“So call me a sucker, Nat, ’cause I’m staying,” he said. “I only wish I had been out there with them, marching behind that flag.”
“Out there getting the crap beat out of you on television?” Marla said.
“Somebody had to do it,” Bobby told her. “The goddamn jingos may have smeared blood and shit all over our flag, but when those people hung it upside down and marched up Telegraph behind it, they washed it clean, they made it something to be proud of again. They showed the world that there are still some real Americans.”
“Now is the time for futile gestures?” Wolfowitz said sarcastically. But his eyes told quite another story.
“Hey, Nat,” Bobby said, staring straight into them, “so it’s a lousy hand we’ve been dealt. But these are the cards, and this is the only game in town, so we gotta play ’em.”
* * *
Q: How many Russians does it take to shave the hair off a wild Bear?
A: One hundred thousand and three. Two to hold him down, one to wield the razor, and 100,000 to elect the result to the Supreme Soviet.
—Krokodil
HERO OF SOCIALIST PARKING
When Moscow police towed off Ivan Leonidovich Zhukovsky’s brand-new Mercedes for triple-parking on Tverskaya Street, Ivan Leonidovich decided not to take things lying down. Instead, he stole a welding laser from his place of employment, broke into the police garage at 3:00 A.M., fused the transmissions of seventeen city tow trucks, turned himself in to the authorities after boasting of his exploits in a long drunken phone call to this newspaper, and demanded his right to a trial by jury under Soviet law.
“Let’s see if the bastards can find a panel of patriots who will convict me!” he declared. “I’m guilty of nothing but what every red-blooded Russian motorist wishes he had the courage to do himself!”
—Mad Moscow
* * *
XVI
For better and for worse, life in the Soviet Union was not quite what Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed had anticipated.
The better of it was that, with the Soviet Union now economically integrated into Common Europe, Moscow was already quite another city from what she remembered from her girlhood visits.
The bustle was still there, people still casually elbowed you aside in the Metro and the streets, there was still that feeling that this was the center of the world and everyone knew it, people still sold everything and anything on the sidewalks, but Moscow was evolving almost overnight into a truly European city; you could watch it happening, as all the spring flowers sprung up in neon profusion through the melting snow.
With all economic barriers lifted, the biggest new consumer market in the history of the world had suddenly opened up in the form of three hundred million Soviet citizens who were being offered easy credit for the first time in their lives. Consumer goods of every conceivable description were pouring into the Soviet Union as Common European companies fought for a piece of the action. To each according to his credit limit at 15 percent per annum, from each in small monthly payments.
Billions of ECU were lavished on advertising campaigns to sell everything under the sun, utterly transforming the Moscow cityscape with billboards and neon signs and videowalls and garish storefront displays. Every bus was festooned inside and out with advertising posters, cabs sold ad space, trees, walls, lampposts, were plastered with advertising stick-ups. A huge videowall had even been erected on the façade of the GUM facing poor Lenin’s tomb across Red Square, and Tverskaya Street had been turned into a kind of scaled-down Champs-Élysées, with neon signs, instant sidewalk cafés, animated videowalls, lavish display windows, sleazy souvenir shops, fast-food restaurants, pickpockets, and gawking tourists from Japan and Central Asia.
The traffic jams were horrendous, and streets, alleys, and courtyard parking lots were jammed with parked cars, legal and otherwise, as every Muscovite’s unfulfilled dream of a car or a moto was suddenly and instantly granted with no money down and easy monthly payments. The militia traffic wardens were to be seen everywhere, waving their white batons, mostly futilely, for the New Breed of Soviet motorist for the most part heeded not the old signal to pull over and meekly accept a ticket from a mere pedestrian official and had to be chased down by the new scooter police. Traffic signals seemed to be in the process of going up at every major intersection, and none too soon for anyone trying to cross against any driver’s sacred right to make a right turn. The broad main avenues were fender-bending nightmares as automotive traditionalists persisted in attempting recently outlawed mid-block U-turns across multiple lanes of creeping cars.
Dozens of new movie houses, video rental stores, nightclubs, theaters, discos, saloons, and restaurants seemed to be opening up every week. Brand-new bookstores and art galleries were everywhere. Twenty new hotels had already been built and more were on the drawing boards. There was a casino near the Park Kulturi, and live sex shows around the corner from the Foreign Ministry on the Arbat Strip. The quantity of alcohol—hard liquor, wine, and beer—available was now limited only by the seemingly bottomless capacity of the populace, and the city was awash in drug dealers from all over Common Europe.
Hookers worked the crowds in plain sight of Lubyanka on Dzerzinski Square, and the Arbat had become a St.-Germain. You could get drunk on the sheer energy of the crowds around the Arbatskaya Metro station even at 2:00 A.M. with the system long closed, as club-crawlers continued their revelry en plein air amid peddlers and gambling games and street entertainers.
After over a century of lip service to dour socialist morality, Moscow was learning how to boogie openly, and taking the crash course in a mad effort to make up for all that lost time. It was Mad Moscow, indeed!
The worse of it was that Franja found little time to enjoy it.
Yuri Gagarin University had grown up around the old Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Academy at Star City, out in the banlieue, and while the Metro went straight from Star City to the centre ville, she found that a Saturday night now and again was about all the time she had to spare for fun and games in the city.
As a highly motivated teenager in Paris, Franja had been a stellar student. Here, she was surrounded by thousands of other former star students just like herself, all competing for a comparative handful of openings in the actual Cosmonaut school.
The Soviet Union now had six Cosmograds in orbit and two more under construction. There was a permanent lunar base, and talk of establishing one on Mars. There were three launch facilities for heavy freight boosters, factories all over the Soviet Union building the hardware, satellite ground stations, data-processing facilities, development labs, and design centers.
The number of actual cosmonauts needed for this effort—Cosmonaut Pilots, Cosmonaut Flight Engineers, Cosmonaut Explorers—was only a few hundred. But the number of engineers, technicians, skilled workers, and assorted support personnel required to do the scut work was up there in the tens of thousands, and Gagarin University’s task was to turn them out on a production-line basis.
For the first two years, everyone took the same basic courses, after which the top 5 percent, as determined by secret equation factoring in academic standing, physical condition, kharakteristika, and, of course, connections, was admitted into the Cosmonaut school.
Everyone else received a final year’s training in some less exalted specialty—equipment maintenance, manufacturing, communications, ground control, computer programming, construction, data analysis and processing. After graduation, about 10 percent of the student body went on to graduate-level scientific studies, and the rest became the working class of the Soviet space program.
As a result, the competition was utterly ruthless. Classes ran six hours a day five days a week, and while the homework load was officially set at three hours a day, anyone who didn’t put in at least four or five hours after class was not going to make it. Saturdays and Sundays were officially free time, but anyone who didn’t volunteer his time for Komsomol activities was not considered motivated.
&nb
sp; Students were required to live in the dorms, big ugly concrete housing blocks set up to “psychologically prepare students for Cosmograd life.” Each student had a bed, a locker, a table, a chair, and a computer console in a large communal room divided by thin cardboard partitions. Bathrooms were communal and spartan. There were communal kitchens and commissaries, and students were required to do kitchen duty as well as keep the building shipshape. The dorms were co-ed, but what love-making took place had to be conducted quietly so as not to disturb the studies of the more diligent—apparently more “psychological training” in Cosmograd etiquette.
The work was the most intellectually demanding Franja had ever experienced, the hours seemed endless, but she had never been one to be afraid of hard work. Her fellow students might be dour obsessive grinds for the most part, but then so was she. What little dating she found time and inclination for consisted mostly of tours of the facilities, museums, and displays of Star City, a whole little metropolis given over almost entirely to the Soviet space program. What sex she indulged in was mostly quick, functional, and, of course, quiet, a matter of obtaining sufficient erotic exercise to keep one’s mind clear for one’s studies, a common attitude at Gagarin, where one’s lover was also one’s competitor.
All in all, she probably would have been happy at Gagarin, or at least too preoccupied to have any time to feel unhappy, were it not for the politics.
The President of the Soviet Union, as well as the Presidents of the constituent republics, were chosen by universal suffrage in multicandidate elections, as were the Delegates to the Supreme Soviet. But the politics of the Russian Spring had turned the Supreme Soviet into an unseemly bear pit of savage factional controversy.
“The Communist Party” did not exactly exist anymore. It had devolved into an uneasy confederation of factions and national communist parties, each one competing for votes on a local level with at least one overtly nationalist party, and each one, therefore, representing the chauvinistic interests of its constituency far more avidly than any central ideology.
The Russians themselves had become just another national minority, though still the largest by far and still in control of the central government, the central Party machinery, the economic apparatus, and the Red Army, to the point where the distinction between “Soviet Federalism” and “Great Russian Nationalism” was entirely lost on the Confederalists, aka the “Ethnic Nationalists.”
The Ethnic Nationalists were a loose alliance of convenience of every national grouping with its own republic or even autonomous region. Nothing seemed to appease their appetite for independence—not popular election of their own national Presidents and Parliaments, not control of local taxes and national budgets, not even the formation of their own independent internal security forces, the so-called national militias.
The more they got, the more they wanted. Every concession, every step away from “Federalism” and toward “Confederation” was taken as a victory over “chauvinistic Russian hegemony.” Ethnic Nationalist candidates won elections by outdoing each other in demanding greater and greater autonomy and lately even direct membership in Common Europe as sovereign national states.
Nor were the Russians themselves united. The so-called Eurorussians still dominated the Russian delegation in the Supreme Soviet, but in the Russian Republic, and even more so among Russian minorities in the other republics, an ominous sense of Russian nationalism had surfaced from the lower depths of society into the higher circles.
It could be as seemingly benign as the craze for neo-Czarist nostalgia or all the Russian Orthodox TV extravaganzas, as troubling as the profusion of mystics and faith healers in peasant blouses or the filth churned out by the Pamyat hard core, or as silly as the attempt to purge Western chord progressions from Russian rock ’n’ roll, or as terrifying as the rhetoric of demagogues who proclaimed that the Soviet Union needed the strong hand of the Slavic master race in firm control of the “Asiatics.”
Crude or subtle, it was all part of a Russian chauvinism that associated the threatened loss of Russian hegemony within the USSR with the entry of the Soviet Union into “degenerate bourgeois Common Europe.”
These so-called Mother Russians might be a minority movement, but they were very much in evidence. On the streets of Moscow, this meant Uncle Joes—Pamyat street hooligans in Stalin T-shirts with mustaches to match—smashing the windows of foreign shops and fast-food stands, terrorizing crowds outside theaters and movie houses showing films and plays from the West, gang-raping “Westernized” girls, and roughing up people whose “Russian purity” they called into question. In the media, it meant things like an endless TV series idolizing Peter the Great, max-metal renditions of traditional Russian folk music, and gory comic books obsessed with the Great Patriotic War. In the Supreme Soviet, it meant Delegates in peasant blouses, cossack pants, and jackboots, foaming at the mouth for the benefit of the TV cameras and mercilessly heckling non-Russian speakers.
And in Gagarin University, it meant that someone like Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed was constantly required to prove her Russian-ness.
Her light French accent might be considered chic among most of her fellow students, who fancied themselves modern Eurorussians and contemptuously referred to the Mother Russians as muzhiks, Bears, or worse, but there was a scattering of such unenlightened creatures on the faculty who tormented her for it.
“In Russian, please, Franja Yurievna,” they would tell her, pretending they didn’t understand her correct answers to their questions.
Being a Eurorussian repatriate with an effete French accent was bad enough, but when they found out that her father was an American, their attitude degenerated to a naked hostility that all too many of her classmates came to share.
And since marks were determined by a combination of grades and subjective evaluation of classroom performance, the disfavor of these miserable nikulturni reactionary Bears was enough to pull her overall average down to only a few points above the mean.
Worse still, she knew all too well that her kharakteristika, upon which her Parisian upbringing and her father’s nationality were black marks enough already, and upon which any hope of getting into the Cosmonaut school also depended, was also being unjustly blackened by the Mother Russians among her teachers.
It was the bitterest of ironies. Franja was being discriminated against as an American!
Mother too, to judge from her letters, was suffering unjustly for the misdeeds of the American imperialists, not to mention Bobby’s selfish insistence on attending college in the United States.
After the Great Stock Market Coup it had seemed that Mother must surely be due for a promotion to department head of something. Instead, after Bobby had entered the University of California at the same time that the Americans were invading Mexico, the Party had called her on the carpet for a political review, and only the intercession of her good friend Ilya Pashikov had saved her Party card and with it her lowly position as his assistant.
Yet Franja also found herself empathizing with her American father, even though it was he who was the unwitting source of her torment. Just as he had turned his back on America in the pursuit of his dreams of space only to find himself unjustly shunted off into a dead-end job anyway because of his American birth, so was she being unfairly robbed of her chance to go to Cosmonaut school by an American birthright she had never wanted any part of.
By the time the results were in on her first year at Gagarin University, it was all too apparent that she had no chance of getting into the Cosmonaut school no matter what she did in the second year, and by the time she went home to Paris for the summer recess, she was seriously thinking of giving up and quitting.
Matters at home were not exactly conducive to lightening her despairing mood.
Father had grown quite bitter with the way things were going with his career at ESA. And it was all too painfully clear that Mother and Father were not getting along at all.
They still slept in the same bed, b
ut what went on behind the bedroom door was something that Franja did her best not to imagine. They fought often in front of her, and frequently over the most stupid and trivial things, and when they weren’t fighting, they seemed distantly polite but cold to each other, manifestly attempting to put on a good face for her benefit, which only made things worse.
The only bright spot was that the Americans had imposed extremely restrictive entrance visas as part of yet another tightening of their loathsome National Security Act, meaning that if Bobby wanted to come to Paris for the summer as planned, the chances were excellent that he would not get back in, something she was certain he would not risk, meaning that Franja was at least spared his presence at this tense and depressing family reunion.
But that was hardly enough. She spent two weeks moping fecklessly about the city, pondering her own problems without really being able to discuss them fully, without it degenerating into another of Father’s anti-Russian tirades, and bearing horrified and helpless witness to the degeneration of her parents’ marriage.
She found herself longing for the spartan dorms of Gagarin University, where she at least had more than enough hard work to keep her distracted, and once she found herself waxing nostalgic for that venue of torment, she knew she had to leave. Where she would go was something else again, but she had to get out. The Midi, maybe, or the Black Sea, anywhere where she could lie on a beach during the day, engage in meaningless sex at night, and try to sort out what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
Russian Spring Page 38
