I stammered something incoherent, wanting to disbelieve what was happening. Valery the KGB man, who insinuated that I was on some deep-cover mission posing as an indigent American student without the brains to register his residency on time, was now trying to recruit me as a double-agent mole, implausible as it was. Or at least he believed I was valuable enough to recruit as a KGB mole, though I could offer nothing in the way of information or contacts. I was dressed in sneakers and had no job and not much money. I was living in a rundown communal, and not out of some hippie let’s-all-be-poor wish. I had no connections, no ties to any government, real or imagined. The whole scene was too ridiculous to be true. I pinched myself, hoping that it was just the cognac, gone to my head.
It wasn’t. I was being interviewed by a suave Soviet state security man who, after befuddling my brain, was now getting down to the real point.
“Tell us about the exiles,” Valery gently prodded. “You know, the daughter and son-in-law of the woman you are staying with.”
“Who?”
“Aw, you know!” exclaimed Valery with a smile. “Viktor and Mila, your teachers in the United States. “How are they? What do they say about the Soviet Union these days?”
I could not deny that I knew them—it was Mila who had arranged for me to stay in her mother’s communal room.
“They recall with pleasure their days in the Soviet Union,” I blurted, sounding ridiculous even to myself. The sentence was as clumsily bookish as it was absurd. Eight years after being exiled, Viktor only mentioned Communists in tandem with expletives.
“Really, with pleasure?” said Valery with a knowing smile, while twisting his shot glass slowly with his fingertips. “This is odd, because as you must know, their departure from here was rather … bitter.”
BITTER? THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE dissident Viktor had to be practically pried out of the empire because he refused to leave the same place that many other dissidents were desperate to get out of. One day in 1981, Viktor and Mila were summoned to the same OVIR office, where a lady clerk handed them a stack of forms.
“Your poor auntie in Israel is sick. Of course, you need to go help your poor auntie in Israel,” said the clerk. “We are going to arrange exit visas for you both at once.” Viktor shook his head in the negative. “We don’t have any relatives in Israel.” He laughed at the incredulous clerk, who acted like she was speaking to a man turning down a winning lottery jackpot.
“You’re the first ones to laugh about this,” remarked the clerk.
“Just fill out the paperwork and get it back to us by tomorrow,” she insisted, shoving the forms at Viktor.
Once they arrived back at the communal, Viktor realized that he didn’t even have the name of his nonexistent Israeli “auntie.” He had the gall to ring the clerk up on the telephone.
“Devushka [young lady], what’s the name of our Israeli auntie?” he asked.
“Are you screwing around, fool?” came the clerk’s response.
“Well maybe we won’t be going to Israel after all …,” answered Viktor laconically.
“Ummm … Just bring the damn documents yourselves. We’ll take care of your aunt’s name ourselves,” came the clerk’s irritated reply.
FOR WHAT SEEMED like an eternity, I pretended to be fascinated with staring at a nondescript office clock mounted on a wall.
“Well,” I said at last, breaking the silence about Viktor and Mila’s present attitudes about the USSR.
“Last we spoke, they said that they were really excited about Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika reforms,” I told the KGB man.
This was either a pathetic faux pas or my saving grace, because few words uttered by Americans evoked more nausea from KGB-type Russians. Our naive smiles and adoration of Gorbachev, a man at best grudgingly tolerated by most Russians at the time, evoked a sensation similar to the regurgitation of curdled milk among many of them. It wasn’t that they were against reform, but Gorbachev’s Communist-style vernacular led many to doubt his sincerity.
“Glasnost and Perestroika, yes,” Valery said, still smiling but barely able to contain himself. “Interesting, of course. Tell me, is there anything else that Americans can discuss about Russia other than Glasnost and Perestroika?”
I did not need to answer but tried to make a rational assessment of my situation and found it wanting, pathetic.
Fact: I was drinking cognac and eating caviar after business hours with a KGB man who wanted information about my Russian teachers-in-exile Viktor and Mila. Both were acid-tongued critics of the Soviet regime. Before his exile, Viktor was so reckless in his denunciations of the party that some of his closest friends thought he might have even been KGB himself, acting as an agent provocateur. He had been a contributor to a well-known underground (samizdat) publication, Tridtsat-Sem (“Thirty-Seven”). (Or Tridtsat Semitov, meaning “Thirty Semites,” as Viktor jokingly referred to it.) Mila, meanwhile, was in with a dissident women’s group and trade union activists, which the KGB was particularly nervous about in light of the “Solidarity” events in Poland. Even eight years after their departure, when Communism, if not the empire itself, was clearly collapsing, the KGB man was still following them. Valery had personally handled their expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, a fact Viktor confirmed when I described Valery to him. Possibly there had been some internal squabble over whether a labor camp or exile fit their crimes. Perhaps Valery had come down on the losing side of the argument and was still bitter; who knew?
Second stupid fact: I had dredged up the already worn-out “Glasnost and Perestroika” theme. Even ordinary Russians were often disgusted by Americans’ naiveté, assuming that reforming the USSR would be a painless matter of injecting a little democracy. It must have been especially galling for a KGB type like Valery to have to listen to twaddle coming from the toothy smile of a silly American who in his estimation didn’t understand a thing about the consequences of an imploding empire.
Last and most embarrassing fact: I had failed to react to Valery’s recruitment offer, if indeed the offer made to a clueless American kid in battered sneakers who was living in a communal associated with unspeakable dissidents had been made in earnest at all.
Another uncomfortable pause descended on us, which was finally broken by Valery.
“Tell me, my young American friend,” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know what it is to spend your entire life building a house, just to watch a gang of vandals come and try to tear it down?”
I listened to his bitter soliloquy.
“Let us presume that the house wasn’t a perfect house. Some of the beams were weak. Many mistakes were made in building this house. A fool designed the fireplace; it fills the rooms with smoke sometimes. A relative got electrocuted rigging up the electricity. But gradually, we learn. Yes, the house is not perfect. It leans to one side. But we live in this house, you see. It is our house.”
I said nothing. Nothing needed to be said.
“Is it better to let the vandals tear it down with a bulldozer and kill all the inhabitants? Or is it better to move some of the bricks gradually, fix the beams one by one, rebuild the fireplace while keeping a kettle of soup on a little stove nearby?”
Valery’s voice trailed off, and his glibness took on a paler hue. His eyes remained fixed and steely, but his lips turned up at a slightly weaker angle.
The tears of a KGB man.
* Those with a grasp of Russian phonology will appreciate the onomatopoeic sound of “Sh-che-MYAK-in.” It emits a grating melody akin to the yap of a small dog or an old woman’s scold.
A BIGAMIST BANDIT AND A BUTTON MAKER
Leading a life of crime isn’t easy.” Vova laughed slightly at his self-evaluation. It was part justification, and part plea for sympathy.
We were just emerging from a brief and thankfully bloodless altercation with two men on a small bridge near the Kirov Theater. They had been walking toward us and slowed as Vova and I approached. It was just after dusk on a foggy even
ing. The combination of darkness and mist produced a disorienting effect, reducing real visibility to a few yards. Vova and the two men recognized each others’ faces with difficulty. Once they did, all three pranced like nervous cats circling for a scrap. There was a long pause while menacing glances were exchanged, followed by a string of profanities uttered in quick, quiet succession. One of the men spit forcefully into the ground and muttered something to the other. Then the pair swaggered on into the gloom, as if they’d just benevolently granted us a stay of execution.
“Da,” whispered Vladimir Kovannikov, aka Vova. “Vsyo-taki ne legko vesti zhizn prestupnosti.…”
“Living a life of crime really isn’t easy … but it beats being a slave.…”
This was, in a way, the mantra of the Vor v Zakone, or at least the modified modern version of the “Thief in Law” credo that dominated the late Soviet criminal underground. Vova was my guide in trying to discover what it really meant.
• • •
WE MET IN 1987 during my first visit to the USSR as a student at Leningrad State University. Vova was then “officially” working as a factory laborer in a clothing button factory. But with the Soviet economy already teetering, he’d taken to supplementing his wages by becoming a private entrepreneur—a capitalist—which was an economic crime against the state. At first it was harmless if still illegal stuff, such as buying name-brand wristwatches from tourists along Nevsky Prospekt and then hawking them to fellow Soviets for a markup.
That was the story of our first encounter: My roommate Jared was walking along Nevsky Prospekt when a lanky, loud, gregarious kid with a big head of frizzy hair going off in all directions, as if he used lye for a hair conditioner, approached and tried, in broken German, to buy Jared’s Timex.
“Spasibo,” Jared had curtly replied when offered a week’s worth of prorated ruble wages for the timepiece. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The offer was then doubled, but Jared still turned it down. Jared explained he wasn’t interested in selling his wristwatch. Over the semester, we would often run into Vova on Nevsky Prospekt, and we gradually became acquaintances.
When he wasn’t using his gutter German to score watches from surprised Swiss tourists, Vova gave us impromptu tours of what passed for Leningrad’s underground hippie scene, and in between shifts at the clothing button factory (aptly named the “Button Factory”) where he worked, he took us on expeditions to little-known former czarist castles and even organized shish kebab cookouts in the Russian woods for his two new American friends. Petty street black marketers like Vova were reviled as slime by many Russians of the time. Yet while some of my Russian “intelligentsia” friends ended up having ulterior motives in pursuing my “friendship,” Vova never asked me for a dime or even a small favor.
A couple of years later, Soviet society began its critical meltdown. Words like reket (racket, as in criminal), keelir (killer), and mafia singed themselves into the vernacular. In fact, many Leningraders seemed to take a dark, Dostoyevskian pride in playing up their city’s apocalyptic atmosphere, even if its outward reputation as being one big mafia operation was exaggerated. Most ordinary people were not personally affected by the growing mob. At least Vova wasn’t, because he had become part of it.
ON THIS PARTICULAR day, we had agreed to meet at the Petrogradsky Metro stop. As usual, Vova was a few minutes late.
I didn’t mind. Petrogradsky had always been one of my favorite Metro stations. The entrance had extremely heavy metal doors that were impossible to push or pull fully open. I couldn’t understand if this was a deliberate design defect to save on hinge repairs, or some sort of sadistic ploy. One had to sort of prop the door open and squeeze through before releasing it, and the door would often swing violently backwards and lash the next poor soul in line in the face. Across the street from the station, there was a store selling posters emblazoned with Soviet-style propaganda exhortations. I remembered it as two years earlier having been full of classic Communist, anti-American bombast, such as a lithograph of a US missile with a picture of Ronald Reagan’s head in the form of an atomic warhead. But Glasnost and Perestroika had taken their artistic toll during the ensuing years, and most of the more hilarious, rabidly anti-Western pictorial rants had been replaced by posters promoting sobriety, advocating ecological consciousness or, even more surprising, preaching touchy-feely peacenik stuff.
As I gazed into the shop window, I saw a shadow growing larger in the glass. I turned around without recognizing the man in the glass. It wasn’t until he flashed his fossilized smile that I knew it was Vova. He’d shaved his head, revealing nicks, cuts, and divots around the perimeter of his tightly wrapped skull. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of an oversize, crème-colored trench coat. He looked menacing.
We exchanged a hug. I asked some requisite questions about his family and work, including the Button Factory. Vova screwed up his face.
“I don’t work at the Button Factory,” he snarled, waving his hand as if to swat away a mosquito. “I’ve got a new job now.” Then he flashed a grin so wide that the brown rot between his gums shone like shiny bits of rust.
“Let’s go,” said Vova, grabbing me by the arm and leading me toward the street. We stopped a Lada-1—a Soviet knockoff of an early-1970s Fiat—and climbed in. “Kupchino,” Vova told the driver, the name of a grimy expanse of factories and faceless apartment blocks in the south of the city.
“Why aren’t we taking the Metro?” I asked. “It’s faster—and cheaper.”
“The Metro? What for?” countered Vova, as if the notion of a subway were suddenly beneath his dignity. “Kupchino!” he told the driver again. Then he turned and spoke to me in a conspiratorial whisper, just loud enough for the taxi driver to hear.
“You see, I’ve got a new system,” hissed Vova. “I just wait until the driver approaches a red light where there’s a lot of traffic. I tell him to get in the left lane.”
“So?” I ask.
“Then, when the traffic starts to move, I jump out, slam the door, and run away!” snickered Vova. “The taxi driver is stuck. He can’t get out and chase me with cars behind him. If he does, his car might get ripped off. He can’t get over into the right lane either, because it’s blocked with moving traffic. By then, I’m long gone.”
I saw the driver jerk his neck slightly as Vova explained his fare policy for cabbies. Maybe the driver thought it was just a joke from a shaven-headed thug in a trench coat.
We sped south, over the elegant iron drawbridges across the Neva River. We had a perfect view of both banks, clad in granite block. The baroque and neoclassical buildings, without a space between them and none higher than the Winter Palace, seemed bathed in a kaleidoscope of fading pastels. Against the setting sun I could see St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Half the city seemed to be in scaffolding, a Soviet hallmark.
As we passed south across Nevsky Prospekt, we began moving away from the city’s heart and into areas dominated by the stolid structures associated with Stalin-era buildings, and then finally into the outskirts of the city, where the “functional” buildings of the Khrushchev era reigned supreme. While most were only twenty or thirty years old, the “suburbs of the future” were already crumbling, battered, cookie-cutter-identical high-rises. This was Kupchino, a formerly pristine (if swampy) forested area that was now a socialist-style ghetto of battered buildings, state-run factory behemoths, and gangland turf battles. It was a world away from my communal and Nina Nikolaevna’s Petrograd district of cathedrals, czarist haunts, and long avenues of worn-down but warm coffee shops.
Kupchino’s miles of apartment blocks were of such a uniform design as to be virtually indistinguishable from one another. The streets were laid out in a rectangular monotone. Humidity discolored the sides of the prefab buildings, leaving black sootlike lines that adorned the exteriors in abstract maps. This proved to be a godsend, for the soot murals made it possible to tell one identical building from another. Otherwise, it was easy to get lost in the Or
wellian maze, possibly the work of a dissident urban planner bent on architectural sabotage. It reminded me of the crumbling housing projects in the south side of Chicago.
Kupchino may have had its aesthetic shortcomings. But from a sociological perspective, it was a hotbed of life as the Soviet Empire was collapsing. Among the endless stretches of crumbling residential blocks buzzed a beehive of fledgling extortionists and shady businessmen. They hung out in acrid-smoke-filled “billiard clubs” and slimy disco bars. All around were smoke-belching, state-owned factories waiting to be taken over in sham privatization schemes.
OUR OLD LADA rattled to a halt in front of a nondescript storefront. When Vova asked how much we owed for the ride, the driver shrugged. This was unusual, since Soviet gypsy cabdrivers—like cabbies everywhere—had a habit of overcharging anyone stupid enough not to negotiate the price beforehand. “Oh, it’s up to you guys,” said the driver, faking a smile. Vova handed him a wad of rubles as we got out of the car. The driver didn’t bother to count them and looked relieved as we disembarked, as if he’d dumped off a pair of lepers.
There was a long queue in front of the store. People were grumbling. Some were arguing. At first I thought the line was for vodka or milk. But there were no drunks hanging around, and no one coming out with bags of groceries.
Two tough-looking men greeted Vova. One was short and skinny. He had on acid-washed jeans and a shiny, synthetic-looking leather jacket. The other was taller and balding. He wore a tracksuit. Under the top half he wore a sweater. Vova and the men discussed something and we moved on toward the shop. The two men led us to the front of the line. I thought we’d evoke hostility for cutting in front, but no one uttered a word—or even gave us a dirty look.
A man in a slightly too-tight sport jacket and tie propped open the door and let us in. The number of customers was tightly controlled—there weren’t more than a dozen inside. Several times more waited in line on the street.
Eight Pieces of Empire Page 4
