Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  Anna’s recent articles revealed more about her than she was prepared to admit to me directly. The brash tabloid for which she worked had always been a mine of interesting stories. It was tame now. Page after page of celebrity gossip was leavened here and there by patriotic articles. Russia’s popular press had morphed into its Western counterpart.

  A Moscow friend was clear about her judgment of this development: “What we’ve got today is much more damaging than Soviet censorship was. It keeps people mindlessly occupied so they don’t have the time or inclination to think for themselves.” All this was true. Anna’s articles were different, though. There had been times after Putin came to power when her articles were bland, constrained by her anxiety to keep out of trouble. Not anymore. Now they were bold.

  They offered a compelling glimpse of the dark malfunctioning of power in Saratov. Take the ongoing topic of the murder of the province’s harsh but honest chief prosecutor six months earlier. For a long time, the police got nowhere with their search for the culprit. Then the murder was pinned on the boss of one of the city’s most powerful factories, Hammer and Sickle. (I remembered it, of course. In the 1990s, the manager’s hair turned white overnight when the boss was beheaded for refusing to surrender his factory to a criminal gang.)

  Anna did not bother to hide her skepticism at this turn of events. With one hand the prosecutor’s office was handing out awards to those responsible for the arrest, she noted coolly. With the other they were refusing the defendant his choice of lawyer. Back at his factory the disbelieving workforce were asking what possible motive their boss had for murder. Their view was that his arrest was the beginning of another hostile takeover attempt.

  To add to the mystery, shortly before the murder an extremely personable swindler had been offering to “replace” the doomed prosecutor with a more amenable candidate, for a cool $1.5 million. The tape recording of the conversation played in court was collected by an aging police stooge with dark glasses and a puffy face who gave evidence in a tremulous voice. He died quite suddenly, mid-trial. Self-assured, amused, Anna exposed the holes in the evidence presented by this Gogolian cast of characters.

  Reading these articles left me feeling chastened. How unimaginative I had been! No wonder Anna did not want to talk to me about her job. As her paper’s legal correspondent, each time she wrote an article she was picking her way through the minefield of a corrupted polity. The law served a state whose leaders had no higher vision than self-enrichment and the perpetuation of their rule. It was a terrifying job. But she, who had always seemed so fearful, was not just chronicling these cases. She was daring to make her own judgments clear.

  Sometimes she even appeared to be enjoying herself. She had become a virtuoso at negotiating such moral complexities. And she could pull it off because all the lawyers, prosecutors, and politicians knew her to be incorruptible. I felt ashamed to have doubted her.

  When Tatiana took me to Saratov station to catch the sleeper back to Moscow, Anna joined us, wearing a smart pink jacket (“secondhand,” she told me proudly). Ten years ago, you had to push through a swarm of hawkers, beggars, and displaced people with bundles to get to the platform. Now the place was spotless. This morning, the Indian summer spell had finally broken. The golden light which had touched Saratov with grace during the days of my visit had given way to drizzle. “You’re taking the sunshine with you,” said Tatiana with a rueful smile. Her face was whiter than ever today, and her eyes were dark holes. Anna, on the other hand, looked perversely vital, even amused as she shifted from foot to foot and hunched her shoulders against the rain.

  Farther down the platform a school brass band was seeing somebody off, rum-pa-pa, rum-pa-pa. We stood there, pretending everything was normal, talking about future plans. There was a piece by Anna I was going to publish in the magazine I edited. I would meet up with Tatiana’s older daughter when I was in Moscow … The words were not the point, they were just a promise that whatever lay ahead, our friendship would hold fast.

  We had shared a great grief in the years of our friendship. In the strangled silence between us lay our aborted hopes for a new Russia, one which would at last come to prize its own people, rather than hoisting itself up on their bones. All of us had bowed to the conventional wisdom that our hope for Russia at the end of communism was naive. But was it? Surely what was wrong was just that it was not stubborn enough. Hope is sacred, the fine point of the fulcrum of change.

  What my friends were really feeling I hardly dared think, dare not even now. I was feeling cowardly, longing to be gone, to leave behind the plague of emotions bearing down on me. Guilt was the worst of them. I had never imagined leaving them to face such a difficult situation. Before we next met, relations between Russia and the West looked likely to get worse. Russia’s economy depended on selling oil and gas to Europe. The world recession, triggered in the West, was going to hit long-suffering Russians. And the harder it hit them, the more Moscow’s war party were likely to beat the nationalist drum and seek out confrontation with the West as a distraction. “We can’t afford to look ahead, any of us. It’s too awful,” Tatiana was saying over breakfast. “All we can do is live in a continual present, manage each day as it comes.”

  This was the political backdrop against which my book was going to come out. My intimate account of the last sixteen years of their lives was going to appear in English, in the West. How would that play out for them, living here? There were times, much earlier on, when I believed that it might offer them protection. Not anymore. Ghosts from Russia’s Soviet past were giving me a hard time.

  So how would my account affect them? The question was so delicate that I had not dared raise it. My friends had stayed clear of it, too. Now, as Anna evaded my embrace in her usual way, as I hugged Tatiana, the risks to which I was exposing them hit me like a truck.

  I hurried onto the train and settled into my compartment without looking back, without waving. That Russian phrase about “leaving in the English way,” meaning without saying good-bye, came back to me. It had always seemed so funny, so un-English, and there I was doing it. Their unspoken question followed me in: could they trust me? These were the people who had taught me so much about friendship. Here in Russia, where everyday life was a battle against poverty, bureaucracy, or corruption, friendship was the true currency, the resource that made all possible. How would I turn out to have repaid that friendship with this book? Would it have repercussions on their lives? The questions were painful, and there were no answers.

  My hope was that the positive lessons which my brave, independent-minded friends had drawn from the 1990s would not turn out to have been in vain. Whatever happens to my friends and to Russia, those lessons will always be there, in the compost heap of history which Anna Akhmatova evokes in her Poem Without a Hero:

  As the future ripens in the past

  So the past rots in the future—

  A fearful festival of dead leaves

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF EVER THERE WAS A BOOK WHICH DEPENDED ON THE GENEROSITY of friends, it is this. I am infinitely grateful to the Russians whose lives I have chronicled in this book. Anna, Tatiana, Misha, Natasha, Igor, and Vera (these are not their real names) befriended me after the fall of communism, when visitors from the West were objects of deep suspicion in that part of the countryside. They have had the courage not to withdraw their confidence in my good faith over the years, even now that the relationship between our governments has hardened into a familiar antagonism.

  Sixteen years is a long time. Behind this book stands a tribe of supporters, people who backed me even when they no longer understood what I was doing, or why I was persisting. My husband, Roger Graef, has been my unfailing champion, chief critic, and my life support, backed up always by Chloe and Max Graef. Without the three of them, I would not have made it. Equally important was my “family” in Moscow, Elena Vasilieva, her daughter, Ira Vasilieva, and son-in-law, Alexander (Sasha) Radov. Adventurous, and unfailingly cheer
ful, Ira and Sasha were my ideal traveling companions.

  That same spirit infuses those most experienced travelers, Vladimir Nikolaevich Alekseev and Professor Elena Ivanovna Dergacheva-Skop, to whom I am boundlessly grateful for taking me to meet the Old Believers of Burny.

  The key that unlocked my visit to Nina Stepanovna was Sergei Filatov’s research on the rebirth of paganism among the non-Slav Volga minorities, published in An Atlas of Religious Life in Russia Today, edited by Michael Bourdeaux and Sergei Filatov (Keston Institute, 2005). What I found there would have been even more mysterious without the help of Joanna Hubbs’s book Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington, Indiana, 1988).

  SUSAN RICHARDS is the author of Epics of Everyday Life: Encounters in a Changing Russia, which won the P.E.N. Time-Life Award for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits openDemocracy Russia, part of openDemocracy, the Web site about global affairs which she cofounded. After her doctorate on Alexander Solzhenitsyn from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, she initiated the program of talks, conferences, and debates at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and worked as a film producer. With her husband, the television producer Roger Graef, she started Bookaid, a charity that sent a million English language books to public libraries throughout the Soviet Union.