LOOKING THROUGH GLASNOST:
Aware of Modern Russia
by Gil Parker
Sample Chapter
3—Alone in Wonderland
There is a little girl outside my train compartment gently cooing to her doll. Her language is Russian, but the sound is universal. As we trundle westward in the warm summer sun, the two worlds mesh-inside the train and outside. At the station stops, everyone is in the corridor, looking out or descending from the trains for a walk along the platforms. Many are smoking papirosy, the fat Russian cigarettes.
Somewhere between Khabarovsk and Moscow on the Trans Siberian Railway, I am finally getting my wish, to meet with the ordinary people. In the streams as we pass, teenagers are splashing about, swimming to escape the summer heat. No lifeguards here, no urban pool equipment. It reminds me of my childhood "Ten Foot Hole" and of running naked in the cow pastures to dry off. I lean back in my seat, listening to the clickety-clack of the wheels on rail junctions, their measured rhythm a hypnotic sound to go with the gentle rocking of the railcar. The train is heading west across the seven time zones between Khabarovsk and Moscow. After a month in the Soviet Union, I am slowly progressing toward Moscow and then home to Canada.
It had been the first chance for me to write my diary since leaving Moscow. The flight from Moscow out to Khabarovsk was eight hours long and seven hours "lost to the clock." I arrived at two in the afternoon, Khabarovsk time, in the city that had been designated as sister to my home city, Victoria. There was hot water available in my room at the Intourist Hotel, not always the case in Russia, so I showered and got a taxi to City Hall. With only a couple of days before my return train was due to leave, I needed to use all possible office hours to make contact with Khabarovsk officials. With my limited ability in Russian language, I had difficulty finding anyone to talk to, but in the mayor's office, Mikhail Gribanov could at least understand.
My KOMY contacts had done nothing with the requests I had left them, no telegram to Khabarovsk to advise of my coming, no meetings arranged as requested. Communication systems in Russia were extremely poor, but this appeared to me to be simple negligence. This was not a technological problem; rather it indicated a lack of attention to detail. Often phones were left ringing if the recipient didn't want to talk. Many times I would encounter this impolite custom, one that frustrated attempts to contact people that were probably in the office but unwilling to pick up the phone. Was this a reflection on the economic system, where personal responsibility was often ignored?
Mikhail booked an appointment with the mayor for the next morning and I rode back to the hotel in his old Toyota, listening on the radio to Stas Namin, the Russian rock star. On the main street, Mikhail pointed out the only public, intercity phone.
"There are only eight lines out of the country!" he said. "That's why we use telex for our foreign contacts." Maybe KOMY had tried after all.
Khabarovsk is not a destination that most foreigners would seek out. Though it is the political and transportation hub of the Russian Far East, most in the West never would have heard of it, let alone understood its local importance. Indeed, the Russian Far East is not much known in our world, extending, as it does, from Lake Baikal east to the Bering Strait. Ill-defined, the region generally includes all provinces bordering the Pacific and some on the eastern Arctic. Siberia, on the other hand, is the generic term that westerners think of to define northern Russia. Anywhere cold and desolate! Its notoriety developed with the gulags, primitive work camps where prisoners in Tsarist times were sent to serve their time, usually in appalling conditions. More recently, the inmates were political prisoners from the Stalinist purges that accelerated in the 1930's. Conditions were no better in modern gulags. Yet, the most famous of the gulags were not located in Siberia. They were in the Russian Far East—on Sakhalin Island and in the mines near Magadan.
The gulags were not what attracted me. At that time, I thought that this might be my only trip to the Soviet Union and I should make as much use of the trip as possible. Traveling by the Trans Siberian Railway would be a way to get a sense of the countryside. Visiting our proposed sister city would introduce me to the people. This was not an official visit, the agreement not yet ratified by either government. But I carried a letter from Gretchen Brewin, Mayor of Victoria, and I hoped to help kick-start the relationship.
The meeting with Mayor Panchenko, facilitated by Mikhail and translator, Lena, went well. Well-dressed in suit and tie, his hair slicked back, he welcomed me with a warm smile. He was interested to hear about Victoria and about the reasons for my trip to the Soviet Union. Different from most of my meetings in Moscow, he was very brief in telling me about his city.
"I look forward to our productive partnership," he said through Lena. "Here is a book about our region that is mostly in pictures. But next time we meet I'm sure that you will speak and read Russian!"
Clearly he had a sense of humor. A hard cover book entitled Amur, after the local river, it showed the broad river plateau, the flora and fauna of the basin, and a few of the human intrusions. I was surprised to see the variety of berries and fruit growing wild. I needed to get out into nature, but would not have time on this short visit.
The next morning I met with Deputy Mayor Svetlana Shevchenko. She was vibrant and strong, with a voice to match. Curly auburn hair topped a face of mobile features; her expression could change like quicksilver. She had a ready laugh, audible throughout the building. We immediately became friends. I hoped that she and our mayor, Gretchin Brewin, could eventually meet. She was concerned with the health and social welfare of the citizens and was committed to fostering all aspects of the arts, including relationships abroad. They would have got along tremendously!
The city was impressive. The complete freedom I experienced here was in contrast to the organized tour of the KOMY exchange. I walked for hours, touring the shore of the Amur River and the central part of the city. Established as a city in 1858, the same year as my own home city, it was originally explored in 1651 by Erofei Khabarov, a ruthless explorer who exterminated any native people that stood in his way. Now home to 600,000 people, mainly of Russian and Ukrainian descent, the city had well-defined residential and industrial sectors extending along the east bank of the river. From my hotel window, I could see smoke rising from a coal-fired central heating and electricity plant to the southeast. The whole city depended upon three of such plants for heat in winter as well as electricity and hot water year 'round.
The downtown is built along three parallel hills. I walked down one of the valleys in between, where a planted boulevard interrupted the urban scene. Despite a drought running several months before my visit, the flower plantings in these valleys were beautiful, nestled under deciduous groves.
Karl Marx Square was framed by a red brick medical building on one side and the soaring precast concrete monolith of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the other. (The CPSU was an unusual acronym; most official bodies had an extended contraction of their titles. For example, the city council was called the Gor-is-pol-kom, the city executive political committee.) The square itself was a wide, paved pedestrian area with flowerbeds and benches. I rested on one of them, observing a stone sculptured Lenin in his trademark cap, facing down the street named after him. A newlywed couple had just laid their bouquets at his feet and they were having their picture taken. The symbols were all still in place.
Below the main square, citizens relaxed on little paddle-boats that skittered randomly on a man-made lake surrounded by shoreline play parks for children. Not far away were many ancient wooden houses with filigree trim and shutters, very decrepit but still occupied. They were once beautiful, but I compared them to the modern high-rise apartments and decided that the class structure in the Soviet Union had not been eliminated. The river defined the city's west boundary. Ferries and small ocean-going ships plied the Amur, over a mile wide at this point. Ferries ran from the dock at the end of Ussuri Boulevard, taking people across the river and to their summer gardens or dachas on the islands. Navigable from the delta on the North Pacific, the Amur River formed a maritime transportation route for freight between Khabarovsk and the northern tip of Sakhalin Island.
In the oppressive July heat citizens of all ages sunbathed and swam from a beach on the river. Fishermen monitored static lines with floats bobbing in the current. They socialized while they smoked, adjusting their lines to the variable current. The task looked a mixture of pleasure and necessity, judging by their shabby clothes.
Downstream, I could see the humped, multi-span bridge of the Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in 1916 as the final link in the route from Moscow to Vladivostok. Over a mile and a half long, this railway bridge crossed the main tributary of the Amur with eighteen truss spans, each over 400 feet long. As a structural engineer, I was impressed with this level of technical expertise and construction capability so early in the 20th century.
Back at the hotel, I was packing for my westward train trip when "Kaboom!" a huge explosion outside blew my drying socks off the window ledge. It was the loudest I'd ever experienced and flung me into a panic. I watched the smoke rise to the south and funnel up into a frightening mushroom-shaped cloud.
I ran down the stairs to the lobby. No one there or on the plaza outside seemed to be concerned. I walked back up to my room, wishing that I had a better command of the language. A few minutes later I was still alive with no immediate radiation effects. I decided that the blast was non-nuclear. Later, on the train west, I discovered an English language Moscow News, which reported that eight tons of TNT had exploded in an ammunition dump on the edge of the city. No deaths, but several people had been injured. Apparently, I had not been the only one looking for an air-raid or fallout shelter.
Anatoly was my guide to the train station. As a summer job, he and other students were designated to act as chaperones for Intourist clients. Once I checked in at the station, I noticed that Anatoly was hanging around, apparently wanting to talk.
"Can you tell me swear words in English?" he asked, blushing.
"Well, I've forgotten most of them," I lied, "why would you want that stuff?"
"People are using them all the time and I can't find them in our dictionaries," he admitted. "For example, for gavno, my book says "excrement." That's not what people say."
There's another Russian word, davno, meaning "long ago" that sounds almost the same. So I traded "shit" in Anatoly's vocabulary for gavno in mine, and left it at that.
With my mini-dictionary in hand I was slowly learning Russian. Volodya, who shared my train compartment, was a gold mine truck driver from Khabarovsk who worked a five-day shift in Svobodnyi. He considered his 50 rubles per day to be a good wage. It was! At that time it was equivalent to $100 Canadian.
Volodya pointed out the sentries at each bridge or tunnel we passed. A uniformed, armed border guard stood beside his observation box inside a barbed-wire compound. The wire fences enclosed each abutment or tunnel entry. The eastern part of the Trans Siberian parallels the Chinese border and the guards were a carry-over from the days of political discord between the two communist countries.
"We have a big army," Volodya shrugged. "We have to spend two-years in the army. What else is there for soldiers to do?"
On most bridge sites, an extra span sat beside the track, ready to be slotted into place should the first be damaged by an enemy or by civil disaster like the flooding that we actually saw on a river further west. The huge Trans Siberian Railway, like most Russian bureaucracies, provided for extreme redundancy in equipment and personnel. In Khabarovsk I had seen over 20 diesel engines parked on rail sidings.
Somewhere in the night, Volodya got off at his mine and the next day, 14 year old Valentin joined me in my compartment. His mother and sister were in a different car. Although initially reserved, he was intrigued by my gift book from Khabarovsk City and helped me to understand the photo captions. He taught me words like lec for forest, taiga for the coniferous forest, especially in the Far East.
"What is that factory?" I asked, pointing to a sawmill by the train.
"Pilorama," he replied. The saw was called a peela. It certainly did peel the boards off the logs.
"It works pretty good?"
"Horosho!" said Valya, the Russian word for "good," sounding strangely like "horror show" in English!
Most of the time we wrote down the names of rock bands that we both knew. His list started with "Dip Prple" and it was much longer than mine. The hours, then days, stretched by in a monotony that was, at the same time, relaxing after my intensive official activities. All I had to do was drink tea from the huge samovar at the end of the car and pay the provodnitsa. Like a conductor for the car, she allocated the seats, rented out the bedding, made tea and collected the nominal fees for these. The countryside that flashed by the window reminded me of northern Alberta where I had grown up, hilly wooded slopes strewn with tiger lilies and poppies. The little villages had randomly spaced wooden houses, some with brightly painted fences and shutters. Most had a huge pile of firewood stacked ready for use.
The locals were clearly surviving on their gardens. Near the tracks, even some distance from the villages, there were gardens planted in the right-of-way. But for many kilometers between villages, there was no development of what appeared to be good land. Perhaps the cold climate limited growth, but the gardens seemed to grow well enough in the villages. So, there was room for more agriculture.
In the bigger cities there were many signs of industry. Each city had the same coal-fired heat and electricity plant that looked like it had come from a set of standard plans. Even in the hinterland everything was done on a grand scale. With central planning, all the needs of the Soviet Union for, say, welding torches or bathroom scales, were made in one factory. Theoretically, the economy-to-scale was tremendous. But, the production quotas had nothing to do with demand for the products. Combined with poor distribution and a lack of individual initiative, the system was faltering badly. I could imagine that the workers in the system felt the frustration; there was little they could do to make their labor more useful, to increase their own worth.
The factories and kolkhoz that I had inspected on our Rotary exchange were horizontally integrated, that is, they were very broad in their product lines and formed virtually a self-contained community. Health, recreation, even cultural activities were planned and run by the company. These social functions were considered part of the function of making whatever 'widgets' the factory produced. "Out-sourcing" was still a foreign term. Little did we (or the locals) know, but the economics of all that were about to change, even within a year or two.
The train was it's own self-contained, mobile community. We ate, slept, talked, and ate again, while the train wound its way westward. The dining car on the train was quite satisfactory. Travelers would often bring their own Thermos bottles and some food to share. They were especially generous to me, a foreigner. As the train progressed, day after day, each compartment took on the aroma of its occupants, including the onion and garlic, the kolbasa and slowly rotting fruit. Sometimes, a vendor might meet the train at the larger centers, milling among the platform passengers, selling meat-centered buns or roasted corn-on-the-cob. When the stops were long enough I would walk the length of the train, stopping to try to decipher the meaning of the local statue and its laudatory plaque.
Rather than do the entire trip to Moscow continuously, a trip of seven days, I planned to detrain at Irkutsk and at Novosibirsk, then fly back from there to Moscow in time to make my flight to Canada. As we approached Lake Baikal, the foothills of the Sayan Mountains appeared to the south, with snow coming down to about 200 meters above the lake—in July!
From the Intourist Hotel in Irkutsk, I walked the city center in a steady downpour, pleased to be mistaken for a Russian and asked for directions. In better weather the next day I took a bus up the west arm to the main lake to tour quaint villages with two Swedes, on holiday from their embassy in Moscow. The woodwork on churches and private homes was intricate, part of the culture developed by the many exiles. Among the first outcasts were the Old Believers, sent here (and many other places, too) after they disagreed with the modernization of the main Orthodox Church in the 1600's. Over the centuries, many criminal and political exiles were treated cruelly and lived in horrendous conditions. Later, political revolutionaries from the St. Petersburg political uprisings of 1825 not only formed a cultural elite, but developed a well integrated society here, away from the machinations of the Tsarist Russia in the west.
The eastern parts of Russia owe much of their development to exiles; the banishment of many political opponents of the tsars resulted in present day communities. Later, the communists perfected the technique, sending millions of prisoners to work the mines of the north and to cut timber in Siberia's forests. Exiles had poor food and had to deal with freezing conditions; many never returned. In Stalinist times, their relatives often had no idea whether their husbands, brothers or wives were even alive. The decades-old veil of silence, reinforced by ostracism of any "enemy of the State," prevented relatives from seeking information. All this would soon start to crack; the flood of unbelievable stories would, in two or three years, become part of the collective consciousness.
Lake Baikal appeared to me almost an ocean. The deepest fresh water lake in the world, at 5300 feet deep, it has its own species of seal. Scientists believe that it once connected to the oceans to the north, which now seem impossibly far. I was impressed by the hydrofoil boats that whisked me across the bumpy waters. A standard method of transport in Russia, I had seen them on the Amur River, plying from Khabarovsk to the east coast.
Back on the train, I suffered through a night of the most incredible snoring I had ever experienced, but the guilty party departed before dawn. Happily, in a few hours, Andrei, a climber from Perm, replaced him. Andrei was returning from a holiday in the Altai Mountains south west of Baikal. Stocky, but clearly athletic, he had the quiet confidence of a seasoned mountaineer. Lacking a common language but sharing the same hobby, we dissected his well-worn pack.
"How long is your rope?" I asked, "and what material is it made from?"
Digging through my dictionary, we pieced together the answers. "Fifty meters, manila."
"How do you use these karabiners? What kind of rock anchors?" Andrei explained, by hand gestures, the uses of each. We walked to the dining car together for a plate of herring and toast. We had a wonderful day and a half en route to Novosibirsk where I ended my train journey. Andrei gave me his magnetic compass as a parting gift. I protested.
"It's OK, I work in factory," he grinned. I keep it even now as a souvenir of our fleeting friendship.
I suppose that I caught the cold from the snorer. Reaching my final stop at Novosibirsk I dragged myself to the hotel and to bed. It was bad enough for me to skip a side trip to Akademgorodok (academic little city,) where the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences is located. Instead, I walked through the modern downtown of Novosibirsk, looking into the store windows and finding the same few articles as everywhere in the Russian Far East. On the street, I admired an excellent sculpture of the perfect physiques of a youthful man and woman carved in stone. Their implements, suitable implements for creating the Soviet State, were the hammer and sickle.
The next day, flying with the sun for four hours, I arrived in Moscow about eight in the morning, the same time I left Novosibirsk. The lovely old National Hotel was a satisfactory home-away-from-home. The restaurant was formal, yet comfortable, with white napkins neatly folded into butterfly shapes. In the evening, one could gaze out the window onto the corner of Revolutionary Square. Even in those hesitant days at the beginning of perestroika, the street was lively with entrepreneurs. These beautiful, well-dressed "butterflies" (the Russian euphemism for prostitutes) were being spirited away in Volga cars.
I chose, instead, to take the Metro to Tchaikovsky Hall for a performance by the spectacular Caucasian dance team from Georgia, and to walk home down Gorky Street. No urban violence infested the streets in those years. There also was a dearth of cafes and bars, nowhere to have a drink or a light lunch. You had to go to a hotel, or go home!
Many people were walking, or sitting in the clean, artistically arranged squares. The cinemas were just getting out and the streets were crowded. Indeed, Moscow was a testament to central planning, possible only in a virtual dictatorship and with an unlimited budget. The street layout, radiating from a central core, helped to move people and traffic well. I wondered how it would deal with the crush of personal cars like we have in North American cities, with the noise, pollution and gridlock. Would it be just like any other city?
With two days left before my flight, I spent $40 for a taxi to the Institute of High Temperatures of the Academy of Sciences that goes by the acronym, IVTAN. I met Dr. Oleg Popel who was happy to discuss our respective experiences in solar energy. His department was aware of most of the theories of solar heating, but their only demonstration prototypes were somewhere in Central Asia, probably Uzbekistan. Photoelectric cells were better developed. A Dr. Rubin showed me data about an invention that I later tried to market for him in the West, unsuccessfully. He was a compatible friend for future visits, as was Oleg Popel, who invited me to his home in north Moscow.
So, the next day, I spotted Popel's thin frame and balding head in the crowd at the Metro station and we walked the grassy path to his apartment block. It was my first experience in a Russian home. Oleg and his wife, Anna, had a well-appointed flat with matched furniture in dark rosewood. The meal was delicious, with pyramidal salads of vegetables and eggs, stuck together with mayonnaise. Serving food is a Russian art form. The obligatory toasts were modest. Unfortunately, my Russian was only up to small talk, so that once past the preliminaries, Oleg and I spoke English and he translated a part of the conversation for Anna. Later in the evening as I rose to return to the Metro, Oleg presented me a box of matches.
"I hope you have a use for these," he smiled, "anyway, they may help you with your Russian."
They were long handled wooden matches suitable for lighting a fireplace or barbecue. The matches are long gone, but the lid of the box I still treasure, with the Russian names for an extended family sitting in costume at a wedding table: wife, husband, mothers-in-law (each side with a different name) fathers-in-law, uncles and siblings.
I was soon to realize that you never go to a Russian's home without a gift, usually flowers, even in the middle of winter. With regular and inexpensive air transport between cities, Moscow always had cabbages from Ukraine and flowers from the Central Asian republics. Life for Moscovites in 1990 was pretty good, despite Brezhnev's "stagnation." It was sometimes different in the "provinces."
I was not the only foreigner wandering around Moscow that year. Even without formal liberalization of the Soviet Government, many businessmen had hopes of getting a ground level start in such a large potential market. In the bar of the National Hotel I met a British biochemical company representative. He had just completed a deal to build a technical facility for AIDS research. And we had been told that the USSR didn't have that problem! Perhaps it was embarrassment, but often our Russian acquaintances would lie, or at least cover up, situations that they thought might reflect badly on their country.
Alexander Vladislavlev remembered our Montreal meeting when I telephoned his engineering office. He invited me to lunch at the prestigious Moscow Hotel off Prospect Marx. He was clearly at home among the elite of capital. We sat among the nomenclatura enjoying excellent service and tasty bifshtex [beef steak in gravy.] But, instead of making progress on any international exchanges between our engineers and his huge engineering union, he wanted to discuss hockey.
"Canada has never won a World Cup from the Russians!" he expounded. "They can't beat us. Not even Dynamo, the Moscow team I played for."
I had no idea if he was right. But, one statistic I knew to be correct. "What about the Canada Cup in 1972, I think we got you then."
Vladislavlev was a brash, forceful egotist, a characteristic I was to discover in many Russian males. Since my activities with the Rotary exchange and sister city liaisons had heated up, I let the possibility of engineering exchanges lapse. However, I would see him again in 1991. He would be in the prominent background as the television cameras panned the "Gang of Eight" of the ill-fated coup. They were explaining to the cameras why they had to "save" the Soviet government, appealing for sympathy for their political view that Gorbachev was moving too fast, jeopardizing the stability of the Soviet Union. Why Vladislavlev was there, I could only speculate. I suppose everyone was trying to guess which would be the winning team. We never met again.
Among the crowds on Arbat Street, I mingled with the artists and street musicians and finally chose an artist. Halfway through painting my portrait, he and all the other artists had to stop, hurriedly escape into alcoves to save their pictures and materials while a water truck spray-washed the pavement.
"This happens every day," said my artist, who signed Sergei of Arbat. "Why don't they just let us earn a living?"
The artists were obviously livid with this attempt to prevent them from their "capitalistic" activities. His poor portrait might have resulted from this, or perhaps from a poor subject.
I was taking another picture home to Canada with me. These years later it seems patronizing, even silly. But, my most salient impression was that the people were disarmingly human! I had become imbued with the idea that the USSR was a machine, an entity, something that threatened our society, even our lives. Seldom did we have a chance to put a human face to the image of the Soviet Union. But now I had seen how families interacted, saw lovers walking alone, children playing in their back yards. I had seen clerks, bureaucrats and doctors reading the daily news on the bulletin boards in Moscow, arguing with each other about the meaning of events that the narratives intentionally obscured. While I had not yet penetrated the privacy of homes (except the short visit to Popel's apartment) I had seen their interaction in businesses, government offices and factories.
It was obvious that there was a strong nationalist bent among most citizens. You could see that in the veterans' prideful display of their wartime medals and in the sympathetic statues remembering the fallen. National pride was apparent in the many exhibitions of the achievements of the USSR, at least one in every major city. The wartime memory of survival, plus the State and Party line that the Soviet Union was the biggest and best in everything, created a shell of invincibility. That aura was vulnerable, even then. The people knew; they just didn't talk to foreigners about it.
"The difference between you and me," one man told me, "is that you believe everything your government tells you; we believe nothing."
Soviet citizens had been denied the international contacts that are common in the West. This was apparent in their interactions, their relations with foreigners. Perhaps because of communism, perhaps because of centuries of struggle of the "common man" against an autocratic state, their sense of community and family was stronger. And, as in my own country about forty years earlier, there was a sense of Victorian morality. It included a need to cover up or ignore any situation or person not complying with society's definition of "normal." Their statues tell it; the young men are strong and the girls beautiful. Then, reality tries to duplicate the ideal. Every man has to show how strong he is. Women, at least younger women, dress much more stylishly than in the West. No woman goes to the market with her hair in curlers.
Perhaps because of their history, Russians seem to be dour, but they are patient, long-suffering and tough. Unlike any other country I had visited, in Russia there was never any hint of fear or dislike of foreigners. Secure in their own nationality, they could be open to foreigners. Above all other traits, their acceptance and friendliness was evident. As I boarded my flight home, I wondered how the KOMY team would see Canada; I wondered what Soviets citizens would be thinking about me.
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