“You mean the Soviet Union?” I interjected.
“No, I mean Russia,” Ellie continued. “I mean we have to be prepared for the fact that it may simply cease to exist.”
Through the Armageddon-tinged pessimism that reigned as the Soviet Empire crumbled, Ellie’s own mind was actually contemplating Russia literally sliding off the world map in a puff. Ellie imagined a great void taking over in the place where Russia was. Today, it is nearly impossible to understand the cataclysmic emptiness underlying this type of thinking. But in those days, it was not uncommon to hear from ordinary Russians.
I asked her how she and Vova had met. Her eyes darted around the room, and she blushed slightly. “Oh, we just met.” Continuing with time-filling small talk, I asked her where she lived.
“At home, of course … with Vova, my husband.”
This seemed strange, as I distinctly remembered Vova saying that he was living with his wife, Lena, whom I’d met many times. True, I hadn’t seen her recently.
Later I would learn that there was a lot more to the story.
Vova suggested going to his father’s dacha outside Leningrad for an early-summer outing. A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, Vova and Ellie picked me up in a taxi. The day was unusually bright and warm for the time of year, and we headed out of the city in high spirits.
We passed small villages, where people from the city were tending their gardens in a get-back-to-the-land ritual as old as urbanization in Russia itself. Turning down a dusty road, we eventually pulled up to a nondescript but cozy-looking two-story wooden cottage and piled out of the taxi. Vova’s father was outside, working the garden. He stood and silently scowled at us like interlopers to be barely tolerated. His facial expression gave away his thoughts: “Here comes trouble—my criminal son and his unsanctioned foreigner in tow to visit me, a Communist factory manager, here, at my getaway dacha. What’s next?”
Vova shed his shirt, revealing a sinewy physique dotted with tattoos. He got out a slab of meat he’d brought for the occasion, and began chopping it into small pieces before putting the chunks into a metal canister, letting them marinate in vinegar and herbs. In the meanwhile, we were dispatched into a nearby wood to gather kindling for a fire. Vova relished the feeling of being in control, entertaining his guests.
He nursed the fire slowly until red-hot embers emerged. We stuffed ourselves with bread and pickles until Vova instructed us to start putting the meat onto skewers. He carefully turned each over the hot coals, making sure the proper degree of cooking was attained. Then we sat down to eat at a picniclike table, Vova’s father grudgingly joining us, poking the shish kebab with his fork and chewing, a silence looming between father and son.
Vova eyed a bowl full of sugar for making tea, and the conversation turned to the price. Riding out in the taxi, a woman on the especially conservative Mayak (Lighthouse) radio station had been literally weeping through the car’s speaker over the alleged lack of sugar in the stores. Vova mocked her, and especially the radio station, which he accused of deliberately using old audio clips in an effort to discredit economic reforms.
“There’s been plenty of sugar in the stores for at least two months now,” Vova sneered. His father countered that perhaps there was sugar for sale, but that after the latest round of price increases, it was expensive.
“The price is fine,” snapped Vova. “But Communists always want something for nothing,” he said, referring to his father.
Vova’s father glared.
“So, Vladimir, when are you going to start working?” he pointedly asked.
Vova murmured something, and Ellie giggled. We finished the meal in an awkward silence.
I wondered what was going through the mind of Vova’s father. The talk in Leningrad—some of it imagined and some of it real—was all about bandits, mafia, killers, and the like. Yet it was as if people were talking about mysterious creatures existing only in speech and print. Bandits and killers, after all, had parents, families; some had children. I doubted that Vova’s father, when asked what his son did for a living, answered, “My son is a racketeer” or “My son is mafia.” I wondered if he thought about it at all. Whatever he thought, his drooping shoulders betrayed a deep disappointment with the road his son was on.
After lunch, Vova’s father went back to silently tending his garden, distracting his thoughts from the chagrin caused by his progeny while the rest of us lounged around. The sun approached its peak in the sky. The world was quiet. I watched Ellie tease Vova, sprinkling him with a garden hose. I wondered what exactly attracted her to him. I thought it must have to do with having a kind of status, or some promise of future wealth—or maybe the hope of meeting someone connected to Vova who could provide both in greater measure than he could. One thing was evident, however: Ellie was clearly not in love; she was merely passing time.
DESPITE ALL THE crock imagery of endless suitcases full of dollar bills associated with the “mafia,” not everyone in racketeering-type activities was getting rich, including Vova. There was little romance to his “profession.” True, he always anted up at restaurants and had enough cash to keep Ellie in nice threads. But he didn’t even own a car, let alone one with a driver. Accordingly, our return to Leningrad was aboard one of the notoriously rickety, smoke-belching Ukrainian-made Lvov buses. It must have been manufactured not long after Stalin’s death. We sat on the back bench, sprawled out, enjoying the rays of sun through the dirty window glass of the clunker. Back in central Leningrad, we took a short taxi ride to an old building near the Kirov Theater. We climbed up to the second floor of a decrepit corridor and turned right. It was another communal apartment.
Vova, having forgotten his key, knocked on the door; on the other side, I could hear a lock turn. The door opened, and there stood Lena, Vova’s first wife. At this point, the mystery of what had happened to her became clear; they were still living “together” in the same communal, another prerevolutionary rundown wreck. They had two of the five or six rooms, one where Lena slept and another next door for Vova and Ellie, wife number two, their headboard directly touching the wall against hers.
Lena smiled at me and shrugged, describing the unorthodox situation without words.
After a few minutes of awkwardness, we all sat down in Lena’s room—a down-at-the-heels rectangle with enough room for a bed, a couple of chairs, and a nightstand covered with some cheap cosmetics and old magazines. Vova opened some down-market Georgian wine with a flip-off plastic cap. For the first time, I watched him get drunk—and in front of his two wives, who seemed to be on good terms, more so in fact than with their “husband.”
Vova drifted off into more banter about the rottenness of late-Soviet life, and his “delusional”—as he saw it—Communist father. He started in again about Pavel and his “degrading” work at the Button Factory, getting up to dial his phone number, 184-8488, only to be told by Pavel that he was leaving for the night shift at the Button Factory.
Vova instantaneously suggested we go visit Pavel at the factory. The two wives, sensing a possible scandal abrew, wisely declined to join us, and we were quickly out the door. “I’ll show you a real Soviet factory and how those workers humiliate themselves,” he snarled.
We grabbed a taxi and within minutes were at the side door to the Button Factory. Vova knew the place well, having worked there previously. A night watchman recognized him. “What the hell are you up to?” he asked. “This is an official excursion for our foreign delegation (me),” Vova responded, lying.
The watchman relented and we sprinted up a flight of stairs. I worried that Vova was there to stir up some sort of scandal with Pavel in admonishment for his continued “degrading” manual labor.
We ended up on an enormous factory floor where dozens of automated machines whirled away. Inside each were thousands of plastic buttons of all shapes and sizes, tumbling their way to a fine gloss.
Pavel appeared in a work apron, dragging a huge, heavy bag of buttons behind him. He looked
proud, not degraded. Then a small group of workers, men and women of all ages and description dressed in work overalls, latched on to us, each trying to outdo the other in terms of hospitality. Several recognized Vova, the camaraderie temporarily turning his despisal for the “degradation” of the Soviet factory into smiles.
A foreman barked. He ordered one of the enormous tumblers, which sounded like little cement mixers, shut off, mentioning proudly that they were Italian made. He opened a panel on one machine and told me to stick my hands inside, like a pirate’s chest. I pulled open my palms to reveal dozens of multicolored buttons. Some had two holes, some three, some four. Some were orange, some white or red. I went home with my pockets filled with the loot. Then he showed us around the facility, including a “rest area” with several showers. A few emptied bottles of cheap Soviet sparkling wine adorned a table. It was obvious the work breaks included more than coffee; a middle-aged man and woman were just emerging with wet hair with wide grins pasted on their faces. We parted ways with Pavel, the foreman proudly pushing more souvenir buttons into my hands.
Ellie and Lena were waiting for us when we returned to their communal. Vova again picked up his rant about the sorry state of the empire, reading jokes from a newspaper. Self-deprecating ones, expressing the misguided perception of the time of America-as-paradise.
Vova read aloud: “An American and a Russian are talking to each other. The American says: ‘I have three cars. One I drive to work, the other I drive to my summer house. And the third I take with me when I go to Europe.’
“The Russian says: ‘To go to work I take the tram. I go to my summer house in a bus.’
“ ‘And how do you get to Europe?’ asks the American.
“ ‘To go to Europe I ride a tank,’ says the Russian.”
After he caught his breath following another convulsion of cackling, Vova sighed and offered to take me downstairs and hail a taxi. It was late, almost 4 a.m.
But Lena would have none of it. “Why, Vova, it’s so late. There’s plenty of room here. My bed is big. He can sleep on the other side.” Vova sized up Lena quizzically. Lena was warmhearted, but I sensed an elaborate game of innuendo and revenge from her. Vova grumbled something and Lena pulled the door shut, with Vova and Ellie on one side of the wall, Lena and I on the other. As I lay on one side of the bed and Lena on the other, paranoid thoughts crossed my mind of Vova’s losing it in an act of uncontrollable rage or suspicion, bursting through the door to strangle both of us to death.
Instead, I heard only what must have been a nightly ritual: a girlish voice from a Russian border town rejecting Vova’s sexual advances. Next to me Lena lay in silence, still awake and listening to it all, no doubt contemplating her unusual fate.
The next morning, Vova was less than his cheerful self. Lena made no attempt to tease him or suggest anything improper had transpired, but he was circumspect with me. After a perfunctory tea for breakfast, we went downstairs to the street.
Then Vova, the former Button Factory worker turned black marketer turned Leningrad midlevel mafia enforcer with two wives and an uncertain future, gave me a perfunctory “Poka!” (See you later!).
VOVA DID, HOWEVER, accomplish one of his goals: “liberating” Pavel from himself. The day after our night visit to the Button Factory, the management summarily fired Pavel on the grounds that he’d shown a foreigner an “industrial facility with potential military applications.”
Less than a year later, Pavel called me and said he had saved enough money to visit the United States, which he had always dreamed about. He asked if he could come to Chicago, where I was staying at the time, adding that he planned on being there for “two or three weeks.”
Pavel’s two- to three-week Windy City stay turned into two months. Then two years. Then twenty. He left his family behind, first working illegally at a junkyard owned by a Ukrainian slave-driver owner. He soon moved up, landing a gig as a busboy. Pavel developed a cocaine habit, was robbed on the Chicago elevated train (twice), married a Polish immigrant, divorced her, became a roofer, moved to Florida, and found a second Polish wife.
The last time I talked to Pavel, he had joined an Evangelical church and told me I’d end up doing the same someday once I found God.
As for Vladimir (Vova), I never saw him again. About a year later, after arriving in what had re-become St. Petersburg, I headed over to the communal apartment where he and his “wives” lived. I ascended the stairwell and knocked on the door. A man pried it open just enough for me to see inside. He didn’t have to ask who I was looking for.
“They’re all gone,” he said with a sigh of relief, shutting the door quickly. I made some phone calls, trying to find Lena or Vova through a network of acquaintances, their numbers scribbled on a slip of paper. No one knew where they had gone. As for Ellie, I had no idea where to look for her.
I rang Vova’s parents’ telephone number. His sister answered the phone. She recognized my voice and accent. But there was silence on the other end when I asked for Vova. I asked again if he was there.
“No,” came the belated reply.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” I asked.
“No,” was the response after an even longer, more awkward pause.
“OK, do you know where I can get ahold of him?”
“No,” said the female voice. Then she hung up the phone.
I wondered where to look, or if to, and whether a prison—or a graveyard—might be the best place to start.
SICKLE AND HAMMER DOWN: AN EMPIRE’S LAST HOURS
The date was Wednesday, December 25, 1991. It was Christmas Day in much of the world, but in Orthodox Russia, just another day. Except it would turn out to be the USSR’s last. I had come to Moscow two months earlier with thoughts of pursuing foreign correspondence. I grabbed a cab and headed out in search of some groceries.
“Under Brezhnev there was even cocoa in the stores, God damn it!” The taxi driver slapped his hand on the wheel of his Volga four-door. “Even fucking cocoa!” He laughed uncontrollably through his gold teeth, as if the very idea of cocoa sitting on a store shelf evoked wonder. “Look what they’ve done. Gorbachev and his cronies have destroyed a great country. Everyone feared us. Now I don’t think even Upper Volta is afraid of Russia.”
Gorby had still hung on as one by one every last one of the fifteen so-called titular republics that made up the USSR declared independence and sovereignty from the center outward: Armenia, Azerbaijan … Kazakhstan … Kyrgyzstan … and when Russia declared itself free and independent of the “Soyuz” (Union), Mikhail Gorbachev had effectively become a president without a country.
But when his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, now president of the reborn Russian Federation, led the effort to cobble together a post-Soviet entity called the “Commonwealth of Independent States,” known by its clumsy-sounding acronym CIS (SNG in Russian), it was all over. Many Russians still had no firm idea as to whether the USSR (SSSR in Russian) still formally existed. The hammer-and-sickle flag was still flying, after all.
“Can you tell what this SNG thing means?” asked the gold-toothed taxi driver as I got out of his car. “SSSR (USSR) sounded a hell of a lot better.” He slammed the door behind me.
While I scurried around town looking for supplies, Mikhail Gorbachev was spending his last day in power behind the massive red walls of the Kremlin. He’d been under a virtual news blackout about his fate, but not of the nefarious kind. None of the Soviet television networks was even documenting the last days of the empire, because none of them seemed to care. By contrast, some foreign networks spent days in the corridors of fading power, recording everything now that the once-feared foreigners had easy access to the nerve center of the erstwhile Evil Empire. The irony was not lost on Gorbachev’s closest aides.
“It’s shameful for us that only Western TV journalists hovered around him,” wrote Anatoly Chernayev in his account of Gorbachev’s final days in power.
While I was at the market “Christmas shopping”
for bread and cheap sausage that morning, Gorbachev asked to have a telephone call arranged with US president George Herbert Walker Bush, during which Gorbachev informed Bush that he would be making a special televised address at seven p.m. Moscow time. He also told Bush that he had signed an order transferring control over the Soviet Union’s “nuclear briefcase”—the means to launch Soviet nuclear missiles—to the Russian Federation and its president, Boris Yeltsin. “As soon as I make my announcement, the order will come into effect,” he told Bush. “So you can peacefully celebrate Christmas and sleep without worry tonight,” Gorbachev added.
Bush is said to have waxed emotional about the close personal ties they had developed over the years; it is not known if Bush offered Gorby asylum.
Meanwhile, I had gone back to an apartment I shared with a friend, Sergei Lazaruk, who at the time was deputy dean of the prestigious Soviet State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) and trying to eke out a living on the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month. We had met earlier that year, when I’d led a group of American film students to the USSR as their interpreter.
A sundry group of other Russian friends had also come over to watch the TV broadcast with us, including Mikhail Zhivilo, then a small-time currency speculator who used to change fifty bucks a time for me at the black market rate. Zhivilo, well dressed and soft spoken, had just started work at Moscow’s first commodities exchange. He talked about the unique economic opportunities amid the chaos and how the period would not be repeated in terms of its potential for making big profits. His optimism seemed absurd given the dire state of the Soviet (Russian) economy. He suggested I join him and his business partners in the precious metals business. I declined, and he openly laughed at my desire to pursue foreign correspondence. His laughter was well vindicated. Within years, Zhivilo was running one of Russia’s biggest aluminum plants. He made tens of millions before falling out with a regional kingpin governor and going into exile with his fortune. (Meanwhile, I am still working a day job, whereas I doubt Zhivilo feels much compunction to—beyond philanthropy.)
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