Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  The following morning we went for a walk along the backwaters of the Volga. Anna strode ahead, pursued by demons. Only once we had settled on a spit of wooded land surrounded by inlets did she start to relax. “Did you know that the man who introduced us is the KGB officer on our paper?” she said with a hint of a smile: “When I saw him again he asked whether I thought you were an agent.” Whatever suspicions she might once have had were over now, I realized.

  There was a sudden flash of yellow-green wings overhead. “That’s an oriole—there’s a nest up there.” Anna knew her birds; she had read biology at university. The trunks of the willow trees were standing in water and the air was filled with the fluff of seeding poplar trees. Two pink-gray ring doves were flying to and fro across the water, as if harnessed together, cooing their murmuring song. A water rat swam across the inlet, breaking the surface with its nose.

  “I’m sorry I was so unfriendly when you were here last,” she said after a long silence. “I used to be so pro-Western. Then I started meeting people from the West.” She pulled a face. “Mostly journalists from Germany. They treated us as if we were animals in a zoo, rare specimens of malformation! You’re different. At least you’re interested in us as people.” Then, after a long pause, “You know what it’s like to live on the other side of despair.”

  Her words caught me off guard. She was right, of course. But how did she know? After all, she had succeeded in choking off every substantive attempt I had made at conversation. Despair had indeed brought me here to Marx. When Gorbachev opened the Soviet empire in the late 1980s I had become as enthralled as she had by the dream of Russia’s Westernizers, who wanted to see Russia become a European state, with the institutions of liberal democracy—civil society, free speech, democracy, and the rule of law. The Slavophiles, on the other hand, insisted that the Western path of development was not right for Russia; the country’s backwardness protected qualities in her which allowed her a different and spiritually superior way forward. I had been fascinated, as I imagined she had been, by the idea of this piece of countryside having an ongoing, supportive connection with Europe, through the Russian Germans. We both dreamed, as Catherine the Great had once done, that this rural region would become a haven of prosperity and civilized values.

  After this promising flash of intimacy, our friendship developed with painful slowness. I sensed that she was holding herself together with difficulty. She responded badly to questioning and rarely volunteered information about herself. She was like a wild bird, poised to fly off if I got too close. So when we spent time together I took to sitting very still, hoping she might just come to trust me. Often, her large dark eyes were wary, defiant. Only now and then, when she let her guard slip, would her face light up with amusement or curiosity.

  It was Natasha who told me why Anna would not talk to me in the winter. An article she wrote had had a devastating effect in the town of Marx, and she was not going to risk that happening again. A bizarre story, it made it amply clear why that Russian German homeland could never have got off the ground in any circumstances.

  In October 1991, shortly after the Communist Party’s attempted coup, a government spokesman announced that the Russian German homeland would be established by the end of the year. By that time, local opposition had died down. It was even dawning on people that the development might improve their lives.

  Their elected representatives disagreed. They announced a state of emergency in the region and called a grand meeting in Marx. In speech after hysterical speech, the deputies declared that unless the decision were reversed they would close all borders and roads to the province and destroy the bridges over the Volga. The town’s prosecutor, backed by the police chief and the head of the local KGB, warned them that such actions would contravene the criminal statute book. But they were shouted down with cries of “Monster!” “Eunuch!” “Coward!”

  Anna covered the event for a Saratov paper. Her article merely reported the facts, but that was enough: unlike Marx’s paper, The Banner (formerly “of Communism”), it said nothing about the “thousands of demonstrators” because there were none. Indeed, the episode would soon have been forgotten had a Moscow journalist who was visiting his mother-in-law not read Anna’s article. Vastly amused, he rewrote the story under his own byline.

  It appeared on the front page of one of the most sensational national newspapers, Moskovsky Komsomolets: “From now on the deputies of Marx’s town council are as free as birds,” the article began. “No one’s going to take any notice of them. The regional prosecutor, the chief of the KGB, the head of the police and the judges have all declared in black and white: ‘We disassociate ourselves from the actions and proceedings of the present council. We’ve got enough trouble with hooligans already …’ ”

  The people of Marx opened their favorite paper to find that the whole country was laughing at their elected representatives. Instead of joining in, they closed ranks: for all their faults, the deputies were theirs. Solidarity in times of crisis was an ancient reflex. It was born of Russia’s geography and climate, the experience of scratching a living out of this tricky soil, watered by patchy rainfall in a land situated too far north for easy living. The survival of the group was a safer option than individual initiative in these obdurate circumstances.

  Marx’s chiefs of the KGB and police were forced to resign and the judges to apologize. Only the town prosecutor refused to back down and survived in office. He retreated behind his desk, armed with heart pills and the complete works of Chekhov, and took to lobbing missiles at fools who wasted his time.

  That buried the last hope of a homeland for Russia’s Germans. It was not Anna’s fault; but, nevertheless, her words were instrumental.

  I was reminded of a story by Nikolai Leskov, supreme chronicler of provincial life in nineteenth-century Russia. The peasants on a well-managed estate had gone on the rampage, smashing machinery and burning buildings down; so the baffled owner hired someone to find out why. The estate’s English manager could cast no light on what had triggered the revolt. All he had done was build new factories and introduce modern farming techniques, he said. And of course he had never beaten them.

  The investigator also met a wall of silence when he talked to the peasants. No, the Englishman had not beaten them or worked them too hard, they agreed. There was nothing wrong with the new factories either. But in the end, one peasant cracked. He said the Englishman had meted out this terrible punishment to a lazy peasant: rather than beating him, he sat him on a fancy armchair, tied him there by a thread—“Just like a sparrow!”—and forced him to watch his fellow peasants work. That was what set the peasants off.

  Russians will endure almost any hardship, these two stories reminded me. What they cannot endure is the suspicion that they are being laughed at, humiliated. No wonder I had run into a wall of silence when I first arrived here. My questions had picked the scab off a very fresh wound.

  TIED BACK TO BACK

  Natasha and Igor greeted me like an old friend, and insisted that I stay with them. It was a relief to have my own room in their house on Engels Street, since the air of Marx was still thick with mistrust. Walking through it was like heading into a strong wind.

  The couple were in a state of shock. When they arrived in the town the only local newspaper was the ponderous Banner of Communism—which was to sack Anna for supporting the Germans, and kicked her out of her flat. The couple had persuaded the town’s tractor factory to let them start a paper of their own. They called it The Messenger and they wrote and produced it entirely themselves. They wanted to liberate the townspeople with their words, to bring them that sense of freedom and opportunity which fired Russia’s urban population during the glasnost period. And it did become a popular little publication. Every issue sold out. But for reasons they could not explain, the factory had just sacked them and appointed another editor.

  The success of an enterprise binds people together, while failure divides them. Since my last visit, Nata
sha had been corresponding with an old admirer, who had moved to Canada and become a successful businessman. Recently, he had asked if she would join him there. “I’m not in love with the man, of course, but he’s nice enough, and he’s had a soft spot for me for years.”

  “Does Igor know?”

  “No—for goodness’ sake don’t breathe a word! It may all come to nothing. But whatever happens, when that letter arrived, I came back to life.” She had indeed. In the winter she was deathly pale and remote, like a faded photograph. Now her snub-nosed, high-cheekboned face radiated energy, and the eyes under that mane of brown curls sparkled.

  The house, which belonged to her, was on the market. “That means nothing though—everyone in Marx is trying to get out. But who’d buy a house here now?” She had told Igor she wanted a divorce. “We had this terrible fight. He attacked me with a kitchen knife. It was scary—but funny, too. Yes, really! After that I realized I’d got to get out fast. I just want to start my life all over again!” When the house was sold, she would return to Siberia. Her father would help her get started: “I won’t need much. I’ve done with possessions. Antiques, pictures, china—I’ve had it all. Even the junk we’ve now got weighs me down. I just want to be free! The years I’ve spent in Marx have taken their toll on me, I know that. But I was given a lot. I’ve still got enough of what it takes to begin again. I can’t wait to travel and see the world!”

  In the meantime, Natasha was spending most of her time out of the house. She left in the morning and did not return until supper time, though she had no work but the odd English lesson. Where she went she did not say. “Igor’s become impossible. I can’t bear to be with him. He won’t take a job, and he’s quarreled with all our friends.” But in the evening, the three of us would sit long over supper, my company seeming to act as some sort of buffer between them.

  As for Igor, he paced up and down the house like a caged animal, rolling his dark eyes, releasing his frustration in scathing diatribes against the backward dolts of Marx. With his dark southern features and distinctive mustache trimmed around his mouth he might indeed have been a zoo animal, so exotic did he look in that small town. Natasha accused him of being lazy and spoiled, and the accusation stung. Yes, he did turn down a job editing a newsletter for the mayor: “But not because I’m lazy—I just won’t work for fools! I’d be only too happy to work, if there were anything decent on offer. What I won’t do is to put up with the old Soviet way of working—and I don’t see a new one emerging. Look around you. You’ll see nothing but people who’ve been broken by the system—I was, too. When I came out of the army I worked at this place where they were developing something like the photocopier. After a while, I started coughing blood. I asked for ventilation. They did nothing. I asked nicely. I explained, I pleaded. Useless. In the end I just stopped working. They finally sacked me for negligence!” He sighed: “In the life of everyone in this country you’ll find some such story.”

  In fact, Igor was not lazy, just in despair. He really did love nothing better than work. His ex-wife, who had set up a dressmaking business in Moscow, had commissioned him (in exchange for a ton of sweets, a currency more reliable than rubles) to devise a machine for making shoulder pads. He was putting the finishing touches to his invention. Whenever he came back from working on it he would be in a sweet mood.

  Leafing through back issues of The Messenger, I understood why Natasha and Igor lost the editorship. To start with it was lively and intelligent, a breath of fresh air after the thudding provincialism of The Banner (of Communism). But gradually, Natasha and Igor’s despair at the town’s Luddite opposition to change spilled onto the pages.

  The articles were unsigned, but there was no mistaking their voices. Igor was the thunderer: “Don’t be fools! If you haven’t got the strength to meet the challenge of this new age yourself, don’t make it worse for others than it already is. Don’t betray those who saved Russia from the communist nightmare! Have a little patience, help each other with a word, a crust, a smile. And particularly the children—they will never forgive your treachery, your greed, your ignorance …”

  Natasha’s style was more literary: “ ‘When will he come, Russia’s liberator?’ we complain. We can’t make up our minds to take that step ourselves. Hello, it’s me! I’m a free person in a free Russia! I’m not a worker, I’m an individual, and I hate lies and slavery!” she wrote on the occasion of Russia’s newly established Day of Independence. “I believe that sometime this day really will become a national holiday. But before that can happen, each one of us must ‘squeeze the slave out of ourselves, drop by drop’ as Chekhov advised us.”

  • • •

  As I sat there, reading their articles, I heard music. A funeral was passing in the street below. A saxophonist and two trumpeters led the way, playing wildly out of tune. Four men carried the bandaged body in an open coffin. A crowd followed, then a procession of cars and buses. The man looked quite young. He had lived a few doors down, said Igor. He fell ill after spraying his carrots. “It’ll pass. Just drink lots of milk!” the doctor said. Next day he was dead.

  Death was lurking in any can or bottle on sale now. Half the products were fakes, but which half? Mostly, the labels were convincing enough. The day before, I went out to buy a feast for Natasha and Igor: a fresh fish, a good Spanish wine, cheese, and a bottle of French mayonnaise. The “wine” turned out to be raw alcohol, apple juice, water with a touch of something petrochemical. The “mayonnaise” was furniture polish with added vinegar.

  “Obmanul cheloveke” (“I had one over on him”), the very phrase expressed satisfaction at having deceived someone. People who lost their jobs were making money by mixing these poisonous potions for their neighbors. Gone were the controls of a developed society. If you bought rotten goods, there was no redress. Nor, for the carrot sprayer’s widow, would there be compensation. Here, it was “fate.” It was not Germans, or even Kuznetsov, people feared now. It was each other.

  Igor and Natasha’s rows would flare up out of nowhere. One day, Natasha and I were picking strawberries in a patch of ground behind their house. The plants were a relic of the couple’s early days in Marx, when they thought the town was going to be their permanent home. “But it’s no good—this place, it gets to you,” Natasha commented, surveying the muddle of weeds and long grass.

  Natasha and I were talking about a friend of theirs called Misha when Igor joined us. He was an ex-engineer turned trader whom I had just met. He would not survive as a businessman, Natasha was saying; he was too innocent. “It’s good to meet someone who’s so confident in the future,” I was saying. “He’s so open.”

  “Misha’s not open,” Igor interrupted. “I’m the one who’s open. If people don’t like it they’re just stupid.” Misha had tried bringing Igor into his business, but Igor had quarreled with everyone.

  “They’re not stupid,” retorted Natasha. “You just can’t get on with them.”

  “I can’t lie, even if everyone else does. You excuse everyone else’s lies, but not my Truth.” They were off.

  “People lie for lots of reasons: not to cause pain; because they don’t want to disappoint someone.”

  “Look, I’m no fool. If a girl says some bloke likes her I’m not going to contradict her. But lies are different. You’ve got to understand,” he went on, turning to me, “how lies permeated every corner of our working lives. It became so much part of us that we have no idea how to live without lying at every step. That’s why I won’t work with these fools! I’ll give you an example: Ivan’s got thirty hectares of land and the state says he can produce x on it. In order to produce that he’ll have to work not just the thirty, but another fifteen he’s kept hidden from the state. If that’s how he’s worked all his life, how d’you expect him to start living without lies? The clever man, who’s praised and rewarded—oh you’re so wonderful, here’s a medal—is the one who’d got his hands on those extra hectares. Then I come along with what I’ve produced on my
thirty hectares, and I’m sacked for living like an honest man! So here we are, heads fogged with lies and people don’t like it when I tell the truth!”

  “See what I mean?” Natasha said to me, before turning to Igor: “Have you finished?”

  “What do you expect me to do, smile and say ‘You’re right’? Every day the wall between me and the rest of the world gets thicker. I can smile and lie and say they’re right when they’re not, and the wall gets a teeny bit thinner. I can lick arse and it’ll get even thinner. Or I can break my bones and it’ll disappear entirely. What should I do? You tell me!”

  “You’re insufferable,” Natasha sobbed, running into the house. Igor stood shrugging his shoulders, as if to say, “What’s with the woman now?”

  Later, he told me a story he came across when editing The Messenger. During one of the waves of mass arrests in the 1930s, a young Volga German couple from Marx who were very much in love were locked for a month in a basement on some phantom charge. They were tied together, back to back. “And guess what became of their great love? When they were freed they ran off in opposite directions and never clapped eyes on one another again.” He paused. “That’s what Marx is doing to Natasha and me.”

  TURNING RUSSIA AROUND

  It was early evening in Marx. The breeze off the fields smelled sweet and the sky over the steppes was vast. Under the poplars of Lenin Alley groups of young men in nylon track suits, trousers hitched tight to display their manhood, were flirting with the miniskirted, bubblegum-popping girls. It was a welcome sight: their youth carried its own sort of promise.

  Natasha and I were invited to supper with Misha and his wife, Tatiana. We walked past broken benches, hacked-down trees, abandoned building sites, and row on row of jerry-built, battered residential blocks. The crippled, gifted art teacher I had just met walked this way to work every day: “I read all the way there and back without lifting my eyes from the book,” he confided. “It’s the only way I can survive the ugliness.” Marx was affecting me like that, too.