Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  Like Sonya, Yuli sought a career in the foreign service. But unlike Sonya, Yuli wasn’t just interested in foreign travel. He saw entering the foreign service as the first step on his long march to the post of Foreign Minister, from which vantage he could best serve the interests of both the Soviet Union and himself, living the high life of a top government official with all the helicopters and first-class world travel it implied while fulfilling the emerging Eurorussian vision.

  The thing about Yuli that charmed Sonya was that with him this was no mere sophistry. He really believed it.

  “The twenty-first century will be the Century of Europe, one way or the other,” he would often declare by way of grandiose post-coital pillow talk, “and if we do not gain entry into Common Europe, the Germans will dominate everything, and the Soviet Union will become a Third World state. On the other hand, a Europe that included the Soviet Union would inevitably become the dominant center of a new world order in which we, not the Germans, would be first among equals. Those Pamyat muzhiks call themselves Russian nationalists, but like the dimwits they are, they fail to understand that Russian destiny will be most gloriously served leading Europe from the inside, not standing outside the sweetshop window looking in.”

  And then, just when Sonya was thoroughly convinced that he really was a totally pompous ass, he would laugh, and take a swig of the raw Bulgarian cognac that was the best he could afford, and become the other Yuli, the one who had grown up as the son of a steelworker in Sverdlovsk, who had fought his way to the center, and who was determined never to be relegated to the periphery again.

  “From me according to my enormous ability to fulfill our national destiny,” Yuli would declare. “To me according to my equally enormous need for a Black Sea dacha and a whole floor on Tverskaya Street and a helicopter and a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz!”

  “What a perfect hypocrite!”

  “No one is perfect,” Yuli would say, rolling over onto her, “but admittedly, I do try.”

  And he certainly did, in bed and in the classroom and in the Komsomol, and in what went on at the right school parties, where Eurorussian-minded professors and outside intellectuals mingled with the favored students. And he took Sonya with him. By their final year they were considered “little Pioneers,” who would become “Komsomolya” when they got engaged upon graduation and eventually take the nuptial vows of “full Party membership.”

  While Sonya was not yet quite ready in her own heart to tie her fortunes to any man before she had even tasted the unknown worlds of Europe, she went along with this illusion, for despite all the enlightened socialist feminism in intellectual circles these days, this was still Russia, where the power of the patriarchy was bred in the bones, and where the paternal regard for the favorite son of same could be easily enough spread to his future choice of wife.

  Sonya had the grades to get into the foreign service academy, even if they weren’t quite up to Yuli’s, and her kharakteristika was exemplary if unexceptional, but when push came to shove, and especially for a woman, it paid to be an adopted favorite daughter of the Eurorussian intellectuals who were trying to clean out the foreign service bureaucracy from the bottom on up by installing a like-minded new generation, even if it was by putative marriage. And indeed both she and Yuli were formally admitted a few weeks before graduation.

  Sonya was content, if, strangely enough, not quite ecstatic. She was three steps away from achieving the life’s ambition of the little girl who had so wished to go to the French Disneyland. Two more years of schooling to gain entry into the foreign service, a year or two at a desk in Moscow, a first posting to some nikulturni disaster area like Bangladesh or Mali, and with any luck, she’d get a chance to serve in Common Europe before she was thirty.

  This was the scenario she had been following all along, but what she had not counted on was Yuli Markovsky’s place in it. It was not so much that she resented entering the foreign service academy with the aid of his connections, but that she now found herself tied to a man, as she had found herself in the Pioneers and the Komsomol, without having the chance to make the choice of allegiance, as a result, somehow, of the collective will of others.

  And that suddenly began to rankle a bit for the first time.

  It wasn’t so much that she didn’t love Yuli as that somehow she had been robbed by pragmatic circumstances of ever really being able to tell whether she loved Yuli or not. On the one hand, it was hard to really love him because loving him was clearly so expedient, and yet on the other hand, perhaps that was the only thing that actually kept her from loving him, in which case she was being a perfect idiot not to love him. . . .

  And so forth, until the thought finally occurred to her that once they were both in the foreign service academy, things would have a chance to sort themselves out naturally, even if they did become engaged Komsomolya as she knew Yuli wanted.

  Because, after all, she would have two years to decide whether she really wanted to be the wife of Yuli Markovsky, and when she did, the choice would be that of the heart alone.

  As it turned out, she was quite wrong.

  Two weeks before graduation, she was summoned out of class to the provost’s office. Fearing the worst without being able to imagine what sin she possibly could have committed, she made her way through the endless corridors and elevators of the vast central university building with her heart in her stomach.

  But instead of receiving a dressing-down, she was handed a telephone over which she was told by a secretary that a meeting with her was being requested by Vitaly Kuryakin, personnel director for the central branch of Red Star, S.A. If she was presently available, a Red Star car would pick her up outside the main entrance.

  Sonya muttered her uncomprehending consent and stood out there on the steps before the huge and hulking old Stalinist-Gothic university building in the soft spring sunshine waiting for the car to arrive and trying to collect her thoughts.

  Sonya had studied all about Red Star, S.A., in her course in pragmatic economics, for there was no Soviet economic enterprise more aggressively pragmatic than what some Common Europeans nervously called the “Big Red Machine.”

  Red Star, S.A., was the corporate child of the Russian Spring, and the new vision of “One Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” beloved of the Soviet external propaganda machine.

  It was cunningly incorporated in Common Europe, not as a Soviet corporation, but 60 percent of the stock was owned outright by the Soviet government. The rest traded openly on the Bourse, so as to allow the legal pretense that it was a true European transnational.

  And so did Red Star, S.A., itself. It sold Russian wheat, oil, minerals, furs, furniture, heavy machinery, caviar, medical equipment, satellite-booster services, declassified aerospace technology, and some even claimed hashish from Soviet Central Asia. It shipped half the proceeds home in the form of consumer goods and reinvested the rest in Common Europe, gobbling up shares in Common European corporations the way the Japanese used to gobble American real estate. The political entry of the Soviet Union into Common Europe might be one of Yuli’s dreams of the future, but the Soviet Union already owned a controlling interest in one of Common Europe’s biggest and fastest-growing conglomerates.

  If in the West it was known as the Big Red Machine, here in Moscow it was dubbed USSR, Incorporated, and for much the same reason—it was a capitalist transnational corporation, but it had the capital resources of an entire nation squarely behind it whenever it made a move, a diabolically successful example of socialist entrepreneurship that had, some said, saved perestroika from the Troubles by starting to fill the empty shelves, and made a semi-convertible ruble possible.

  What on earth could Red Star, S.A., possibly want with the likes of her?

  It did not take Sonya long to find out. In less than twenty minutes, a sleek export-model Zil limousine pulled up beside her, of a type usually sold to the modest government elites of better-run impoverished Third World countries, only painted a quite o
utrageous primary red.

  This unlikely vehicle sailed down the drive out of the Lenin Hills like a Czar’s carriage, fairly bulldozed its way through the downtown Moscow traffic, and soon enough deposited her in front of the equally unlikely Red Star Tower on Marx Prospekt overlooking the Kremlin and the river beyond.

  This was a thirty-story office block in the old Bauhaus mode, Russified by rose-tinted glass walls, a neo-Stalinist black marble ground-floor façade replete with abstract versions of heroic statuary, and a red-and-gold-striped onion-dome cupola topped by a huge red star outlined at night in neon. It looked something like a refugee from Tokyo and something like a Krokodil cartoon of its own bad taste, and yet there was something rather engaging about it, an almost punk sensibility that seemed to be thumbing its bright young nose at the massively stodgy old government palaces among which it arose.

  Vitaly Kuryakin’s office on the twentieth floor, when Sonya finally reached it, was more of the same, with a big window looking out over the ancient Kremlin and Red Square—those suddenly archaic-seeming old emblems of Russian power—from on snobbish high. Its sleekly modern decor of chrome and polished teak and black leather and computer terminals proclaimed its distance from the symbology of the center of Mother Russia far below and its kinship with any such corporate office anywhere in the developed world.

  Kuryakin himself seemed quite at home as a creature of this transnational corporate venue. He looked to be somewhere between his late thirties and his mid-fifties, with light brown hair pinstriped with silver and expensively styled into an earlobe-length conservative rakishness. He wore a sharply tailored powder-blue suit and a white silk stylized peasant blouse with a gold embroidered choker in lieu of collar and tie. He sported an antique clockwork Rolex and rimless swept-back eyeglasses tinted a subtle gold.

  He was, in his way, beautiful and awesome, that fabled creature of which Sonya had heard and dreamed of becoming herself—a true Eurorussian, a sophisticated and elegant Soviet citizen of the world.

  Kuryakin himself democratically poured them glasses of tea from the old silver samovar that was the only item of Russian tradition in the whole office and then came right to the point.

  “Red Star is expanding rapidly and we have an immediate need for entry-level personnel,” he told her. “A profile of the ideal recruit was constructed by our department, and when we ran the school records and kharakteristikas of the current crop of university graduates through it, your name popped out in the top 25 percent. Congratulations, Sonya Ivanovna! You are privileged to be offered an entry-level position in Red Star, S.A.”

  “But . . . but . . . but I have already been accepted into the foreign service academy and—”

  “The foreign service!” Kuryakin exclaimed disparagingly. “It will take them another decade to root out all the old dinosaurs, and it would take you at least that long to get anywhere in that bureaucratic mess. Red Star, not the foreign service, is the place for a bright young woman, let me tell you!”

  “But . . . but . . . I’m engaged to be engaged, in a manner of speaking—”

  “Your personal life is your business if you come to work for Red Star,” Kuryakin said airily. “The bottom line is the bottom line as far as we’re concerned, you perform your job well and you can screw the whole Red Army chorus on weekends if you want to, or marry an orangutan.”

  “But Yuli . . . My career. . . .”

  “Come, come, don’t be an idiot!” Kuryakin declared. “It will take you two more years of schooling before the foreign service will even hire you at a salary a third less than what we’re offering you right now, and in valuta, Sonya Ivanovna, not rubles!”

  “Valuta?” Sonya said sharply, her mind snapping suddenly back into focus at the sound of the word.

  Valuta was hard convertible currency—dollars, ECU, yen, Swiss francs—that could be spent freely by anyone in the West, unlike the ruble, which was convertible to the ECU only on an official international accounts level. Anyone who dreamed of traveling in the West, dreamed of doing so, somehow, with a satchelful of valuta, since the alternative was a penurious stipend through the Outourist misers.

  “Yes, of course, valuta, it’s one of our main tasks to turn rubles and Soviet goods into the stuff, and so naturally we’re swimming in hard currency,” Kuryakin told her. “Besides, there’s our image to maintain. We can hardly have our employees slouching around Common Europe like the worst Western stereotype of the impoverished Russian, now can we? Surely you can keep from embarrassing us with the Belgians on a salary of 5,000 ECU a month!”

  “Belgians? 5,000 ECU a month?”

  Kuryakin eyed her confusion most strangely. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?” he snapped irritably. “I’m a busy man, Sonya Ivanovna, I’ve interviewed at least fifteen people today already, and I’ve got no more time to waste. Do you want the job, or not?”

  “But you haven’t even told me what the job is, Comrade Kuryakin,” Sonya pointed out.

  “I haven’t?” Kuryakin said. He groaned, his eyes rolled toward the ceiling behind his glasses, he threw up his hands and gave her an apologetic smile. “You’re right, I haven’t,” he said. He shrugged. “I’ve recruited so many people so fast today that you’re all starting to blur, and I’m starting to get ahead of myself!”

  He got up and refilled his tea glass from the samovar without bothering to offer the same to Sonya or even noticing the rudeness, took a long sip that looked like it should have burned his tongue, sat down again, and then seemed to slip back into his smooth man-of-the-world persona.

  “We’re offering you the position of French and English translator in the Brussels office—5,000 ECU a month to start plus one month’s signing bonus for relocation expenses, going to 5,500 the second year, after that on merit. All medical coverage of course, Common Europe holidays plus May Day, Lenin’s birthday, and the Anniversary of the Revolution.”

  He reeled it all off rapidly and diffidently like an American politician reading off a TelePrompTer into a television camera.

  “Two weeks’ paid vacation the first year, going to three after two years, four after five, an extra day for every year of seniority thereafter. The right of free travel within Comecon and Common Europe on your days off with a permanent travel visa from the Foreign Ministry on your passport. Free lunches at the commissary, wine or beer extra . . .”

  He paused, sipped more tea, seemed to downshift into a lower gear. “Well, I think that about covers it,” he said. “You do want to take it, now don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course!” Sonya exclaimed without thinking.

  It was all like some fabulous dream, like something happening to the heroine on some American soap opera cassette, like a jet to Disneyland West. Brussels! Common Europe! 5,000 ECU a month in valuta! Unlimited and unencumbered travel in Europe on weekends and holidays and vacations and the hard ECU to pay for it!

  “But . . . but . . .” she stammered in the next moment as the reality began to sink in. Yuli . . . the foreign service . . . engagement . . . marriage . . . the whole life scenario that she had carefully constructed and worked for . . .

  “But what?” Kuryakin snapped in annoyance. “I thought it was all settled.”

  “But I’ve never even thought of being a translator,” Sonya said, playing for time in which to collect her wits. “I can read and write English and French fluently, to be sure, but I have no training in—”

  “No problem, no problem,” Kuryakin said expansively, with a dismissive wave of his Rolexed hand. “Translation is AI augmented these days, three weeks at our seaside training school in the Crimea, and you will know enough information technology to begin. We have a hole to fill immediately, and we don’t expect a graduate from the foreign languages institute!”

  He glanced at his watch. “Well, what do you say, yes or no?” he demanded. “I’ve got another interview scheduled in five minutes, and with all the tea I’ve been drinking today, I really would like to have time to g
o to the toilet first.”

  “Can’t I have a few days to think about it?”

  “No, you cannot,” Kuryakin said flatly. He leaned back in his chair, sipped his tea, swirled the glass in front of her face, and regarded her more sympathetically. “Look, I know this is a big decision to make right now, on the spot,” he said, “but the fact is that I’ve got twenty-eight positions to fill in four days, and I’ve got at least ten possible candidates for each, so I can’t afford to wait around while one of them decides what to do.”

  He smiled, he shrugged. “Or think of it as a test,” he said. “We’re socialist entrepreneurs here at Red Star, we deal with high-speed capitalist jet-setting wheelers and dealers, and we have to be able to wheel and deal just a little faster than they do. We deal in options and currency-rate fluctuations and the electronic economy, where if you stop to think too long you’ve already blown it. We don’t want the kind of obsolete Russian who thinks slowly and carefully and paranoically, as if the KGB is watching every moment. We want the new Russian, Sonya Ivanovna, the Eurorussian—worldly-wise, decisive, instinctive, even a little impulsive.”

  He stood up and peered down at her with the big window at his back looking down on the Kremlin and Red Square and the river and southern Moscow beyond, all small and unreal from this vantage in the cloud-dappled bright sunshine, like a diorama of a toy city illumined by spotlights from above in a children’s palace.

  “Yes or no,” Kuryakin said. “Brussels or the foreign service academy? The New Europe or the old Russia? Rubles or valuta?” He laughed. “If you find that a difficult decision to make, you’re certainly not for us!”

  Put that way, what could Sonya say? It wasn’t as if she was so in love with Yuli that she really wanted to spend the rest of her life as his wife, she had never been sure she loved him, and if she couldn’t be sure, it must mean she really didn’t, and if she didn’t really love Yuli enough to throw away the instant fulfillment of the dream of her lifetime for him, then what other reason was there for stupidly turning down such a golden opportunity?