Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  I would like to have had more confidence that an incumbent President Obama would steer clear of stirring up trouble there. But the worse the US domestic economy became, the more attractive it might seem to keep pressing on with the crazy policy of expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, to include Ukraine and Georgia.

  Natasha and Igor had lived their private lives rashly. But I knew my friends well enough to be confident that they would do whatever they could to help Crimea’s Russians resist becoming political pawns. At least there was no history of ethnic tension to exploit between Ukrainians and Russians, as there had been in South Ossetia. The only group in Crimea with a declared interest in separatism were the increasingly politically organized Crimean Tatars, men such as Igor’s friend Evdan. For them, the memory of Stalin’s wholesale deportation in 1944 would never fade. In any conflict, they would always side with Ukraine.

  Tatiana had tried ringing Natasha’s sister in Novosibirsk. When she asked for news of Natasha, her sister slammed the phone down. “I’m not surprised,” Tatiana sighed. “In Marx I remember watching Natasha throw away a pile of unopened letters. ‘I don’t know how to manage long-distance friendships,’ she said when I asked her why. ‘They’re just an imitation of friendship.’ ” Knowing how wounded Tatiana had been by the way Natasha broke off contact when she left Saratov, I said quickly: “I don’t know what it is about Natasha. But there’s something inevitable about the way she’s ended up in the eye of the political storm yet again, don’t you think?”

  • • •

  When the car rumbled over the old bridge across the Volga, I was looking out for Pilnyak’s island. Pilnyak (né Wogau) was the popular “bourgeois” writer from Marx whom Stalin hounded to death for having hinted that the Great Leader ordered the elimination of his rival, Frunze. There the island was, stretched out below, its two long white sandy beaches looking like a pair of tights laid out to dry. A long time ago, Pilnyak tells us, a barge had sunk there. Over the years sand had built up around it, until finally it surfaced in that island.

  It was an image that mattered to Pilnyak. He returns to it again and again, even in the atrocious Socialist Realist novel Stalin forced out of him in a final act of creative humiliation. What did it mean to him, I wondered? Was he protesting against the Soviet faith that you can refashion history, and human nature? Was he objecting that while the river flowed on, the sunken barge remained? It was a more ambiguous image than that, though. For the island kept changing shape.

  This autumn, Putin had been launching an ambitious bid to do just that, to impose a new shape on Russian history. He had given his enthusiastic endorsement to a new standard history textbook for secondary schools. Western commentators construed it as an attempt to repeal the revelations of the glasnost years and return to the pre-Gorbachev version of Soviet history. So I tracked the book down in a Saratov bookshop when I arrived and spent a long time huddled on a stool, leafing through it.

  It certainly contained a fulsome litany of Soviet achievements, imperial, economic, and technological. But it was not just a return to the old Soviet view. It was altogether more ambitious, a considered attempt to make the notion of “sovereign democracy” mean something.

  Teachers were being offered ways of presenting Russia as having a special destiny, one which could not, should not, be measured by any Western yardstick. Yes, Russia’s Eurasianists had finally come in from the cold. Nineteenth-century Orthodox autocracy and Stalin’s imperial vision were finally reconciled in a single narrative whose underlying theme was Russian exceptionalism.

  In the Soviet period there had indeed been bouts of repression and execution, the revisionist argument went. But the rationale for them needed to be understood. There had been famines, too, there was no denying it. But the numbers who died had been vastly exaggerated (one to two million perhaps, not the seven to ten million the detractors claimed). Stalin, “the most successful leader of the USSR,” had been acting entirely rationally. How else could an industrial state have been forged from a peasant society in such a short time? How else could the fascist enemy have been conquered? Yes, Stalin did deport whole ethnic groups, “in order to keep the monolithic character of the system.” But Russia emerged victorious. Russia’s greatness had been realized.

  As we left behind the aching, bloodstained Volga countryside and dropped Nadya and her friend at school I was wondering what these bright twelve-year-olds were going to make of this rebranding of their country.

  Tatiana dropped me off at the handsome Radishchev Museum. Framed by great plane trees, it stood on its own in the heart of the city. It had been closed for years, this fine, neoclassical building, one of the first purpose-built provincial museums in Russia. “For repairs,” they said. People wearily assumed it had been grabbed by some powerful organization. But when I arrived this time, I heard it had been reopened.

  I spent the morning treading the magnificent wrought-iron staircase, marveling at the renovation, checking in with my favorite paintings. I had started coming here sixteen years ago, when Benya’s boat brought me to this old closed city. Inflation was taking off and the privileged workforce of those armaments factories were in a rage at their sudden impoverishment. This was where I would take refuge when I could no longer bear the hostility my foreign accent had provoked.

  Now hard times were setting in again. Long before world markets started crashing, there were already fears of an impending catastrophe if Russia’s government did not use oil revenues to improve people’s lives. All over the world, the myth of the free market had gone to the heads of elites, but nowhere more than here. The price of oil was tumbling. Judging by the newspaper reports, xenophobia was on the rise: attacks on anyone non-Slav in appearance had been on the increase for some time. If the regime continued to stoke up anti-Western feeling a time might come when my accent again provoked hostility.

  I was hunting for my favorite painting, by the remarkable Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Born in the Saratov countryside, son of a cobbler, he bicycled all the way from Leningrad to Paris, and from there to Italy to study the art of western Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance. Where was it? There it was, hanging high up in a corner. Two girls were getting dressed after bathing in the Volga. Their outstretched arms filled the canvas. The painting was a feast of lemon yellow, fuchsia, scarlet, and Giotto blue. Petrov-Vodkin had brought together the legacy of medieval Russian iconography with that of Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance. The composition was modern, yet ancient, an everyday image suffused with intimations of transcendence.

  One of the girls looked like Tatiana when we first met, a clear-browed beauty with pale skin, pale hair, and wide gray eyes. Then, she was still a shy provincial girl, under the influence of the sophisticated Natasha. Now, she had taken her place in the army of Russia’s strong women, as the point of first and last resort for the old and the young, the single and the frail, the idealists and the honest. All of these stood far more frighteningly exposed in Russia than in the West. For them, family and friendship were the only safety nets.

  When things fell apart, it would be Tatiana who absorbed the anger and fear, kept her judgments to herself and supported those around her, as Lyuba had done, as women down the centuries had done in this unyielding northern landscape.

  Matushka moya, mother of them all. The clarity with which Tatiana understood all that went on around her was the burden she had to carry. After our banya, when we were sitting in the kitchen, she had talked, in her balanced way, about the Georgia war and the difficulties of living in this postideological age. “I don’t believe in anything they tell us in the mass media. I know it’s all propaganda.

  “Twenty years ago it was different. We did all believe in communism—we accepted it, like the weather. You don’t demonstrate against the rain. But I remember as a child this feeling of shame, listening to those leaden speeches they used to make in the name of the Party. I knew it was false—children can tell these things. Not that I was especially sensitive. I’ve t
alked about this with other people of my generation—they all had the same feeling, a sort of inner chill.”

  However much they pushed Putin’s new history textbook in the schools, I reflected, they were not going to be able to shape the minds of Tatiana’s children in the old Soviet way. Some of the gains of the last twenty years could not be undone. Russians would remain free to talk, to travel the world and use the Internet. A return to monolithic control over information was a technological impossibility.

  FESTIVAL OF DEAD LEAVES

  “Of course I despise my Fatherland from head to foot, but I mind when a foreigner shares my feelings.”

  ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

  I woke up during the night, fretting about Anna. We were back at Tatiana’s flat in Saratov. But Anna had not asked me to stay. She had not come over. She had not even rung. I was accustomed to Anna’s strangeness. I had learned not take it personally. This was different, though. She had never avoided me before. That hurt.

  When I first arrived on this trip, she had been there to greet me at Saratov station. Her lean, tanned face lit up by a lopsided smile, she dodged my embrace as usual. She returned with us to Tatiana’s flat, and stayed for a meal. It was long enough for me to register the change in her.

  Anna had somehow grown into her skin, become womanly, attractive. There was a new animation about her. She had let her hair grow for the first time, and wore a striking plaid jacket and trousers. Strong colors suited her. I wondered fleetingly whether she was in love. She slipped away after the meal and I was longing to see more of her.

  There had been times back in England when I was trying to write about Anna that I was so maddened by her elusiveness I almost fancied she didn’t exist, that she was merely the part of myself that I left behind in Russia when, with regret, with relief, I returned to the daylight world of the West. Now, when she was looking so vibrant, when she was only half a mile away, she had dropped out of sight.

  Being with Anna had never been easy. Silences had been the other, the constant companion of our friendship. But since she had written me that wonderful letter after we met I had never doubted the connection between us; the fact, as she put it, that I was a-little-bit-her. Was that no longer true?

  I remembered those early days, when we were both looking for answers to the same question: what does it mean to be Russian, now that communism has gone? We shared the same hopes for Russia, too. Her enthusiasm for the ideals of liberal democracy was untarnished. And I, her friend from the West, was the living representative of her hopes. Even then there were good reasons why she needed to retreat into silence, I reflected. Hers was a country with volatile politics and a venerable tradition of punishing people for their opinions. Before we ever met she had lost her job and her flat simply for having come out in support of Marx’s Russian German community.

  Then there had been the time when a Moscow journalist picked up on her account of a hysterical attempt by Marx’s leaders to provoke rebellion against the region becoming a Russian German homeland. So crushed was the community by the mocking article he wrote in a popular paper that when I arrived in Marx shortly afterward, no one would talk to me. Anna had been the agent of their humiliation, albeit unwittingly. Muscovites were dangerous enough, foreigners far more so.

  The reasons for Anna’s silences had changed over the years. Though I was often left struggling to grasp what lay behind them, I never doubted that she was challenging me to try to understand. After Putin came to power, after Russia’s relationship with the West became strained, there had been a tacit agreement between us that I would not expose her to unnecessary difficulties by asking her directly about politics.

  Increasingly she had turned her energies inward and started exploring her spiritual world. But even then she wanted me to bear witness to her life. Or so I thought. Had I been kidding myself? The thought was unbearable.

  Perhaps the problem was connected with the Orthodox Church? I had watched her wavering between the two branches of Christianity, Western and Eastern. I saw how she struggled to resist the comfortable lure of Catholicism. She battled to breach the outer defenses of Russia’s Church, the obscure language of its liturgy, the way it made no effort to help the uninitiated. That was a journey where I could follow her only so far. But she had clearly broken through long ago, found her way to something that nourished her. She had discovered a Russia she could love. I was even a little envious.

  The problem, if there was one, was that the relationship between Church and State in Russia has always been so close. In its idealized form it amounted to a quasi-mystical “symphonia” between them. “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationhood,” ran the old tsarist rallying cry. When Putin embraced the notion of sovereign democracy, the regime was setting itself up as the legitimate inheritor of that autocratic tradition.

  I noticed with alarm how other formerly liberal friends, now pious believers, had started investing Putin with the reverence traditionally accorded to the tsars. Had the burst of popular patriotism prompted by the war with Georgia affected Anna in the same way? Had she felt challenged to go the full stretch, to embrace the notion that if she loved her country, she must support the values and actions of its rulers?

  The thought was so alarming that I was now wide awake. Outside in the street, a cat fight had started. I switched on the light. So that was it, was it? Anna had thrown in her lot with sovereign democracy. She could not cope with our friendship any more. All this time, I had never really been more than a function of her idea of the West. Or was it just that the distance between Russia and the West had grown too great? Either way, the connection between us had snapped.

  The rubbish vans came and went, roaring hungrily, collecting refuse along the street. Dawn broke, and I got up early, waiting for the moment when Nadya would be at school and I could discuss my fears with Tatiana. She would tell me the truth. She knew Anna well.

  Tatiana was unequivocal. “No, that’s all nonsense. Anna’s just being Anna,” she told me firmly. I felt a rush of relief. The night devils slunk away. What on earth had got into me? Then she added, in her emollient way: “You’re her conscience—and she can’t bear it.” That seemed highly improbable. Anna had more than enough conscience of her own. Tatiana was just trying to make me feel better.

  After that, I insisted that Anna and I spend an evening together. Perhaps I should not have tried. For the occasion comically recapitulated our first, painful evening in Marx sixteen years earlier. There was I, longing to talk, to catch up on her, find out how she was. And there she was, deploying her words like well-placed guns, behind whose cover she kept contriving her retreat back into that hinterland of silences.

  Topic after topic, she simply vetoed. “Don’t let’s talk about my work—I’m fed up with it. I’d love to leave, but there’s nowhere else to go. They’re not interested in serious, objective journalism anymore. It’s all become—well, very political.”

  Anna dealt with the subject of the war with Georgia with equal dispatch, chopping it up like an awkward joint of meat. “How did people react to the war?” she growled. “They didn’t. Oh yeah? So they’re killing each other in the Caucasus again? My boots need mending.” Then she added bleakly: “Still, you get to the point where there’s nothing you can do but back your government. Living in a weak country’s no picnic. We tried that. It’s preferable to live in a strong one. Now let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

  So we focused on the good news, her summer holiday exploring the glorious churches of the far north, the Moscow periodical Arion, which was publishing more of her poems.

  Lucy, her beloved cat, who had survived falling seven stories from the window of her flat since my last visit, did her best to keep me entertained while Anna made a fuss about the fact that the hot water hadn’t been turned on as promised. She rang to tell the building manager off. Then she ran a very deep cold bath into which she dangled a small electric element, which might or might not warm the water up enough to give her a bath around midnigh
t.

  Meanwhile, I could hardly fail to notice that she had no furniture or carpets. Money had proved another taboo subject. Anna had been proud of her earnings. Now she was visibly struggling. Inflation was running a good deal higher than growth, and prices had shot up. The price of bread alone had risen by 22 percent since the beginning of the year. According to one survey, Russia’s middle class was shrinking, down from 25 percent of the population last year to 18 percent this year. Half Anna’s salary went in rent, her friends reckoned. Meanwhile, her parents, now old and infirm, needed her help to survive on their basic pension of $74 a month.

  Anna had moved home since I was last here. She had just redecorated her old flat when the owners decided to sell it. This one was wretchedly dark and shabby and all but empty, except for a pile of periodicals thrown in a corner and a bookcase which the owners had left behind. Tatiana said she had refused all offers of furniture, in order to be prepared for further, involuntary moves. Anna slept on the floor now. Only her icon corner looked cared for. There, on a small chest covered with a freshly laundered cloth, lay her Bible and a few small paper icons.

  Stilted though our evening was, I came away reassured that Anna had not lost her head and become a rabid nationalist. Nor was she trying to distance herself from me. She was just under greater pressure than I had ever seen her, struggling with the unexpected descent back into poverty, with having no home, hating her work, hedged around with constraints it would have been dangerous or demeaning to talk about.