Читать книгу Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing a Changing Russia - Naomi F. Collins - Страница 8

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

—L. P. Hartley

The guests returned to their hotel rooms after the reception the night of the coup attempt, August 19, 1991. While I stood in the kitchen wrapping leftover mini-pizzas in Saran wrap, my mind flashed back to the days living under Soviet rule, an atmosphere that could be returning, from the look of things. I saw, like an old black-and-white movie, our earliest days in Moscow in 1965-1966, living in the student dormitories of Moscow State University. The gloom of a long, dark winter; the isolation and fear, grimness and monotony. Feeling discouraged and powerless, I eased into bed.

“This is where we came in,” I mumbled to Jim as he dozed off. Unable to sleep even in our comfortable king-sized bed, I pictured our old dorm room at Moscow State University only eight miles away. I saw myself twenty-five years earlier lying on the narrow steel-frame cot, tugging on my small rough woolen blanket, green, with a white snow flake pattern, trying to keep my shoulders warm while preventing my toes from popping out at the other end and wondering what anyone over 5’4” would do. Looking at the 12-foot ceiling looming overhead, a ceiling higher than the width of the room, I felt as if a giant had dropped me into a deep box.

Our last night in the dormitories, Wednesday, April 20, 1966, I had also lain sleepless. Fear had sharpened my sense of the room, revealing things I had not noticed before: the embossed flower pattern in the beige walls, the linseed oil and beeswax smell of the parquet wood floor, the dimness of the ceiling light we had left on as an amulet. A cockroach lurking in the shadow of the radiator had watched us. The tilted chair we had wedged between the door handle and floor to barricade ourselves in, as we had seen done in movies, had given the room an unsettling look.

Two feet away from me that night, Jim had lain on the identical cot, with the same controlled breathing. We had almost convinced ourselves that this barricade and our careful breathing could protect us from arrest and imprisonment by the KGB, the State Security Force commonly known as Secret Police. We were absolutely silent, knowing that our room was bugged, and that any inkling the KGB had of our unexpected departure could foil our plan. Although the long hallways outside the room were empty, I imagined I heard footsteps approaching, and flattened myself out still further on the bed, trying to become invisible. Like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, I felt we had been framed. Unlike Joseph K., we had some idea of what the accusation would be, but knew our innocence would make no difference. We, too, would be incarcerated, captive to the capricious will of arbitrary forces. Escape was all I could think of.

Jim and I had first arrived in Moscow on September 13, 1965, at 10:15 in the morning at the Belorussian Railway Station. I was 23; he, 26. We had been married for two years.

After ten days at sea and three more on trains, we were relieved to be greeted by professionally chipper Russian students equipped with a van, and a one-ton open-back truck with a canvas tarp, to collect us with our baggage for our trip to the dormitory. Our footlocker contained “stuff” for the academic year: clothes, pillows, Melmac plastic plates and cheap forks and knives, an electric frying pan, toiletries, sanitary napkins, deodorant, aspirins, toilet paper, Band-Aids… Our greeters, with English far more fluent than our Russian, had been hand picked—and gender-matched to us—by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel) to be friends to each of us for the year.

“How was your trip?” Nina asked me earnestly.

“We hope everything goes well,” Ivan told Jim.

We piled our footlockers into the truck and ourselves into the van that headed for the “Old University”—the historic downtown campus of Moscow State University dating back more than 200 years. Right across from the Kremlin, these crumbling painted stucco and light brick buildings still held active classrooms, and housed libraries and offices for professors and administrators. We entered a decaying administration building. Stepping up over a two-inch threshold, the men ducking to avoid hitting the lintel overhead, we descended two unevenly worn stone steps, and walked along a concrete corridor to the office of student stipends. There an official counted out 200 rubles in cash to Jim, equivalent at that time to $240. Accustomed to the distancing of money transfers through checks, I was taken with the nakedness of a raw cash transaction, pay-for-study. But at that moment, I had no idea that cash was the only option: there was no credit card or checking system in Russia then, nor would there be for more than a quarter of a century.

We were fortunate, rich by our own standards. The 200-ruble stipend was generous, about four times what Russian students received. (Levels were set by official government agreements.) The money went far. Unlike Russian students, we had no need to buy clothing or household goods, and had no children or parents to feed or support. We could use our rubles for food, laundry, souvenirs, books, occasional travel and restaurants. The currency was not convertible to dollars, so there was no point saving any of it. The ruble stipend was supplemented by a few hundred dollars of hard currency for the year, dollars we hoarded for our planned year abroad to follow.

With the cash in our pockets, we climbed back into the van to head for what was then called Lenin Hills. After driving along miles of mustard and tan stucco and brick buildings, we saw in the distance the newer Moscow State University. One of seven Stalinesque “wedding cake” buildings that dot Moscow, this massive white castle sits imposingly on a hill rising along a graceful bend in the Moscow River. How foolish, I soon learned, to try to get your bearings on any of these buildings, since they all look alike. The dormitory with its 17,000 students (we were told) covered well more than one city block on the ground, soared over 20 stories at its highest, and sat at the epicenter of radiating symmetrical structured gardens with tree-lined walks and formal plantings. Protected by giant fences, gates and guardhouses, the structure had controlled admission through a student pass long before U.S. institutions required any IDs or security measures. No one could enter the building without a pass, a propusk, but the only place to obtain a pass was inside the building. This experience made Catch-22 easy reading later that year.

Despite its size, the building was well heated, freshly painted and cleaned. The four wings of the building were identical. Very few in the bank of elevators functioned. Most stairways were locked for reasons we never learned, but assumed it was either to control the building population, or to prevent the need for cleaning. We were grateful to be no higher than the sixth floor. But I marveled at the architectural irony of the structure: dedicated not to emperors but to the common man in a socialist state, its heroic proportions were so monumental and overpowering in scale as to dwarf mere human beings.

Designed to showcase Soviet life, to model the look of the future, the university building contained not only bedrooms, but also classrooms, libraries, bookshops, cafeterias, food stands, and well-furnished lounges on each floor. These common rooms, resplendent in Victorian potted palms, Oriental carpets, wood wainscoting, and stuffed chairs, hardly fit our picture of what Socialism or The Future looked like. But it didn’t much matter, because the doors were tightly locked, except for three holidays a year, the November 7, January 1, and May 1 Soviet holidays. It also didn’t take long to see that the bookstands carried a limited range of ideologically acceptable books, those surviving censorship; and the cafeterias and food stands stocked only limited fare. But some of these observations unfolded gradually over time like the red banners and buntings that were to emerge unexpectedly at holidays to brighten a few gray days.

On our first day, our student hosts led us through the gates and guardhouse. A guard blocked our entry, insistent on reviewing our full documentation. The guard was not only the first female sentinel I had ever seen, but also old enough to be my grandmother. (There’s so much to write home about…my mental list was toting up…) Our escorts spoke to her in rapid Russian, and we were whisked through the gatehouse. Then, in our small suite, I was cheered to see we had our own toilet. It sat in a room so tiny it gave meaning to the term “WC” (Water Closet), and had a pull-chain flusher suspended from a high white porcelain tank. The students at other universities had only the hole-in-the-floor toilets, or seatless “western” toilets, in the shared bathrooms at the end of each floor. I felt not only far from home, but deep into the past.

Another little room contained our sink and stall shower. Two narrow bed-sitting rooms accommodated our two cots, along with two wooden straight chairs, two small wooden tables, two secretaries, two lamps, two small Oriental rugs, and two water flasks and tumblers. The rooms were comfortable for two, but normally housed four students, and sometimes their undocumented relatives. The rough-hewn wooden furniture and shoddy bath fixtures belied the building’s youth, a mere 15 looking like 50. But everything I had seen so far seemed heavy, massive, and old... I was beginning to feel weary—and hungry.

When we had caught the “Orient Express” from Paris to Vienna three days earlier, we had provisioned ourselves with bread, cheese, and fruit on the advice of our German friends Peter and Gerda. They knew the vagaries of train dining cars, and the limits of our pocketbooks. When we transferred to the “Chopin Express” in Vienna, replenishing our food supplies in transit, we found ourselves on a first-class Soviet train headed through Czechoslovakia and Poland to Russia.

Crossing through the “Iron Curtain,” we entered another realm. Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., uniformed border guards burst into our compartment, shining bright flashlights into our eyes to jolt us awake. Their rifles were trained on our eyeballs. They barked commands that we knew meant they wanted to see our passports, declarations of currency, listing of goods, and other papers and IDs. One of the guards had a portable office strapped around his neck, a fully stocked desk protruding from his substantial belly: inkpads, stampers, pens, and documents. Other officials searched everywhere—under the berths, under the train; they poked and prodded. In some cases, they seized personal items. They didn’t feel they had to explain themselves.

At the Soviet border city of Brest, the train halted. We were, I wrote my parents, “hauled out of the train, rounded up, and dragged from place to place to fill out forms, organize trunks, and try to obtain a train ticket from the border to Moscow, with little success.” Inexplicably, we were locked into a small one-room station house for reasons we never learned. Were they trying to avoid contaminating the local population, seeking smugglers, or simply harassing foreigners? With the help of a porter (paid a small gratuity: could that have been the issue?), and after a lot of shouting, we acquired the tickets, and re-entered the train. I felt anxious and unsettled.

Meanwhile, the train had its wheels changed. At all borders of the Soviet Union, train wheels had to be changed to fit the broader gauge of Soviet tracks. European tracks featured a narrower gauge. Although this seemed at first a whimsical, wasteful, or foolish oddity—or lack of planning—I learned it was none of these, but rather another kind of planning, a strategic effort to prevent trains from most of Europe—Germany, France, Poland, and others—from driving straight into the heart of the Soviet Union. As impenetrable as a fortress wall, the wide gauge tracks halted invasion by train. This was my first exposure to a larger world in which the experience of war and peace shaped people’s thinking, plans, and lives.

We now crossed into the vast, gray lands of the Soviet Union. The borderlands, empty fields with giant coils of barbed wire, sprouted giant girders supporting brilliant floodlights—the brightest lights I was ever to see in the Soviet Union. Guards with heavy boots, machine guns strapped over their shoulders, faces set in serious- to-menacing expressions conveyed the sense that humor, charm, or lightness were alien to their spirits—and job descriptions. While the train raced hour after hour at high speed across Soviet lands, I began to grasp what Napoleon confronted when he attempted to conquer these Russian lands on horseback and foot, lands that were to conquer him instead. I pictured the settings for World Wars I and II. This was twenty-four years from the 1941 invasion by Hitler’s armies advancing into Russia. And this was still before the first snow fall of winter. It looked very much like an old black- and-white movie of the fields of World War II.

Seven other American graduate students were on the same train, same car. After a night’s sleep, we all met in the dining car over a satisfying breakfast of rye bread so dark it tasted caramelized, butter, fried eggs, and hot tea. For lunch we consumed our bread, cheese, and fruit in our compartment, looking out the window. And tea. A samovar in each train car burned charcoal to keep water steadily boiling to heat a little pot of concentrated tea leaves and water perched on top, and provide diluting water from the samovar spout below. A porter plied us throughout the day with glasses of hot tea, big sugar cubes, and plain white arrowroot cookies. In the evening, he delivered pillows, crisp sheets and pillowcases, and one blanket and one towel per person. Tips (na chai—the words themselves meaning “for tea”) were expected.

By dinnertime, I was struck by the contrast between the barren gray lands we crossed hour after hour, and the bright, warm comfort of the interior. Our first-class train compartment was decked out with a small Oriental rug, curtains, a table hinged to the wall under the window, a sink, and various hooks, racks, and shelves. The dining car sported an outfit of declining elegance, threadbare red velvet curtains with gold tieback tassel-pulls, frayed carpet, and well-laundered linen tablecloths and napkins. The smells escaping from the galley—sautéing onions; stewing beef; pan-frying potatoes; and soup steeping in its fennel, dill, and bay leaves—were reminiscent of the aromas that had filled the hallways of my New York childhood apartment building in winter when shut windows bottled in the concentrated smells of East European cuisines.

After showing us to our dorm suite on our arrival, our student hosts toured the corridors with us, past the locked lounge, to the common kitchen down the hall. I tried to count the people who would be sharing this kitchen, with its two small dirty gas stoves. (That would be some twenty-five suites, of two to four people each, making, 50-100 people, could it be?) The eight burners and two ovens offered unmodulated temperature choices: “on” vs. “off,” and could be started only with matches (because there were no pilot lights). In the sink, murky gray water stagnated, unable to drain through floating fish scales and potato skins, sunken old cabbage leaves, and grease. And there was no refrigerator. The only pristine object in the room was the ironing board. What I didn’t know then was that this room would bring us together with our neighbors too cautious to come to our room, or invite us to theirs.

There was Anna, diagonally across the hall, focused and thoughtful, soon to become a friend; not yet plagued with the mysterious ailment that laid her up for much of the year. Then Alexander and Maria next door, an attractive, gentle, and non- ideological couple from Siberia, almost finished with their graduate studies, and uneasily awaiting notice of where they would be sent for their first jobs. Directly across the hall lived a mysterious Middle Eastern student, Syrian, we thought, a man who spoke to almost no one—but at the Muslim feast of Eid roasted an entire lamb in the common oven, arousing interest and envy among Russian students with their very small stipends and limited diet. Even I was intrigued, seeing for the first time an intact mammal roasting, eradicating any myth in my mind that the lamb chops I ate were remote from an entire sentient creature.

Farther down the hall were Previr from India—who ate no meat—whom we came to know only later, and down the other way, Eva, one of two female graduate students in the American delegation. Most of the year there were about sixteen American graduate students, with four spouses, all wives; a few more came for the second semester. These, with a few others in Leningrad, were the only American students in the USSR. We also came to know two North Vietnamese men through an incident in the kitchen; four Mongol students, also male; and an assortment of other foreign students—a male and female student from Great Britain; a man from Nigeria; and many Soviet citizens of various nationalities and from various republics, including the mysterious “Charlie,” who found us one day in that kitchen, and was to reappear in our lives during our later stays in Moscow. But the majority of students were Russian.

We left the kitchen as our hosts led us to the student cafeteria for lunch. On the stairs down to the basement, I felt my stomach flip from the smells of heavy cooking overlaid on layers of old food odors drifting up toward us from the meal hall. Torn between my good-girl training to be polite to our hosts, who were so effusive in their efforts to please us, and my gut instinct to skip lunch, I tried to act more gracious than I felt. But in my head I pictured the graduate dorms at Indiana University, even before the days of tempting food courts with a range of options that grace the campus today. Lunch might then have been a grilled cheese sandwich, or tuna fish salad, with an apple or banana, chilled milk, a cookie… suddenly, the food we grumbled about there seemed very tempting and familiar—and very far away. I heard behind me one fellow-American student in our group regaling another with stories of intestinal ailments that befell our forebears who ate here…while a little voice in my head whispered: “Naomi, what are you doing here?”

I let others slide their trays before mine in the food line. I was glad not to be first as the babushkas — literally, grandmothers, but used generically for older women—dishing out the food barked impatiently at us while various mystery-foods landed splat on our plates. My mind hadn’t yet switched to Russian, so I was unsure what they were saying, but imagined that we seemed to them very slow and ungrateful people. We helped ourselves to forks—there were no knives—and a three-inch sheer tissue-paper triangle that was intended to serve as a napkin. I grabbed a recognizable slice of bread and a scoop of raw grated cabbage, both generously offered free for all students, so even the poorest didn’t go hungry. The rest of the meal cost a nominal sum for us, but was too dear for many Russian students. I stabbed the gray, gristly stew, and decided we would have to check out other options—the “professors’ dining room,” the food stands in the halls, and home cooking in the common kitchen.

The rest of our first day resembled that at any large institution. I told my diary:

“We ran around all day for cards, forms, passes, identification cards, foreign office registration—the usual bureaucratic disease is rampant here, too.

And now I must sleep.”

The next day, I realized I would have to shop. I had heard so much about queues, I thought I understood why they formed: A desirable but scarce product showed up; people lined up to buy it. There was hardly a day when U.S. newspapers hadn’t shown pictures of Russians standing in line, as if standing in line were part of who Russians were, the People of the Queue, victims of the failure of Communist rule. But although the reasons did include the failures of central state planning, they also turned out to be more structural and strange.

The first store I entered had separate counters for cheeses, sausages and cold cuts, and hacked up parts of cows, pigs, and lambs. Without refrigeration, these foods emitted pungent sour smells.

First, I went to the cheese counter, waiting my turn, while others elbowed their way in front of me, sometimes screaming at me in the process. At my turn, I managed to request, in careful Russian, and converting to metric system at the same time, “a half-kilo of Gollandsky—i.e., Dutch or Edam—cheese” (about one pound). A sturdy woman in a dirty apron cut, weighed, and wrapped my piece of cheese in a newspaper page, called out the price, “79 kopecks,” and gave me a slip to take to the cashier. I then waited in the cashier’s line, gave her the slip, which she impaled on a spike took my money and gave me a new slip, with which I returned to the cheese line to claim my cheese. Three lines, one half-kilo of cheese. I shuddered to picture gathering the rest of the groceries. While I stood feeling sorry for myself (the voice in my head now querulous: “What are you doing here?”), I realized that I’d have to re-think my shopping. I would have to rove from line to line first, and order each of my purchases—250 grams of cold cuts, two half-liter bottles of soured milk, a bag of rice. Then go to the cashier with all the slips, pay the total, get new slips, and reverse my steps back to the line at each counter to collect my small purchases, hoping to remember which slip belonged to which purchase for pickup. The counter ladies became inflamed when handed the wrong receipt, and I hated being the object of their screaming wrath. I’d also have to remember not to leave home without my net bags — avoski, “just in case” bags—for toting things home, since there were no bags of any kind in the stores. Nor egg cartons. Eggs, when available, would be counted out and placed into a piece of newspaper twisted into a cone. “Not putting all your eggs in one basket” suddenly made sense, even though there weren’t any baskets.

Then I walked into Produce Store #83, which proclaimed “Fruits” on one smudged plate-glass window, and “Vegetables” on the other. It had thigh-high open wooden bins, each containing vegetables: onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beets, parsnips. The produce looked old and worn, covered with the earth that sprouted each; the carrots were lumpy and wooden; the small onions and potatoes, rot-spotted; and the cabbages mottled. (“Cooking and disguising these, that will be the trick,” a bright voice in my head interjected.) The uniformity of the stores and their fare didn’t promise any exciting finds.

Another store supplied dairy products, cardboard triangular containers of milk, sour from lack of refrigeration; and bottles of milk products designed to be sour—kefir, liquid yoghurt, soured/buttermilk products. With some sugar sprinkled on top, we soon learned, these drinks could become a staple of daily life. Meanwhile, although a variety of cheese-names filled each cheese case, it was hard to distinguish among them by taste. The hard cheeses, designated “Edam,” “Swiss,” and such, survived fairly well without refrigeration. The soft white curd cheese, like a farmer cheese or pressed cottage cheese, worked well with sour cream. Sour cream, I discovered, was as thick and rich as ice cream. It was popular served straight, with a little sugar on top, as a first course in restaurants, or as snacks in bufyets (buffets). Jim consumed it often, long before anti-cholesterol advocacy had begun. Because there was almost no refrigeration in stores—even for meat, chicken, eggs, milk, or cheese—or in people’s apartments (or in our dorm), it wasn’t possible to stock a supply of perishables, but useful to have a few lasting products, some bread and hard cheese.

It seemed the perpetual Russian queues could be as much about plenty as scarcity: they were about systemic inefficiency and systematic control of consumer demand. And they worked. People’s expectations for variety and freshness were not high; nor did they normally seek to buy great quantities. The possibility of stocking up with a loaded shopping cart at a self-service grocery was completely unimagined and about thirty years into the future. Actual scarcity, real or created through hoarding, added tension and mystery to the already difficult process of acquiring daily fare. Staples were the bellwethers: if bread, salt, or matches seemed in short supply, panic buying could then trigger a true shortage.

Happily, we found one secret to easier survival: small portable food kiosks and carts sprinkled randomly along downtown sidewalks sold ready-to-eat snacks. Before fast food became common in the States, Russians grabbed from little carts hot buns (pirozhki) stuffed with ground meat and onions, or cheese or cabbage, and ate them on the run, counting them breakfast, lunch, or snack. Walking outdoors in the cold, we found these savory pastries very appealing, and also surprised ourselves by delighting in solidly frozen ice cream cones in mid-winter. Rich vanilla ice cream, packed to fill the inside of each cone—with an unexpected pink icing flower flourish on the flat top of each—came to be another staple for us, as for the Russians. We learned only during later stays in Russia that ice cream would also prove to be a source of cream for cooking, since there was no way to buy cream itself other than by deconstructing ice cream.

While my tongue reveled in the rich taste of ice cream, my stomach rebelled at another street treat: kvas. Dilapidated little tanker trucks dispensed this fermented brew in a shared drinking glass. Small queues formed to quaff the beer-like beverage, a low- alcohol drink derived from fermented bread. For decades, these quirky-looking spouted vehicles lived on the streets of Moscow (and elsewhere), until they disappeared in the early 1990s—although the drink itself lived on, available in two-liter plastic bottles.

The shared public drinking glass was not unique to kvas drinking, but also a fixture at public water dispensers. For a couple of kopecks, a person could acquire one glass of bubbly mineral water—as soon as the person in front had finished using the single glass, attached to the machine with a chain. I’ll admit I was too squeamish to indulge in either drink, hardly the most intrepid traveler.

The entrance to the university was almost a mile from the nearest Metro train station. Although there were buses closer to the university gates, they were jammed, and lumbered only slowly to the station. So I found myself walking the uniform paths from Metro to dorm even on the coldest winter days.

Emerging from the Metro train stop at the university after one of my earliest trips downtown, I was drawn to a brightly lit, crowded shop. Called a polufabrikat, it contained an assortment of ready-made, prepared foods: stuffed cabbages; “beef stroganoff”—beef cut up for becoming stroganoff; cheese blini (crepe/pancakes); little pilmeny, like miniature Chinese steamed dumplings, but served with sour cream or vinegar; pancakes or croquets made of potatoes and carrots, or cabbage and potatoes, or cheese—ready to pop onto a pan for heating and eating; breaded meat cutlets; bifstek—or “beefsteak”—meat that didn’t require a lot of stewing; hotdogs of various kinds (like German “wursts”); cold cuts of several kinds (in the bologna/salami family of “wursts”), always heavily laced with white dots of congealed fat; and “salad”—a mix of cooked peas, potatoes, carrot cubes, and mayonnaise. There was also a section for “Danish” pastries of several kinds, all perfumed with vanillin. The shop was warm and inviting. Promising, I thought—at least for a few items.

Autumn in the Soviet era was always marked by the major national holiday, the celebration of the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks had toppled the “Provisional Government” that had taken power after the Tsar abdicated. Observed on November 7^th (because of the change in the calendar after the Revolution), the holiday sneaked up on us when we were new to Russia in 1965. While days rapidly became shorter and darker in late October, housekeepers and laborers appeared in the dormitory of Moscow State University. They unsealed the doors of the Victorian-style student lounges on each floor; cleaned and polished all surfaces (often with dirty rags); rolled out the red carpet (a cliché come true); and scaled scaffolding to hang enormous red banners and buntings. More lights were lit, illuminating by contrast how very dim and gray normal had become for us.

Because I did not fear arrest for photographing patriotic manifestations (as opposed to numerous other arbitrary but punishable offenses I might commit with my camera), I took many photographs of the university decked out in celebratory gear. At the time, I did not much value these photos, which seemed formalistic and sterile. I do now. Today when Americans consider Soviet history, we spotlight the red banners and buntings, the martial displays, the exhortatory posters, as comforting evidence of an inscrutable but static, structured past. But in their original setting, those images seemed greatly stylized, hackneyed, and uninspired; even irrelevant, which, in part, they were.

Winter came. Our room faced north in a straight line to the Arctic. Icy winds rattled our double windows and leaked in around the edges, freezing the sausages sitting on the inside sill. We stuffed the cracks around our double windows with rags and paper, wedging small pieces into crevices with a knife, then taping the stuffed cracks shut with masking tape we had brought with us. Then we piled all the clothing we were not wearing at the moment on and around the windows’ edges, to stem the drafts, changing supplies daily while we exchanged warmed outfits for chilled ones.

The winter of 1965-1966 was one of the coldest winters in Russian history, a history not lacking in cold. For a long spell, the temperatures dipped down around 40 degrees below zero, rising sometimes only to zero F. When accompanied by cutting winds or frozen fog—air filled with suspended droplets of ice—it seemed even colder.

When I walked the mile walk from the Metro station to the dorm, ice crystals formed on my eyelashes, brows, and the front of my hair peeking out between my hat and the scarf across my nose and mouth. A photo captures me standing among a row of frosted trees, ice drops clinging to my eyelashes, bangs, and eyebrows, the rest of my face, hair, and neck wrapped tightly in hats and scarves. Everything around me glittered as I viewed the world through the diamond dust coating my eyelashes. The handkerchief in my coat pocket froze stiff, crisp as a potato chip.

Indoors, I prepared dinner. Little beef chunks and sliced onions soon sizzled in the electric frying pan in our room. Beef cuts were anonymous: hacked up chunks of muscular cows that could no longer provide milk. It seemed more gracious to cook the beef in our room than to flaunt it in the common kitchen where most Russian students, too poor to buy beef, relied on bread, potatoes, cabbage, sausages and cold cuts, cheese and soup.

The hearty meat smell that filled the room covered layers of stale odors: traces of old garlic and onions; beeswax and oil rubbed into wooden floors; damp woolen coats. It almost felt like Christmas, that icy December of 1965. The Russians were scurrying to buy gifts, gather delicacies, and prepare for the big New Year’s holiday and the visit by Grandfather Frost (Dyed Moroz). Close to 40 degrees below zero outside, and I was warm and content preparing “Beef Magu,” a special, named by our British friends, to play on the Russian acronym for Moscow State University, “M.G.U.” (em-geh-oo). “Beef M.G.U./Beef Magu.” The recipe was always the same— sauté onions, sauté beef chunks, add a little water, salt and pepper and cover pan; add potatoes and carrots at the appropriate time, and cook until the beef became tender enough to chew.

That afternoon in a burst of year-end cleanliness and recognition of limited supplies, I had decided to clean the three dish sponges we had brought with us for the year—and couldn’t, of course, replace. So I set them up—a pink one, a yellow one, and a blue one—to boil in a little pot of water on the stove in the common kitchen, and went back to our room to read for a while. When I returned to retrieve the sponges, a crowd had formed around the pot, sniffing, looking, and questioning one another.

Buzzing, they surrounded me. “Is it sausage?” one man asked. “No,” I said, “it isn’t.”

“Then what is it?” someone else asked.

“Sponges” was a word I had never been taught in Russian. These neighbors tossed a succession of possible Russian words at me to try them out, while I fielded each by shaking my head harder. Even the universal language of mime failed me, in my attempt to demonstrate the use of a sponge. Still looking skeptical and baffled, they left, without understanding, it seemed. These were not exotic bright pink, blue, and yellow sausages, as they thought, or, in fact, edibles at all. But I could almost see them musing, scratching their heads, asking, “Then why cook them?”

The idea of cleaning sponges by boiling them had occurred to me only after seeing the laundry room in the basement of our dorm. I knew that we would have to find some way, beside using our little bathroom basin, to wash clothes. In a city of some seven to eight million people, there was only one laundromat with modern (American) machines. To reach the facility required two buses, followed by standing in line for a few hours. That didn’t inspire me.

Then in the basement I found the “laundry.” For thousands of students, it contained one four-burner gas stove, one huge kettle/pot in which to boil water, a long wooden stick to stir the clothes; and two non-automatic agitator washers (ca. 1942 vintage), each with a hand-turned wringer. (My head was buzzing, time warp, time warp.) Only four items of clothing were allowed in the little washer at one time—two pairs of pajamas or four tee shirts. No rinsing, only washing was allowed. In one corner of the room sat an industrial- strength, gray-green iron centrifuge to be used only by the official housekeeper of the room (dezhurnaya), she as iron-willed as the machines. In another corner on a table sat a non-electric flatiron, a heavy piece of solid iron that had to be heated on the stove, then used to press clothes - a tool for the intrepid only. I found the dank basement room at the end of long, dark tunnels like a scene from a bad dream, and knew I’d go there as rarely as possible.

I watched students arriving to wash their clothes. They carried one outfit and stripped down to their underwear to wash their other outfit, the one they were wearing. Without self-consciousness. They dropped the clothes into the huge pot of water on the stove and boiled them with flakes of soap they shaved off a bar with a small knife. Then they rinsed the clothes by hand, wrung them out, whirled them in the centrifuge (or, rather, surrendered them to the keeper of the machine), and then took the clothes back to their rooms to string up to dry (giving real meaning to “I have nothing to wear”). In the powerfully heated rooms of winter, drying didn’t take long. But I wasn’t surprised years later when washers and detergents quickly supplanted socialist theory as items of interest and discussion.

I used the quaint little washer (skipping the pot-boiling part), wrung the clothes, and carried them upstairs to rinse and dry. I rinsed them in the yellow plastic dishpan we had brought with us, one of the most valuable items we imported.

But by flouting the set system, resisting stages in the formal laundering process, I left the housekeeper angry and frustrated. At the time, I thought her an old witch. She resembled the toothless harridans in fairytales. Her angry epithets of my ignorance and incompetence pursued me, echoing down the basement hallways.

“Girl, girl…” and a string of accusations. I pretended not to understand her screaming demands. She probably knew I was pretending.

But one day walking down the hall, back to our rooms, with my dripping load, I pictured her going home at night and telling her grandchildren the grievances of her day: what unseemly habits and disobedient attitudes these foreigners have! And only years later, did I come to feel compassion for this tired old woman with a 41-hour a week job in a dark, damp basement, disrespected by the students.

I didn’t want to be there any more than she wanted me there. I had followed my husband Jim to Russia. We were not idealists nor ideologues, just graduate students. Jim had majored in Russian history and literature at Harvard College, then in Russian studies at Indiana University’s graduate school and Russian and East European Institute. He had succeeded in his application to become an exchange student to the Soviet Union under the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants awards, later to become IREX, International Research and Exchanges Board. At the time this was virtually the only way for an American to study in the USSR.

I was a Ph.D. candidate in history and had agreed to go along for the company and experience. We agreed we would spend the following year in London where I could complete research and writing of my Ph.D. dissertation on the ferment of ideas surrounding blasphemy, heresy, and political subversion in revolutionary 17^th-century England. Was it religious heresy or political subversion that Cromwell sought to obliterate? Was there a difference?

Cultural history—ideas that underlay “Western” thinking— intrigued me. Because I had to give up a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to go to Moscow, we agreed to save from our fellowships and assistantships to accumulate the $3,000 we would need to get through the following year in London. And so I became in Moscow an unintentional observer of an incomprehensible land.

When I re-imagine the times, I picture the United States we left behind, led by President Lyndon Johnson building up troops and war efforts in Viet Nam, with U.S. involvement growing in all aspects of the war. “American Planes Reported Dropping Napalm Bombs in Vietnam” was a headline of the times. Johnson, having filled President John Kennedy’s term after his assassination in 1963, was one year into his own term as elected president. Headlines of the period read “Johnson Installed; Stresses Great Society” and “LBJ Signs Civil Rights Act.”

Meanwhile, popular culture was taking a new turn with the advent of the Beatles. “Beatles Invade America,” one headline read. And miniskirts appearing on the scene for the first time elicited headlines, debates, and cartoons.

In the Soviet Union in which we landed, Leonid Brezhnev ruled as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (and later as its General Secretary). He had ousted Nikita Khrushchev from that position about a year before we arrived, “surprising most observers,” the newspapers said. From what we could see as soon as we arrived, virtually all visual and visible signs of Khrushchev’s period, his legacy and rule, had been totally obliterated. Mentions of Khrushchev, his actual name, his speeches, pictures, and memory were completely eradicated. It was as if he never existed. He had truly become a non-person. Very eerie. Brezhnev’s rule meant not only the disappearance of Khrushchev and his reforms, but also a return to Communist orthodoxy and a hardening of the Cold War atmosphere. “Soviet Union Is Now Using Spy Satellites” was another headline of the time.

Winter was long and dim. On a cold, dark day in January, I marked my twenty-fourth birthday sadly, far from close friends or family beyond Jim; no cake, candles, cards, or gifts. I felt very foreign and very old for twenty-four. By February, gray prevailed. People, I noted in my diary, were “plodding and pushing a path through gray slush on gray days dressed in gray.” I was bored by the sameness of things—of products and shops and prices—all numbered and uniform throughout the land; the “nothing-to-do-ness of it all.”

In February, I wrote my parents how cut off we were from any news from outside Russia: there was no radio, TV, magazine, or newspaper that was not controlled by the Communist party. The land was sealed shut.

This was also not an easy time to be an American in the Soviet Union. But we were there for the reasons graduate students travel: research in unique collections in archives and libraries, shards of history that could not be found elsewhere. And so it was that Jim spent his days at the archives—the Central State Archives of Ancient Documents, the Archives of the Historical Museum, the Manuscript Division of the Lenin and University Libraries. He read 17^th- and 18^th-century records and manuscripts and early printed books for research on Peter the Great. The archives were cold. The smells from the bathrooms in the basement carried up the stairs; a single tap of cold water was available to those who had the courage in the underheated buildings to take off their gloves.

The libraries I used—the Moscow University Libraries, the Gorky, and the Lenin (now, Russian Library) - were, unlike the archives, warm, comfortable, and well-kept. I loved the cozy rooms, wooden floors and bookshelves, large chairs, oriental rugs, and large potted tropical plants, windows steamed with people’s breath. Hourly the tiny transom window (fortochka) at the top of the enormous casement windows would be opened for five minutes to air the rooms of people smells that accumulated (without deodorant, mouthwash, and detergents). Surprisingly welcome, the way- below-zero-degree air would rush in, freshening and cleansing the room, waking any snoozing readers.

Access to books, I learned, was a political decision, based on need to know. That is, some bureaucrat would determine what categories of books I could read. He or she would issue a card that would set (and limit) what collections would be open or closed to me. Incremental degrees of access were awarded people according to their status: party member, Academician/scholar, graduate student, undergraduate, the general public. Certain trusted Russians earned the right to read foreign literature; most did not. So I presented myself with trepidation for my treasured card. Happily, as a foreigner, I was issued a card sufficient to read “foreign” literature. But if I hadn’t felt sufficiently “foreign” before, now I knew that reading in English sealed my status. In the “Foreign Literature Reading Room,” I found myself in the company of a handful of mature Russian professors and a few other foreigners reading works in English and other Western languages. The collections were good, indeed; but, like most research libraries, not circulating. However, Moscow State University’s library lent books, and even acquired books on request through inter-library loan. I felt very fortunate, much luckier than the researchers in the archives, or those who researched fields deemed sensitive. I had access—and steam heat. For exchange students in sensitive fields (contemporary, political, military), we learned, life would be hell.

With books, I was at home. There was no television available to us, but when we glimpsed broadcasts, we saw that Soviet-controlled stations (that is, all stations) featured an excess of men on tractors or men in trenches. I preferred my books. The American Embassy library and gift bookshelf for Russians stocked American authors. These presentation books I read carefully, not to mar the pages or crack the spines—and guiltily—before giving them to Russian friends. I had almost convinced myself it was O.K., since I had no other source of books. (Situational ethics, Naomi, a voice now chastises me.) Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Anderson, Joseph Heller, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty…a U.S. government curriculum of worthy American writers, a selection that today would seem rather “white” and “male.” And I had brought a few books along, books outside the canon, or by non-Americans, including Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando; Camus’ Plague, and Kafka’s The Trial, in addition to well-known Russian novels, best read in their context.

Deep into Look Homeward, Angel one evening, I heard an urgent knocking on the door. I opened it to a group of highly agitated North Vietnamese students whom we had previously met in the shared kitchen. North Vietnam was at the time an enemy of the U.S. I had met the students one day when I had walked into the kitchen and heard an Arab student exhorting one of the North Vietnamese students (in Russian):

“Viet Nam is your country, not the Americans’. It’s your country.”

I focused on watching a pot of water come to the boil. Meanwhile, the Arab student left the kitchen. In the silence, one of the Vietnamese fellows turned to me and asked, “Where are you from?”

Uncertain of the reaction I would receive, I affected poise and replied, “I’m an American.”

He smiled and responded cheerfully about his studies in Russia and other small talk. After that, whenever Jim and I met these young men in the halls or kitchen, they always exchanged friendly greetings. I’m not sure I know why.

So when I opened the door that evening, the only mystery was what was agitating them. In accented Russian, they said, “Your husband is in trouble in the kitchen. Come quickly to help—he is making explosions!”

Of course, I followed them; my heart rate ratcheted up. Reaching the kitchen, I peered in quickly, only to find a cheerful Jim, happily popping popcorn.

Popcorn was one of his favorite treats. With some popping corn he had shipped with us, he was using a small covered pot over a hot flame. He was a pro, and the pot and corn were under control. But what a fearful sound, the menacing echoes bouncing off the hard tile walls and floors. And why—I could see them wondering— would something edible make such a noise?

Jim poured the popped corn into our all-purpose yellow plastic dishpan, added salt, shook it around, and invited the skeptical neighbors to share the popcorn. They did, and seemed to love it, although I wondered if they, like many students, were often a little short of food. But it did become a tradition for the rest of the year. At the first sound and smells of popping popcorn, they would show up in the kitchen. And if they didn’t, Jim would knock on their door with a bowl of freshly popped corn.

Another evening many months into our stay when Jim and I were alone in the kitchen, a young man entered whom we had not seen before. He had a confident swagger, wore blue jeans, and addressed us in English. Blue jeans, branded capitalist by the Soviet regime, gained major currency as status symbol, conspicuous purchase, and defiant statement. Sometimes all three. There were almost no ways to obtain them legally, and their black-market price was very high. My antennae were up.

He struck up a conversation using casual rather than studied English, saying he had been a friend of Larry’s, an American exchange student from Cornell the previous year. He told us he lived on the 10^th floor, chatted for a while, invited us to call him “Charlie,” and left. A couple of weeks later, he showed up again, knocking on our door, and asking if we’d do him a favor. Already wary of an English-speaking, jeans-wearing, visiting person from nowhere, we carefully asked what it was he needed:

“My friend Larry from Cornell gave me this record. And I listen to this Bob Dylan. I try to write down and understand the words, so I can sing them when I play my guitar. But it is not possible for me. So I thought for you it would not be so difficult to write down the words.”

We looked at each other, until Jim said, “O.K.” and invited him in. Easier promised than done, we discovered that Jim and I had to try to capture alternate lines, and then to pick up the phonograph needle every few lines to catch up in our writing. Finally, close to midnight, triumphant and grateful, he left with the already well- scratched record and the full text of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He left me wondering then (and even today) what he heard blowing in the wind back in 1966, and how many years he thought it would be before people would be allowed to be free.

After that he continued to show up randomly, hungry for American sounds, words, music, style, and look. He picked the wrong people to emulate, since we were hardly “hip,” but watched carefully our dress, manner, and especially our colloquial speech. He loved American slang. Although he was to show up in our lives over all the decades we returned to Russia, in the 1960s, his preoccupation was to be Bob Dylan. And it almost seemed he might succeed.

Maria and Alexander right next door to us had no interest in becoming Bob Dylan, pop stars, or hip. A gentle, refined couple married for some years, they were finishing their advanced degrees in philology (languages, literature, and linguistics), and hoping to be placed in schools in the same city as each other. She had the wholesome bright red cheeks Soviet posters idealized, and a warm, inviting smile; and he, the tall, lean build of a basketball player, with a gentle nature. We watched them await their mail and return from their faculty meetings during the first semester while they anticipated their fate.

One day in mid-winter, when we sat together drinking tea, I could see they had something to tell us. With the tea, we were eating homemade strawberry preserves, served Russian style, in miniature dishes with tiny spoons. They told us they’d be leaving soon—for Omsk, in Siberia. And that in a few days her mother would come from her village not too far from Moscow to deliver their three- year-old daughter to them to take along to their new home. Little Katya had been in grandmother’s care during her parents’ graduate studies. She turned out to be a picture-perfect little girl bundled in her fur coat, pink scarves, mittens, caps (wool under fur), and little felt boots, her cheeks glowing with cold. We knew we’d miss them, with their quiet decency and dignity, integrity and warmth.

And so they packed their belongings in tote bags, bundled other possessions and tied them with cord (they didn’t own suitcases), took little Katya, and, with Jim’s help, carried their household effects on the Metro train to the railroad station to embark on a three- to four-day journey to their new home and new life in Siberia. They looked like Tevye’s children in Fiddler on the Roof—but pointed east instead of west. We were happy for them, for their good fortune in being kept together as a family, but saw in their eyes an expression that said that this “goodbye” was forever. And it was.

We spent many evenings sitting around talking with fellow students, drinking tea and eating cookies. The tea, steeped from leaves, not bags, was strong; the cookies, mild and plain, very durable. The “friends” assigned to us by the Office of Foreign Students came by frequently, with enthusiasm and apparent sincerity, hoping we’d spend more time socializing with them— but that didn’t happen. I knew that Nina had a job, reporting our activities, views, and weaknesses to the KGB. Her father was a local Communist party bigwig; and she, with her strong determination, lack of scruples, and focus on her mission, was set on a career path to success. I sympathized with her ambition and tenacity, but was uncomfortable with her prying and intrusive questions. Raised to be a “good girl,” and still not very worldly, I didn’t know how to cope with this unwelcome relationship, so I remained courteous, but distant and unforthcoming.

Fortunately, Ivan was less persistent, and sometimes even appeared reluctant or ashamed. But he was soon succeeded by German (Herman; but no H in Russian), to be Jim’s newly planted friend. German was more sophisticated, educated, and even aristocratic: his grandfather had been an Orthodox priest — unlike Roman Catholic priests, Eastern Orthodox priests can and do marry and have children. Perhaps they reckoned he would be a better match for Jim, and in that, they were partly right. We did, in fact, spend a bit more time with him, especially because he had also been assigned to accompany our group on some of our travels.

We came to know other people as well, like Anna, the serious, down-to-earth student of philology across the hall. A small woman, with large brown eyes and brown hair, she was both intrigued and cautious in her visits. She enjoyed borrowing my books, then asking questions to fill out her picture of what America was like. We talked about daily life: “What kind of house do you live in?” she asked, in English, nodding her head slowly to absorb the answer: “We have no house,” I replied, “only dorm rooms and small rented flats.” “What do you eat for your meals at home?” And such.

We also talked “girl talk,” including about health problems. She, like most Russian women I then met, knew little about the functioning of the female body, the general information that most girls at home picked up from popular books (or the booklet, “What to tell your daughter,” that Kotex sent free to shy or anxious mothers). For Anna this was not academic, as she suffered a great deal, even becoming bedridden, from some sort of female problem, but without the benefit of good medical diagnosis, care or cure. Sadly, we watched her and other friends and their families suffer from conditions or illnesses we thought would have been easily addressed in the States, helped by antibiotics or aspirin or other medications we took for granted—but were not available there.

When our British friend down the hall became ill mid-winter with flu-like symptoms, fever, and pains, his Russian roommate called for medical help. A medical professional in a dirty white coat soon came by. She treated him by placing mustard plasters on his chest, and suggesting he eat strawberry jam; and urged that he open wide the windows of his room for fresh air—which she then did with gusto, quickly chilling the room. Perhaps this approach worked; in any case, he did eventually recover.

Meanwhile, next door, with our friends gone off to Siberia, another married couple quickly filled their suite. At 6:00 a.m. their first morning, we awoke to the blast of booming radio noise. When we tried to speak to them later in the day, to ask them please to tune down the radio in the early morning, we found them to be boorish, rough, and slovenly—and clearly very heavy sleepers. Their snoring permeated the thick cement walls between us, their radio blasted, and we found we could do nothing about it for the rest of our stay.

Ironically (or necessarily), in a country that did not seem to have as high a standard of sanitation as other European countries, cleanliness was highly valued in the dorm. Cleaning duty for the kitchen and halls rotated among students. Additionally, our rooms were inspected, unannounced but frequently, for dust, dirt, and clutter. A large chart posted in the hall publicized individual ratings from 1—5 on the cleanliness scale—a matrix of names running down the left column; dates across the top; and grades from 1—5 in the grid. I figured we had sufficient disabilities as The Enemy without adding dirt to the list: we kept our rooms clean and earned high ratings on the chart, and showed up for kitchen cleaning duty when scheduled.

I wrote home on November 11, 1965:

Jim is now doing his “cleaning duty” on the floor. About once each month, each person is granted the opportunity to clean the common kitchen at 7:30 a.m., sweep the corridor, and then serve a five-hour shift answering the single telephone on the floor.

I’ve wondered how long the Sanitary Commission lasted after our time, and whether it still inspects the increasingly run-down rooms of the university today.

Cleaning the kitchen’s layers of grease, garbage, and stickiness took a strong stomach. Without detergent, sponges, cleansers, and steel wool, the kitchen suffered from hopelessly entrenched dirt. That is why I still remember the moment real life imitated television advertising art.

Jim’s turn to clean the kitchen came. He marched in with our can of Ajax, unknown in the USSR, rubbing years of stains and grease from the white porcelain sink and stove. Oblivious to his surroundings, Jim did not see behind him, watching in utter awe, the tiny cleaning lady (uborshchitsa) of our floor, old, toothless, amazed. Witnessing the miracle, she afterward treated him almost like a god. Far better than walking on water, he had cut right through the water to the bottom of the sink!

She was so taken with Jim that when she had a special joy in her life, she came to see him and share the moment with him. She invited him into the kitchen, conspiratorially, to reveal—as she unwrapped the newspaper surrounding the item—one plucked skinny dead duck, a duck she had purchased unexpectedly, and triumphantly, for her family’s holiday dinner. She could not have been prouder if she had shot it herself. Jim expressed the admiration she hoped for. At the end of our stay, Jim presented her, along with our gratuity and probably far more precious, the remains of the can of Ajax.

We were surprised at the Victorian decor of the university lounges, of hotels and living rooms, in the country we had imagined to be out of Brave New World. But just as surprising were the remnants of what seemed Victorian attitudes, a gap between the doing and saying, what was practiced and what was discussed or displayed. For men and women to show affection in public, to hold hands, or exchange kisses was considered socially unacceptable. But privately, and before the ’60s revolution took hold in the States, unmarried people were engaged in what we would have considered promiscuous sex. Unprotected, since there were virtually no condoms, diaphragms, or other family-planning measures available. The measure of last resort, abortion, was widely used, but not by choice: no woman relished this surgical procedure performed without benefit of anesthetics, and often without the level of hygiene to prevent infection and sterility. But abstinence did not seem a popular alternative. (Is it ever? I wondered, when I thought even about the married couples we knew with unplanned pregnancies.)

Our friend Emily, a graduate student from Great Britain, learned another lesson in the suite she shared with her Russian roommate, Irina. Emily washed and hung her underwear to dry in the bathroom they shared. “How can you allow your underwear to hang in the bathroom when male visitors might visit?” Irina implored Emily, appalled at her immodesty. This might not have seemed odd coming from a virgin, but Irina had been having sexual relations with a number of different men during the year. And she was not unusual. The incongruous prudery that governed public life contrasted with the casual and serial sex practiced privately. Not professed, just performed.

At the same time, in public places, blue-collar women, women construction workers, plasterers and painters, and other laborers on scaffolds and on the ground (women, as always, serving as the heavy labor force of Russia) thought nothing in hot weather of removing their blouses and working in their brassieres. And nobody seemed to notice, except foreigners like us.

Proper behavior in public was enforced, I learned the hard way, by the babushki, the keepers of tradition. I still hear the shrill voices of old ladies screaming at me, “Girl, what are you doing?” This question was addressed to me when I sat with my legs crossed; or conversely, in trousers, sat with my legs akimbo; and sometimes when I didn’t even know what I could be doing wrong, although I knew it must be on that mysterious List.

There seemed to be a correct or conventional way to do everything. “Doing your own thing” was not imagined. It seemed that formulaic behavior in daily life mirrored religious practice, also highly structured, formal, and ritualized. Was it a comfort to people to observe established patterns forged by tradition, knowable and known? Long before individualism was excluded from the Socialist and Soviet agendas, it was also absent from traditional Russian life. The pressures to conform combined with prescribed rules for carrying out daily activities made foreigners, or citizens who deviated or dissented, more conspicuous and isolated than they might have been in a land in which diverse ways of doing things are as common as set ways, uniqueness as familiar as uniformity. At the time, I knew we stuck out, looking odd and alien. Since then I’ve wondered whether this narrow gauge thinking has made ethnic and cultural variety still discomfiting to Russians today.

Daily life offered stock ways and words to navigate buses, make change, buy food, stand in line. On buses, trams, and trolleys, drivers were boxed off in their own space, devoted only to driving. Paying was on the honor system. But the phrases for passing coins along through the jammed bus to reach the pay boxes and collect the ticket receipts; the elaborate ways in which people made change, often among multiple people; and the language for entering, exiting, and passing fellow passengers, were fixed expressions in what amounted to highly ritualized language and behavior. Not random and chaotic like New York, nor quiet and nontactile like Washington. I wrote my parents that:

In each vehicle, two little boxes contain tickets that each passenger is to take after he or she drops the correct change into the box: five, four, or three kopecks for a bus, tram, or trolley. Not having correct change, a passenger initiates a prescribed conversation on—let’s say—the 25-kopeck piece he has. Coins start passing from hand to hand throughout the crowded vehicle in exchange for other coins, until finally a correct total per person per trip is achieved—say for five people at five kopecks each. The 25-kopek piece is passed to a person near the box, who is requested to deposit it and draw five tickets which, then in turn, are passed back to their respective five purchasers, all of this in stylized phrases.

Travel was never quiet, while people settled confusion, disputes, or problems among themselves. The penalty for not paying was a 50-kopeck fine, and finding one’s name posted in the newspaper and on bus notices. The honor system was backed by random spot- checkers. I was eager not to be found wanting.

Below the surface of our daily activities, undercurrents of surveillance, suspicion, and manipulation percolated up. The authorities in the Soviet Union were fairly successful in their efforts to preserve the intellectual isolation of Soviet citizens, and they wanted to keep it that way. Sealed off from radio, television, and print communication from the outside world, people in the Soviet Union remained ignorant of alternatives, of a life outside. Most had no experience beyond their hermetically sealed environment. What bits of information filtered into the country confused people’s thinking about the world even further, since Soviet media and an active rumor circuit reported a random assortment of items without relation to one another or to any whole picture. A murder here, a day of war there, a law passed somewhere else, a flood or tornado. No context or coherence, just unrelated snippets.

Telephones were not yet universal in homes: coin-operated public phones were widely used. For inter-city calls, people had to go to special sites, from which such calls could be placed. We could not make international phone calls from university telephones, or from public phone boxes. To arrange a call to the U.S. (which we did only once because of the high cost), we trooped downtown to the Central Post Office and Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street, a half-day’s excursion on multiple Metro trains, to schedule and then await the overseas call. Russians and foreigners alike stood in line, put in the order for their call, then sat and waited. If and when the call went through, the caller was assigned a phone booth in which she or he could hope to hear the overseas party above the scratchy interference of the lines. We were told that there was only one international telephone channel in Moscow.

(Of course this was before international or long distance calls could be direct dialed even in the U.S., but calls could be placed from home telephones via an international or long-distance operator, a live human voice. It would have been hard to picture everyone in New York heading for the Central Post Office to call overseas.)

The same site downtown served to send packages overseas. We had to arrive with loose objects, not previously packed boxes. Only after postal personnel examined each object, could we pack each, on site, for shipping. Homebound Russian books and little wooden painted souvenirs began their journey there. Single-site monitoring simplified the government’s oversight of citizens’ overseas connections.

Once the international exchange programs began shipping idea-bearing foreign students to the Soviet Union, and the authorities realized they could not erect physical barriers to these outspoken guests, they used psychological pressure to prevent deep mixing. It worked fairly well. And it became the darker underside of our existence.

How did they do it? By constructing and manipulating an undercurrent of fear, they could control both citizens and foreigners. Deception could provide a useful weapon in psychological warfare. At the university itself, Soviet authority was represented by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel). The Director was a formal, remote man, housed in the back office, delegating day-to-day responsibility to Natalya, an attractive young blonde. Her soft, pleasant features masked a steel center. She melted at mention of her young daughter whose picture adorned her desk, while calculating destructive manipulation of foreign students. She proffered friendship to lonely American students, acting on orders from the KGB-connected bureaucracy to which she was 100 percent loyal, and that paid her in privileges and perks. She helped me understand how powerful dictators like Stalin and his successors could staff and institutionalize their ambitious and destructive goals from day to day, manage and administer their wills, one document and one person at a time.

Her strategic plan was to befriend students, cozying up, becoming familiar, confiding, insinuating her way, conveying “I’m on your side; trust me; I’m your ally against other forces.” Since we all saw a lot of her—she served as intermediary for us in the university and sometimes traveled with us on student trips— several students fell for her apparent friendship.

From that base, the Office for Foreign Students directed a damaging effort to drive out one particular American student, “John.” His research interest was 20^th-century Soviet politics, a topic they deemed sensitive and preferred to protect from scrutiny. Targeted for ouster, John became the object of a campaign to isolate and discredit him, and to destroy his will to stay.

The first stage was a quiet campaign of whispered confidential hints dropped to other American students. “How is John doing? Is he well?” Natalya would ask with some doubt in her voice, looking sympathetically into the eyes of one of John’s American friends. As the campaign escalated, the questions evolved into a more direct, urgent seeding of doubt.

“What problems is he having?” “He doesn’t seem right, does he?” She would press his closest American friend, who himself was becoming doubtful of John’s strength. Because we all suffered health problems—exhaustion, intestinal parasites, coughs, bronchitis, staph, and strep—none of us probably seemed “right.” But John soon collapsed in a deep faint in downtown Moscow. He had pneumonia, we learned. He was sent back to the States. And I learned more about the dark side of power than I had wanted to know.

The day he succumbed, he and “Tim,” another American student, were heading from the archives for lunch at the Hotel National. The old hotels—the National, Metropole, Ukraina, and Praga—were not yet refurbished in the retro-splendor they enjoy today, but they provided the finest dining available. At one of their cafés, one could get little dumplings or pastries, soups, and more substantial dishes for lunch; and in their restaurants, a full course meal at mid-day or evening. For a city the size of Moscow, a city of some seven to eight million people at the time, there were very few proper restaurants (as opposed to snack bars or buffets)—one or two dozen. Of these, most were housed in hotels. They aspired to be not just restaurants, but nightclubs with entertainment, with a band for dance music, usually featuring a female singer, in tight, sequined attire, bleached, teased hair, and lots of makeup.

Restaurant dinners at mid-day or evening often included the range of traditional courses. First a soup—cabbage, beet, sour grass, or potato, sometimes fish or meat; followed by an optional 100 grams of sour cream set in a stainless steel stemware cup, and topped with a sugar sprinkling. For the main course, “bifstek,” a rendering of “beefsteak,” a small beef fillet, was most popular; but I always headed for the sturgeon with mushrooms baked in sour cream sauce, a sort of sturgeon Stroganoff, when it was available. The side dish was frequently, and not unexpectedly, potatoes— commonly pan- fried. Then there was “salat” (cold potatoes, cooked peas and carrots mixed with mayonnaise)—a course I passed up; and for dessert, stewed dried fruit or vanilla ice cream. Fresh fruits and vegetables ranged from rarely seen to nonexistent; oranges or apples occasionally appeared at a restaurant or food stand.

The restaurants’ printed menus aroused immediate hope of rich variety and plenty. Well-worn menus listed dozens of hot and cold salads, appetizers, soups, entrees, and desserts, pages of apparent choices far more extensive than any fare the establishment offered. But when one tried to order, the waitress peremptorily informed the hopeful eater: “We have beefsteak or Chicken Kiev.” Then, more impatiently, “What’d’ya’ want?” I couldn’t figure out then or since why anyone thought that highlighting so large a gap between potential plenty and actual scarcity, falling so visibly short of a professed goal, seemed desirable propaganda for the success of the regime. But most likely the two bureaucracies, the one that created and printed menus, and the one that stocked restaurants, never met. Or perhaps the missing food items could be accounted for in some other way. Rumor had it then, as later, that desirable foods went missing en route, off the farm, dropped from the truck, from the warehouse, or out the back door of the kitchen.

About one hundred years earlier, I later learned, Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice Underground, Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, had journeyed to Russia in the midst of writing his Alice books. In his visit to a hotel restaurant in 1867, he noted that it was some consolation to find that during dinner,

we furnished a subject of the liveliest interest to our six or seven waiters …who ranged themselves in a row & gazed in a quite absorbed way at the collection of strange animals that were feeding before them... Now & then a twinge of conscience would seize them, that they were after all not fulfilling the great object of life as waiters & on these occasions they would all hurry to the end of the room, & refer to a great drawer, which seemed to contain nothing but spoons & forks. When we asked for anything, they first looked at each other in an alarmed way—then, when they had ascertained which understood the order best, they all followed his example, which always was to refer to the big drawer… (The Russian Journal of Lewis Carroll, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935)

We ate in restaurants only every few weeks, but as foreign graduate students, we were also allowed the privilege of the professors’ dining room. Unlike the student cafeteria in the sub- basement, this somewhat nicer establishment was set higher in the dormitory, and had small tables rather than refectory seating. The food fell short of hotel or tourist quality (not itself terrific), but like some faculty clubs, pegged itself a few notches above student fare.

Food was a serious preoccupation for Russians even in the 1960s. Sufficient food supplies still spelled survival, especially for those who endured the starvation or profound hunger of the World War II years and afterwards. As late as 1947 a major famine killed a great number of people through starvation and disease, and took a toll on the health of survivors.

Although the War had ended about twenty years before we arrived, its ghosts still haunted the streets of Russia. There was a conspicuous shortage of men over forty (compared to women); and those that remained bore heavy evidence of injury, suffering severe handicaps. Beside the eight to ten million soldiers lost in the War, another 15 million Soviet citizens died from starvation and cold, illness, prison, and labor camps. (I try to picture the entire population of New York State, all of it gone.) Another 25 million were left homeless. Famine remained a real and not unfounded fear. A bulging tote bag signified successful foraging and ensured that life would go on. Almost impossible to imagine, I found it to be, to picture what it actually felt like to know there is no food at all—not just this type of food, not just in this shop, not just today, but all food, gone. How would I live my days with that haunting vision?

Sustenance apart, meals and tea in Russia traditionally held greater meaning. They served (and serve today) as occasions for expressing friendship; as symbols of sharing; signs of success; shows of hospitality and prosperity in displays of generosity and extravagance.

People gathered to break bread together; newcomers were (and are) greeted with the traditional ceremonial offering of bread and salt (pull a piece of bread from the loaf, salt it, and eat it while your hosts wait expectantly); holidays were celebrated with feasts; friendships were cemented with shared home-cooked preserves or pastries. It is hard to imagine business that didn’t begin over drinking tea together, or an evening with friends not set around an oilcloth-covered kitchen table topped with tea glasses in ornate filigreed holders, sugar cubes, fruit preserves, chocolates, simple white cookies or rich French-style cream pastries. So central to the culture was (and is) gathering around a table to eat and drink— for business, pleasure, family gathering, or friendship—that the Russian language has a single word for this “at-the-table” phenomenon (zastolye), a word without easy translation.

For us, in settings from homes to restaurants, dorm kitchens to food shops, procuring, preparing, and sharing meals were to play a role during every period of our returns to Russia. From the 1960s through the turn of the 21^st century, it was hosting and being hosted, from gatherings of friends or neighbors around a kitchen table to state dinners toasting summit meetings of presidents of the United States with their Soviet or Russian counterparts—sharing a meal or tea, an enduring activity.

For a foreigner, venturing beyond Moscow was not easy during Soviet times. Today’s freedom of travel was unimaginable: travel was restricted and monitored; permission was required, and often denied; logistics undependable. Our trips in the 1960s were the most affecting, since they allowed us to cross the threshold into the enduring, yet untouristed realms of rural Russia.

When we headed out of Moscow on a railroad train or rented bus, we left a world of paved streets, high-rise buildings, indoor plumbing, and central heat for the life of the villages and small towns that had survived intact for centuries. Entering each village or town was like stepping into a movie set for an 18^th- or 19^th-century story. Muddy or frozen rutted dirt roads wended along lanes edged by low wooden picket fences. Within each enclosure sat a sagging, tilted log cabin, usually decorated like a gingerbread house with elaborately carved wood-framed windows and doors.

Like a Chagall painting, the rooflines of cabins perched and pitched at random angles, making the artist’s depictions seem less whimsical than photographic. Smoke from charcoal or wood stoves spiraled out of chimneys. Inside, in contrast to the bleak, tumbling- down village around, potted plants thrived on windowsills, and colorful curtains, carpets, and pillows provided cozy warmth that belied the colorlessness outdoors. Children and adults walked to and from the village pump at the well, carrying buckets of water home for washing, cooking, and bathing. Toilets were outside, in outhouses: hot and pungent in summer; icy cold in winter. Around the cabins, geese and chickens wandered erratically, pausing at the well, then squawked off out of the way of a woman with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, a water bucket suspended from each side. I saw a very resigned old horse dining on weeds, while his master, a bearded old peasant on his sled, waited patiently with his milk cans for their afternoon journey.

Riding past villages that flourished during medieval and early modern times, we could tell the seasons from the horse-drawn carts: during spring, summer, and fall, they had wheels; in winter, sled blades. The design of these sleighs would have been familiar to Tsar Peter the Great more than two centuries earlier.

In spring, summer, and fall, women kneeled at the banks of waterways, washing their family’s clothes in rivers and streams. In winter, they washed clothes through a hole in the ice of a frozen river. A photo I took from a distance captures the brilliant red of the washing woman’s hands. Little had changed in centuries. Like pinching one’s self in a dream, we had to look at the bus that delivered us, the local telegraph and (shared) telephone in the single post office, and the signs of electricity, to know that we were in the 20^th century at all. Many goods were still hauled by horses or by men and women burdened under massive loads. Motorized vehicles were scarce.

Our first fall, we traveled to Vladimir and Suzdal, and in March, to Yaroslavl, Pereslavl, Borisogleb, and Rostov (the Great). Although all these now seem very small towns, they had been great principalities in the 11^th through 14^th centuries. Won in bloody battles, they served as centers of power of warring noblemen long before Moscow was the capital, and before centralized government united Russia. Vladimir had been the capital of Rus from the 12^th century through most of the 14^th century.

Layers of history settled on these authentic remains of great fortresses and fortifications, domed churches, monasteries, elaborate walls, painted frescoes, and icons. Before renovation and tourism, these crumbling remnants retained a robust grittiness that linked us directly to the past, without the filters of restoration, fresh paint, shorings, and landscaping. No tour buses yet, either. It wasn’t hard to imagine the overgrown courtyards and weedy fields filled with medieval noblemen in suits of armor clashing swords.

Twelve of us American graduate students—papers and arrangements laboriously obtained—set out by train for Yaroslavl. We waited a long time for taxis and a hotel room, but settled into a small town small hotel we had (it appeared) successfully booked. The next morning, we toured the historic fortress (kremlin), church, and a 19^th century estate. To top off the day, we had a cheerful dinner at the old hotel, the proprietors having cooked a home made meal for the traveling foreigners.

The next day, we continued on to Rostov (“Rostov the Great”) and Borisogleb (Boris and Gleb), two quaint old towns dominated in their dreariness by huge old kremlin domes. Climbing the dungeon- like steep, narrow, dark, and dank stairways on to the parapets, we ran the length of the crumbling fortress, picturing knights peering through the slits in the walls, slits through which they poured hot oil on to any enemy attempting to scale the structure. About one thousand years ago, Boris and Gleb, brothers for whom the town was named, had accepted death, although they were innocent, in order to redeem their people. They became Russia’s first national saints. A haunting photograph in my collection freezes a moment of bleak splendor, the crumbling but majestic monastery surrounded by snow, highlighted by a line of black picket fencing, capturing a Borisogleb almost frozen in time.

None of the towns we visited in 1965 or 1966 had seen many foreigners: we were an oddity, and provided entertainment. Children followed us. Adults stared at us as if we were nude. We felt very conspicuous and different, although we were not discernibly different-looking from Russians. (There were no black students among us.) That evening, when we dined at a small restaurant in town, after a few drinks, we joined the local Russians in singing and dancing in a typically Russian evening, warm and hospitable.

By the third day, when we moved on to Pereslavl, accommodations, food, cold, exhaustion had reduced our number to five. We went on to tour a small church, monasteries, and museums, and saw men restoring an 18^th century Rococo church by making their own boards out of logs, precut boards being not yet obtainable in Russia. As visitors, we were shown special sites not normally opened; and one man played us a recording of the chiming of the old Bells of Rostov as a gracious gesture to his foreign guests.

A most touching moment came during lunch in a small cafeteria on the main—and only—street in Pereslavl. We stopped at a typical cafeteria (stolovaya): a rather basic, unkempt establishment that would make a roadside diner at home look luxurious. There was hushed silence while people watched the five of us seating ourselves. Then a waitress walked over to our table, and looked as if she suddenly realized what the place must look like to us. So she quickly reached over, lifted the sticky little mustard pot off the table, and returned in a few minutes with a newly filled, wiped off little pot of mustard in honor of the visitors. We found this a moving gesture.

One memory I could not immortalize in a photograph was the public rest room at the bus station in Rostov. This was not the first hole-in-the-ground rest room without plumbing, running water, or paper I had experienced in Russia: almost all rest rooms lacked actual toilet fixtures, or running water, or paper (not for decades to be seen, and even then not in public facilities). Even the elegant Lenin Library, home for high-level academic and professional figures, had an indescribably primitive bathroom.

But this was about the worst. A sagging wooden outhouse whose smell extended well beyond its walls, the inside was covered so deeply in human waste we were grateful for boots to navigate the floors. Meanwhile, a large, drunk man attempted to break his way into the “ladies” side, while Eva, the other American woman, and I took turns barring the door with all our might. Had it not been freezing cold, and had we not been “downtown” in this small town, we would have selected an outdoor space behind a bush. But that wasn’t an option.

On most of our rural travel (even four decades later), the best plan was to stop the bus or car near a woods, designate one side of the road for women, the other for men; head for the bushes, and finish before the flies and mosquitoes found you. (Why, I wondered, do we capture in photographs and writing sights both beautiful and bizarre, but rarely those disgusting, or simply a little embarrassing…)

Back to the courtyard of the small shack labeled “depot,” we watched buses come and go, packed to overflow with peasants carrying sacks of food, potatoes, onions, carrots; parts or whole slaughtered animals (a pig? a lamb?), random supplies and accessory parts from hubs, like Rostov, to their still smaller villages.

While we awaited our bus, hearing the usual background shouting and arguing, but before we realized what this particular chaos was about, we watched while a few Russians were forcibly ejected from a bus by the authorities. Suddenly, we realized, this expulsion was to clear seats on the bus for us, the “foreigners.” Although upset and protesting, we did not prevail, and were set in place for our trip home. Those sitting securely on the bus seemed to accept the unstated rule that foreigners had priority seating, and didn’t appear to hold it against us. But we felt very uncomfortable.

Another day, on a train trip into the countryside, seated on a “hard coach,” the low-fare wooden bench seats, we found next to us a Russian middle-aged farm hand from Ukraine, headed home. He was returning from accompanying a train car full of apples from his collective farm to the Urals to ensure their safe arrival at the other end. He had to travel about 3,500 miles round trip in his effort—a trip equivalent to going from Boston to Denver and back again. His was not an exceptional journey, but gave the term “inefficiency” real meaning.

Looking out the window, passing ordinary scenes from daily life, he asked us, “Do you have ducks in America?”

“Yes,” we replied, “we do.”

A little later, “Do you have cows in America?”

“Yes,” we responded, not adding that their bones did not stick out in this pitiful way. He advanced to apples, trucks, trees, and other random items. Finally, he leaned over and whispered something into Jim’s ear, to which Jim replied, “Yes.” That, I later learned, was whether we have prostitutes in America. By the time we left he seemed happily confirmed in his view that things were not so different in America from Russia after all; though, he was sure, each of these must have been much better in America. But his image of America, like that of so many Russians, was a collage of bits and pieces, a patchwork not yet assembled.

No trip to Russia seemed (or seems) complete without a pilgrimage to the home of Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glade). What was then his country estate now seems comparable to a suburban home in any major city in the U.S.; but its setting in a lovely countryside scene promised a glimpse into this artist’s world. I was struck then by, and never forgot, his tall Underwood manual typewriter still sitting in his den, as if awaiting his return to imprint the words of another lasting novel.

I also knew how hard (if not impossible) it would have been to acquire such a fine imported object at the time of our visit in the mid-1960s. But the typewriter was emblematic of another era, of a time before the Bolsheviks had isolated Russia from the rest of the world. Until the Communists took over and sealed the country shut, artists, writers, and businessmen traveled freely to and from the West. Educated Russians read and spoke French and German, and could cross cultural and physical borders with relative ease. Traveling to Tolstoy’s home and tomb brought us one step closer to that previous cosmopolitan age, and to the great author, while leaving the ineffable quality of his art a mystery.

Sojourns into small towns and villages of rural Russia illuminated even more than Moscow the two sides of being a foreigner: the exotic and the privileged. If we stood out—which we always did, even dressed in our plain, well-used clothing—we were also treated as special guests. People exerted touching efforts to please, and to meet what they imagined to be our expectations, but you could see that they felt they could not have succeeded. For all our stays in Russia, the image remains of that fresh little mustard pot set down on our table in a grim, grimy cafeteria, with its sticky tables and chairs, marred floors, and smells of unrefrigerated sausages, cheeses, and buttermilk, stale odors of overcooked onions, cabbages, beef bones, and soups. The contrasts of generous hospitality and warm reception with pungent odors.

Living in Moscow, we, like Russians, took advantage of theatres, museums, music, parks, historic sites, and other entertainment and arts. Tickets were cheap. We saw a memorable performance of the opera Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi, in which Boris was massive and masterful, and the settings monumental; and a theatre performance of Brothers Karamazov staged with the passion of those who became the Karamazovs. We were cheered by shows at the Puppet Theatre, the repertory circus, and the circus on ice with its now famous performing bears. Odd, how quickly the bears seem human, and “reality” shifted. And we witnessed numerous concerts and ballets, including those we would see throughout our stays in Russia: the enduring Swan Lake, Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet.

At performances, the intermissions provided an occasion for a spread of special delicacies. In theater lobbies and lounges, lines formed quickly at the “bufyet” (buffet table) to buy flutes of champagne, glasses of coffee, bottles of plain or fruity mineral water; open-face canapes of salami-type sausage, or a dot of red caviar. Chocolates, cookies, or frosted cakes supplemented the other treats—and served for many theater- and concert-goers the supper that could not be scheduled between leaving work at 6:00 p.m. and the performance at 7:00. Later I discovered in Europe the same lovely practice of experiencing the arts interspersed with touches of edibles enjoyed with friends at cafe tables during the intervals. And still more recently in the U.S.

Enter Lev Vlasenko, concert pianist. Well before we left for Moscow for the first time in 1965, Jim had met Lev when the latter visited and performed at Harvard in the late 1950s. During our stays in Moscow in the 1960s and ’70s, we attended any of his performances we saw advertised and visited him briefly backstage. Sadly, he and his wife felt that any unauthorized contact with foreigners—with us—might harm their careers and personal life.

“We hope you understand,” he would say, looking imploringly into our eyes, “we hope you understand why we cannot get together, why we cannot ask you to our home.” He had tears in his eyes. In that moment, all abstract writing about arbitrary, authoritarian or totalitarian government and its repression, became real, focused, and human, in the face of a friend in tears, pleading (through his eyes), “If you’re really a friend, you will keep away from me, and forgive me for having to ask this of you.” Of course we understood and spared them our presence. But each time Lev traveled abroad, to East Europe, Israel, or South America, he sent Jim a little picture postcard, through which we were to track him for the rest of his life.

Living in the former Soviet Union was not just about living isolated and enclosed, sealed from the outside world. To re-imagine that time and place, for Russians and for ourselves, we have to feel again the heavy and pervasive hand of authority, the scrutiny and secrecy, and the arbitrary and oppressive behaviors. Although we often felt spooked by surveillance, we came closest to encountering Soviet police the December 1965 night the university was raided for subversive students. I wrote home:

About 1:30 a.m., Jim and I returned from a late visit with a friend upstairs to find the door to our staircase locked. Locked stairways are not unusual since stairways, like lights and elevators, are used sparingly, apparently to avoid wearing them out. We heeded the sign posted there and went down to the fifth floor and up the only active elevator to discover our own sixth floor in turmoil of swarming people. Somebody said this was a surprise random bed check. All exits to the floor had been locked or guarded while some sort of police were bursting into room after room, banging and opening doors, searching closets and johns for—we knew not what. Someone yelled out to the “inspectors” that we were Americans, and so we passed a most cursory inspection of our room. The authorities demanded everyone’s documents—the university passes and domestic passports that everyone carries. Some of the stowaways that normally took shelter in the dormitory quickly hid on the kitchen balcony, spending the night locked outdoors in the dead of winter.

The raid was probably inspired by more than its rumored purpose, a search for people occupying the dormitory without permission. That day, a large demonstration in Pushkin Square on behalf of the censored writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, impelled the authorities to root out anyone who participated in the event. While the commission proceeded from room to room, forcing all students out into the hallway, they searched for placards, signs, and papers that might implicate people. No search warrants or permission were needed, no reason given. Sleepy, shaken, undressed and confused, people were also afraid. A lot was at stake.

And that’s how we met the student from India who lived down the hall. In the midst of this upsetting scene, Previr came up to us for the first time, hugging his arms around himself in shame at being thrown from his bed into the hall in his pajamas.

“How appalling!” he said, looking a mix of anger and embarrassment. “How undignified to be unclothed in public.”

I was too shaken to care that most people were in underwear or nightclothes, but never forgot the power of commanding officials armed with legal and government authority on their side, and nothing on ours.

We enjoyed coming to know Russian friends. But we also discovered that they often were not forthcoming about their families. Even when we talked about ours, they limited what they said about theirs. Most probably had unremarkable pasts, but some had reason to avoid revealing their roots, as we learned at the end of our stay. If during much of our time in Moscow I felt irritated or insulted by the students whose job it was to spy on us and report back to the authorities what they learned about us, by the end of our stay I was more pained and saddened than irked by their plight.

Right before we left, some friends told us their stories. They revealed their nightmare lives. They knew they lived in the shadows, because their mother or father, grandmother or grandfather had been incarcerated in a prison or labor camp for reasons either known or unclear to them, but without a real trial or possibility of parole. Dark family secrets. The parents, for whose sins they were paying, had been punished not for murder, theft, rape, or fraud, but for political views or expression deemed unacceptable to the authorities; or for simply being in the wrong class or wrong place at the wrong time. The children were marked for life with this disability, the sins of the father visited now not only on the sons but also on the mother and daughters.

As young students,they had tried to walk a careful path. They had hidden their political liability from strangers, but were still stalked by their history in files and records. At some point, a reasonable- looking official had approached them unexpectedly with a lifetime choice: to terminate their education and get employment in a coal mine far from a major city (or other unpalatable opportunity), or to attend a highly selective national university in a major city, receive a stipend, master foreign languages, sciences, or other fields, and look forward to a promising professional career. The price of choosing the university path was to report back regularly the activities, relationships, character flaws, and vulnerabilities of foreign students whom they must befriend.

We never knew how many people turned down this offer, of course; and we did believe we had friends who were not living a blackmailed life. We also did not know which of our friends had parents on the persecuting side, people in authority who wrote and enforced laws that imprisoned political dissenters, ran brutal Gulags, or signed orders for executions. But we did know several students who accepted the deal, and were assigned to us and to our British and Canadian friends. Some of these students became the middle-aged or retired professors, engineers, teachers, computer scientists, doctors, government bureaucrats, linguists and librarians who staffed the nation for years, and who may or may not remember the original terms of their education. Some are probably no longer alive, with early death blotting today’s Russia.

Our stay in Moscow ended abruptly, unexpectedly, and dramatically before we ever witnessed the warmth of spring. We left Russia suddenly on Thursday, April 21, 1966. Well advised or ill advised, framed or fooled, we’ll never know. On April 20, Mr. C. at the American Embassy, Moscow, summoned us to tell us that a Russian who jumped ship and defected to the Philippines had given Jim’s name as a reference. The facts no longer mattered: whether we knew him or not was inconsequential. What mattered was that we might be subject to arrest (we did not have diplomatic immunity), vulnerable for supposedly aiding his defection.

We also knew this was not fanciful thinking. In 1963, Frederick Barghoorn, an exchange professor from Yale University, was arrested and held for a period in a Russian jail. Whatever reasons were provided, we assumed that his research topic transgressed the Soviet’s comfort zone. The thought of jail transgressed mine: totally chilling.

“That’s not something any of us would want to risk,” Mr. C. indicated.

Truth was, we did not know the man. This stranger had knocked on our door unexpectedly some months before, announced his startling plan to defect, and then left. Innocently or deliberately, he had made us party to his intentions. A few months later he executed his scheme, naming Jim in the process.

We felt defenseless against incarceration or expulsion. We already believed that the Soviets had for some time wanted to rid themselves of Jim’s presence. This event provided an opportunity. Or created one. Russian intelligence apparently assumed (we later extrapolated) that Jim was an agent. His Russian was too good. Somehow, he was the designated “leader” (starosta) of the student group, which they took to mean that he had been anointed by the U.S. government. We knew he had been elected to that post spontaneously in a raggedy discussion on the train into Russia with our fellow students, partly because of his proficiency in Russian. (“Sure, sure…” we could imagine their saying.) Perhaps seeing they could not frame him through the usual weapons of choice— women, drink, or drugs—they scared us into leaving.

Or, perhaps this stranger truly was a free spirit, defecting to defy the regime, and planning mindfully to cover his attempt with the name of a genuine student. But a real defection likely made us even more vulnerable than a set-up might have done.

We spent our last night in terror and fear. With imaginations fueled by films, we had bolted and blocked our door, wedging the back of a tilted chair under the doorknob. We lay awake all night listening for footsteps, but making no noise that our eavesdropping equipment might pick up. It was the longest night of my life. Exhausted by morning we left empty-handed as advised, avoiding suspicion, acting normal. I knew at the time that our futures hinged on how convincingly nonchalant we appeared walking from our rooms, through the enormous building, out the guarded gates, and into the car the Embassy had sent. The less time exposed to taxis, metros, or streets, the more likely we would escape expeditiously. After a silent ride to the airport, with nothing but our coats and a few dollars in our pockets, Mr. C. deposited us on an airplane bound for Warsaw, Paris, and London. Once we were gone, our fellow American students packed our personal belongings - including Jim’s research notes - into the footlocker that had accompanied us to Moscow, and the American Embassy shipped it to the London docks.

Our hearts flipped on landing in Warsaw to learn we had to leave the plane. We feared the reach of the KGB. Our hope was to huddle in the midst of a cluster of tourists, not allowing ourselves to be isolated. We figured that the police would want to avoid a scene or any public display. So we continued our high-stakes acting gig, clinging close to a large clump of French tourists inspecting the Polish folk arts for sale in the airport shop, feigning our own interest in these assorted wares. (“How colorful!” “How cute!”…)

Relieved but numb when we arrived very late in London on the last plane from Paris, we were dismayed to be prevented by immigration officials from entering easily. Only after questioning us individually and together did they allow us temporary entrance, with the provision that we check in shortly with the police and immigration authorities. Which we did. If in Moscow we had learned to feel like foreigners, that night we learned how it feels to be an alien, without money, luggage, or even a convincing story. The true story of how we came to be standing there at that time of night began sounding a little suspicious even to me.

None of the mystery or drama surrounding our escape shows in the two Western Union telegrams we sent my parents, that they saved from 1966 until their deaths.

In the first, from Moscow, on April 21, 1966, we said: “LEAVING MOSCOW FOR WESTERN EUROPE ON ADVICE OF AMERICAN DOCTOR…. DO NOT WORRY. WILL WRITE WHEN WE ARRIVE IN EUROPE.” Now, with my own children, I’d know better than to exhort parents not to worry, since that is the sure trigger to set off the worry alarm. But for grounds to leave unexpectedly, illness provided a good, as well as true, rationale. For months I had been suffering a sore throat and fevers, which—it turned out—signified strep throat. Now I had a name and treatment for that, too.

Then from London on April 23: “ARRIVED LONDON THURSDAY WILL WRITE.” The bold finality of the telegram seemed comforting, with its block letters appliqued across the yellowed paper.

Big relief, being in London. Although the world we had escaped seemed partly the “Wonderland” into which Alice had fallen, another fictional model completely at home in this world would have been Joseph K. Alice had been upset by inexplicable behaviors (“curioser and curioser”) and taxing confusion over words and meanings (“I can’t quite follow it as you say it”), but it was Joseph K, in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, who found himself thrown into an arbitrary and secretive universe in which uncertainty and fear were cultivated and exploited. Subject to inexplicable forces, accused of being guilty (but of what?), he begged in desperation for an explanation, and feared execution. Not a benign setting, this, in fiction or in real life. On our long, last night in Russia I dreaded our end might be the same as his, imprisoned and unfree. I was desperate to leave Russia immediately.

Suddenly it was springtime in London. How much lighter I felt. I had been sprung from a sea of surveillance and could breathe on land. The range of colors, the variety and aesthetics of public places, beyond strict utilitarianism; the tidiness and good repair; people’s courtesy, cheerful service, and healthy appearance buoyed us.

As I reflected on our time in Russia, I realized that daily life had not been easy, making our departure something of a relief. The hypocrisy of the official voice on radio, TV, and newspapers, mouthing untruths, boasting successes that belied reality, while avoiding mention of catastrophes people actually witnessed, increasingly grated. As foreigners, we had the additional discomfort of being a curiosity, aliens on display, as well as observed, monitored, and surveilled, without exemption even by night. Surveillance was possible 24/7, before the term 24/7 was invented.

Although we had not been accustomed to great comfort or privilege at home, we were still vexed by the day-to-day inefficiencies and frustrating “Catch-22” logic of the place, as well as a litany of rules (enforced or disregarded—who knew?); and controls (all side roads off the main roads guarded by police and entry gates). All this was capped by the natural diminution of the human spirit sealed in the isolated, gray monotony of the land.

Some of my reaction might today be ascribed to “culture shock,” a term that emerged into popular use only after that time. Nor had I, twenty-three years old, thought systematically about cultural contexts and codes, covert and overt; or about the impact on a person encountering another culture, crossing social and psychological borders.

From what I heard from Russians, it appeared that many also suffered some degree of helplessness in the face of unchecked power; hopelessness in the face of a future over which they exercised little control; tedium and boredom from limited variety and choice; and frustration and irritation at hypocrisy, arbitrary government, and unnecessary obstacles. Cynicism-for-survival was, as always, rampant. The popular Russian joke is still shared today:

A man in an ambulance asks the attendant, “Where are we going?”

The attendant replies, “To the morgue.”

The patient responds quickly, “But I’m not dead yet.”

To which the attendant retorts, “And we’re not there yet, either.”

Yet that trying academic year taught me more than I realized at the time. (“Stay real, Naomi, a little voice warns me: You’re no Pollyanna!”) Living far from familiarity and predictability, far from the givens, offered insight not only into a them and their culture, but also into an us and our culture, setting under scrutiny the habits we took for granted as universal. (Don’t women everywhere sit with crossed legs?)

And it taught me things about myself that I may not have wanted to know. I was discouraged to realize that I was not perennially cheerful in the face of obstacles (though somehow managed to behave appropriately); sometimes not as much “a good sport” as I thought I should have been; and not as fearless or bold an adventurer as I had hoped I might be. I felt old and tired at twenty-four.

I wrote my parents on April 5, 1966, “With Jim in the Russian field, we should be back here at some point in our lives.” But I did not then savor the possibility. Nor did I guess how many times over how many decades I would return to live and visit the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia through the turn of the next century, through dimmer and brighter times, each time assuming it would be my last.

Long after other remembrances of living in Moscow faded, the distinctive smells of the city, of the corridors, kitchens, streets, and Metros, remained. On each return, the smells triggered recollections and a sense of place far more quickly than the sight of the Cyrillic alphabet and sounds of the Russian language. These were hardly the aromas of Proust’s Remembrances of his childhood, the sweet little cakes and mother’s perfume. The kitchen had reeked of foods cleaned in the sink, boiled on the stove, left on the table, trashed. Onions, cabbage, sometimes beef; fish skins, scales, and guts left in the sink. Foods in the kitchen, as in food shops, sitting at room temperature, became pungent in their distinctive types, exaggerated reminders of milks, cheeses, meats, fish, vegetables.

The dormitory corridors had their own smells, especially of a sticky, light brown viscous glop used to clean the wooden floors. Its distinctive beeswax smell permeated the halls, blending with the scents of steam heat, damp woolens, cooking smells from the common kitchen, and sweet tobacco, reminiscent of pipe tobacco at home. People smells, untreated with deodorant, mouthwash, detergent, daily showers, fresh clothing, or air fresheners, merged into the mix, creating the unique and memorable blend.

Outdoors, most odors disappeared into the cold. Fresh air arrived with the winds and snow from the Arctic. Only on temperate or still days did the air carry the fumes of diesel and low octane fuel exhaust, chimney and factory smoke, and burning coal and oil. It was many years later that trucks and cars filled the air with visible exhaust; and years before the summer smells became familiar to me, since our stay during the ’60s began in fall and ended in spring.

Figure 1. Snow scene at MGU (with Naomi). Xmas 1965.

Figure 2. Long dark corridor at Moscow State University dorms.

Figure 3. Neighbor’s little girl in foreground of the central tower of MGU.

Figure 4. Bus station/depot at Rostov, March 1966.

Figure 5. A typical village house/cabin. Pereslavl, March 1966.

Figure 6. Monastery outlined with black fencing in snow. Borisagleb, March 1966.