فصل 22

CHAPTER 22

MAY DAY!

MAY DAY!

Iwoke early on May Day, 1990, the annual festival of labor, sunshine, and kitsch. The weather was perfect, a sweet astonishment in the perpetually dreary city of Moscow. Rumor had it in the past that the Communist Party, in its constant attempt to tame the heavens and the earth, seeded the clouds so it would rain before and after—but never on—the parade.

May Day was a cartoon of what was happening in the country. You could just plant yourself on Red Square and watch it all go by. Under Stalin, May Day raised the cult of personality to the level of communal entertainment. Every float and billboard, every song and banner was devoted to the worship of his greatness. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev the atmosphere was still grotesque, but more jolly. Unsurpassed achievements of the workingman at least equaled the unsurpassed wonderfulness of the Leader.

By 1988, there were still some portraits of the Politburo leaders and Central Committee-approved slogans (“Acceleration!”) floating by, but Gorbachev had reduced the ceremony mostly to a bit of tacky fun, a production worthy of halftime at the Sugar Bowl: strongmen flinging golden dumbbells into the air, gymnast-nymphets jackknifing at the waist in honor of the working class. Harmless Sovietiana. The banners were more in the spirit of self-help than national vanity. The country was collapsing, after all, and everyone knew it. It was in the papers every day. That year I also managed to run into Yeltsin as he wandered toward his modest car. He had not been seen around Moscow since his fall from power nearly a year before, and this was probably his last moment of shyness. Oh yes, he said with a fantastically broad smile, he was quite healthy. We would hear from him soon.

By 1989, the slogans had turned to a sugary mush. “Peace for Everyone!” one said. Or the touching “We’re Trying to Renew Ourselves!” It was all so innocent, a Fourth of July barbecue without the hot dogs. Ideology had disappeared. There were no “our rockets are bigger than your rockets” signs anymore, no boasting of magnesium production rates, no Uncle Sams stepping on the neck of the Third World. An empire with thousands of nuclear warheads was eager to show just how toothless it had become. The Soviet Union was in the midst of a self-actualization craze.

For 1990, Gorbachev decided to account for the new wave of young politicians in the various legislatures, city halls, and town councils. The Kremlin announced that the liberal mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, would be on the reviewing stand of the Lenin Mausoleum along with the Politburo and a few selected government honchos. Yuri Prokofiyev, the astonishingly dense leader of the Moscow Party organization, also declared that factory workers would no longer be compelled to celebrate. This year May Day would be “completely voluntary,” he said. Only banners bearing “anticonstitutional” slogans would be discouraged. “What a gesture!” everyone was supposed to think. “What a kind and liberal leadership!” But, as usual, the Party was acting more out of anxiety than generosity. They opened up the parade only in exchange for an agreement from Democratic Russia, Memorial, and other opposition groups that there would be no embarrassing “countermarches” across town. In Leningrad, the Party was taking no chances; it canceled the parade altogether.

The morning was reliably gorgeous—a hard bright sun and a cool breeze washed along faces that had turned the lightest shade of pale after the long winter. Along the walk north from October Square to Red Square, I saw a few people carrying a Lithuanian flag and some rolled-up banners. I didn’t think much of it. I got to the reviewing stand early, bought an ice cream, and gossiped with some of the other reporters. The public address system pumped out some treacly Soviet pop tunes and Pete Seeger’s “We’ll See That Day Come Round.” Finally, it was time for the ceremonies to begin. As always, the reporters took careful note of the order in which the various leaders walked up the stairs of the Lenin Mausoleum to the reviewing stand. Yeltsin and Geidar Aliyev had told me how Gorbachev, like a baseball manager, would give everyone his place in the order just before showtime. “Usually, it was written on a little card or piece of paper,” Yeltsin said. He also said that at lunch breaks during Politburo sessions, everyone sat in his usual May Day order.

For the reporters, it was still considered slightly important who chatted with whom, who wore a fedora, who a homburg, and, above all, who was missing. This was called “Soviet watching.” At least for me, the ritual lost its aura with the discovery that underneath the mausoleum there was a laboratory charged with monitoring the temperature and rate of deterioration of “the living Lenin.” Below that, there was a gymnasium where the guards could work out on off hours. The idea of some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts in the bowels of sacred territory somehow erased all mystery from the grand procession and the leaders who watched it.

For about an hour, May Day was as calm and uneventful as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. One merely had to substitute images of heroic labor for Underdog and Bullwinkle. Gorbachev watched with a bored, kingly smile, as if he were pleased to live through this hour of his life without crisis. The first marchers were mostly factory workers and members of official unions, and the signs they carried reflected their fear that a market economy would leave them without money or a job. “Enough Experiments,” one said. “A Market Economy Is Just Power to the Plutocracy,” said another. “Down with Private Property.” Even while they mouthed the slogans of the right wing, those workers demanded our sympathy. They had lived for decades in a world of guarantees (however meager) and absolute truths (however false), and now everything had been denounced, undercut, found out. They felt threatened to the core.

The crowd moved from left to right, from the brick Museum of the Revolution across the cobblestones of Red Square then down the slope past St. Basil’s Cathedral and toward the steely Moscow River, glinting now like the oiled barrel of a .38. But suddenly, the march seemed to run out of marchers. We all looked left and saw that another wave had gathered, but they were waiting, and they looked … different. What was this? There were red, yellow, and green Lithuanian flags, black, blue, and white Estonian flags, Russian tricolors from the czarist era. There was shouting, more young people, an entirely different feel. Something was about to happen. You could feel it. Everyone could. These were the very people who would have gone off to “counterdemonstrations” had the Party not cut a deal with them. Soon the Party would wish it had never had this stroke of genius.

The democrats started marching onto the square, and now their placards became visible from the reviewing stands. I’d seen the same ones at other demonstrations, but on Red Square? With Gorbachev watching?

“Socialism? No Thanks!”

“Communists: Have No Illusions. You Are Bankrupt.”

“Marxism-Leninism Is on the Rubbish Heap of History.”

“Down with the Politburo! Resign!”

“Ceauşescus of the Politburo: Out of Your Armchairs and Onto the Prison Floors!” “Down with the Empire and Red Fascism!”

There were no portraits of the Politburo members, but there were numerous posters featuring Yeltsin (“Tell ‘em, Boris!”) and Sakharov (“Conscience of the Nation”). Then came the most chilling symbol of all: red Soviet flags with the hammer and sickle ripped out—an echo of the opposition flags on the streets of Bucharest during the uprising of December 1989. The demonstrators all stopped and turned toward the Lenin Mausoleum. The square was filled with tens of thousands of people now, waving their fists, chanting “Doloi KPSS!” (“Down with the Party!”) “Doloi Gorbachev!” “Doloi Ligachev!” I borrowed a pair of binoculars and glimpsed the faces of the men on the reviewing stand. (Later I got a closer look on television.) Ligachev glared and nodded, his face hard as a walnut. Yakovlev was impassive, Yoda-like; Popov looked utterly serene, even pleased, though hesitant to let it show in such company. Gorbachev, as always, was a master of his emotions. As tens of thousands of people denounced him, he never let the minutest flicker of anger crease his face. I remembered other men in similar situations, how confused and frightened Ceauşescu had looked when he listened to those first demonstrators from his balcony in Bucharest. Gorbachev’s performance was as amazing as the demonstration itself. He watched and watched and occasionally chatted with those next to him, as if this were the most common May Day parade in memory. As if it were normal!

The confrontation seemed as if it might go on endlessly. The demonstrators were ready to stay in Red Square all day. We all stood there, watching, still as lizards in the sun. The men on the mausoleum did not move. They merely stood there, as if they were watching something else, some other parade, instead of their own last judgment. Finally, someone ordered the Kremlin loudspeakers turned up and they started churning out patriotic slogans and marching music. But it was no match for the chanting on the square, a surge that grew louder with every minute. This was their square and there was not a goddamn thing anyone could do about it. At the center of the crowd stood a Russian Orthodox priest, his beard from the pages of Dostoevsky; he carried a seven-foot-high crucifix and shouted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, Christ Has Risen!” Finally, after a full twenty-five minutes of this, Gorbachev nodded, turned on his heels, and walked off the tribune. What else could he do? Everyone, Popov included, followed. Later, I visited Popov at city hall and asked him how he and Gorbachev had felt standing there on the mausoleum.

“For me, it was interesting,” he said. “For Gorbachev? I would say the word is … uncomfortable.” I also spoke to Yegor Ligachev, who told me that he had been deeply disturbed by the incident. “Not just me, but Mikhail Sergeyevich, everyone had this feeling,” he said. “On the one hand, we gave the chance for any force to march on Red Square and express themselves. On the other hand, we witnessed such extremist outbursts, such blatant aggressiveness, that if they would come to power and we would organize such a demonstration, we would be sent directly to jail from Red Square. No doubt about that. I watched for a long time and Mikhail Sergeyevich came up to me and said, ‘Yegor, probably it’s time to finish it.’ And I said, ‘Yes, it’s time.’ And we left, with me walking beside him. It was uncivilized. I said to Mikhail Sergeyevich, ‘Once again we are seeing what a deplorable state the country is in.’ These were my exact words.” After Gorbachev and the rest left the reviewing stand on Lenin’s tomb, I walked into the square and joined the march at its tail end. Everyone was jazzed with a sense of power. “The leadership may try to dismiss what happened here today as just some extremists blowing off a little steam, but it runs deeper. Gorbachev has done a lot of good, but when it comes to us, the radical, he turns away from his natural allies,” one demonstrator, Aleksandr Afanasyev, told me. His face was streamed with sweat, flush with the thrill of the standoff. A young man named Vitaly Mindlin, who was carrying a pro-Lithuanian banner, told me, “I’ve been forced to go to these rallies for years, and this is the first time I’ve come voluntarily, acting from my own soul. Gorbachev may have been insulted by our openness, but we have to take that risk. We can’t afford to act as if we were someone’s subject. We are our own masters. The people dictate the moment now, not Gorbachev.” The Party, of course, tried to make sure the country did not hear about the demonstrations. Official television gave blanket coverage to the first hour of the parade, but once the radicals crested the hill and entered Red Square, the broadcast ended. Of course, glasnost subverted any attempt to control the information. The more liberal papers were filled with accounts of the May Day events, and the public read not only about Moscow, but about the anti-Communist demonstrations in Eastern Europe and the “anti-empire” demonstration in Ukraine. The Party had been humiliated nearly everywhere. In Lvov, the center of the Ukrainian independence movement, demonstrators carried icons of the Virgin Mary and signs saying, “USSR: The Prison House of Nations.” The mayor of Lvov, Vyacheslav Chernovil, could not help but applaud. He’d spent the better part of his adulthood as a dissident and political prisoner. “Happy May Day,” he told everyone. “Happy May Day.” A few days later, Aleksandr Yakovlev had the pitiable job of facing the press. Playing against type, the most liberal man in the leadership denounced the May Day demonstrations as “insulting” and “freakish.” Yakovlev turned demagogue as he singled out the few kooks in the march, war veterans with pictures of Stalin, monarchists with icons of Nicholas II. He made out this lunatic fringe to be the main current of the demonstration itself and then pompously declared that what we had witnessed that day were “anti-reform” forces trying to frighten the goodly men of the Kremlin. What a strange and terrible thing it must have been for Yakovlev to carry out such a task. Yuri Prokofiyev, the Moscow Party chief, was more honest in his anger. The crowds, he said, “carried insulting slogans exceeding the limits of decency. They smeared the leaders of the country, the Communist Party, and the president and chanted rude, almost obscene words and whistled. The goal of these people was explicitly clear: to spoil the holiday with the poison of confrontation.” What a phrase! “Almost obscene words!” The Party press scolded the “tastelessness” of the demonstration, as if the demonstrators had used the fish fork for the steak. Gorbachev, for his part, just kept away from the subject. What could he say? What he felt standing there on the mausoleum? What had Lyndon Johnson felt as he sat in the Lincoln bedroom or the Oval Office and heard the great throbbing coming from Lafayette Park: “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” In his own perverse way, Johnson had started out thinking of himself as doing good, raising up the poor, giving black folks a chance. And now he was a baby-killer, a demon. Gorbachev’s indignation on May Day must have gone even deeper. He had challenged institutions and a system many times more monstrous than anything a modern American could imagine. His maneuvering, his attempt to erode the power of the Party and slowly build up democratic institutions, was the political feat of an age. No czar or general secretary had ever put himself and his power in such jeopardy. And now it had all gone wrong. Day by day, the people of the Soviet Union were developing minds of their own. Gorbachev cheered that—at least in principle. But the reality of a new psychology, independent and defiant, confused him, sent him running to the reliable bases of traditional power. He ignored those who told him what he did not want to hear. The only men who would flatter him were precisely those who would one day betray him. His tragedy had begun.

The liberal press was forever wringing its hands over the lack of young people in politics. I found that strange. Red Square that May Day was filled with men and women in their thirties, twenties, and teens. Unlike Karpinsky, Afanasyev, Yakovlev, and Gorbachev—men who had been raised as true believers and then begun the long process of awakening after Stalin’s death—the young had never believed for a minute. They did not believe in Communism, the Party, or the system. They did not believe in the future. As a secret Politburo analysis dated May 19, 1990, described the phenomenon, there was now in Soviet society an utter “disrespect for the organs of state power.” The Gorbachev years were not a negation for the young, but rather a chance to fill a void, to move from a despairing cynicism toward something resembling normal modern life in all its multiplicity. For the young, the instructions and pretensions of the existing system constituted a separate world of the absurd, a realm of lies so funny you could die laughing.

The official indoctrination had started in the first grade. On the first day of school, the principal would gather all the children in an auditorium and tell them, “You are so lucky to be living in this country where all childhoods are happy ones!” The first words in their readers were “Lenin,” “Motherland,” and “Mama.” The flyleaf bore a picture of the Lenin Mausoleum, and in the sixties the last page of all textbooks had a portrait of Khrushchev with the caption “Nikita Sergeyevich is a fighter for peace. He says to all peoples, ‘Let’s live in peace!’ ” On Revolution Day, the children were declared Oktyabritsti, “Children of October,” and they wore star-shaped badges bearing little pictures of Lenin as a cherubic child. In the essay “Less Than One,” Joseph Brodsky captures the experience of school under the regime in two sentences: “It is a big room with three rows of desks, a portrait of the Leader on the wall behind the teacher’s chair, a map with two hemispheres, of which only one is legal. The little boy takes his seat, opens his briefcase, puts his pen and notebook on the desk, lifts his face, and prepares himself to hear drivel.” In summer, the luckier children went to Pioneer camps, where they played war games with balsa rifles and acted out “The Siege of Sevastopol” in evening song competitions. They were raised on a quaint prudery. During the Brezhnev era, the weekly Ogonyok magazine advised that “girls should learn self-respect, then there won’t be any need to pass laws prohibiting kissing and hugging on the street. A woman’s modesty increases the man’s sexual energy, but a lack of modesty repels men and brings about total fiasco in their intimate relations.” In 1980, an American researcher published Sex in the Soviet Union and cited one article in the official press declaring that premarital sex caused neurotic disorders, impotence, and frigidity; another article said that the “ideal duration of the sexual act” was two minutes, and a man who delayed ejaculation for the pleasure of his partner was doing something “terribly harmful” which could lead to “impotence, neuroses, and psychoses.” All this while many Russian girls, in the absence of effective birth control, were having one abortion after another.

Those who grew up under Brezhnev were slowly crushed by a great, invisible weight. “Most conformed out of laziness, hopelessness,” the music critic Alex Kahn told me one night. “When I was eighteen and in my first year of college, I was picking apples on a collective farm and I was talking to a friend of mine every day in the field. And I remember how we concluded that we were living in the most sophisticated dictatorship that has ever existed on this planet. The force of the propaganda was so strong that there could never be a revolution from below. I knew all about Sakharov and the other dissidents, but they were a tiny island off by themselves. The system had permeated society at every level. It was everywhere. No one was being tortured, as in the Middle Ages or under Stalin—or, at least, not many. But the system was unshakable because it penetrated society so thoroughly. You could talk openly only with your closest friends, and even that was not always safe.” But people of Alex’s generation and younger grew up without the same sense of ever-present fear that their parents had known. The “era of stagnation” demanded obedience, but usually not your neck, not even your soul. For the first time, a generation began to distance itself from the system and look at it with disdain; it saw the strangeness and horror in all that had gone on before. Its relation to the state and its institutions was purely ironic.

What seemed to save people was the cocoon of friendships, the feeling of independence and intimacy that long nights of talk could provide. My tutors in this were, above all, a quartet of friends in their mid-thirties so close to one another for so many years that I feel presumptuous even now saying I was part of their circle. At least I was a kind of tangent to the circle of Masha Lipman and her husband, Seriozha Ivanov, and Masha Volkenshtein and her husband, Igor Primakov. They were the sort of people you’d see in the audience at meetings of Memorial or Moscow Tribune or, joking and paying half attention, at a rally somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow. Seriozha was a historian, Igor a seismologist, Masha Lipman a translator, Masha Volkenshtein a pollster. They were not famous, but they knew people who knew this well-known artist or that reform politician. Of the four, I knew Masha Lipman best, because she eventually came to work for the Post. When we finally had the nerve to stop hiring the KGB-approved informers that the Foreign Ministry had always sent us, Masha went to work as a researcher and translator, finally displacing a harpy of the higher organs.

Most nights when we got together, the talk was about politics. I supposed that was always the way in a city of revolution. But after a while Masha and Seriozha talked about their families, typical stories for educated people of their generation.

“My maternal grandfather, David Rabinovitch, was born in Kharkov, in the Pale of Settlement, and he became enthralled with proletarian ideas,” Masha told me. “He was a typical Jewish intellectual, enthusiastic about a new era, a new art. He was a musician. When he came to Moscow and graduated from the conservatory, he taught Marxist political economy and was a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. He wanted a new proletarian culture, loved Mayakovsky. For Jews, the Revolution meant the idea of an end to the Pale of Settlement. Grandmother was an actress who studied with Meyerhold, worked in his Theater of the Revolution. My grandfather knew Shostakovich, and my grandmother played a vendor who sold fur-lined brassieres in a Mayakovsky play.

“It was incredible. They and their friends developed a revolutionary style even in the way they lived at home. They had no dishes, no real furniture. They decided it was all too bourgeois and left it all in Kharkov. Birthday parties, weddings, and New Year’s trees were also gotten rid of. Bourgeois. To make a table, my grandmother found a few boards, scrap wood, and asked the super to make a table. They thought that traditional Russian felt boots, valenki, were also bourgeois, so the children walked through the slush and the snow in their thin leather shoes, crying of the cold. They just mocked all traditions of the old order. So they had my mother call them by their first names and they ate their meals off of butcher paper.” Nevertheless, Masha’s maternal grandfather was sent to the camps for espionage. He had met a few times with an American reporter. He survived, returning home after Stalin’s death. Her paternal grandfather was not as fortunate. Aleksandr Levit was a revolutionary who worked in the Komintern and attended the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1935. He used the pseudonym Tivel. The year after the congress, he was arrested and disappeared. During the Moscow purge trials, Masha’s grandmother turned on the radio and heard the voice of one of the accused, Karl Radek, testifying. “It was Tivel who came to me suggesting we kill Comrade Stalin,” Radek said. Masha’s grandmother fainted straightaway: “She knew it was the end.” Seriozha’s family history was less dramatic and, perhaps, more typical. “My first clear memories can be easily dated. My parents had sent me to bed. Guests were coming over. My uncle brought a typewritten copy of Paris Match, which had run excerpts of Khrushchev telling the story of Stalin’s death. I was in bed, trembling with curiosity. I had the door opened slightly and listened. I remember I was incredibly interested, even though my parents tried to fight this interest. They knew it was vaguely dangerous.

“When I was thirteen I had some very sharp political discussions with my parents, about history, about Bolshevism, about conformity. I was insisting that Bolshevism was a mistake that had caused incalculable suffering. I knew it from the beginning. I listened to the ‘foreign voices’ even though they were jammed. You had to sit out those long wooo wooo sounds. But you could hear the stations better out in the country where the jamming wasn’t quite as good as it was in the center of Moscow.” At about the same age, Masha said, she was in a ninth-grade class that was reading Crime and Punishment, and the discussion turned into a political event, a moment when Masha realized that she was growing slowly and inexorably away from the mythical Soviet childhood. “I raised my hand and said I thought the killing of another human soul was prohibited, and what’s more, there was nothing more precious than a human life. No one in the class agreed. There were those who said, ‘What if the person is an enemy?’ The teacher accused me of sharing an ‘abstract concept of humanism.’ At the next parent-teacher meeting, this teacher told my mother with great assurance, ‘Don’t worry. I will struggle with her.’ ” As a teenager, Masha listened carefully to the talk at her kitchen table. Her parents were on the margins of dissident society. They knew people who knew Solzhenitsyn. They visited Nadezhda Mandelstam, the great memoirist; as always, Mandelstam greeted her guests in bed, in her nightgown and covered with the husks of sunflower seeds and cigarette ash. Masha listened to her parents’ underground music tapes—the magnitizdat—of Aleksandr Galich and Bulat Okhudzhava. “The tapes were a big secret. Not all of my friends had a tape recorder, and my friends would come and listen to other things. Once a girl opened a drawer and saw the tape marked ‘Galich’ and I will never forget the terror of that moment. I was sure that we’d end up at the KGB.” Masha and Seriozha traveled in the same circles during the Brezhnev years. When they first met, they discovered that they both adored the same book: Venedikt Yerofeyev’s comic epic Moskva-Petushki. “That was the book of what our lives were, the pain of it and the irony, too,” Masha said. “It was a book about trying to escape when no escape was possible.” Their friends were students, young men and women who lived on the edge of dissidence, who were absorbed in books and talk. “In school and university, to be an intellectual meant that you got together all the time, talking and drinking and talking about how drunk you got the night before,” Masha said. “I think of it now as a life of meaninglessness. It was considered the height of good taste to disdain your studies, to skip classes. A job was valued insofar as how often you could call in sick without losing it.” “My choice of occupation was a form of escape,” Seriozha said. “I really wanted to be a diplomat, but I realized what that led to. Then a journalist. I was sent by my school in 1971 to sort of hang around the paper Moskovski Komsomolets, and I realized very quickly that it was impossible to be a journalist and a decent person. The means of escape for intellectuals were ancient history, theoretical physics (if you could avoid military research), structuralism. Or you could be a dvornik, a caretaker or an elevator operator, and spend your vast amounts of spare time reading. It was a bit easier to be a scientist, but in the humanities you always had to be on the watch for the dead hand of ideology. So that’s what I did. I raced into the past, far past the Bolsheviks, to Byzantium.” The circles of urban intellectuals whom Masha and Seriozha knew so well played at escape, at separateness, through style as well as substance. Unlike their Bolshevik grandparents, who affected the lives of ascetics, these Westernized intellectuals made a point of having good manners, of an almost stylized politeness, with men holding open doors and helping women on with their coats. They used a slightly ornate vocabulary, one as distant as could be imagined from the crude, politicized speech of Pravda and Izvestia. “There was a time when you would even kiss a woman’s hand as a greeting,” Seriozha said. “What could be more opposite from ‘Greetings, comrade!’ ” Real escape was possible only through emigration. And even though Masha and Seriozha both saw many of their friends off at the airport, they could not bear the idea of leaving, of living a life outside the Russian language and culture, of forcing their children to imagine their Russianness from a tremendous distance. “I went many times to get the forms and applications, but finally I just could not imagine myself stepping off a plane in another country and saying to myself, ‘Where I am now is where I will be for the rest of my life.’ I could not do it.” And so they staked their lives on a new Russia and tried to understand the pathology of the old. “Igor would quote Paul Tillich, who said there are two great fears: the fear of death and the fear of vastness, senselessness,” Seriozha said. “Death and suffering are the same for all, but senselessness means different things in different cultures. Europe chose the undeniability of death as a principle, refusing to construct anything everlasting, so life ends with the end of life and is senseless. Previous old cultures and modern Oriental cultures chose another explanation. One possibility is to create something that lasts forever, a form of eternity. So we are together and there is no death. When some cells in an organism die in one organ, the organism still lives on, because it is social and not individual. The problem of death is solved. The idea that the ego has borders that are the same as the borders of the self is a new idea; it began with Descartes’s idea ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If you ask a representative of old Roman culture or European medieval culture, ‘Does human life coincide with the life of one man?’ he’d say no.

“This was the case with Russian culture. And in Russia, this medieval mind-set has lasted until very recently. The serfs in Europe were liberated in the mid-fifteenth century, but it happened in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of community was more important; that way the physical unit lasted eternally. The idea that the individual was of absolute value appeared in Russia only in the nineteenth century via Western influences, but it was stunted because there was no civic society. This is why human rights was never an issue. The principle was set out very clearly by Metropolitan Illarion in the eleventh century in his ‘Sermon on Law and Grace,’ in which he makes clear that grace is higher than law; you see the same thing today in our great nationalists like Prokhanov—their version of grace is higher than the law. The law is somehow inhuman, abstract. The attempts to revise this principle were defeated. The Russian Revolution was a reaction of absolute simplification. Russia found its simplistic and fanatic response and conquered its support. What we are living through now is a breakthrough. We are leaving the Middle Ages.” The young people in Red Square on May Day had changed not only in intellectual terms. Many of them were fairly ordinary, if being a worker or a student or running an elevator is ordinary. Simply because the intellectuals and the articles and books they wrote might have given the best expression of the times, the perestroika phenomenon was also a matter of the pleasure principle, the Id unleashed. The Id of sex, of self-expression, of rock and roll, of materialism, of even the junkiest impulse. The Id of tabloid accounts of the murderous past, the ruined landscape.

The war in Afghanistan, for example, was just one reason among many that the young had come to despise anything that smelled of official Soviet life. More and more, the worst insult you heard was sovok, a slang word for Soviet. If you called someone sovok you were saying he was narrow-minded, officious, weak, lazy, obsequious, a hypocrite. After years of reducing the West to a swampy hell of imperialism and homelessness, Soviet television and the press now romanticized “over there” as an attainable paradise. The movie Little Vera, with its brutally realistic view of Soviet family life, was a hit, but eventually people tired of putting the mirror to their own sorry selves. The state film industry quickly realized that the way to fill the theaters was to buy up Hollywood movies—surf movies, second-rate police thrillers, Porky’s II, anything smacking of dumb pleasure.

In Leningrad, I met a man, no longer young, named Kolya Vasyn. He was a genuine dissident in the Brezhnev years, but his dissidence consisted of his worship not of Jefferson or Mill, but of Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and, above all, John Lennon. “Lots of things can liberate people,” he told me as we listened to a tape of The White Album. “For me it was the freedom in John Lennon’s voice.” Since the early sixties, he and his friends had been collecting pirated tapes of Western rock and roll and listening to them with the same furtive pleasure and sense of revelation as the intellectuals who read Sakharov in onionskin underground editions in one night-long sitting. He told me that when he first started listening to rock and roll, it was impossible to get records and it was before the era when audio cassettes were easy to find. “We had friends who worked in medical clinics and they would steal used X rays,” Kolya said. “Someone would have a primitive record-making machine and you would copy the music by cutting the grooves in the material of the X rays. So you’d be listening to a Fats Domino tune that was coming right off of the X ray of someone’s long-forgotten broken hip. They called that ‘on the bones.’ ” Kolya Vasyn’s closet-sized apartment, decorated with Beatles memorabilia and a massive reel-to-reel tape recorder, became the equivalent of Sakharov’s kitchen for the rock-and-roll set. Every major rock and jazz talent in Leningrad—the Soviet Union’s Liverpool—came through, talked the night away, and, inevitably, collapsed in a corner. The native rock scene there was interesting enough: Kolya, Alex Kahn, and a bunch of others started a rock club on Rubenshtein Street, and Boris Grebenshikov’s group, Aquarium, was as innovative as many of the top bands in the West. But what was most important was not the Soviet version of rock and roll, but the way that rock and roll brought kids into the greater world.

The Soviet regime had long worried about the lures of Western pop culture. Even the dullest ideologues, men who had never traveled much farther west than Minsk, knew that somehow James Brown and the Rolling Stones were nearly as dangerous as Helsinki Watch and the Voice of America. “The enemy is trying to exploit youthful psychology with dubious programs,” Konstantin Chernenko declared at a 1983 plenum of the Central Committee. The Party’s youth paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, said of rock and roll, “Those who fall for this bait are playing into the hands of ideological opponents who sow in immature minds the seeds of a way of life alien to our society.” But by 1989 and 1990, Komsomolskaya Pravda was earnestly reporting the latest news about Pink Floyd, the Talking Heads, and the kheep-khope (hip-hop) phenomenon. On my trip to Perm to visit the prison camp, I heard an odd throbbing sound coming from a vegetable stand. It was the first time I had ever heard a Russian rapper.

Rock and roll brought along with it sexier clothes, Reeboks, commercials, McDonald’s. To the ideologues and nationalists nostalgic for an imagined Russian past, Purple Rain and Metallica were more of a threat than the idea of a stock exchange on Revolution Square. Now even the conservatives admitted that the country needed wealth, but in any issue of Molodaya Gvardiya or Nash Sovremennik you could read raving polemics about the evils of rock music, the encroachment on traditional Slavic music. “Live rock has become the scourge and poison of our lives,” wrote Valentin Rasputin, Vasily Belov, and Yuri Bondarev, all prominent novelists and cultural conservatives. “Pop music, with its stupefying, monotonous, hollow pulsation, absurd texts, completely lacking in poetry, is kicking every new stream of youngsters into a spiritual void.” I was even told that the Politburo would frown severely upon the rise of a rock culture in the Soviet Union. Alexsandr Yakovlev’s view is what passed for liberalism. “It’s not exactly my sort of thing, but I don’t think banning it is the answer,” he said. Ligachev, for his part, wanted to prevent Elton John from getting an entry visa. I am not sure what dire order Yegor Kuzmich would have given had it been Ice-T and Public Enemy on the passport line.

Most of the men who ran the Kremlin had never been to the West, or when they had been, it was in the “bubble” of an official visit. It was not by chance that the two men who had traveled in the West extensively before coming to power were also the two main figures of official reform: Yakovlev and Gorbachev. God only knows what the hard-liners thought the Soviet Union would look like if the West moved East. But you could guess. When a young activist named Roman Kalinin registered a gay newspaper with Moscow City Hall in 1990 and published personal ads and some fairly tame articles on gay life in Moscow, Pravda accused the paper, Tema, of telling necrophiliacs where they could find corpses and pedophiles where to buy children for sex. Kalinin seemed unfazed. He started passing out fliers for a gay rights demonstration: “Turn Red Square into the Pink Triangle.” For the older generation that had finally given up the Communist dream, the West was the land of their defeat, a smug and garish landscape of success. It was as if all the dreams of utopia had evaporated and they were stranded between McDonald’s and the gulag. What could they do but order a Big Mac?

But for the young, the West was the dream itself. Compared to the hole they were in, the problems of the West seemed laughable. The West was romanticized, sure enough, but why not? How could you begin to talk about the decline of the American economy with a thirty-year-old woman who still had to live with the husband she had divorced five years before because there was nowhere to move? By 1990, one of the fastest-selling books in the street kiosks was How to Find Work in America, followed quickly by How to Find Work in Europe. This lust for all things Western could break your heart. For a couple of weeks, I watched the making of Russia House. The director, Fred Schepsi, set John le Carré’s novel against all the most predictable postcard backgrounds. Off to the side, dozens of young Russians worked in odd jobs, as translators, stand-ins, technicians. I talked mostly with a young woman named Kira Sinyeshikova, who helped the Americans communicate with the Russians in the crew. I watched her watch Hollywood; I watched her bask in the glow of Michelle Pfeiffer. Kira could not get over the organization, the equipment, the treatment of the stars. And after a while she giggled at the way the Americans thought they were “capturing the true Russia” as they filmed Red Square, the Zagorsk cathedrals, the radiant parks of Leningrad. A few weeks after the production closed, Kira was back in her regular job as a tour guide at the Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad. We had agreed to meet for dinner, and I joined one of her tours. It was late morning and she was leading around a bored group of tourists from Voronezh and Siberia. She told them all about the “wondrous” documents stored there, the “unique” memorabilia of Lenin. The tourists did not care, and Kira cared less. I have rarely seen eyes so blank.

Things Western opened the world up. That spring and summer of 1990, I spent a couple of afternoons a week in Lenin Hills, where the Japanese had built a pretty decent baseball park for Moscow State University. I sat in the dugout with a kid from Sioux City named Bob Protexter who had come all the way from Iowa to coach baseball.

“I read this was happening in Sports Illustrated,” he said. “I wanted adventure, but what the hell would I do in Tahiti? So I figured I’d teach Russians how to turn a double play.” When the baseball craze began in 1986, traditionalists were gravely concerned. Somehow it never occurred to them that the country had also gone basketball-mad in the seventies without causing the sudden implosion of the Soviet nuclear force. Nevertheless, Izvestia published a frenetic editorial claiming that baseball was a foreign intruder and that, anyway, Russian lapta was a superior game that gave America the idea for baseball in the first place. Sergei Shachin wrote that lapta, which dates back to the days of Ivan the Terrible, came to California when Russian émigrés settled there in the nineteenth century. Hence, baseball. “It was a guess,” Shachin admitted later.

The Soviets were getting an all-star team ready for an American tour, and they looked raw but not without talent. The field was filled with former javelin throwers, former water polo players, and former hockey players. Protexter’s friend Richard Spooner was the Johnny Appleseed of the game in Moscow. He worked days at an American business consortium and spent weekends preaching the wisdom of the infield fly rule. Spooner managed to supply the Chemists, his team at the Mendeleyev All-Union Chemical Society, with gloves, balls, helmets, and even videocassettes of Los Angeles Dodgers highlights. The more they watched the tapes, the more the Russians developed the tics and affectations of their American brethren. Scratching, spitting, bubble-blowing. It took a while to get them all down pat. In one game, a guy took his gift of Red Man chewing tobacco and gobbled it down like chocolate. He threw up and spent the rest of the game in a hopeless daze. He struck out three times, looking.

“Now they chew and spit all right, but so far they haven’t caught on to the tradition of grabbing your balls before the pitch,” Protexter said.

Vadim Kulakov, Spooner’s catcher at Mendeleyev, was a fanatic devotee of Gary Carter, later of the Mets and Expos. “If I ever have a son,” Kulakov said, “I shall call him Gary, after the great Gary Carter.” Kulakov used a curling iron to affect the cherubic look of Gary Carter. On the field, he had the same frenetic style, the same showy sense of hustle as “Mr. Hustle.” And when he went on road trips with the team, Vadim Kulakov gave his girlfriend a Gary Carter 1988 Topps baseball card “so she will remember me.” So far, no Russian had ever hit a home run at the Moscow State University park. The Big Bear was still a nation of spray hitters. So far, no one had thrown a proper curve, and the slider was as distant a dream as shopping malls and microwaved tacos. But the fielding was surprisingly good. The country boys, the kids from the collective farms, had a good sense of outfield play. The only thing that seemed a little precarious was the decision-making. Billy Martin-Reggie Jackson-like squabbles were a common sight in the Moscow dugouts, and I was told that was likely to last a good while. “We decide everything together,” said the leading Soviet manager, Vladimir Bogatyryov. “Despite all that’s happened, we still have more of a collective mentality here in Russia.” It was nice to see that the Russian ballplayers had developed a sense of style despite the obvious impediments. Most of the players wore caps from major-league teams, though one wore a Minute Maid model and another, as if in the worst nightmare of the KGB, sported a model with the bold logo “Radio Liberty.” In the other dugout, one of the coaches was writing a new lineup combination on the pale-blue cover of an old copy of Novy Mir. For a while I watched the action with Bill “the Spaceman” Lee, late of the Boston Red Sox. Lee was entranced with the players, the way they strived equally for mannerism and real skill, as if they knew, instinctively, that the quirks of the American game were not irrelevant, but the beauty part. He tried to show the pitchers that they had to “respect” the mound, to care for it “like your home, your office.” And they loved the Spaceman.

“I’ll tell you this, speaking as a red-blooded American who has no beef with the Russians: I hope they get this game down,” Bill Lee said. “Because if they learn how to play, they’ll discover it beats the shit out of working. Take anything. Take music. When they can turn on the TV and they can see Joe Cocker singing ‘Civilized Man’ with fifty thousand people going apeshit and everybody’s got their tops off and their tits jiggling, well, they’ll say, ‘You know, I want that! I gotta have that!’ The same with baseball. They want what we have. And why the hell not?”