Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union
In a clear, confident voice, Father Dudko began reading a confession in which he renounced his previous dissident activities, praised the Soviet authorities for their humanity and said that he now recognised that his struggle against atheism had been a struggle against Soviet power.
When Father Dudko finished people began calling each other in Moscow’s dissident and intellectual community. Father Dudko was the religious counsellor and friend to most of Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia, and one historian later described his recantation as an “inexpressible blow.”
The confession of Father Dudko, however, did not signal the start of a new campaign against religion but, on the contrary, was followed by intensification of the preparations of religious facilities for the 1980 Olympics. Long neglected Russian Orthodox churches were being restored, crosses erected and icons lit to demonstrate Soviet respect for religious faith.
The irreconcilability between Father Dudko renouncing his beliefs on nationwide television and the final touches being put on the restored cupolas of Russian Orthodox churches is symbolic of the problems foreigners will experience in understanding a society which invests enormous energy in creating a false facade to conceal the ideology which guides it.
More than 30,000 western tourists have come to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics and the overwhelming likelihood is that the impression they will take away with them will be based on the false front, not the ideological reality.
The buildings on main Olympic routes have been repainted, drunks, hooligans and others likely to make public scenes have been exiled, attractive Soviet guides who have been carefully screened will aid foreign visitors and a full cultural programme has been arranged. Meanwhile the ubiquitous police—both uniformed and plain-clothed varieties—will discourage chance encounters in the street.
The Soviet authorities believe that Western visitors to the Soviet Union generally have no interest in probing deeply into Soviet life and will draw their conclusions on the basis of what is visible. The Soviets therefore set out to organise what the visitors will see.
The Olympic Games will be a net gain for the Soviet authorities in the political sense if the vast majority of foreign visitors never give any thought to the ideological essence of Soviet society and assume that in the Soviet Union too, appearances reflect reality.
The foreign visitor—who buys expensive Olympic souvenirs in Soviet dollar shops, travels in an Intourist car, attends the Bolshoi ballet and the Olympic events and admires the golden cupolaed churches which have been carefully restored—may easily return home to tell friends that the Soviet Union is little different from countries in the West.
The western visitor to Moscow may notice that older people are better dressed than he had imagined. But this will be less important than the fact that some of those strolling past him on Kallinin Prospekt are former labour camp prisoners who adopted, as a result of their experiences, the fundamental assumptions of the Soviet “new man.”
The experience of having been arrested, serving 15 years in a Siberian labour camp and then being freed, rehabilitated and restored to one’s previous position as if nothing had happened teaches a man one of totalitarianism’s basic rules—that his actions do not always influence his fate.
The Soviets have tried to create an environment for western visitors in which they will feel comfortable and which they will compare to their own. Having arrived at a gleaming airport built by the West Germans, the western visitors will be quickly taken to luxury hotels and offered the opportunity to participate in familiar activities such as group excursions, buying parties and theatre tours.
The visitor, however, will learn more about Soviet society far away from the tourist facilities. Although it is off the beaten path, the visitor may gain a feel for the way in which totalitarianism made people interchangeable in the Soviet Union by taking a walk in the dimly lit heart of 19th century Moscow.
Watching the reflection of the street lamps on the motionless surface of Patriarch’s Pond, it is easier to understand that the Soviet Union is a country where a figure stepping out of the shadows for a solitary midnight stroll could, with equal ease, have spent his life as a high Soviet official or as an “enemy of the people and saboteur.”
The Soviet Union was not always so diffident about its ideology or so anxious to make bourgeois westerners feel at home. But ideological fervour has slowly drained away to be replaced by ordinary careerism which must nonetheless realise its goals within the established ideological structure. The result is a surrealistic situation which helps explain why the Soviets prefer to conceal the state of their ideological ambiguity behind a protective facade.
The techniques being used to create an atmosphere of normality for Olympic tourists are aimed at misleading journalists, businessmen and Heads of State. Soviet political culture was shaped by Marx and Lenin’s unflattering view of the western bourgeoisie. If the West feels baffled by the Soviet Union this is partially because the Soviet authorities have more confidence in their ability to maintain a misleading facade than in their capacity to defend themselves as an ideological movement.
According to Marxist-Leninist ideology, the elimination of private ownership did away with the basis for social differences which are always class-based. The Soviet Union therefore should, according to doctrine, demonstrate total unanimity and this unanimity should be completely voluntary. In fact, unanimity does not exist in the Soviet Union but the political structure of the country is organised on the assumption that it does.
One of the rituals through which the supposed unanimity of Soviet society manifests itself are the periodic elections to the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, in which 99.99 per cent of the population votes in favour of the Communist Party candidate. What really happens during these elections, however, is that people vote because they fear bureaucratic revenge at the hands of the State apparatus which affects every part of their life, if they refuse.
The ritualism in the society is also manifested in “Socialist competitions” which take place at every work place and involve pledges by the workers to increase production or reduce tardiness and so-called “Leninist inventories” among young adults who make promises such as to improve their “moral and cultural level” and report on fulfilment at meetings of the Komsomol, the communist youth organisation a year later.
None of these rituals has any real meaning but they are intended to express the unity and “enthusiasm” of the society and although it is a rare Soviet official who will show any eagerness to discuss these practices, none can afford—in a conversation with a foreigner or even an unknown Soviet citizen—to belittle their significance. The ritual reflects the ideology which is the ultimate justification for Soviet power.
In a situation of ritual adherence to an ideology which has been deprived of substance a special role is created for the use of “hints.” Mr. Naum Meiman, the acting head of the dissident Helsinki Monitoring Group, was puzzled one morning last September, to be called to his neighbourhood party organisation to discuss his longstanding application to emigrate.
Emigration matters would normally have been handled by the Soviet Visa Office. But Mr. Meiman went to the local party headquarters nonetheless where the chairman of the party committee spoke to him about his dissident activities and said, “as a resident of our area, we strongly and persistently advise you to change your behaviour.”
To a Soviet citizen, the message was clear. If Mr. Meiman did not cease his dissident activities, he might soon cease to be a resident of the local chairman’s area, which would mean that he could be exiled from Moscow. If a foreigner were to inquire about the conversation, however, a Soviet official would describe the talk as a friendly conversation with no implicit threat.
The Soviet penchant for advertising what is meaningless and concealing what is important can deepen the psychological distance between westerners and Soviet citizens by depriving words of their meaning. This is reflected in a wide variety of situations from Soviet claims to have been “invited” into Afghanistan to the behaviour of the women who manage the cafe next door to my office. They shut the doors when they feel like gossiping and hang up a sign reading “closed for technical reasons.”
The successful creation of a false facade for foreigners and the irresponsibility with words in the Soviet Union both stem from the basic Soviet attempt to convince people that the truth is what they are shown or told and never what they learn independently.
The emphasis is on manipulating what they can see because it is assumed that foreigners have no access to independent impressions. With Soviet citizens, the goal is to get them to ignore what they see and believe what they are told.
One night a friend of mine named Volodya came home after an alcoholic binge to find his wife and mother waiting up for him and, in his words “ready to strangle me.” He had been out with his friend, Petya. In a distinctly Soviet attempt to save himself, he told his wife, “Petya is Dead.”
Volodya’s wife, who was fond of Petya, burst into tears, helped her husband into bed, and brought him a cup of tea. When she left, Volodya picked up the phone and called Petya. He told Petya to stay out of sight for a few days because he had told his wife that he was dead. Petya, who had also been drinking, agreed, and went back to sleep.
The next day, Petya having forgotten the incident, saw Volodya’s wife on the down escalator at the local Metro station as he was riding up. He waved at her and then, realizing his mistake when he saw her look of absolute horror, began shouting, “no, no, I’m dead, I’m dead.”
Only in the Soviet Union would a man in Petya’s position have felt there was a chance to convince her.
Financial Times, Wednesday, July 30, 1980
Light and shade in Shadrinsk
View from Middle Russia
The morning sunlight in Shadrinsk revealed an old Russian merchant town where leaning log houses, warped from centuries of rain and snow, lurched over dusty streets and five-storey housing blocks stood in the background with iron balconies and laundry hanging out to dry.
It had taken 39 hours to reach the Ural mountains town of Shadrinsk, in the Trans-Siberian Express and on the way, we passed timeless wooden villages where peasant women bent over dirt plots in the heat of the sun.
As we approached the outskirts of the town, trucks loaded with chopped wood waited at a crossing and the grassy Russian plain was broken by a pine grove which gave way to a scene of peaceful decrepitude where unused railway sidings were dotted with marigolds and grain elevators rusted in the sun.
We had been prompted to make the trip by the massive Soviet propaganda campaign following the invasion of Afghanistan. In Moscow, educated people are sceptical of their Government but I thought this was probably less true in the towns and villages flung out over thousands of miles of provincial Russia, the “deaf places” where most Soviet citizens live.
During the train journey to Shadrinsk, a factory town of 80,000 in the centre of the USSR, which was picked at random, a colleague and I got some idea of what lay ahead. There were many soldiers on the train, en route to new postings, as well as a reasonable cross section of the travellers one would meet in any second-class compartment on the busy Trans-Siberian Express.
Almost to a man, people we spoke to condemned the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics and said that they supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“We gave the Afghans help, just as the Americans gave us help in the Second World War,” said a retired schoolteacher from Kurgan. “They published the appeal for help in our newspapers.” I asked him if he ever considered the possibility that what he read in the Soviet newspapers might not be true. “How could it not be true?” he replied.
In Shadrinsk, I unpacked my things at the Hotel Ural and walked through the shadeless central square, stopping to talk to some young girls who were sitting on a bench near the war memorial. Across the road at the Motherland Cinema a new film was playing called, “From Your Loved One, Don’t Be Parted.”
In the next three days, I spoke to people in cafes, in the barren farmers’ market, in the restaurant of our hotel, and in the lush, mosquito-ridden city gardens. The overwhelming impression I took away was that there was little realism in the idea of President Jimmy Carter that an Olympic boycott would inform the Soviet people about Western anger over Afghanistan, In remote cities like Shadrinsk which are cut off from outside information, the conditions for informing people do not exist. Soviet propaganda is the reality.
One night in the hotel restaurant, we sat down at a table with some amateur musicians who worked at the Shadrinsk Auto Parts factory, and began talking with them about world events. They said they were disgusted by the Olympic boycott and, echoing the phrase constantly repeated in the Soviet newspapers, said it was wrong to mix, politics with sport. “We all know about Afghanistan,” said Volodya, one of the men, “but I put a fence around this question. Sport is one thing, politics is something else.”
At a table cluttered with empty vodka bottles and half-eaten meat and potato salad, Igor, another of the men, explained the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as an example of “typical Russian generosity.”
The lack of access to uncontrolled information about the world situation in Shadrinsk was complemented by a shortage of decent books. The only bookshop was full of technical books and bound volumes of Lenin’s works. There were only two counters where genuine literature was being offered, a counter where the works of Chekhov were displayed as a prize in a lottery and an exchange desk where a few works of modern literature were being offered in return for specific other books listed in a file of index cards.
One night at Shadrinsk’s floodlit dancing ring in the city gardens we chatted with a pretty 19-year-old shop girl. My colleague asked her if the fact that she wore Western jeans and liked Western music meant she didn’t like the Soviet Union. “No,” she said emphatically, “I love the Soviet Union.”
During our stay, we had several meetings with local officials but the result of the meetings was to give the impression that political discussion is frowned on in Shadrinsk when it departs from the verbatim repetition of official propaganda. With political issues and anything that bears on them eliminated from the conversation, our talks with local officials were taken up with their odd recitals of meaningless facts.
In a 90-minute meeting with leaders of the Komsomol, the Young Communists’ Organisation, we learned that Shadrinsk has four cinemas, 18 secondary schools, six hospitals, 75 retail establishments, 4,000 private cars, 8,000 motorcycles and every year, no fewer than 800 weddings. This information was not apparently prepared in order to waste our time but simply defined the area of independent intellectual competence permitted to local officials.
The impression of faith in the picture of the outside world given by Soviet propaganda and the Soviet Press would have been all but total in Shadrinsk, had it not been for one fleeting, discordant incident which took place while I was out for a quiet stroll.
I turned off on a side street and came upon the site of an old church which was surrounded by broken, weathered scaffolding except for the red bell tower and the golden cupola and cross. In a yard beside the church, an old man was filling pails with sand and I asked him if restoration work was continuing. He laughed disinterestedly without looking at me and said, “the State has more important objectives than restoring churches.”
The man continued his work, apparently unperturbed by being approached by a foreigner. “First they destroyed the churches now they’re restoring them,” he said. “I remember how they destroyed this one. They blew holes to the walls and burned the icons. Then they took out all the silver and gold. They said they needed the metal for industry.”
On our last day to town, we walked through the city gardens where mothers were pushing baby strollers and old men played chess on large outdoor boards. The intense sunlight filtering through the trees threw deep shadows on the sidewalks and the branches and leaves formed thick canopies over the winding dirt paths. We met a worker named Oleg from the telephone equipment factory and sat with him on a bench in an old, unpainted gazebo.
He said that Shadrinsk was a patriotic city which had supported the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia out of affection for the Czechs and the 1956 invasion of Hungary out of a desire to help the Hungarians. “Tell Carter that the Russians don’t want to fight,” he said. “We know how to fight but we don’t want to fight.”
Listening to Oleg, who was obvious in his interest in the outside world and his sincerity, it was easy to imagine the frightening potential of a dedicated army, with recruits drawn from places like Shadrinsk, marching into war full of confidence in the rightness of their cause but without the faintest actual idea what they were fighting for.
“I know we went into Afghanistan for purely humanitarian reasons, in order to help,” he said. “We’re Russians. If I had my last loaf of bread and you needed it, I’d cut it in half. I don’t care who you are, whether you’re English, American, Vietnamese, Israeli, we’re all people. We helped Cambodia, where how many million people died. It made your hair stand on end. We helped Vietnam. We are ready to help any country.”
I walked down some potholed side streets the following afternoon past a derelict church and emerged on the river bank to a scene of worldlessness and peace. Under feathered clouds in a blue sky, wizened old women watched from the steps of wooden houses as two policemen warned a young boy not to cut the branch off a tree.
There seemed little reason for life in Shadrinsk to be affected by events in a place as remote as Afghanistan and in the local newspapers, which were on sale in kiosks on the main street, it was easy to see how the conflict could have escaped people’s notice. In the twice-weekly Shadrinsk Rabochy and Zauralskaya Pravda, the daily regional paper, most of the news concerned the grain harvest or truancy among workers in the local factories.
In the evenings, we could pick up the Russian language service of the BBC and the Voice of America from my hotel room but on an issue like Afghanistan, the information broadcast by the BBC directly contradicts the information conveyed by the central Soviet television and Press. It may therefore indirectly reinforce official propaganda because to trust Western broadcasts, the resident of a provincial Russian city must make the unsettling assumption that much of what he is told about Afghanistan in the Soviet Press is a lie.
One afternoon we were joined at our table in a cafe near the central square by a muscular construction Worker who spoke to us about the world situation and became increasingly vehement as the conversation proceeded.
“The Americans are cunning people,” he said. “In how many countries do they have their bases? How many bases surround the whole Soviet Union.” The Russians were a peace-loving people. The Olympic boycott was an action against peace. He said that everyone supported the policy in Afghanistan and he added that no one had sent him over to talk to us, a possibility which crossed my mind while he was talking.
That night we met Oleg and a friend of his at the hotel restaurant. Oleg insisted on buying us several rounds of drinks and reminiscing about instances of East-West friendship, including the meeting of Allied and Russian forces on the Elbe. He recited a poem by Yevtushenko, “Do the Russians want War.” After delivering the full poem, he raised his voice to recite the last lines: “Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war.”
Oleg’s friend, Vitya, offered a few final thoughts at our table on the situation in Afghanistan. I had asked him whether, he was troubled by Soviet Press claims that the Government of Afghanistan invited Soviet forces to help and the head of that government, Hafizullah Amin was immediately killed.
“There could have been two governments, one popular and the other anti-popular,” Vitya said reflectively. “We supported the popular government of Babrak Karmal. We don’t have all the information. We can’t see the peaks of policy. We see what is known to us but we know enough to take a view.”
Financial Times, Tuesday, August 5, 1980
How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps
The 1980 Moscow Olympic Games were for long the focus of the most varied hopes and expectations. The games have now passed into history as an athletics success, but their impact on Soviet society has been strangely inconclusive.
To a limited extent, the games have improved the Soviet Union’s image. Athletes and foreign tourists have been impressed with the Olympic restaurants and hotels and the sports facilities, as well as the precision with which the transport to events was organised. But many in Moscow believed the games would mark a turning point towards either liberalisation or repression, a view made plausible by the years of careful preparation.
The opportunity to meet foreigners and be exposed to a different, freer way of life was one aspect of the Olympics which had most appealed to Moscow residents. The tight security thus gave rise to bitterness. People in Moscow began referring to the games as “our lipa,” diminutive for the woman’s name Olympiada which can also be translated as “sham” or “fake.”
To people in Moscow, the Olympics seemed remote. The foreign visitors, whose numbers were cut by the U.S.-led boycott by as much as three-quarters to around 75,000, were little seen by Russians, except in the windows of buses passing in convoy to Olympic events.
The opportunities for tourists to meet Russians were carefully controlled. Foreign visitors proved unadventurous, and tourist hotels were closed to all but registered guests and those with special passes.
Just before the Olympics began, the Soviet Komsomol, the communist youth organisation, opened 20 or so Western-style discotheques in the buildings of professional clubs around Moscow. The discotheques were intended to remedy one of Moscow’s longstanding shortcomings as a tourist attraction—the lack of street life or night clubs.
The discotheques offered Western rock music under strobe lights, and a relatively daring disco fashion show. Foreign tourists were brought to a club by their Soviet guides, ostensibly to show them Moscow’s hidden night life. In some cases, whole delegations were taken to the disco, where they were given the opportunity for political discussion or to dance with carefully vetted young Komsomols as well as plainclothes militia men and members of the KGB.
The number of Russians who might meet tourists was also restricted. The ban on travel to Moscow by non-residents and the successful efforts to persuade residents to take vacations during the Olympics, helped to reduce the number of people in Moscow by at least 1m.
The apparent object of this was to eliminate queues and improve the food supply. But, combined with the massive police presence, the reduction had an eerie effect. Ubiquitous police stood watch over unnaturally thin crowds.
Some Moscovites remember ruefully the last great influx of foreigners in 1957. About 40,000 foreign students, most from the communist bloc, the Third World or Western Socialist organisations, came to Moscow for several weeks for the International Youth Festival, and changed Soviet society fundamentally. For many Russians, the youth festival offered the first contact in their lives with foreigners. After decades of political terror, the free atmosphere in Moscow then, with foreigners and Russians meeting openly, impromptu Jazz concerts in the parks and a carnival atmosphere on the streets, gave people enormous hope as Moscow entered the period known as “the thaw.” Many of those in Moscow old enough to remember the International Youth Festival wondered if the Olympics would rekindle some of the hope for liberalisation and a freer life which surfaced then.