Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  “Now we can’t get out. Who’d buy a house in Marx now? We can’t even get work. Igor’s a brilliant engineer, and he knows all about computers, but he’s been out of work for months. I’m a journalist, I’ve got a degree in mathematics and I speak English, but I can’t even get a job teaching!”

  “How do you manage?”

  “I’ve got a few private pupils. Mostly, we just sell things. We had all these pictures, crystal, furniture …” Now the room was bare, except for beds, a table, some chairs, and books.

  While Natasha was talking, a man appeared in the doorway and stood looking at me disapprovingly. He was strikingly handsome, with olive skin and a trim mustache that curved down each side of his mouth as far as his chin. His black eyes, underscored with dark rings, were sad. “Ah, Igor.”

  “So why can’t you get a job?” I asked him.

  “Because I don’t belong,” he replied. “It’s a town of serfs! There are no educated people here—we’ve only got each other.” He fixed Natasha with his soulful eyes.

  “I used to be sorry for them,” he went on. “Then I realized you can’t do that—you’ve got to judge them. I’ll give you an example,” he said, walking to the sink and turning the tap. “Take this tap—quite simple, you might think. It turns on. It turns off. Well, our neighbors don’t have running water.” I murmured something sympathetic. “What was that? Did I hear you say ‘poor things’?” Igor rolled his eyes. “They could have had it long ago—free of charge. But guess what?” He was in a lather now. “No, you couldn’t guess, you come from the West. Those ‘poor things’ of yours would rather live like that. Yes! The idea of change, any kind of change, terrifies them. They revel in their backwardness—in the Caucasus, where I come from, a man will at least pretend to be brave. In Siberia—Natasha’s from Siberia—they’ve got a different kind of courage. But not in Marx! I tell you—you’ve come to the real Russia here!”

  Natasha was watching with amusement. Igor continued: “I can’t tell you how lonely it is. And ugly! You’ll damage your eyes! Listen—when they needed bricklayers to build the new Catholic church they had to go to Saratov—no one here could remember how to lay bricks straight!”

  On it rolled, Igor’s litany of contempt and self-pity, acted out with extravagantly theatrical gestures. He pulled out a bottle. “In the Caucasus we wouldn’t call this drink. But you can’t be too careful nowadays. It’s the only stuff you can trust. The rest’s all doctored.” The bottle, 96 percent proof, came, improbably, from France. The couple proceeded to teach me how to drink raw alcohol, using fruit juice as a chaser.

  A few glasses later, Igor pulled his log closer to the table and looked me in the face. “Come on, you can tell us,” he said, cajoling. “Why have you come?” I explained, not for the first time.

  “Don’t give me that malarkey.” He was hectoring now. “Who sent you?”

  “What do you mean? No one!”

  “Who did you say you were working for?”

  “I don’t work for anyone.”

  Natasha sat back, relishing the spectacle of her husband baiting me. He pressed on.

  “Who paid you to come?”

  “It’s not quite like that. You see I’m a—”

  “Come off it,” he interrupted, sarcasm boiling over. “There you are—sitting in your nice London house with your charming children and your loving husband. And you expect us to believe that one fine day you decide to come and see how people live in the town of Marx! I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Ah, I get it!” Igor interrupted. “You’re here for a bit of rough! You’ll go home and dine out on horror stories of your brave trip to the heart of barbaric Russia.”

  “I came because I want to understand.”

  “Understand? The woman wants to understand!” Igor bellowed, rolling his dusky eyes. “When has the West ever wanted to understand Russia?”

  “I can’t answer for the West.”

  “You don’t seem able to answer for yourself either.”

  “And you don’t seem able to listen.”

  It was almost dawn and I was fed up with being bullied. I lost my temper. “Look, I may be a fool for trying to write a book about Russia right now. I’m clearly a fool to have come here. But what about you? I can leave—you’re stuck. Anyway, who’d send a spy to a dump like this?” There was a long silence. Then Igor fell about laughing and Natasha threw her arms around my neck and started kissing me: “Honey, honey, look to me—I am waiting for you so long,” she slurred, her impeccable English smashed by drink. “You’re a wunafull, wunafull …” Horrified, I disentangled myself and locked myself in the front room, where Natasha had set up a camp bed.

  I lay awake, stung by Igor’s accusation that I was either a spy or a sensation tourist. How different it was when I set out on my travels in the last years of Soviet power, researching Epics of Everyday Life. Then, I wanted to find out how ordinary people were handling the revelation that they had been lied to all their lives. Often, I was the first Westerner they had met. It was people’s resilience that struck me then. Where was that resilience now?

  I woke early next morning to the sound of a howling cat. I had slept badly, mocked by my naivete at thinking that any island of prosperity could rise up here, out of this drowned land. During the night I remembered something else, too. A Moscow journalist friend had come to Marx ten years ago to research an article about irrigation. He had not been welcome either. “In the evening I was eating in a restaurant when something hit me on the head,” he told me. “I took no notice. Wham! It happened again. I looked around. No one there. Wham! And again. Three men at the far table were throwing their bones at me.

  ‘Is that what you usually do with your bones?’ I asked them.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘What business is that of yours?’

  ‘Who are you?’ ”

  Jostling, threatening, they followed him out of the restaurant. He used the only weapon he had—the names of the local Party bosses he was going to see. “Hey, brother, why didn’t you say so before? We’ll see you back to the hotel, make sure you’re all right.” Watch it, my friend concluded: they don’t like strangers in the town of Marx. I had laughed at my friend’s story, thinking how different it would be now. Yes, it was: it was worse.

  The howling cat was sounding desperate. I unlocked the door to find her scrawny and heavily pregnant, clearly about to give birth. After failing to rouse Natasha and Igor, I wrapped myself in a blanket and watched over her as she went into labor. On the wall hung a photograph of Natasha wearing a striped jacket and a cap made of newspaper on which was written the word MARXLAG. A strand of barbed wire ran across the picture.

  By the time Natasha and Igor woke up the feline drama was over. The cat’s convulsions had produced blood and afterbirth, but no kittens. Like the Volga German homeland, it was a false pregnancy.

  THE RED CARDINAL

  Anna did warn me that no one in Marx would ever talk to me about the political tornado which had hit the town. She was right. But back in Moscow I started researching. The story I pieced together captured in miniature the tragedy of Russia in the twentieth century.

  When Soviet communism set out to liberate man from the tyranny of nature, the countryside around Marx was accorded a highly significant role. The land, which was fertile, though inclined to drought, was earmarked to become the market garden for the whole empire. Once the Volga was dammed and the land irrigated, the town’s hinterland would become a “zone of guaranteed harvest.” When agronomists objected that the soil was not suitable for irrigation they were labeled bourgeois saboteurs and dispatched to the camps.

  The task of “novelizing” the First Five-Year Plan for the region was given to Boris Pilnyak, who went to that lycée in Marx. Pilnyak was deeply opposed to the harnessing of literature to political ends. In 1929 he had himself been denounced as a bourgeois saboteur in a hysterical press campaign. This project was his chance
to redeem himself. Stalin also had a score to settle with Pilnyak, as the writer had published a story in 1926 that more or less openly accused him of having engineered the death of one of his rivals, Mikhail Frunze. The Great Joker assigned him Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police, as his literary mentor. The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, published two years later, tells the story of the heroic workers who foil a scheme by capitalist saboteurs to blow up the dam they are building. But this creaking tract won Pilnyak only a few more years. He was arrested in 1937, accused with gallows humor of wanting to kill his literary adviser, Yezhov.

  The plan to create that “zone of guaranteed harvest” also ran into trouble. The new dams prevented the river’s low east bank from flooding the steppe in spring, moistening the soil for the growing season. So by the late 1950s, the region was suffering from drought. Cattle were dying, and at one point the population even had to be evacuated.

  Manpower and resources were drafted in to solve the problem. Teams worked night and day, in nonstop shifts, to build the Saratov canal. For a while it looked as if these efforts had worked. Grain harvests rose by three or four times on the irrigated land, and the result was held up as a model for Soviet agriculture. Yet they were in such a hurry that they did not line the canals and ditches with cement. So they leaked. The water table started rising, bringing salt to the surface and souring the earth, just as the agronomist had warned.

  The Party bosses ignored the problem. The more they irrigated, the more subsidy they could wring out of the state. Gradually, to keep the subsidies rolling in, the whole project moved from fact into fiction: directors of state farms were pressured to sign papers stating that work was complete which had barely begun. Those who agreed were promoted, those who refused found their careers blocked. Of all the Soviet money-making scams, irrigation was the most lucrative, since subsidies were paid not on the basis of harvest yields but on the amount of water poured onto the fields.

  Yes, really, the more water they poured on the fields, the more subsidy they were paid. By the end of Soviet power, this approach left almost half the region’s finest farming land salinated and unfit for agriculture. No wonder those in power did not want a German homeland. New money from Germany would have meant new people, asking awkward questions.

  The man who ran this operation for twenty years was Ivan Petrovich Kuznetsov. Marx was his power base. He commanded a workforce of some 30,000, and won a medal as a Hero of the Soviet Union. A boss in the old Stalinist mode, he worked from early morning until late into the night, employing staff in two shifts—two secretaries, two chauffeurs, and the rest. Day and night people waited outside his office: the bosses of housing trusts, factories, state farms; Party secretaries, and colonels whose battalions were assigned to construction. It was Kuznetsov who decided which roads and housing blocks would be built, and who was assigned housing.

  They called him the Red Cardinal, King of the Shadow Economy, and his connections reached right up to the Politburo. Detailed information about him was hard to find: even at the height of glasnost those who knew kept their mouths shut. But gossip suggested the scale on which he worked: in 1988 the Gorky car factory received an order from Saratov for 150 cars to renew the town’s pool of taxis. Only seventy arrived. A similar fate befell a planeload of humanitarian aid from Germany.

  When President Yeltsin visited Saratov after the fall of communism, he announced publicly that it was time to depose Kuznetsov. The irrigation boss responded in venerable Soviet tradition, by retiring to hospital with a “heart condition,” and demoting himself to deputy head of irrigation.

  The Red Cardinal was no longer the boss. But was his power broken?

  A-LITTLE-BIT-ME

  Back in London, a battered envelope dropped through my door one spring morning. It was from Anna and it had taken two months to arrive. It was remarkable that it had done so at all. Salaries of Russian postal workers were well below subsistence level; letters in and out of the country were being routinely dumped, or opened in the hope of finding money.

  It arrived just after President Yeltsin had surprised everyone by winning support for his reform program in a referendum. He staged it in order to leapfrog parliamentary opposition to his reforms. Some 58 percent of the voters backed Yeltsin personally, while 53 percent backed his economic program.

  A sheaf of poems fell out of the envelope: “I don’t know what waits for us tomorrow,” she wrote in eloquent, fractured English. “It might be dictatorship, a coup, chaos or civil war. I have not lost my hope, of course, but impartial analysis of our Russian atmosphere shows we must be ready for all. So I want to ask you a favor. If something will happen with me, all my poems will perish with me together. I would not want that to happen. My poems are my trace, my sign on this Earth.

  “I often recollect words of my friend, a psychologist. When she saw the photo of you and me she said that we have something in common in our eyes. And you remember, we were born on the same day.

  “I think that you are …” She broke into Russia: “a-little-bit-me. A-little-bit-me lives far away, in safety in England, in a fairy-tale world of elves and gnomes. And that makes me feel good, at peace.”

  After reading this enchanting letter I sat there, stunned. Was this the same person who had frozen me out throughout that interminable evening? I was ashamed of myself. Anna must have been in deep trouble. How easily I had dismissed the possibility, misread the situation, behaved like a cartoon Westerner, unable to imagine that in provincial Russia today people could still be listening for that knock on the door.

  From other people in Marx, I had learned more about Anna after we parted. When things got ugly for the town’s small Russian German minority, she was one of the few Russians who publicly rushed to their defense. As a result, she lost her job on the local paper, and was turned out of her flat. The townspeople turned against her, too: Marx was full of stupid rumors to the effect that she had a Russian German lover, that she gave birth to an illegitimate child.

  I had to know if she was all right. There was no way I could ring her, as she had no phone. I tried reaching Natasha and Igor. After the usual delays, the Russian operator said in that familiar, Soviet categorical tone: “There’s no such place as Marx.” How good it would be to be able to write the place off as a chimera, a nasty, neurasthenic state of mind, but it was real.

  “I’ve been there!”

  “There is no such town as Marx,” repeated the robotic voice. “But I can put you through to Engels instead.”

  So there it was, the partnership between Marx and Engels, still indissoluble, reincarnated in bricks and mortar. Later, I learned why Marx was not on the phone. The town’s telephone system was still being switched manually. The operators had been offered automation, but fearing for their jobs, they refused.

  I scanned Anna’s poems for clues as to the source of her trouble. I found none. But I recognized the voice of a real poet. One of them (translated here by me) perfectly captured the desolation I felt when I arrived in that provincial town:

  It was a battered bus that brought me

  to the country, as if to prepare me for what I would find.

  It smelled thickly of burned out stars

  and the dampness of the starry waste.

  Lumps of dark redbrick

  lay around like meteorites.

  The red-eyed cur, abandoned since spring

  (its owner was Rita-the-Slain),

  Loomed everywhere, as if it had

  innumerable bodies which, though wasted,

  were still sinister. It was no astronaut, but man

  that dared to live among the groves

  of clay-defying elms, which grow by the shaggy river

  and reach toward the hills.

  Brave is the man who lives

  so ill-defended from himself at such a time!

  Resolute he strides into the nothingness

  carrying his irreparable hump, the earth,

  having pronounced an irrevocable �
�yes”

  to the crimson-gray, unpeoplable Universe.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF DESPAIR

  “I think that you are a-little-bit-me.” With these words Anna reeled me back to Marx like a fish on a line. As I traveled down there on the train, I imagined what the town was going to look like in summer. It might have charms I could not have guessed at.

  But no, Marx turned out to be even uglier without its cosmetic blanket of snow. The rows of decrepit residential blocks, the concrete high-rises and rusting sheds lacked any pastoral appeal. There were no redeeming features in the abandoned building sites, broken benches, and rutted, puddled streets where the infrequent traffic showered muddy water over passersby, but where, if you turned on a tap, there was no clean water to be had for whole days on end.

  Anna’s boyish face was brown and her tonsured hair gleamed. But when I moved to embrace her she shied away. When she heard how anxious her letter had made me she looked horrified. “Forget it—it was just a little winter gloom.”

  There was more to it than that, though. Because of her brave stand on the Volga German issue, Natasha explained, Anna was invited to Moscow in the spring for a trial period working on Izvestia, Russia’s oldest liberal newspaper. It was the first move toward offering her a job. When no offer was forthcoming, she fell into a depression: her chance of escaping the provinces was over. “You can’t blame them,” Natasha commented. “She’s a good journalist, but she can’t play the game—they’ll have written her off as hopelessly provincial.”

  When I went to stay with Anna the first things that caught my eye in her cramped hallway were two photographs on her wall. One was of me, looking almost as wary as Anna. The other was of Elena Kamburova, the singer who had befriended me on Benya’s cruise. Since my last visit, she had given a concert in Saratov, and Anna and Igor (who had taken the picture for the paper) had both fallen under her spell. During a further evening of interminable silences, I clung to these gossamer connections.