Moscow Revisited
WOLL, JOSEPHINE
A TRAVELER'S REPORT Moscow Revisited BY JOSEPHINE WOLL Moscow After eight years away from Moscow, a visitor can't help being struck first by the physical changes. There has been an...
...A January issue of the daily Molod Ukrainy (Youth of the Ukraine) included extracts from the letter of a woman whose sons are currently serving in the Army, oneof themin Afghanistan...
...But by and large the treatment is serious, the response eager...
...The press rarely refers to the war in Afghanistan in its discussions of drugs, but in private conversation individuals frequently point to the conflict as one of the major causes for the recent upsurge in addiction and crime...
...Examples proliferate: the forthcoming publication of Anatoly Rybakov's novel about the '30s, Children of theArbat...
...Zhivago: "First they pillory him [Pasternak] and make him grovel, then —25 years after he died, 40 years after he wrote Zhivago—they generously decidete print it...
...Everything comes to the capital —frozen ducks from Czechoslovakia, grapefruits from Cuba, bottled orange juice from Vietnam (though no oranges and, abruptly, no coffee...
...the publication of information relating to Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Grigori E. Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin (who is portrayed in a TV show on Lenin as one of his "helpers" in making the Revolution...
...Real life in Moscow has always taken place in overcrowded apartments and smoky rooms, in conversations about books and poems and plays and paintings and movies...
...Some Soviet young people, often the privileged children of the intelligentsia, deride the current "thaw," pointing to the sorry fates of previous liberalizations...
...Drug use, a growing problem the last few years, has been receiving a great deal of attention in the media and is treated in a major new novel, Plakha (The Scaffold), by the very popular Chingiz Aitmatov...
...In a new play by dramatist Eduard Radzinsky, for instance, an anecdote about a security officer who caused his own wife's arrest in 1937 is included gratuitously— and is fashionably shocking, like the obscenities uttered by the heroine...
...The landscape in the microregions is bleak, the houses poorly constructed, but Muscovites are grateful nevertheless—they needed the space desperately...
...Plums from Moldavia, koulibiaka (meat- or fishstuffed pastry) from the Ukraine, cheesebread from the Caucasus, and melons from Central Asia barreled into the city by the truckload, to the absolute delight of Muscovites...
...Thanks alot...
...housing developments 10-12 stories high, and building sites— lakes of mud—are everywhere...
...They watch television, too...
...There are four channels on Moscow TV now, showing high-quality educational shows and films...
...In autumn, harvest season, food abounded...
...Lest anyone miss the point, the film is introduced by Genrikh Borovik, whose years working in the United States enable him to he about American life with great authority...
...Viewers are supposed to come away realizing how awful life is for émigrés, and what a mistake it is to abandon one's homeland...
...It still does...
...They begin forming Unes an hour or so before vodka sales begin, and routinely wait two to three hours...
...Nightly news has become far slicker and more professional than it used to be, although the new professionalism glosses what are often the same old distortions, especially on a late-afternoon television program that is pitched at the after-school crowd...
...And others as well...
...The rest of the country is scantily provisioned by comparison...
...Some alcoholics have devised horrible ways to make their liquor last, such as shooting vodka into their veins...
...There was a period, and not such a short one at that, when the press provided almost no information about how our lads were fighting over there," he said, going on to explain that he and his colleagues are only beginning to learn ho w to deal with this sensitive subject...
...The rhetorical shift is reflected in the publication of letters to newspapers (like the weekly supplement to the Party youth paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda) that express popular discontent with the war...
...Josephtne Woll, longtime NL contributor and author of Soviet Dissident Literature: A Critical Guide, teaches Russian literature at Howard University...
...and the USSR) say...
...A group of Georgian delegates walked out of last spring's Writers' Congress to protest what they considered racist stereotyping of Georgians in a story by the well-known writer Victor Astafyev...
...From upper-floor windows one can see, amid hundreds of look-alike buildings, a few trees, swings and a sandbox for children, a daycare center, a movie theater and some shops...
...Previously veiled or tacit antisemitism is surfacing unexpectedly in artistic and scholarly circles...
...With the recent invitations to Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, with the decisions to publish works by Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan A. Bunin, the Stalinist equation of émigré and traitor has simply vanished...
...Drink is another matter...
...At a Literary Institute meeting a critic attacked a half-Jewish writer for failing to fully comprehend Russian (the word heavily stressed) philosophers, and lumped him together with other fourth-rate writers, all of whom happen to be Jewish...
...She recently returned from an extended trip to the Soviet Union...
...their patience is finally being rewarded...
...Every weekend near the farmers' markets the streets were lined with small kiosks and tents, blue canvas covers flapping in the cold wind...
...Yet to her parents and their friends, 50- and 60-year old members of the intelligentsia, and to ordinary Russians who haven't—as she has— read Zhivago years ago, the expansion in cultural freedom is immensely important...
...Most Muscovites hardly regard the war in geopolitical terms: By and large indifferent to the Afghans, they dislike Soviet involvement because many of the young men who serve there come home embittered and antisocial...
...Ugly displays of chauvinism crop up, filling a part of the space created by the more open atmosphere...
...Freedom for one is freedom for all, and several manifestations are distasteful...
...Following years of official paeans to Soviet-Afghan friendship on television and in the movies, the official line has changed, favoring disengagement...
...after years of waiting for any kind of workplace, he hardly cares...
...An American documentary about Soviet émigrés has been shown at least three times here on television...
...One artist stuffs cotton wadding around the windows of his studio, built a mere two years ago...
...Sometimes, perhaps inevitably, the past is exploited for cheap effect...
...They are genuinely interested in the real problems and real achievements of their former compatriots...
...Ordinary citizens, unless they have foreign friends with access to hard currency stores where vodka is freely (if expensively) available, are barely drinking...
...There has been an enormous amount of construction: All around theouteredgesofthecity"microregjons" have sprouted...
...their conversations begin wistfully: "We're not drinking people, you know, but...
...But for the returning visitor the tone and content of those conversations have changed substantially...
...During the days before the 69th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, anetworkof fairs went up all over Moscow, each one offering goods—and sometimes entertainment—from a different region or republic...
...The journalist whose article the woman was criticizing replied with a partial apology for the insensitive media coverage...
...She is right, of course...
...But the atmosphere is more open, despite what the skeptics (both in the U.S...
...One young woman, a defense attorney, bitterly comments on the promised publication of Dr...
...she distinguishes between this war and the sort of war fought in defense of the motherland against the Fascists...
...No one minded the cold...
...it always has been...
...It's positively revolutionary...
...hospital emergency rooms are treating noticeably fewer victims of alcohol-related car accidents...
...I noticed, however, that people simply tune out the introduction and the postscript, and concentrate on the documentary...
...EVEN AT THE top the attitude toward those who have left the Soviet Union, and certainly the vocabulary concerning them, has changed radically...
...Liquor stores are open for the sale of beer, wine and champagne from late morning until early evening, but vodka is sold only four hours a day, and it remains what people want...
...It is followed by a Soviet-made film about America prominently featuring New York's homeless as well as some desperately unhappy émigrés...
...She questions the high cost in human lives of providing help to the Soviets' Afghan allies...
...the release of Tengjz Abuladze's extraordinary film Pokaianie (Repentance...
...In a city where shopping inevitably breeds irascibility and frustration, the atmosphere at the street fairs was relaxed and good-humored...
...Its disappearance is part of the new willingness to examine the Stalin years, a process occuring in scholarly, popular and artistic formats...
...Besides the two traditional markets—state-run stores where food is cheap, and farmers' markets that offer a much wider selection at much higher prices—there were, for the first time, street fairs...
...They have waiteda very longtime...
...Customers lined up for vegetables, baked goods, crafts, and even shish kabob grilled on hastilyerected barbecue stands...
...The newspapers have been one of the main vehicles for Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev's glasnost campaign, and Soviets who have not read Pravda or Izvestia in years find they simply must these days to leam what is going on...
...and she alleges that a disproportionate burden of the fighting is borne by sons of workers: "There are no children of officials there...
...After adjusting to the shock of new housing complexes and better-dressed women, and the pleasure of walking along the street munching a stick of shashlik, what remains is the sense, for probably the first time in 25 years, that there are possibilities, after all, in Soviet life...
...Although "drinking people" are certainly still pursuing their pleasure, the effects of the new, draconian antidrinking laws are very definitely visible: Far fewer drunks stagger through the streets and lurch onto the subway trains at night...
Vol. 70 • February 1987 • No. 2
