فصل 16

CHAPTER 16

THE ISLAND

Imet a free man on the island of Sakhalin. His name was Nikolai Batyukov, a would-be intellectual turned itinerant fisherman, and he knew only vaguely of the political fervor thousands of miles to the east in Moscow. He did not have much to say about Gorbachev or Yeltsin or any other figure in the political life of the capital. “As you can see, I keep my distance,” he said.

Batyukov was one of the few men or women I had encountered in Russia who seemed at ease with what he had made of his life. He was in his fifties, and many years before he had been, in the loose, Russian sense, an intellectual, a serious student, but he saw “no future at all” in a life of the mind. “Not in this country, not in the Soviet Union.” He gave it all up to live as a “half-legal, independent” fisherman. “In this country, the only way to be free was to run away from it,” he said. “I couldn’t run to Tokyo so I ran for the hills.” In the warmer months, Batyukov set up camp in the pine woods overlooking the Sea of Okhotsk, a landscape as jagged and beautiful as the coast of northern California. He fished mainly for salmon and spiny crab and sold his catch at markets in the capital city, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Batyukov had a hermit’s wild gray beard, and today he said he felt more worn out than usual.

All day he had been hauling nets heavy with salmon; it was the summer run. There were more fish around than he could possibly catch. What made him furious was to see the “government nets”—the nets set out along the shore by the state fishing boats—filled with rotting fish, big, glorious salmon going gray and belly up while the captains idled at sea, waiting for Moscow to give them the order to bring the fish on board. Those fishing nets held at least 150,000 pounds of salmon, Batyukov reckoned, but because the local bureaucrats had to wait for orders from the central bureaucrats of the “central command system,” a million-dollar catch would soon be little more than rotting guts, bones, and scales. “Can you imagine anything so stupid?” he said.

As if to make his guests taste the loss, Batyukov set out one of the most splendid seafood feasts I have ever eaten. He cooked it all outside over a fire, in dented tin pots and an ancient fry pan. He worked with speed and skill; he was the fifteen-minute gourmet. There was a fish soup as fine as any in Marseilles, a mound of steamed spiny crabs, glossy red salmon caviar smeared on fresh bread, glasses of home-brewed vodka, and mugs of hot chaga, a chocolaty tea made from the sap of birch trees. Most people in the Soviet Union got fat on bad sausage, potatoes, and butter. Batyukov had clearly built his magnificent pot on finer things.

“I live the way I want to live,” he said, “but the only way I do it is to keep low and out of sight. In your country, I’d be a worker, maybe a businessman. Here, I’m like an outlaw. An outlaw fisherman. So, sure, I like what I’m hearing on the radio about Sakharov and glasnost. Fine. But I’ll believe it when I can see it. Tell me. You’ve been in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Do you figure everything’s different? You figure there’s a place for a free man like me?” In 1890, Chekhov left behind his literary triumphs in Moscow and traveled by rail and riverboat to the prison colonies and fishing villages on Sakhalin. “This seems to be the end of the world,” he wrote in his journal as he approached the coastline, “and there is nowhere else left to go.” In Chekhov’s day, Sakhalin was Russia’s Australia, a penal colony so distant that it seemed the very definition of exile. The camps were places of arbitrary cruelty and violence; one prisoner finally murdered a sadistic guard by suffocating him in fermenting bread dough. Working conditions were miserable. Migrant coal workers ate candles and rotten wood while the czar’s ministers sold the island’s salmon and caviar abroad. Chekhov visited Sakhalin to work as a census taker, to talk with prisoners and vagrants, and to write a long, and strangely dispassionate, account of life there, The Island. Sakhalin seemed to him as remote as Patagonia; Sakhalin, for Chekhov, was as much an idea as a place, a representation of Russia’s vastness and the czar’s reach across it. In his census, he discovered a people who took on names that somehow reflected their remoteness and conditions. “The most common surname is Nepomnyashchy [Unremembered]. Here are some of the vagrants’ names: Mustafa Nepomnyashchy, Vasily Bezotechestva [Without Parents], Franz Nepomnyashchy, Ivan Nepomnyashchy 20 Years, Yakov Bezpozvaniya [Nameless], Vagrant Ivan 35 Years …” The czar’s prison camps closed long ago. Stalin favored the slightly closer, but less accessible, Kolyma region as his favorite murder site. The Soviet regime did what it could to Sovietize Sakhalin, building squat, shabby apartment houses in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and crabbed collective farms in the ports and provinces. The government populated the island by offering extra pay for miners, fishermen, and farmers.

Sakhalin was considered a border frontier, and so, until just a few months before my visit in the summer of 1989, the island was closed to foreigners and even to nonresident Soviet citizens. Even when I was there, Sakhalin was covered with concrete guard shacks. The KGB border troops were the age of college sophomores and wore daggers in their belts. They were stunned by the presence of foreigners: a reporter from The Washington Post one day, a Korean computer salesman the next. It seemed to them an invasion, but they were under orders now to let us through.

I went to Sakhalin to see if the political reforms going on in Moscow had taken root at the edge of Russia. By the time I got to the island, there had already been an awakening. The first sign of trouble for the local Party apparatus came in May 1988 when a few hundred men and women staged a demonstration outside the Chekhov Drama Theater in the capital to accuse the Party chief, Pyotr Tretyakov, of doling out apartments to his relatives and generally padding his own patronage rolls. The police and KGB circled the small demonstration but were too stunned, too confused, to act. The Party tried to wish it all away. To acknowledge the demonstration would have been “a situation.” That was impermissible, unthinkable. The next morning, the official papers made the requisite noise about “a handful of extremists,” then ignored the issue entirely.

But soon, as if sensing the Moscow breeze at their backs, the local democrats staged even bigger demonstrations on the squares and streets of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The island’s Party leadership was suddenly, and unalterably, on the defensive. A triumphant banner appeared over Lenin Avenue: “Get Rid of the Bureaucrats and Give Them a Shovel.” Tretyakov, the Party chief, would have fought back if he could have, but he got no support from Moscow. He was fired by the Central Committee and fled Sakhalin for Moscow on a military transport jet. He never returned to the island. In the meantime, the new Party leaders knew well enough to halt construction of an expensive new headquarters and said they would let the people of Sakhalin decide whether to make a hospital or a school out of the building. In fact, everywhere I went in the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990, the Communist Party was always in a state of “halted construction.” Dozens of expensive headquarters never opened, were turned into schools and hospitals, or, more often, sat empty, dark, haunted.

This tiny revolution became an instant legend on the island. It was known as the “May events,” a distinct echo of the legendary “July events” that led to the Bolshevik uprising of October 1917. Gorbachev was so pleased with the sign of an awakening in the hinterlands that he told reporters, “Finally, perestroika has come to Sakhalin.” But for all of Gorbachev’s triumphalism, the Party still could not grasp the depths of people’s anger with the old structures of power and the hegemony of Moscow. The Central Committee replaced the old apparatchik, Tretyakov, with a new one, Viktor Bondarchuk. Sakhalin Island had to wait only a few months before it showed its opinion of Comrade Bondarchuk. In the race for the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk seat in the Congress of People’s Deputies, an obscure and dyspeptic journalist named Vitaly Guly trounced Bondarchuk. Guly had been an ardent Komsomol boy, dutifully traveling the island preaching ideology. But he had changed radically by the mid-eighties. Now in his late thirties, he wrote many of the opinion pieces and embarrassing investigative pieces that led to the “May events.” One afternoon, we rode around in Guly’s tiny Moskvich “looking for constituents.” He wanted to talk with workers about the Congress and the miners’ strikes. “I can’t exactly say all I need to say in my paper—Sovetsky Sakhalin—so they have to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” The roads were generally miserable, but suddenly we found ourselves on a strip as fine as a German autobahn. Guly laughed and said, “You want to know why the road is so smooth? This is the road from Party headquarters downtown to where all the Party big shots had their dachas. They wanted a good road for themselves, and that’s all there was to it. Presto! It was built! As for the rest of us …” We headed toward a fishery and caviar-processing plant on Freedom Peninsula. To get there, we had to get through yet another KGB checkpoint, which consisted of a crumbling concrete shack, two teenage guards, and a boom box booming “I Saw Her Standing There.” The guard poked his head inside. He asked for our documents. While he checked them over he was still tapping his foot to the music.

“Okay,” he said. “We were expecting foreigners. Go ahead through.”

After I got over my awe at the sight of the caviar—women in white fingering their way through bucketfuls of wondrous, slick goo—I could concentrate on how easily Guly mixed with the workers. He had the knack of listening to their complaints, remembering their names, and laughing at their jokes. Many of the workers referred to the first session of the Congress simply as “the show,” the “great show in Moscow,” and they wanted to know much more about immediate things: their salaries, housing. One woman told Guly with no embarrassment that “the main method of birth control on this island is abortion and the only way you can get one is to hire a doctor and rent a hotel room.” Guly said he would look into the possibility of building a clinic and making birth control available on the island. But there was also a grim understanding between the woman and Vitaly Guly: only the Communist Party had the power to do anything. And it would do nothing. Guly and his constituent smiled thin smiles at each other and parted.

Guly headed for the car, boiling. “Sakharov is right,” he said. “I’m a member of the Party, but the Party has to go. The rest is details.” But the Party remained and the Party was still all-powerful, especially in a distant province like Sakhalin. The Party had rigged the elections so that it could stock the Congress with obedient servants. These were, in the main, dim-witted hacks who had very little idea at all what words like “perestroika,” “glasnost,” or “democratization” meant. Since the days of Stalin they had been hearing the Kremlin boast of its democracy, its constitutionalism; the Constitution written under Stalin, after all, sounds no less glorious than the American version of 1789. But it hardly mattered. Words, much less slogans, had long ago lost their meaning. What really meant something was belonging. Membership in the Party apparatus was all.

During my stay in Sakhalin, I shuttled back and forth between one host and the other, between Guly and a happy lug named Anatoly Kapustin. Both were deputies in the Congress, but they could not have been more different. Kapustin was elected not by people in his territory, but rather to a seat specially reserved for fellow Party and labor union officials. According to the more polite critics in town, he was a time-server, a low-rent apparatchik who had worked his way up from the coal mines to a soft office job in the union bureaucracy. He was in no way nasty, and friendlier even than Guly. Kapustin was eager to please. He had voice like a bassoon and a crushing handshake. He smiled constantly, like a maniac. But now he was in deep trouble. After the triumph of his election, he was having a very bad summer.

“Things are out of control,” he said, “and that’s not good.”

There had been strikes at the Sakhalin coal mines, and in their aftermath Kapustin wanted badly to show us that he was “working closely with the working class.” One morning we watched him try to negotiate his way through a meeting with about 150 miners at union headquarters in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Kapustin did the best he could. He pledged “openness” like Gorbachev. He chopped the air and wrapped the lectern like Gorbachev. But his moves were unconvincing. The poor man was too weighed down by his own meager talents, his dubious résumé and election, his habits of thought and speech. He was a cliché, an earnest windbag of the apparat. His new role as a “man of perestroika” was beyond him. He was no more convincing to the miners than he was to himself. Kapustin was like a dinner-theater extra asked to play Hamlet at the Old Vic with an hour’s preparation. He knew some of the lines—“We will work together, hand in hand!”—but he fooled no one. The miners rolled their eyes and hooted like a flock of owls.

Afterward, Kapustin was embarrassed and sad. He thought he was getting it. He thought he’d been brave. “I used to toe the line all the way,” he said. “The big guys would say what to do, and I would do it. It was just ‘Kapustin do this’ and that was that. Now I think if something is wrong, I try to speak up.” But it wasn’t enough.

Nearby, in the hallway, one of the strike leaders, Vitaly Topolov, said he was trying hard to work with Kapustin, but the prospects were not good at all: “I suppose he was an apparatchik, but Gorbachev was an apparatchik under Brezhnev, too. I keep hoping.” Kapustin bumbled on. We drove through the hills to Sinegorsk, a tiny mining town built by the Japanese when they were in control of the island in 1905. There, in the mine director’s office, Kapustin was suddenly at ease. These were his friends, the midlevel bureaucrats who were marginally competent in their jobs, marginally honest. They all regretted the passing of time and apologized for the meager spread of ham sandwiches and fizzy water.

“Too bad this isn’t the Brezhnev era,” one of the mine directors said. “Back then we really would have laid out a banquet for you.” It wasn’t their arrogance that hampered them so much as their complete lack of comprehension. When it came to simple economics, they could not connect the dots. The mine director complained that production had fallen at the mine by half, but at the same time he launched into a glorious paean to the central planning system and the web of state orders and subsidies. The fact was that his mine was badly equipped, primitive, and probably defunct. It was a dangerous place to work and an ecological disaster, and would never be profitable in a normal economy.

After lunch, Kapustin led us on an expedition of the mine, and it was worse than anything I’d seen in Siberia, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan. The mine was a horror. There were no elevators, and the shafts were brutal and tight. It took some of the miners two hours of sliding and creeping along stone just to get to their work stations. Later, my back and legs were covered with bruises and I was more sore than I would have been if I’d run ten miles. Until the strike, the miners had not been paid for this “commuting” time: they tore themselves up, four hours every day, for free. “And we’ve taken you down the best mine we’ve got here,” the director said. “This one’s dry. In the others, you’ve got water running down your back all day.” Outside, in the daylight at last, Kapustin wiped the soot from his eyes and put on his Gorbachev face again. Two dozen miners, exhausted and instantly bored, circled around. They wanted to go home but had been told to wait. “I’m here to listen to your problems,” Kapustin said clumsily. “Please, tell me your problems.” The men wore the bemused expressions of high school students watching their teacher trying too hard to be hip. They could not wait to go home and soak in a bath. They were in no mood to perform for a union hack like Anatoly Kapustin.

And yet, for a few days, I liked him. Kapustin was trying so hard to be admired, and the rewards for toadying were next to nothing: a slightly better salary, a better summer vacation. As a member of the Congress, he was the Soviet equivalent of a congressmen, and yet no American—much less a member of the House of Representatives—could have lived the life of Anatoly Kapustin. He lived just about as badly as anyone else in the Soviet Union.

A couple of days after our trip to the mine, Kapustin took us out to a huge fishing trawler. I thought we’d get a chance to see how a state boat operated, why it was that so many tons of salmon were rotting in the nets a few hundred feet away. But Kapustin had no interest in that. He was a close friend of the ship captain, and, as Kapustin said, “It’s time we kicked back and relaxed. You relax sometimes in America, don’t you?” He led us to the captain’s stateroom, a wood-paneled affair of surprising elegance. The table was already set with china, decent silverware, dishes heaped with food, and a half-dozen bottles: Georgian champagne, Ukrainian beer, pepper vodka. There was no way out. We were in for a time of it, and I prayed only that the seas would stay calm.

Amazingly, Kapustin was a worse drinker than I am. After three vodkas he was expressing his eternal fealty to Yegor Ligachev and the “wisdom” of the Party hard line. The strikes were an outrage, private property impermissible, the independence movements in the Baltic states treason. After just one more drink, he was making horrible sport of Sakharov, calling him “self-righteous,” “anti-Soviet,” and “useless.” “Just who does he think he is?” Kapustin said, his face darkening. “The man talks too much for his own good. He’s a slander-monger.” It was a nasty performance, and I was—to my surprise—surprised. So many Party apparatchiks in so many situations had performed prettily for me, the foreign journalist. But now Kapustin was unbound. The vodka and the days of proximity had worked on him like a key. He was a man who instinctively felt the moral and political threat that Sakharov posed to him and the Party. Sakharov and his followers were challenging the very existence of the Party, the power of the Kremlin, the way of doing business. “Sakharov and his bunch think we don’t understand them,” Kapustin said, lifting his glass one last time, “but we do. We understand them. All too well.”