Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  A long pause, and then:

  “Our people need a bit of the Iron Hand,” says Nina Nikolaevna, obliquely referring to the gathering chaos in the disintegrating empire, from the drunks down the street to the imploding planned economy. I will hear the same thing from other ordinary Russians for years to come.

  In Nina’s own eyes, the empire is also responsible for great feats. For her the empire itself was the mysterious hand that put that precious piece of seal blubber to her lips during the starvation of the Leningrad Blockade, giving her a second lease on life.

  TEARS OF A KGB MAN

  Nina Nikolaevna’s crash course in the ways of the communal was reaching an end. I nodded knowingly at her entreaties about whom to avoid (the Colonel, for one) and who to turn to in need of help (the Widow). I had passed the communal home economics section as well. In addition to having learned to use the right wooden toilet seat, I could now distinguish between our grease-coated fry pan and the almost identical others, and I no longer used someone else’s towels. One skill was pretending to lock the door with an ancient key. It looked like something pilfered from the antiquities section of the Hermitage Museum. (The locking ritual was an act of willing self-deception: Locked or not, the door often flung open when given a good shove.)

  Satisfied with my progress, Nina Nikolaevna announced that the time had come for me to fend for myself. She and Igor had for many summers retired to a bucolic dacha outside Leningrad, and the time to return to some facsimile of their Russian peasant roots was at hand. (In reality, the “dacha” was a bare-bones rented room with no plumbing, but at least it was in the countryside.)

  She pulled a tattered suitcase from under her bed, and I watched her gather a few blouses and a dress and fold them inside. Igor added a pair of old pants and a shirt and some socks, and a whole summer’s laundry was ready to go. A second contraption—a duffel bag on a metal frame with vinyl wheels—represented the portable kitchen and was stocked with rice, sugar, and other staples hard to get outside the city. There were a couple of plates and bowls and a tarnished silverware set. (Igor tossed in a few packs of acrid unfiltered cigarettes).

  Like a dutiful son, I helped them carry the luggage downstairs and to an overcrowded trolleybus that stopped in front of St. Vladimir’s Cathedral. The trolleybus was sweltering hot and packed to the transoms with bleary-eyed men fresh from knocking ’em back at the beer stand; Nina Nikolaevna pretended not to notice them. We deboarded at Finland Station, where Lenin made his triumphant return to Russia in 1917 disguised as a locomotive worker, an event marked by an enormous statue of Vladimir Ilyich standing atop an armored vehicle that dominated the station yard. After the purchase of two tickets on the rickety if reliable electric suburban trains, we walked in the shadow of the statue among the human hustle and bustle of the platform, the bittersweet smell of burning locomotive engine coal staining the air with a sense of impending departure, while Nina Nikolaevna issued last-minute edicts about the rule of law in the communal.

  “No drunks inside—especially the Colonel.”

  “Understood.”

  “Always lock the door, and if it doesn’t work, don’t leave until it’s fixed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And never, ever leave or go to sleep with the television on.”

  “Never.”

  This was an oath not to incinerate the communal in her absence; Soviet televisions were known to overheat and explode if the power cord was left in the wall.

  Nina Nikolaevna and her Igor ascended the steps to their carriage, and she continued to issue last-minute directives while holding her cane like a scepter. Her pose vaguely resembled the nearby bronze statue of a triumphant Lenin thrusting his arm into the sky, and I almost felt that I was vowing to join the vanguard of the 1917 revolution against Denikin’s Whites and other class enemies of the Great Socialist Experiment.

  But it was 1989, and the only vigilance I was being drafted into was to be on guard against diabolical saboteur appliances and counterrevolutionary drunks. I promised that I would try.

  Then the electric train silently pulled out of the station, and I was alone in Leningrad.

  Or almost alone. Before leaving the United States, my Russian teacher, Viktor, and Nina Nikolaevna’s exiled daughter, Mila, had given me some addresses of friends left behind in Leningrad. One was Lyona Shakhnazarova, an ethnic Armenian woman who had recently fled the Azerbaijani capital Baku; anti-Armenian riots had erupted there in one of the first spasms of interethnic unrest that would soon almost engulf the empire. There were whispers of dark forces being behind the violence.

  Lyona was staying in a room on the first floor of a building near Bolshoi Prospekt, a fifteen-minute walk from our communal. Her firsthand experience of the ethnic supernova expanding across the empire informed her view of its future. She was convinced that there was none.

  Lyona was well educated and from an intelligentsia family and was thus connected to the upper echelons of the Communist Party. But if she ever had any sympathy for the disintegrating system, it had turned to antipathy. Over thimblelike cups of Turkish coffee, Lyona hinted darkly about KGB practices—and that I should “watch out.”

  I chalked it up to paranoia—this was, after all, the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s declared glasnost i perestroika that were supposed to represent a sort of Soviet “sunshine” clause on society. All the paranoid cloak-and-dagger stuff of the Cold War past was banished, forever!

  “Be careful,” she reiterated. “I know how they work.”

  I asked her to explain.

  “Your apartment, for example,” she said flatly, referring to the communal.

  I was all ears as Lyona pointed out that only recently had foreign visitors been allowed to stay in private apartments—until then, guests such as me from the nonsocialist world had been confined to hotels or dorms. And as for gaining permission to stay in a communal like ours—especially one linked to forcibly exiled dissidents like Nina Nikolaevna’s daughter, Mila, and her husband, Viktor—well, it was simply unheard of.

  Indeed, the local visa office had initially told Nina Nikolaevna that I could not stay with her. Then, inexplicably, they changed their minds.

  “You see,” said Lorna darkly, winning a point.

  “Why then,” I asked, “did they issue me a visa at all?”

  “Because they probably thought it would be more interesting if you did come than if you didn’t,” she said, giving the third-person pronoun an odd twist of ominous emphasis. “They probably want to find out what you’re up to.”

  “What I’m up to?”

  “Yes. The purpose of your visit.”

  “To work on my Russian, of course.”

  “Yes.” Lyona smiled. “Of course.”

  ALL FOREIGNERS WERE required to register with the local registration office, known as the Otdel Viz i Registratsii, or Department of Visas and Registration, referred to by all by its acronym, OVIR.

  Call it an oversight; call it foolishness; call it exuberant forgetfulness; call it deliberately courting doom (which it was not), but the fact remained that I was vaguely aware that I should have checked in with the OVIR authorities the day after my arrival, and I had not. To assist me in talking my way out of trouble, the Widow offered to accompany me to the OVIR, and I gladly accepted.

  The walk to the OVIR led along the picturesque bank of the Neva River near the Peter and Paul Fortress (where notables from Dostoyevsky to Tito had spent time locked up) and skirted the Gorky Metro station and a small amusement park, as well as an iconic old ice-cream café. It was a pleasure to be outside on that cloudless day, walking with the Widow.

  At OVIR, I joined an orderly line of Russians waiting to obtain permission to travel abroad; the authorities widely started to allow this about a year earlier, as part of the gradual opening of the system. When my turn came, I handed my passport and visa to a clerk who, after a quick glance at the data, told me to wait.

  Then she disappeared down a hallway in
to an office, reemerging a couple of minutes later and beckoning me to enter. The Widow followed, whispering that she was acting as my “translator,” although she spoke not a word of English.

  Behind a gray metallic bureaucratic desk sat a gray, metallic-looking midlevel bureaucrat, or chinovnik, who looked up at me with a gray, metallic look of shock and horror straight from central casting.

  “This is very serious,” growled the bureaucrat, pushing his body away from the desk. “You are two days late for your registration, according to Soviet law governing foreign residence in the USSR!”

  His name was Comrade Shchemyakin, and his face was so severely cratered by smallpox or some other youthful disease that it looked like a kilo of frozen hamburger after a hatchet attack.* A taciturn bureaucrat, right out of Gogol. A live literary archetype, almost too good to be true.

  “There will be a penalty!” announced Shchemyakin. “And you are obliged to leave your passport here while we determine the proper sanctions!”

  The Widow swooned and pleaded with Shchemyakin in rapid-fire Russian, indicating that the situation was grave, very grave.

  “Nado zhe!” implored the Widow. “Oh my!”

  But Scar-face Shchemyakin only shook his head in the negative.

  We exited the OVIR office in a despondent haze; for my part, I was kicking myself for having dropped the ball on the well-known registration business and saw my late Soviet adventure going up in smoke—or more accurately, going up in the air on a twelve-hour flight back to the United States, with a Persona Non Grata stamp in my passport.

  “We need to bring him a present,” hissed the teary-eyed widow. “You know, an Amerikanskii podarok!”

  An American present. Palm greasers, she meant—a bribe.

  We practically sprinted back to the communal and up the stairs to the fifth floor and the other Nina Nikolaevna abode, where I tore through my bags for some potentially appropriate gift, settling on a couple of packs of Marlboros and a twenty-dollar bill. Then we headed back to the OVIR. We jumped the line of Soviet citizens trying to get out of the country that I wanted to stay in, and made a dash to Shchemyakin’s door before the secretary could stop us. Once inside, the Widow Nina unceremoniously plopped two packages of Marlboro Reds on Shchemyakin’s desk along with the twenty-dollar bill.

  “What is this?” Shchemyakin sneered dismissively, in a tone that conveyed neither acceptance nor rejection of the paltry haul.

  “It’s not about that,” he snarled, referring to the “gifts.” “I’ll call you once we get everything figured out. Now get out of here!”

  Notably, he did not shove the gifts back across the desk before we cleared the door.

  It was a long night spent fretting and worrying, with a good amount of self-recrimination and anger mixed with despair. I couldn’t sleep until toward daylight, and woke to the grating sound of the communal telephone in the hallway ringing off the hook. I tried to ignore it, thereby saving myself the trouble of trying to decipher which Nina Nikolaevna the caller wanted—my absent landlady, or the Widow, who had retired in a fit of distress at my apparent fate. Let someone else answer, I said to myself, covering my ears with a pillow. But no one else seemed to be around. Finally I forced myself to my feet, headed into the hallway, and snatched the receiver in irritation, demanding who the caller was and with which Nina Nikolaevna he wished to speak.

  I immediately recognized his voice. It was Shchemyakin. But instead of declaring me Persona Non Grata with twelve hours to leave the USSR, he almost beamed friendship through the receiver—and it was rather clear that our newfound camaraderie was not due to two packs of smokes and twenty bucks.

  “Could you come to the OVIR office at eighteen hundred hours—six p.m.?” he asked politely.

  “Of course I will,” I replied.

  Glasnost and Perestroika had apparently won the day.

  Heading to Shchemyakin’s office alone that evening, it occurred to me that the timing of our rendezvous was unusual. All Soviet offices strictly observed priyom, or reception times, typically 10 to 12 in the morning, and 2 to 4 in the afternoon. Before, between, or after those hours, the bureaucratic state was in lockdown; 6 p.m. thus seemed like a very odd rendezvous time.

  My confusion deepened when I got to the OVIR. The main entrance was locked, and there was no one outside. I rang a bell. A well-dressed secretary popped her head out. She invited me inside—a little too warmly—and sat me down in the reception area. Then she and another pretty bureaucrat hurriedly packed their purses and rushed out the door as if late for their own weddings.

  A few more moments passed in silence, and then I heard a distant door open and shut and the pitter-patter of footfalls approaching.

  “Lavrernce!” said the voice in Russian.

  It was Shchemyakin, wearing a smile so forced that it seemed to cause him pain.

  He moved uneasily, stiffly, like a rusted robot, as he led me down the hall and into a comfortable room with leather sofas. There was also a coffee table carefully laid out with coveted “Misha the Intoed Bear” chocolates from the Red October factory, sundry cookies imported from abroad, Beluga caviar in a crystal bowl, and a bottle of Ararat “export” cognac from Soviet Armenia. Shchemyakin motioned to me to sit down, sat down himself, and handed me my passport and visa with a smile.

  “Everything’s fine with your documents,” he cooed, as if being two days in “major violation” of the Soviet Foreign Registration Law had been a joke.

  “Spasibo,” I said, standing. “Thanks.”

  “But before you go, there is someone who wants to meet you.”

  THE AMERICAN IMAGE of Soviet KGB officers was reinforced by dozens of late-Communist-period B films made by, of course, Americans. Usually, the pristine Yanqui is snapped off the streets of the USSR and flung into the Gulag as if it’s just for sport. The physical appearance of the KGB man was a constant as well: KGB men were almost invariably portrayed as sadistic, shabbily dressed, and paranoid, and as projecting zero humanity, whether feigned or otherwise.

  In reality, most Russians knew the MO of the chekist, especially middle- and higher-ranking ones, to have been different, at least in the post-Stalin era, when there was less bloodletting. A solid career in the KGB was among the more prestigious Soviet occupations, like it or not.

  AN ATHLETIC-LOOKING MAN of about fifty years of age entered the room and strode toward me with hand outstretched to clasp mine.

  He was gracious, almost glib, and introduced himself as “Valery,” though I have no idea if that was his real name. He acted like a stage actor emoting at a theater-in-the-parks summer fest, where you had to belt out every consonant and vowel. He wore a black leather jacket of high quality, a stereotypical KGB getup.

  “Tak!” exclaimed my new friend, uncorking the bottle of export cognac and pouring us out two shots; Scar-face Shchemyakin hovered in the background, timidly following along with the ritual.

  The first toast was to my arrival in the USSR. The second was a throwaway about the druzhba narodov, a standard trope about the supposed “friendship among nations” of the USSR, or in this case between the USSR and the USA. After some more chitchat about the need for international understanding and other gracious goo, Valery poured a third toast and dedicated it to “our work.” This seemed odd, but I downed it anyway and was preparing to make my own when Valery put down his ryumochka, or shot glass, and looked straight into my eyes.

  “So,” he asked, without a hint of a blink of his steely eyes, but with a face still glowingly warm and smiling. “Who sent you?”

  “Sent me?”

  “Yes.” He grinned. “What is the purpose of your visit?”

  I must have looked dumb. I didn’t know what Valery was talking about and said so.

  “I have no purpose,” I responded, using the Russian “U menya net tseli” and sounding far too existential. Valery rolled his eyes slightly, and Shchemyakin’s pasted-on grin started to fade.

  “I mean, I’ve come to improve
my Russian. To see friends.”

  “And why is it you’ve chosen to study Russian?”

  I’d heard this question dozens of times, from Americans as often as Russians. Many Russians assumed there was something innately dubious and possibly nefarious about foreigners wanting to learn the language of Pushkin. Many Americans, by contrast, automatically assumed students of Russian to be Commie sympathizers or wannabe spies for the CIA, thus reinforcing the Soviet assumption.

  “But Russian is a beautiful language,” I said.

  “But there are many beautiful languages,” countered Valery. “What about Italian? What about French or German?”

  Then for some reason Lenin popped into my head, specifically a flashback from the monument at Finland Station, where I had seen off Nina Nikolaevna.

  “But look at Lenin—he knew so many languages …,” I said.

  Valery rolled his eyes again and poured us another cognac.

  “Yes, languages are important,” he reflected.

  “But tell me,” he said after a slight pause. “It must be quite uncomfortable for you to live in that communal apartment. I mean, to my knowledge Americans aren’t used to such conditions.”

  I replied that I found the experience interesting, and that, at any rate, I had no money for anything more luxurious. I was a student, in other words. I had saved up for the airfare while working as a waiter and also studying at university, and was not paying a cent to stay at Nina Nikolaevna’s (unless you consider “rent” the two tins of hard-to-find cinnamon and some other simple gifts brought from the United States). Food and other staples in 1989 Leningrad were dirt cheap by Western standards. In other words, I could probably live more economically in the USSR (including airfare) for a summer doing nothing than working and renting a flat in the States doing some summer job.

  “Perhaps we could help you?” smiled Valery. “I mean, it is very expensive to visit the USSR. Perhaps next summer, you could work with us? You could even work here, in the OVIR office?”