Moscow, USSR
“Moscow has changed very much in the past few years,” said the cab driver, a World War II veteran of the Moscow battle, as we sped along the expressway from Sheremetevo airport to Red Square.
Such as there, he gestured, a new monument marking the closest point of the German advance—a trio of huge replicas of crossed, steel girder tank obstacles. Up ahead were half-finished apartment buildings, sheer white blocks of prefabricated concrete stacked one atop another. An experimental electric delivery truck was traveling our way, on a trial run of its battery-powered motor. My driver discoursed on that a bit, then, as we entered downtown Moscow, he nodded toward a nearby car, “There’s the new Volga.” It is flatter than the bulky old model that has been the workhorse for more than a decade, but still a heavy, squarish-looking machine. And for the moment, the driver said, the new cars are being supplied only to government agencies and enterprises.
Elsewhere in Moscow, you can see the new Intourist Hotel, a slab of glass and dark metal plates rising 25 stories above the adjacent older and more inviting National Hotel. The new Rossiya, a monster of 6,000 beds, now provides a garish aluminum and glass backdrop to the ancient St. Basil’s cathedral in Red Square and the red stone Kremlin towers. And, finally, there is the showplace Kalininskii Prospect, a quarter of a mile of white-faced high-rise apartments and offices and low-slung shops and restaurants placed continously along a wide mall that is punctuated at one end by the two curved towers of Comecon headquarters—the Soviet and east European economic and trade organization.
All this is new in the past few years. And against the cathedral-like Stalinist skyscrapers whose spires are visible from almost everywhere in the city, the new architecture lends a contemporary look to Moscow.
But that is the first impression. For Moscow does not change that rapidly, neither its appearance, nor its people, nor sounds, nor odors.
The sidestreets are lined with solid, squat brick and plaster buildings put up in Catherine the Great’s time a century ago. Through thick wooden doors and stocky, double-paned windows you can glimpse the offices of the countless government and Communist Party organizations that manage the country—the party central committee, the Moscow party committee, the national office for labor and wages, the office for industrial mediation, the offices for housing, economic planning, gas and oil research, food distribution, foreign tourists, technological innovation, labor unions, and on and on.
The Moscow subway, still a marvel of efficiency, gives off the sounds of tens of thousands of footsteps mixed with the tunnel echo of endless trains. The streets carry leaning, wheezing buses that exhume a choking black smoke. A cream and blue colored truck with the word “Khlebil” —bread— stenciled carelessly on the side and, like most of the truck fleet seemingly cast from wartime dies, grates ponderously along.
In GUM, the rambling gray stoned central department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, hordes of Muscovites elbow from counter to counter beneath arched glass roofs three stories above the malls. At one booth, a hundred people are lined up waiting to buy yellow and red headscarves for the equivalent of $5 each. There are lines, too, inside the grocery stores and the clothing shops. And wherever a crowd forms, it draws still more people who, if there is something special to be had, want to get in on it.
So. at a stall in a pedestrian subway, passersby crush around a book salesman. “What book is it?” someone asks. “Show me the title.” It turns out to be a collection of anecdotes and stories—nothing out of the ordinary, no new edition of poet Voznesensky, or a general’s memoirs recollecting encounters with Stalin.
But there is the new bust of Stalin in Red Square. Unveiled in July, it stands atop a gray block of granite far back along the Kremlin wall behind Lenin’s tomb. A woman in from the provinces excitedly asks, “When was it put there?” A man answers, “This month.” “This month?” she repeats. “Yes, I was here before and it wasn’t there.” She and a friend exchange words of surprise over the bust. Two other women, from central Asia, put their heads together to whisper reactions as they look at the likeness of Stalin. And a foreigner, an Asian tourist in baggy, Mao blue trousers, readies his camera to record that something has changed here insofar as the judgement of Stalin goes.
Yet, that scarcely touches the Muscovite’s life. The controversy over the past and Stalin proceeds quietly far above the street level. So does the problem and protests of dissidents, the tiny, unorganized, unassociated factions of writers, scientists and assorted intellectuals who champion civil rights. They are not news here (unless one picks up a BBC or Voice of America broadcast through the jamming) and they do not much concern the Muscovite whose interests now as for the past decade and more have been food, clothing and housing.
The Muscovites still display that determination and purposefulness as they surge along the streets. In summer, the men are in shirtsleeves and ill-fitting trousers, and the collective farm officials seem invariably to wear yellow straw fedoras and their medals and decorations for wartime and civilian-time accomplishments. The women shun the minis, maxis and pantssuits for cotton flower prints reaching to the knee and stretching over stout bodies.
A few of the young people try desperately to imitate their western counterparts. They have found global sunglasses, jeans, beards and bleaches. The girls have sewn a miniskirt, but modestly short. And now and then in Red Square or along the main streets, a group of youths encircles one with a guitar and they sing quietly. But you can see that their elders disapprove of too much of this lifestyle and they stare with amazement at the young foreign girls and boys who bring these fashions into the country.
Though the statistics—for shoes, textiles, television sets, bicycles, fish products, canned goods, or watches—all read upward, the daily existence in Moscow remains a struggle. Slabs of meat offer neither quality nor variety. A pound of tomatoes costs 500, of cheese, $1.50. The cases and racks in grocery stores provide enough staples, but you still—except in the few self-service stores—buy receipts and then take up a position in line for the food items. The salesgirls, looking surgical in their white aprons and head cloths, remain surly and indifferent. The buses are filled beyond capacity. Taxis are shared by everyone. And even the best restaurants seat strangers with strangers to make better use of limited space.
So for the Muscovite, now living in a city of seven million plus, the daily life is a fight for space and things. And, remembering Moscow from three years ago, and two years before that, and two years before that, the city does not seem to have altered.
The post-Khrushchev leadership, while never as flamboyant in its promises as Nikita Khrushchev, did commit itself to an economic reform, part of which was a more comfortable standard of living. But it is hard to see that in the past five years, for example, Moscow has gotten very close to the millenium. The bureaucracy remains of gigantic proportions, Pravda continues to sound the call for greater productivity, prosperity grows in small, almost immeasurable units.
The Russians—always as optimistic as they can be melancholy–say that things have gotten better, and will get even better. They still refer to wartime devastation a quarter century ago, and how difficult life was before.
They still are reluctant to talk politics, except in bland platitudes. A Muscovite is careful with whom he meets privately, and what he says. For the official ideology and institutions are watchful—perhaps more now than a few years ago—of foreign cultural influences, of the literature, people and ideas that enter the country. The official message remains “socialist construction”—a new society—and the rooftop banners still proclaim “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
None of this has changed, it seems. And for that, there is a familiarity, a sameness about Moscow in the shadows of the glass and steel towers.
A meeting with one Russian begins with a telephone call, and the uneasiness, the apprehension are transmitted at once. He would rather not be seen at the hotel, and we therefore arrange to meet some blocks away. Since we do not know one another by sight, he will, he says, mention something about the weather to identify himself.
Viktor—which is not his real name — is one of the intelligentsia, a scientist, obviously from his dress successful (he earns more an three times the average worker’s wage of $125 a month). He grew to manhood during the war and twilight of the Stalin era, and as a boy saw his father, an intellectual, arrested and imprisoned during the purges.
We stroll to a small Moscow neighborhood park, exchanging personal information so that we know generally where one another stands politically. His sense of humor is quick, and he enjoys an anecdote. As we sit on a park bench, out of earshot of sidewalk crowds, the talk takes a serious bent.
“We, your country and mine,” Viktor says, “have much in common, in our problems. The cities, economic development, moral problems. We Russians like Americans generally. Whenever a problem or a question comes up, it is obligatory here to ask ‘What are the Americans doing in this field?’
“We are up to here”—he smiles and gestures with a flat hand to his neck – “in the United States. But we also do not like some things. We think Americans value money too much, the straining and grasping for money.
“Russians want money, too, don’t misunderstand me. We want houses, cars, television sets and all. But we think we do not put money above all else.
“You can say that we believe in communism. Not what is printed in the press. That is ideology, propaganda, and I hate it. I mean communism where there is concern about one another, where we value spiritual things. It would be like your religion in the west in the broadest sense. That’s what I mean when I say communism.”
Leaving the park, we stroll on through sidestreets, away from densely packed main thoroughfares. These old streets, flanked with durable, thick-walled l9th century buildings, have the flavor of Moscow. And on this warm, sunny afternoon, they have a tired beauty.
Viktor inquires about a new book, “Journey Through Siberia.” I offer to send it to him later, but he objects. “No,” he explains, “for one thing, political books are not allowed in. They would not get here. And, second, I do not want my name associated that way. I have a reputation, and I don’t need that problem—the questions as to why I’m getting books from abroad. It might be the same in your country, if someone receives books from a Communist country. They want to know why.”
He suggests lunch, and we move into the mainstream of pedestrians toward a small restaurant. “You should remember one thing about the country,” Viktor advises on the way. “Be careful about identifying people. Sometimes things are written from here by journalists—so and so says this, so and so thinks that. Then the Voice of America –I listen sometimes — broadcasts the information back here. It creates difficulties for the persons named.”
“You should also remember this,” Viktor continues in a low, easy voice. “What people tell you privately may not be all the truth. They may be dissatisfied, discontent and they exaggerate. What you read in the papers—that is not the truth either. The truth is somewhere in the middle.”
The restaurant is tucked in the side of a century-old structure. Inside, the walls are covered with dark brown stained plywood. There are only a dozen small square wooden tables and half are empty. The place smells old and used, but it is relatively private.
Over meat, fresh tomato and cucumber salad and a bottle of white wine, we talk about the country’s general condition. I mention the concern in the Soviet press about industrial production and the economic reform.
“Our chief problem,” Viktor corrects, “is agriculture, our second is the military—the heavy defense spending. And our third is industry. We have the technology, some of it better and newer than in the United States.
“But we lack organization. We have too many people doing one job. There is too much bureaucracy. It is hard to get things done, to get things moving.
“You in the West talk about absence of freedom, about repression here. Well, there is that type of freedom. But there is also freedom in organization, if you understand what I mean. You see, we—unlike you—are working toward a goal. We want and need to develop and progress. That takes organization, and that can mean repression in the sense of making people work a certain way. But we must do this. We cannot change without organization.”
We linger a while, to finish the wine and chat about inconsequential things, and then leave to take the bus to Sokolniki park, on the northern edge of Moscow where the permanent exhibition grounds are. At the moment, the Yugoslavs are showing industrial goods, and because it is a beautiful summer Sunday, the park is crowded with Muscovites enjoying a day off.
At a small pond, where people are swimming and fishing, we find two tree stumps to sit on. It is hot enough that we both take off our suit jackets. Viktor has vowed to give up cigarettes, but he takes one anyhow. As we smoke, I ask him about Nikita Khrushchev. What do people think of him now? Viktor laughs.
“He is not a serious topic. Khrushchev was a muzhik. He came up under Stalin, he acted like a peasant, gathered power and favored friends. You remember when he took his shoe off at the United Nations and pounded the desk with it? No leader of a big country does that.
“Yes, you credit him with denouncing Stalin. But if Khrushchev hadn’t done it, someone else would have. It was not a case of a particular man rejecting Stalinism, but of a particular moment.”
I ask about Stalin. Could the country go back to that time? Viktor shakes his head. No.
“The question of Stalin is complicated. That a bust of Stalin has been put in Red Square does not mean a return to Stalinism. That is an absolutely wrong interpretation. We cannot go back to that. We had the cult of the individual. We know what that was, We lost twenty million people during the purges. And twenty million more during the war. We have learned from that.
“Some here say that despite the purges, we all the same won the war under Stalin. That without the iron fist that produced the purges, neither would we have defeated the fascists. I disagree. When the war started, there was spontaneous unity against the Germans. It did not require Stalin, an iron hand.”
We move on, walking through the park planted with slender white birches and pines. Is it possible, I ask, that Soviets, because of the war, support the military more than in the United States? That therefore there is no pacifist movement in the Soviet Union?
“I’ve never heard it put that way here, among Russiana,” Viktor responds. “Rather, civilians may say that the military is dogmatic, hardline, while the military thinks civilians are soft, not militant enough. Even with the war, we have no pacifism, unless it is in the form of a struggle for peace, a war for peace. People too well recall the war—the older ones, the youth know it only as history—and would want the country strong enough militarily to prevent another war.”
Another question. It seems that since Khrushchev, there has been a conservative emphasis in internal policies. “Perhaps,” Viktor says, then smiles, “but maybe it is like this”—he traces an up and down cycle in the air. “Maybe things swing back and forth.”
By nine o’clock, most tables in the Hotel Moscow restaurant, just off Red Square, were filled. At one, a group of eight young people were celebrating some occasion and their table held bottles of wine, vodka and soda water. An army officer and a friend were slowly and methodically getting drunk at another table. A couple and their child—from the countryside, you could tell by their dress—came in looking a little bewildered. The brassy percussion of the orchestra echoed over the large hall—thirty feet high, the ceiling supported by four stout emerald marble columns and at the top a mural tried to give the effect of an open sky with stone arches, four trapeze artists and, inexplicably, a worker waving a red banner.
As couples moved to the dance floor, a hefty woman on the bandstand clenched a microphone to sing “Rossiya, Rodina Moyall—“Russia, My Native Land”—the way Kate Smith used to sing “God Bless America.”
Above the din, Gregorii, a chance acquaintance, explained that he was in Moscow on a business trip from Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian republic. An engineer by training, Gregorii had been born and lived there most of his life. He was now 39, but looked older. “We Georgians age faster,” he laughed, brushing a hand over his balding head.
Georgia is one of three small Soviet republics in the mountainous region at the Soviet Union’s southern frontier between the Caspian and Black seas, and adjacent to Turkey and Iran. It has for centuries had to fend off either the Turks or the Russians, and was finally incorporated into the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
But the republic is best known as the homeland of Joseph Stalin, once an obscure Georgian revolutionist, and later, of course, ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter century-until his death in 1953. Admiration for Stalin among the Georgians is legendary and there are still celebrations there on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, December 21.
Gregorii earned, he said, 125 rubles a month (about $138); his wife, an artist, the equivalent of $235, so that between them, their income was $363. With their one young son, they lived in a three-room flat for which they waited years, and for which they paid $50 a month.
“No, that isn’t bad,” Gregorii commented about his income. “We can live on that, but we don’t save anything. The rent is high for one thing. I suppose things are much cheaper in America. For instance, how much does a car cost?”
I gave him some prices, and then when he asked about wages, some representative salaries.
“Well, you know, our country, Georgia, is rich,” he responded. “We could be as rich as America if we were alone. But they tell us we have to help Kazakhstan, or Siberia, and our money goes out. But what can we do? We’re a small land, only three million people. Before we had the Turks, now the Russians.
“You know the trouble here?” Gregorii continued. “It’s Great Russian chauvinism. That’s the trouble. The Russians don’t like us, and we don’t like them. I can feel it when I’m in Moscow. No, they don’t like us.”
The orchestra blared a two-step of some vintage. The army officer invited a woman from another table to dance—quite proper in Russian restaurants. Another couple livened the floor with a twist. Gregorii didn’t care much for the scene.
“In Georgia,” he said, “usually just the men go to the restaurants. The women stay at home to care for the children, I consider this the right way. Why? Well, look, here you might bring your wife to a restaurant and anyone can ask her to dance, put his arms around her. No, no, that’s not right.”
Gregorii turned a moment to his dinner of chicken outlet and vodka. He ate slowly, stopping every so often for a cigarette and sips of Moscow brand beer. Would a bottle of champagne be good, he asked, and snapped his fingers for the young waiter who after ten minutes produced two slender glasses and a green bottle of Soviet champagne.
“You know,” Gregorii picked up the conversation, “it was better under Stalin.”
How could that be? Millions of people died during Stalin’s rule, wasn’t that true?
“I’ll tell you why,” he said. “We lived better when Stalin was alive. Now, for example, prices stay the same or go up. The price of drinks, of cognac has been raised. Under Stalin, prices were lowered. The working class lived well, say from 1930 to 1940 when the war started.”
Still, so many people were killed because of Stalin, I persisted.
“Yes, that is right, and we have condemned the excesses. But one man didn’t rule the country, remember. It’s impossible in a country this size that one man can rule it. It’s a group that runs the country.”
Wasn’t it true, however, that before Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, he left a letter saying that in his opinion Stalin would not be the best man to succeed him? Didn’t Nikita Khrushchev reveal this letter for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1956 when he denounced Stalin?
Gregorii leaned back in his chair and smiled knowingly. Then he hunched forward as if to confide.
“Sure,” he scoffed. “that’s what Khrushchev said. But that wasn’t true. Khrushchev made that up about Lenin. Actually, what Lenin said was that Stalin was the most capable man to succeed him. Khrushchev was a fool.”
Did he know that a bust of Stalin had been placed over Stalin’s grave near the Kremlin wall in Red Square?
“I heard about that,” Gregorii said. “I didn’t believe it, and I haven’t yet seen it myself.”
We got off on another subject, about development of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the influence of different traditions and histories. Gregorii objected.
“The problem is not tradition, the problem here is the system. How many years does your president serve — it’s five years, isn’t it?” No, a maximum of two four-year terms. “Eight years. But he’s elected, right? Here, they stay in as long as they want to. That’s how the system works.”
We finished the champagne. The band had packed up, the lights were being flicked off and on to announce closing. Outside, the night air was fresh, slightly cool, and we strolled from the hotel the hundred yards to Red Square. Floodlights made St. Basil’s cathedral, with its multicolored domes, like something in a fantasy. The main Kremlin clock tower, topped with an immense red star, glowed under banks of floodlights that also illuminated the low red and black granite tomb of Tenin. It was nearly midnight and the usual crowd of foreign and Soviet tourists was standing before the mausoleum waiting the ritualistic changing of the two-man guard at the door.
“You say,” Gregorii commented, “that the memorial to Stalin is over there. Let’s look at it.”
We walked across the cobblestone square to stand at the white chain around Lenin’s tomb and the flanking reviewing stands. Behind the mausoleum, fifty feet from us, we could make out the gray granite bust between clusters of small pines. Gregorii looked for a moment.
“No, it isn’t a good likeness. His face is too thin. Stalin’s face was fuller.”
Then, we were parting at the hotel. Gregorii hoped to get to America some day. That was his dream, but he probably could never make the trip. And if I should got to Tbilisi, I must come to his house. Georgian hospitality is famous, he said. Just ask for him in town, everyone knows his family. Just ask in any restaurant.
It had been almost three years since Oleg and I had last met. Though his hairline had receded a little further, and though he had been working hard — both teaching at Moscow University and preparing to defend his all important dissertation — he retained his characteristic zest and enthusiasm. Oleg, even in his younger student days when we first met, had always lived the present. He did not care much for endless philosophizing about the world condition. And so, over dinner at one of Moscow’s newer restaurants, we talked first about mutual friends. Who had been married, who had finally gotten an apartment, who had completed his studies at the university and what each was doing now.
Oleg himself was the father of a second son. His wife, at the moment on a holiday in the countryside to visit her parents, was still working on her candidate’s degree — about the same as a Ph.D. in the United States. And Oleg was committed to defend his candidate’s dissertation before a university panel within the coming year.
“Oh, of course,” he agreed, “that will make a big difference after I defend my dissertation. If, for example, I am appointed a dotsent (associate professor) my salary would be about 350 rubles a month (about $390). The future in a university here is very good, if though you have the brains.”
The key, as Oleg emphasized, was gaining an advanced degree. For this not only placed one in the relatively privileged class of university intellectuals, but promised a secure future and, if one had the talent for a position in a major university, it meant residence in cities like Moscow, Leningrad or Kiev. Permits to live in these cities remain difficult to obtain since they provide a standard of living, cultural atmosphere and personal opportunity lacking in the provinces.
“Defending your dissertation here,” Oleg went on, “is not only an important moment in your career.but a state affair. I’ll explain.
“If a student proposes a new idea, a new interpretation in his dissertation, and it is approved, that idea or interpretation has, you might say, official sanction. After all, the universities are government sponsored and they have official standing.
“So dissertations reflect policy, broadly speaking. This is all the more true in university departments like that of philosophy which deals with Marxism-Leninism. Thus, the board of examiners at the public defense of a dissertation is very careful in its questioning and approval or disapproval.”
As he looked to his own future, I asked Oleg, did he feel compelled to join the Communist Party?
“No,” he replied, “not as a teacher. But all, or almost all, administrative jobs in the university are held by party members. And if a person is considered for such a job, and is not in the party, he is virtually required to join.
“I have deliberately avoided joining the party,” Oleg continued, “simply because there is an element who joins to further their careers. And they do. I want my work to be judged for what it is, not from the standpoint of whether I’m a party member.”
As a student of linguistics, Oleg talked at length about his research. His own dissertation, he smiled, was so logical that if the board of examiners accepted the basic facts—facts, Oleg said, that were commonplace—then the examiners logically would have to approve the dissertation.
Beyond that, his research had given him a perspective. He was persuaded that people used words lightly, without delving into their meaning. Oleg warmed to the topic as we discussed civil liberties in the Soviet Union.
“Take ‘freedom,’ he said, “that’s a complicated word. It means all sorts of different things, like the word ‘democracy.’
“All right, you say, for instance, that we can’t talk about or publicly criticize our political leaders, or the KGB (secret police), or the military. That’s true. But you could give Russians freedom tomorrow to do that, and what would happen? They would blabber and blabber. It would mean nothing. But if you gave them freedom of action, that’s quite another thing.”
Somewhat untypical for him, Oleg reflected on the Russians as people.
“The Russian is a hard person to explain,” he said. “Yes, you in the West may say that for centuries the Russian lived under czarist rule, then Stalin, and that he somehow needs a strong leader.
“That’s not true,” Oleg protested. “We have times in history when huge areas of the Russian empire were essentially separated from direct government control. And yet people there managed to govern themselves. No. the Russian doesn’t need a strong hand. He can manage himself.”
But why then does he tolerate what seems so evidently an authoritarian system. Why doesn’t the Russian resist?
“I don’t know,” Oleg confessed. “I can’t explain that.”
Nor, it seemed, did Oleg much care. Not involved in politics himself, searching for that niche in the university that would provide him both social status and relative material comfort, the greater issue of Russia’s social development did not absorb him. It was enough, it seemed, if he could defend his dissertation and assure his own small place and security in the system. And that perhaps was what most of his countrymen wanted also.
The authentic Russia can be found in many places, and one is Moscow’s Leningrad railroad station on a late night. It is so far removed emotionally and psychologically from the tourist’s route of the Kremlin and the Bolshoi ballet as to lie in another world. Through this worn, dank 19th century structure, the peasants move to the capital and back to the villages. Muscovites leave from here on their holidays and business trips. The transients pass through on their way north and south.
The gleaming dark red “Red Arrow” express, ever immaculate and silent, the most luxurious train in the Soviet Union departs from this station every night at midnight for its eight-hour thirty-minute run to Leningrad. The Helsinki train, fifteen to twenty cars long, dark green, but faded looking beside the manicured “Red Arrow,” also takes up at the Leningrad station. And there are lesser trains to small cities and villages north of Moscow.
There are never enough places, it seems, on the trains. And the Russians come to the station to struggle for tickets, or simply with their limitless patience to sit until there is space.
In the ticket office—a cavernous room with foot thick walls and twenty foot high ceiling—a gray mob pushes toward the cashiers window. On the glass is stenciled an announcement in white paint: “Holders of the medals Hero of the Soviet Union or Hero of Socialist Labor, and invalids of the fatherland war do not have to wait in line.” There are perhaps forty persons pressing for tickets on the coach train north to Leningrad. And other clusters of people have taken refuge in the ticket office from the crowd outside. One mother unfolds a white towel to spread across her full cotton skirt and gently rests the head of her weary young son on her lap. Around them are clustered suitcases and bags. It is hot, the air is thick and it smells of tobacco smoke, sweat and stale clothes.
Outside, in the terminal, floodlights focus the eye on a huge statue of Lenin. Behind him, as a backdrop, is a multicolored mosaic of red, gold, blue and silver ceramic tiles which incorporates the word “Peace” in six different languages. The roof of the terminal is supported with steel girders and the plaster walls show the grime of decades.
On the platform, a mob of humanity fills worn wooden benches and the asphalt flooring. A train is backing in on track three, and there is a rush for the cars. “Hurry, hurryl” someone shouts. The aged porters—they all look equally 70 years old—dressed in soiled, baggy uniforms, shapeless hats pushed back on their heads, yell “Coming through! Out of the way!’ as they charge their metal baggage carts into the crowd.
Over the loudspeaker, a melodious and incongruous male voice soothingly intones, first in Russian, then in English: “The Moscow to Helsinki train will depart in two minutes, all passengers are kindly asked to take their seats.”
On the benches, beneath the great statue of Lenin, people have squeezed into every inch and then onto the floor. A peasant woman—you can tell by the head scarf wrapped tightly around her face, the long full skirt, the plump, weathered flesh and the rough hands—cradles a baby in her arms. She sits on a brown cardboard suitcase bound with a stray piece of rope. Around her are string bags of fruit.
At another place beside a thick steel girder, two children—the boy must be eight, and the girl, six, wait patiently on a pile of suitcases. Their faces are scrubbed clean, their hair combed smooth, their shirts are pressed. They seem to not dare moveg but look around them—bewildered, a bit frightened – at the mob pushing back and forth.
One family is spread over a mound of items—cases, bundles wrapped in torn Pravdas, open string bags of nuts and apples. The man wears a dark suit with an open-collar shirt. He has a three day’s growth of beard. The young daughter, her blond hair tied in pigtails with a ribbon, leans exhausted, half sleeping against her large, soft mother.
Someone near them, a woman, has bought a red plastic hobby horse as a surprise from Moscow. And another is taking back a large new doll with curly blond hair. For people from the provinces, the log cabin villages in the pine and birch forests, or the small factory towns that punctuate the rail lines of Russia, for these people, Moscow is a paradise.
After all, there is GUM, the main department store, and Detskii Mir, the childrens’ store, where you can buy the clothes, yard goods, toys and fancy things for the house. If you have the money, you can even buy a pair of women’s dress shoes made in Italy or West Germany, though they cost the equivalent of $50. Or men’s suits made in Poland or even England.
Or, if you are lucky, you are in GUM the day that black vinyl suitcases, finished with gold colored zippers and vinyl straps, go on sale for $20. And though the line of one hundred or one hundred fifty people means a wait of two hours, it is worth it. Who knows when another shipment will come in.
So Moscow is an adventure. And the people from the provinces struggle back with their suitcases, string bags, knapsacks and cloth sacks stuffed. And, they come to the Leningrad station, weary and patient. They push together, indifferent to one another. Years of fighting for space and things have made them, you begin to think, tough. They, the Russians, endure the wait, the hardship, the crowding.
At the Leningrad station, you can also see the foreign tourists arriving. The porter has loaded their pieces of blue-colored aluminum flight bags onto a cart, and the couple with an out of place dignity follows him through the mob. The man has a finely creased wash and wear suit, and the woman wears a tan traveling suit with the proper jewelry and sparkling summer shoes. They are, of course, traveling first class on the “Red Arrow.” Foreigners—under the care of Intourist, the state travel agency—do not fight at the ticket window, or have to rush for the coach seats, or elbow for space on the benches with people with sacks of clothes and bags of pears. Intourist takes them, the foreigners, from their hotels in hired cars. No lining up for a taxi for them, or pushing into an already overcrowded bus to the objections of passengers—“What are you doing? Where are you going to put those suitcases? There is no room here now as it is.”
The foreigners, then, scarcely see the Leningrad station. Only for a moment do they whiff the ever-present odor of urine spread from the foul toilets. They just glimpse the mass under that monument to Lenin. But you walk—self-consciously, because you know these Russians recognize you by your dress as a foreigner—through the mob. They look you in the eye for a moment, and then so weary look away. Their faces have no emotion. Like refugees evacuating the city. They huddle for hours, and hours after that. Patient. If they are anything, the Russians are patient.
© 1970 Mark W. Hopkins
Received in New York on August 25, 1970.
Mark Hopkins is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from The Milwaukee Journal. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Hopkins, The Milwaukee Journal, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
