than gained...
...The neutron bomb presents an easy target to Soviet propagandists, for revulsion to it is widespread and genuine...
...The magnitude of the nonsense was a measure of the power of the government, for these meaningless lines obviously could not exist on their own...
...On the other hand, a Soviet official I met who spoke English well and had traveled abroad, jumped at the opportunity to talk...
...My friends are pessimistic about their country...
...Yet in spite of the ugliness and problems, most of the residents would find it churlish to complain: A very short time ago they lived in far worse circumstances...
...they know that more is registered than the victim realizes...
...I could not help admire them...
...I spent a long evening with a scientist whose personal integrity I respected, although his political sophistication left much to be desired...
...They have been able to move out of communal apartments into a place of their own...
...Some think the greater availability of goods will further cement the already powerful regime...
...A well-placed tip or favor of some kind may make you a friend among the sales personnel, someone who will call to let you know when a desirable article has arrived for sale...
...We did not part friends...
...Perhaps the Soviet regime is saving millions of rubles by not bugging rooms and telephones...
...The drivers couldn't help disregarding the policeman as soon as they could do so without being detected, and the result was predictable confusion...
...The celebration has become more secular, and I would imagine that some old Communists now bemoan the "commercialization of the anniversary...
...I heard of executed uncles, jailed mothers and childhoods spent in exile...
...Depending on my mood and the circumstances, the answer varied between a quarter and a half...
...I said it could not become a decent place until it rejected its own criminal past...
...Still others serve as vehicles for the Lenin and Brezhnev personality cults...
...I had numerous friendly chats with them about life in Russia and America, but there was no mistaking their function: They kept a good account of everyone's coming and going...
...I tried to explain that to me freedom meant the creation of an environment in which one may expand one's horizons and may seek understanding of as many facets of life as possible...
...When you try to talk about the problems of this complex society, so far removed from their own, they listen only out of politeness...
...Others, younger and more courageous, are not sure how far they should go...
...At that point I had to exert great effort to control my emotions...
...Very soon she found occasion to mention that she came from a family of Leningrad intellectuals, and to lament the decline of intellectual and social standards in the USSR...
...It is important for one's prestige to come well dressed to the office, so one will go to great lengths to acquire the desired articles...
...Anyway, conditions in the camps had not been so bad, and he knew personally many who had come back from them...
...I sought out conversations with people whom I met in connection with my work in Moscow, even though I was aware that they had been screened for contacts with foreigners and almost certainly would offer a uniform set of opinions...
...These are the best and most interesting stores in town...
...Thus, from their point of view he was not a poet...
...On being watched...
...To my knowledge this institution, the dezhurnaia, exists in no other country...
...Those who sew pay high prices for Western fashPeter Kenez, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
...But the Stalinists were ambitious...
...He was obviously embarrassed and tried to avoid me...
...He was used to dealing with people like me and did not for a moment hesitate to lie...
...But aside from the dissenters, I heard no one express resentment about being watched...
...Ten years ago I thought that once Soviet society became richer, people would become nicer to one another and the political system would grow into something more decent...
...He appears in typical Fuhrer positions: kissing and being kissed by children, shaking hands with workers and peasants, spreading his arms out as if he were blessing the crowd...
...In our country all power belongs to the people...
...Many of my olds friends live in more comfortable circumstances than a decade ago...
...I spent the bulk of my free time in the congenial company of dissident artists and scientists...
...It lacks architectural unity: Next to 19th-century peasant houses there are large new skyscrapers, which in turn must coexist with the atrocities of Stalinist architecture...
...I was saddened because it seemed to me that if this was the degree of liberalism and commitment to civil liberties even among educated and intelligent Russians, then we did not have much to look forward to...
...logans...
...the workers are uninterested in questions of freedom...
...The scientist was a loyal citizen who staunchly defended the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and looked upon Eurocommunism with suspicion and hostility...
...the friendship of people is a powerful bastion...
...But like the 99 per cent approval the government received at the polls, the posters on the walls made a possible opponent feel alone and helpless...
...Paradoxically, he argued in the same breath that Soviet man was interested above all in spiritual values, while Americans were hopelessly materialistic...
...Glory to the great Soviet people...
...Obviously, a great deal must be coming from abroad...
...The woman was unabashedly patriotic...
...Rather than an altogether positive notion, he saw it largely as allowing people to do wicked things...
...As I walked the streets of Moscow reading slogans with morbid fascination, it seemed to me that these were the moments when I came closest to understanding the special genius of the Soviet political system...
...How could so much human misery be produced by something so accidental as the character of one man...
...and since sidewalks are rare, in the gloomy autumn rainy season one is surrounded by a sea of mud...
...They prefer to blame ideas...
...I heard of two English ladies, not accustomed to Soviet ways, express shock upon learning that they would have to share their room with a young man...
...on the other, she justified his exile in the early 1960s...
...For him, the Soviet regime's greatest achievement was not introducing equality and social justice, it was raising the standard of living and making the country strong...
...I don't think he understood what I was talking about...
...I understand that within a short time everyone became very friendly and exchanged presents...
...there is no need if everyone acts as if they were...
...Nice as these ladies may be, their job is surely loathsome...
...Taxi drivers still act as if they do you a favor when they take you home in the evening...
...Surely they cannot be regarded as agitation tools...
...As a result, there are huge districts with tens of thousands of residents who have no access to local shopping of any kind...
...it would have been contrary to ingrained habit...
...She was hurl by my sharp tone...
...Drivers do not stay in lane, they drive too fast, and they do not show the courtesies to one another that are taken for granted in countries where the automobile has had a longer history...
...On the one hand, she described him as the greatest poet of his generation...
...In cases where Soviet society badly mistreated an individual or prevented him from developing his full potential, the citizen might feel absolved from responsibility...
...I called the country unfree, because it hampered the individual in his search for truth...
...The slogans are nonbelligerent, stressing a religious motif...
...We frequently explored abstract JOSEPH BRODSKY subjects such as honesty, belief, the search for truth and decency...
...Standing on long, rather slow moving subway escalators gives one a chance to watch the flow of humanity...
...The Communist political and social system that pretended to be a remedy had proved to be worse than the disease...
...I have no evidence to prove my telephone was bugged, but I would never call a friend from the hotel...
...I remember two especially interesting discussions, one concerning the Soviet Union's role in the world and the other Italian Communism...
...I believe these people wanted my company as a witness...
...The Russians had troubles as well, he explained...
...For all the cars on the streets, the modern buildings and the fashionable clothes one sees, it is the continuity that is striking...
...For some peculiar reason, different institutions are responsible for constructing apartments and stores...
...The next thing he wanted to know was how much I earned and what kind of car I drove...
...Aseemingly inevitable corollary of the higher standard of living is the traffic jam...
...The Party is the brain, honor and conscience of the people?Lenin...
...After considering my answer for a moment, he said he thought so too...
...Putting it so unequivocally is an exaggeration...
...Some of them have been in exile and in jail, but most have not played major roles in the dissident movemenl...
...One simply assumes that telephones and hotel rooms are bugged...
...Others focus on the pronoun "we": "We will meet the 60th anniversary of the Revolution fittingly...
...He said that it was an invention of Western propaganda that many Russians and Ukrainians did not want to return to their homeland after World War II...
...Given the history of the country, though, people often prefer to err on the side of caution...
...Who could resist a regime with the power to put shameless untruths on the walls...
...Since Brodsky was not a poet and had no job, he was a parasite and therefore it was correct to exile him...
...Perhaps the designers of the no-lurn rule fancied themselves creating freeways for Moscow cheaply...
...The scientist's retort came down to one argument: The United States was no better...
...The city is lit up by millions of electric bulbs and the usual November grey is enlivened by a sea of red flags...
...She made it clear that she did not consider Jews to be Russians, and consequently had no objections to their leaving...
...Moscow has its zebra crosswalks, but I never saw a car stop for a pedestrian...
...The famous Russian bread was not as good as I had recalled: It was improperly baked and often raw in the center...
...Still, the question remains: Why put up these slogans...
...I asked the policeman who was frantically trying to turn everyone around how I could get home...
...First of all, I said, it was odious to exile someone who had committed no crime...
...His attitude made clear he didn't care what I did...
...Then, as if to show his good will, he said he understood that Americans had trouble with black people...
...Here was an example of irrational and arbitrary authority...
...Few Russians ever consider that it could be otherwise...
...Long ago, in the period of the Civil War and maybe in the 1920s, the slogans were genuine in the sense that they were created by local initiative...
...Long live Socialist democracy...
...How naive and silly that belief was...
...A small incident will suffice to illustrate...
...yet I was constantly uneasy...
...It is above all a passionate rejection of Soviet society that binds them together...
...Putting up and removing posters is a highly organized matter in the USSR, carried out by people of enormous experience who work with clock-like precision...
...The U.S...
...They sought to remake society, and for that goal silent acquiescence on the part of the people was not enough...
...The year-round slogans have definite themes...
...Of course the authorities knew days ahead, if not weeks, of his travel plans and how they would snarl traffic...
...housewives must travel long distances to bring home something for supper...
...Most depressingly, they see little hope for the future: Party members, lacking principles or ideological commitment, are eager only for power and material possessions...
...To them it makes more sense to blame the word, to hold Marx and Lenin responsible...
...The idea of taking people into confidence, I expect, never even occurred to anyone...
...But Moscow is not a beautiful city...
...almost all hours of the day one can see lines of people waiting to make a call...
...The African students who came to Moscow all wanted to pick up Russian girls...
...It is hard for them to accept that Soviet society is the product of a particular environment, the outgrowth of a particular history, combined with the incomparable evil genius of Stalin...
...She said that ordinary Russians did not understand his poetry, did not share his intellectual and artistic concerns...
...A peculiar institution, the komissitmnyi magazin, where used and sometimes new goods are sold on commission, plays a considerable role...
...They are there primarily because they have "always" been there...
...One of the most common ones was a quotation from the Soviet anthem: "Let us glorify our free fatherland...
...Lines at food stores are not quite as long as before, the distribution system having improved somew hat, but what was available in restaurants and what my friends could purchase was not appreciably better...
...Nevertheless, the Kremlin scarcely spares investment in "important" matters...
...others argue that the desire for possessions will outrun the government's ability to satisfy it and discontent will increase...
...One rainy evening I was driving home in bumper-to-bumper traffic when it became clear that Gorky Street xvas closed...
...Seeing an old woman crossing the street, I stopped the car to ask her assistance...
...What exactly they wanted to prevent the foreigners from doing is not clear, since the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square on which the Soviet leaders stood was about half a mile away...
...the painters produce abstract works that cannot be sold...
...Nevertheless, the new districts are shoddy and depressing: the houses are so uniform they can be recognized only by their numbers...
...The restaurants—except those catering to foreigners, still observe one, or even two meatless days a week...
...Complicating matters was the Russian traffic rule that one may not make a left turn from major axe-nues—or, on occasion, a right turn...
...Sure enough, several weeks later I ran into him in the hotel lobby...
...Where, the foreigner wonders, do the Russians get the beautiful fur coats, boots, stylish dresses, and corduroy suits that can be seen on the streets...
...The most frequent word on the posters is "glory": "Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...We will complete the Five-Year Plan ahead of schedule...
...Rumor has it that the Georgians are adulterating their tea with sand to make it heavier...
...She told me she was not competent to discuss movies...
...He offered absolutely no help...
...They wanted me to understand how they live...
...The customs and the rules favor the powerful, and the sad fact is that one quickly adjusts to enjoying privilege: I, too, soon managed to learn not to stop for pedestrians...
...may be a troubled and sick society (this concession puzzled him), but it had nothing to learn from Russia...
...In the hotel where I stayed, as in all hotels where there are foreigners, someone sat in the corridor of each floor 24 hours a day...
...after standing only a few years they seem to be falling apart...
...She brought up the example of Joseph Brodsky...
...Most of the time I simply listened...
...Although I could not help him, his inquiry made me happy...
...I noted that today Russia is hardly regarded by anyone as a seductive example...
...Before I got used to it, I also was very much annoyed by the treatment of pedestrians...
...The slogans fascinated me...
...The last time I was in the Soviet capital my great ambition was to be taken for a Russian, but I never succeeded...
...In the course of the last decade the Brezhnev cult has vastly expanded...
...They concede that the standard of living at least in Moscow has been rising, although they maintain the change in the rest of the country is not nearly so impressive...
...There is not a single store in Moscow where they are sold, yet thousands of young men and women wear them...
...My acquaintances, both supporters and opponents of the regime, found this preoccupation strange and amusing...
...I responded that whether Russians were happy abroad or not was an empirical question while whether they owed something to their society was a moral one, and the two should not be confused...
...The slogans proved that black was white, that the Soviet Union was a democracy, that people spontaneously supported the policies of the government...
...Unlike housing, the food situation has not strikingly improved...
...After an hour of unpleasant meandering in rush hour traffic, I got to the Kol'lso, the major artery encircling Moscow...
...This year I did not see that most odious line, "Lenin is more alive than all the living," but its spirit has been preserved: "Let the name and cause of Lenin live through the centuries...
...I returned recently for a three-month visit, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, partly at least because I wanted to see how the country had changed...
...Indian Prime Minister Morarji R. De-sai was going to the airport and his motorcade had temporarily blocked Gorky Street...
...One of the minor puzzles of Soviet life is that the clothes people wear are by and large superior in quality and appearance to the shoddy merchandise available in the stores...
...The decorations for the 60th anniversary of the Revolution were somewhat different than what I recall from the 1960s...
...They like Americans, albeit for their wealth and power, not because of their advances in the field of civil liberties...
...His concern was limited solely to the fact that everyone had to make a U-turn...
...Shall we attempt this in a country that for decades has done everything to prevent the development of artistic taste by destroying those artists who could contribute to raising artistic sensibilities...
...there is hardly a tree in sight...
...Strangely, too, telephone lines are not installed at the lime of construction, grossly overburdening the few public phones placed in the streets of a development...
...When conditions improved in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, slogans became much rarer, and in some countries, notably Hungary, they disappeared altogether...
...It would be an exaggeration to say I was afraid while I was in the Soviet Union...
...Soon a police car appeared and we were instructed almost hysterically to move on...
...More importantly, as far as I could tell the regime has not made one concession to the spirit of human freedom...
...The conditions the dissidents live under are not conducive to the development of political sophistication...
...Workers in offices receive presents and hold little parties...
...Glory to Soviet youth...
...and I carried no written material with me when I left the country...
...The cab driver's views reflected the thinking of many Russians...
...We both got up from the table unhappy...
...active complicity was thought necessary...
...they articulated their feelings for me...
...I arrived knowing no prominent dissenter...
...To them, a Communist is a Communist...
...A merely repressive and authoritarian regime would have welcomed this quiet of the tomb...
...In the new political situation the slogans acquired a different meaning...
...We will transform Moscow into a progressive Communist city...
...Some are self-congratulatory: "The Party and the people are united...
...Seeing a slogan on the wall praising Socialist Democracy, one could sense the gun, not very carefully hidden...
...Let us further strengthen the unity of the Party and of the people...
...people must therefore scramble between oncoming vehicles wherever and whenever they can...
...But worse than the drivers are the peculiar traffic rules, and those who direct traffic...
...In the course of the evening it became apparent that we had sharply different understandings of the idea of freedom...
...Two or three days following the Constitution's adoption by the Supreme Soviet, most of the flags, pictures and slogans disappeared...
...Twice during my short ^^^stay Moscow burst into Red ^ J bloom...
...To be understood, the slogans must be seen in an historical context...
...One evening, on my way home from the theater, several empty cabs refused to pick me up before a helpful and friendly driver finally stopped...
...The slogans were counterfeit spontaneity, just as Soviet elections were counterfeit democracy...
...When I saw Pravda the next day, I found out what the trouble had been...
...On November 7, the day of the parade marking the 60th anniversary of the Revolution, a militia man was stationed in every room of the huge lnlourist Hotel that looks out on Gorky Street...
...He suggested that we meet at the subway station next evening, rather than in the hotel, and during the following two or three evenings we went out to eat, saw a film and went to a bar...
...Nothing would have been easier than to, say, put up signs channeling the traffic through different streets...
...dismissing them would be a much greater repudiation of the past than the Soviet regime is capable of...
...Days before the occasion people wish one another "happy holidays," Moscow comes to a halt, everything is postponed until after the festivities...
...Collectivization eliminated the last vestiges of organized and unorganized opposition...
...As it happens, I got to like most of the middle-aged women who held this job...
...Russians should not abandon their country, she said, and would he unhappy if they did...
...nor the USSR is responsible for all evil...
...American television watchers also think they can "tune out" during commercial time, but the advertisers are not fools...
...In her opinion it was not only the right but also the duty of society to show its disapproval of parasitism...
...There are no laws in the Soviet Union against meeting foreigners, nor is it apparent how strongly the regime disapproves of such contacts...
...Furthermore, at a time when there were not enough agitators and the peasantry was semiliter-ate at best, it was not altogether absurd to think that the simplified political messages put up in large red letters might influence the views of some of the uncommitted...
...he talked about filming sadistic and pornographic acts, and asked whether I agreed that they should be forbidden...
...But that is not the Soviet way...
...She took one look at my white license plate, the tell-tale sign of a foreigner, and ran away...
...Of course, the other implication of my initial encounter is that peasants still come to Moscow to buy food...
...they are on the constantly growing outskirts...
...In the hotel restaurant, on my first evening in Moscow, I was seated next to an Azerbaidzhani engineer who was in the capital on business...
...Her pulling the carl before the horse infuriated rue...
...The regime has the understandable, and in my opinion laudable, goal of trying to accomodate as many people as possible quickly...
...They agree with Solzhenitsyn's formulation: The future of mankind depends on whether Communism disintegrates in Russia, or whether it first succeeds in conquering the world...
...They regard Soviet cultural life as increasingly impoverished and observe that contact with the outside world is increasingly difficult...
...Aside from my official contacts, I would never consider asking a Russian ' acquaintance to visit me in my hotel...
...Georgian tea had also deteriorated...
...When he found out that I was an American, he turned to me and asked very seriously, "Where is life better...
...Soon it became clear that it was not my company alone that attracted the visiting engineer...
...A day or two prior to the great event flags, Lenin and Brezhnev pictures, and slogans appeared—on the walls, hung in between buildings, in the middle of the street, in every conceivable nook and cranny of the enormous city...
...They do not care to make what they consider to be small distinctions...
...They see their friends leaving the country and feel abandoned and lonely...
...I felt I was being watched...
...And despite the decades of relentless propaganda, most Soviet citizens realize that people in the West live better than they do...
...Now it was different, and I was to be repeatedly addressed by strangers who assumed I was a local resident, for today Russians dress much better and look more "European...
...Certainly something must have happened in the interim, even if it was nothing more than a realization on his part that the blue jeans were not worth the risks...
...But talking to him was considerably less depressing than talking to a woman acquaintance who expressed loathing for the present regime...
...by the 1930s, not even the remnants of independent thinking were tolerated...
...Glory to work...
...The Party Chief's wise sayings, such as "The present struggle of the Soviet people is the direct continuation of the cause of October," decorate the walls...
...He talked longingly about American cigarettes, and especially about the pair of blue jeans he needed because his old pair was disintegrating from use...
...Surely no one is going to be won over by the mere assertion that there is such a thing as "Socialist Democracy...
...All agree that the quality of their own lives has grown worse...
...Once he drove away, all 20-odd drivers, including me, immediately and cheerfully disregarded his most emphatic instructions and completed our U-turns...
...Barren construction sites add to the ugliness...
...Almost as impressive as the well-dressed crowds is the improved housing situation...
...On my second day in the city I was walking not far from the Kiev railroad station when a man, obviously fresh from a village, stopped me to ask where he could buy sausage...
...Rather il-logically she saw the desire of the Jews to emigrate as the source of present anti-Semitism...
...Conversations...
...Above all, where do all those blue jeans come from...
...They grossly underestimate the significance of the differences, say, between the Italian and Russian varieties...
...I told him that in my opinion it was better in America...
...I expressed my resentment of a regime that had stolen the ideology of the Left to cover up an unequal, conservative, repressive society...
...the idea of exchanging dollars on the black market never entered my mind...
...I heard some complain of the limitations imposed on their domestic movements and the impossibility of traveling abroad...
...People eat a great deal of fro/en fish, greasy sausage and fried potatoes...
...indeed, anything foreign is considered ipso facto better...
...It seemed to me that the dissenters, like all Russians, tend to exaggerate their country's global importance...
...That I believed...
...He told me he would return to Moscow in a month...
...Glory to the Soviet people, the builders of Communism...
...We were both in a strange city without our families, and in a short time we became friends...
...You came home late last night...
...I often passed the time by observing the people going in the opposite direction and trying to decide what percentage of them could melt into a European crowd...
...Surely those who despise work, and that includes the great majority of the Soviet people, will not change their attitudes simply by reading that inane sign, "Glory to work...
...the writers write pessimistic stories, often dealing with the rejects of Soviet society...
...I told them that the world is full of unattractive and repressive regimes having nothing to do with Communism, that neither the U.S...
...The\ refuse to behave like mice: Those who believe in God attend Church services...
...The policeman would not even listen to my question about how I could reach my destination...
...Moreover, how shall we establish who are poets...
...At night when cars move with frightening speed, without their headlights, crossing the street is a dangerous undertaking...
...On one occasion I was trying to find an address...
...They consider themselves victims of a relentless campaign to wear them down and eliminate all opposition...
...The right to work is the greatest achievement of October...
...The apartment house complexes now being built are not in the center of the town...
...It was a rather cruel mockery that during the very month of my visit Moscow had a safety campaign going on, the object being to make the city streets safer by teaching pedestrians the traffic rules...
...She had survived the Stalin era and was well socialized...
...Worst of all, from the point of view of an American, in the beginning of September all greens, other than cabbage, disappear Iven some of the pasl pleasures of Muscoxile cuisine now disappointed me...
...I read them aloud, like a child learning the alphabet, and kept repeating to myself the ones I considered particularly remarkable...
...Ordinary Russians grumble about material problems, about the poor quality of Soviet goods...
...Unable to get across, everyone had to make a U-turn on a narrow street...
...after all, the young man was merely doing his job...
...I found the traffic in Moscow particularly unpleasant...
...Instead there are designated spots, al great distances from one another, where turns are allowed...
...and none hesitate to entertain foreigners...
...They ceased to be political messages, becoming instead basic assertions that filled the void...
...I did not always succeed...
...and they charge double if you happen to live outside the center of the city and it is raining, for that is their understanding of capitalist enterprise...
...On occasion we disagreed about politics...
...I asserted that the Soviet Union was afraid of artistic and social innovation...
...The Academy of Sciences, for example, sent a young woman student of English to meet me at the airport...
...I did not convince him...
...The majority of my acquaintances were less corrupt and cynical...
...The streets of Moscow...
...ion magazines...
...This somehow seems more profound, but it has the unintended and ironic effect of underestimating the crimes of Stalin, because they do not see that he was one of a kind, sui generis...
...I did not hesitate to criticize the USSR in response...
...Casual rudeness between individuals remains pervasive...
...But anniversary or no anniversary, Moscow is never free of posters, or pictures of Lenin and Brezhnev...
...I called his comparison a diversion and rejected it...
...This was no paranoia on my part...
...We will carry out the directions of the 25th Party Congress...
...An English literature scholar, this lady lived in Leningrad, a city she considered in every way superior to Moscow...
...Any genuine liberalization must inevitably lead to the demise of this particular Soviet institution...
...Waiters continue to alternate unpredictably between surliness and chum-miness...
...In the beginning of October the capital celebrated the adoption of the new Constitution...
...The slogans were unambiguous: "We approve and adopt the Constitution...
...Such caution at times reaches ridiculous extremes...
...and the young have no ideals...
...Nor was it true that those who had returned were punished...
...For the sake of their consciences, they have chosen not to accept definitive limits on their careers...
...On one point they all agreed: No one reads or even notices the slogans...
...Interest in the United States, therefore, is largely limited to questions of living standards...
...At the entrance he would have to sign a guest book and, interestingly, even those on business hated to do this...
...In an\ case, on this particular evening trying to make a U-turn on the Kol'tso was very difficult...
...They never expressed the thoughts and feelings of the people, but the Communist bosses in the villages believed they were useful in showing strength...
...Traffic was moving at a snail's pace...
...I heard tales of horror, dispassionately told...
...Shall the issue be decided by plebiscite...
...I heard of trifles for which people had lost jobs, or even been sent to camps...
...He brought up pornography repeatedly, as if it were an essential part of freedom...
...At least 20 cars filled the turning lane, waiting for a favorable moment to move, and I joined the line...
...When I criticized an appalling institution, a newly established bookstore where one can buy Russian books only for convertible—i.e., non-Communist-curren-cy, he asked what I thought of Carter's policy of building neutron bombs...
...They would remark in a friendly fashion as I walked by them, "So, you are going for a walk again...
...Prejudice and racism are as endemic in the USSR as everywhere else, but not as unfashionable as in some Western countries...
...I was extremely careful not to do anything that could get me into trouble: I did not cross the border with a Bible in my possession...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
