Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  The epitaph for this tale of revolution-in-our-time was told to me later by a Bolivian colonel. One day Debray received a Christmas card from a little French girl. "She said she was praying for him," the colonel related. "It was very sweet. I asked him to translate it and he threw it to the ground." The colonel shook his head. "How can you kill for the new generation and not care about that child?"

  VIII.

  USSR: The Well-Fed Wolf

  "The well-fed wolf does not become a lamb."

  --Old Russian proverb

  By the spring of 1967, although still very much in love with Latin America, I was also ready for a change: ready to move on, geographically and professionally. I had lived in Latin America for three years and had covered the continent from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. As always I had to do my own planning, for editors everywhere seem perfectly happy for you to stay where you are.

  I decided it was time to go to Russia, time to be completely (not, as in Cuba, peripherally) drawn into the dialectic of our era between democracy and totalitarianism.

  The ostensible reason was the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The paper immediately agreed to the trip, and I began planning. This time -- in contrast to what it would be when I went back in 1971 -- planning was relatively easy. The government wanted to impress foreigners and was even (unheard of!) working with foreign journalists, instead of against them. Novosti, the government's press agency, was willing to work with foreign journalists for a price and to arrange interviews. I set as my major task the investigation of Soviet youth. At this critical juncture in Soviet history I would attempt to see what the next fifty years would bring.

  The trip there was filled with expectation. Years before I had fallen in love with Russian history and literature, had cried over Turgenev's young and idealistic heroines, had dreamt of the barren vastness of the steppes and the wild darkness of the forests. Now it was all within my grasp. Henry Gill, the same fine photographer I had gone to Guatemala with, and I were planning an elaborate and seductive approach -- from Japan by ship to Vladivostok's port of Nahodka, then across all of Siberia, down through Central Asia and up to Moscow and the cities of the north.

  En route to Hawaii I arranged to stop in San Francisco to see Eric Hoffer, the famous longshoreman philosopher and author of The True Believer. I had written ahead of time and, among other things, told him how shamelessly I had "plagiarized" him. Apparently that caught his fancy because he invited me to dinner. His answering note consisted of four lines written in a small cramped hand, crowded up on the top of a piece of lined schoolbook paper. He wrote that he would be happy to see me and where should he call for me? Then, when I arrived at the hotel, there was a similar note saying, "Welcome to San Francisco. Please call and let us know you are here."

  By five o'clock, the San Francisco fog was slipping down from the tops of the hills and then cowering in the valleys. Between these two layers, I saw a brown-gabled house with windows looking out from under eyebrows of sagging vines like great eyes. It was a gentle house -- a kind house -- and when I rang the bell there was a friendly bedlam.

  "Come into the kitchen, we'll have some Scotch, we'll have a nice time, don't you like the kitchen best?" The kitchen, indeed, was one of the wannest and most hospitable I'd ever seen. As I looked at Hoffer, a big man, almost bald, he seemed to me like a person in whom all the good qualities of the workingman--the man whom he writes about and believes in--were personified. He was a warm and passionate man, nothing about him was quiet or restrained; his voice boomed; his laugh was proclamation. If we had Capitalist Realism statues, he would be our model of a workingman. Lily, his friend, was a beautiful woman of Italian descent, her dark hair falling naturally into curls, her eyes silky and her mouth slow and sensuous. They were all big, vital people--bigger than life really, a lot like my own family. He, particularly, reminded me of my father.

  Hoffer's book, The True Believer, had become a bible for many people, particularly in the fields of revolution I was working in. In it Hoffer had characterized, analyzed, and theologized about the "weak" of the earth--immigrants, women, workers, but people who worked out and through their weakness in the American, democratic mode instead of the Russian, totalitarian mode which I was soon to see firsthand.

  He saw, in short, that America had been settled and peopled and given its peculiar character by the weak, by people who had been torn out of their communal European societies and tossed adrift -- physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Later he would fashion his philosophy of the weak -- the misfits, the outcasts -- as the catalyst of history, and he would write:

  "People torn out of communal societies become isolated and afraid unless they have abundant opportunities for self-realization. The only way to acquire confidence and self-esteem is to make individual existence bearable." But, he went on, the "shock of change"--to be successful in releasing vast human energies, like those of the uprooted immigrants who came to America -- must occur simultaneously with a tradition of self-reliance and the opening up of abundant opportunities for action. These factors, however, are not present in much of the underdeveloped world. Hoffer saw weakness as corrupting if it did not have these "abundant opportunities," and wrote: "Weakness, too, corrupts. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from a sense of their own inadequacy and impotence."

  For, he went on to contend, if the uprooted were not permitted to work off their desperate and lonely energies in unceasing activism, the only other answer to their gnawing insecurities was faith: absolute faith in which they could ease the burden of their suddenly freed selves and avoid the terrible consequences of freedom without purpose or form. How well this fit the Third World revolutionaries I'd known and particularly the Marxists I was constantly covering! "Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self .... The passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction." Such people, moreover, could easily switch from one passion to another, for what they really sought was not truth but faith. And so Communists could turn easily to become violent anti-Communists. Hoffer also had his own notion of what the uprooted of the world desired. This was generally thought of by Washington analysts as material things and economic development, to start with. No, said Hoffer, their needs were not primarily material, their needs were psychological. "Give the people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters and even die for them. You do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them. It will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them."

  In that evening I spent with Hoffer and friends, it came through to me even more dramatically than in his books how much he believed that America was not only the quintessential, but the only country of the common man. Hoffer distrusted the intellectuals -- they were too theoretical for him. He saw them as the true oppressors because when they came to power they demanded not only physical submission but mental submission as well. I could not have arranged a better briefing for my trip to Russia -- where before the Marxist revolution the czar could own men's bodies but only God could own their souls.

  Once during the evening Hoffer shouted -- that is the only verb to use, for his voice was so resonant -- "I will never leave America." How like Saul Alinsky, whose friend he had been!

  Over a groaning dinner with roast pork, huge scoops of ice cream with walnuts, and glass after glass of red wine, he discussed the recent Berkeley riots, which was exactly the sort of event to disgust him. He saw this kind of student in the same light as the intellectual -- wanting to tell the workingman, who after all produced all the wealth, what to do, wanting to make him respond like a Pavlovian dog.

  "When I saw those riots," he said with an impish look, aimed particularly at me, the Latin Americanist, "I wrote down in my little book, 'The working men of the world are becoming Americanized, and the American intellectuals are becoming Latinized.'" As to the black firebrands then looting cities, he declared
without equivocation: "They are not revolutionaries. Revolution is not stealing and burning." Stokely Carmichael was someone who "wants to be given power as if it comes in a can. The Negro needs pride in himself. He can't be given things." During this he continuously called intellectuals "scribes."

  But he listened, too. I was able to tell him several things that backed up everything he had written -- among them the fact that in Latin America "anti-Americanism" was the preserve of the intellectuals and the middle class and that, on the contrary, the workingmen are very pro-American. I told him that his ideas about the dependence of the weak upon the strong and the resentment it caused were particularly apt in Latin America where the weak (the Latins) resented the strong (the United States) not so much because of injustice but because of their own feelings of inadequacy.

  Hoffer replied: "I knew it..." He cried out, then: "The workingmen of the world will all look to America. They will all understand America."

  I remember the evening as though it were yesterday: the sheer human zest and passion, the wonderful talk, the belief in a future for mankind -- but a realistic one.

  ***

  Only days later, Henry and I stood on the deck of the Japanese ship as it approached through the gray mist the empty, dimly out lined coast of the eastern Soviet Union. Low, hilly, bleak. I was filled with a deep emotion, as though a long-held dream were about to be realized.

  Soon it was all spreading out in front of my eyes, so close and yet, always, always, always so far. There, in Khabarovsk, where the men fought tigers with their bare hands. There in Bratsk, far north in the Siberian wilderness, one of the "new towns" where people went to escape. There in Samarkand and Bokhara, between the Red and the Black Sands in Central Asia, in the great blue and gold cities of Tamerlane. It was all within my grasp--and always and ever eluding my grasp.

  Our days everywhere were similar. We were always housed in some utilitarian but acceptable (finicky male Henry didn't agree with that last word) hotel where nothing ran efficiently or smoothly, but instead with the utmost of bureaucracy, which is what the Russians substitute for efficiency. In each city we could contact the Novosti man and he would have arranged appointments. The appointments were always formal and utterly similar, as though we were dealing with well-informed and well-planned puppets. Every moment we were challenged; we were "the imperialists" -- why were all capitalists so ugly, so inhuman? Facts, statistics, history: nothing moved them. Every night we came back to the hotel exhausted with that special exhaustion that no one can know who has not known Russia. We would stagger to the dining room, sometimes struggling for hours to catch the waiter's or waitress's eye. Deliberately, insouciantly, scornfully, sarcastically, they would ignore us. Sometimes it took three hours to get the simplest and always the most banal of dinners. Since in the Soviet Union any service occupation is looked down upon, they excuse themselves from serving other people by scorning them. It was enraging. Often we got around it by ordering caviar and champagne in our rooms. Eric Hoffer would have enjoyed the sight of us, here in the "workers' paradise," surviving by eating caviar and champagne!

  How was I going to write about this shrouded land, this cloaked people with their souls hidden deep inside them? Where was I to go to discover their real selves? Were there even "real selves"? Was it all in the propaganda and in the harsh statements that the officials so avidly fed me? Was I wrong always to grope underneath the psyches presented me? What were the clues--and how would I even recognize them when I found them? Every night I went to bed with the same heavy and dull exhaustion that seemed to permeate all of Mother Russia.

  Then I began -- just began -- to get clues, to have this strange secret world open up. As in so much of journalism you could not push it; you had to just be around, to hang around, and then suddenly people would reveal themselves, like actors waiting for their -- never your -- cue.

  Once on a ship in the Black Sea, for instance, my guide and I were standing against the railing quietly watching the dramatic seacoast where Jason sought the Golden Fleece when suddenly he said, "The government explains it all by saying we can't leave because they need the work force." I didn't answer. The words had come out of nowhere and hung there like spiders spinning their own web. No Russian would admit that the government forbade them from leaving, you see; but suddenly, when you least expected it, it came out.

  Then there was a night in Kiev, when I was talking with a charming young woman I shall call "Natasha." The conversation in the hotel dining room had started with the typical chauvinistic Russian remark that Russians could not create anywhere except in Russia. We moved on to Stalin and I mentioned, "Look at all the people killed. The top members of the party, the politburo .... "

  "You know more than we," she said, now defensive but also sad. (How many times was I, for whom "knowing" was so important, to hear that from young Russians!)

  "And they were the top members of the party," I went on, because I had a relentless intention then of making them see or at least hear the truth. "It's the Communists who should hate him."

  "Maybe this is why the ordinary people do not hate him," she suggested tentatively. "You ask people today if they hate Stalin and you'll be surprised...." Then her mood suddenly changed. She became very upset and tears rolled generously down her cheeks. And then she made the most extraordinary revelation for a Russian.

  "After the death of Stalin," she started, "I was terribly upset." By now we were sitting on the darkened steps of the hotel, and perhaps that gave her a feeling of safety -- that plus the wine. "It was a great disillusionment for me to hear about his crimes -- I can't tell you how deep it was. I couldn't even go to the institute to study for two years. I lost all interest in everything. It wasn't until my marriage, when my husband began to explain things to me, that I began to feel again." By now she was crying very gently.

  "Now..." Her voice suddenly became fierce. "Now I don't want to know things."

  When I suggested to her that to be fully human you had to "know" things, she shook her head fiercely.

  "Why?" she demanded. "I don't think it's at all necessary. So what if Stalin killed a million people, as you say? There are still two hundred million of us left!"

  ***

  I was not in Russia during the "thaw" of Nikita Khrushchev, for that was largely over by the mid-sixties. But some of it lingered on. Stalin was long dead--and the society would not return to that mailed fist, to that "man of steel" and epoch of steel and blood. The United States was getting over the sickening death of John F. Kennedy and was full-blown in the war in Vietnam. Latin America, with such hope during the Kennedy period, now was pulling back; the democratic solutions offered in the early sixties were dying by the wayside, and Central America again was slipping toward the all-out civil war and guerrilla "solution" that later came back to haunt us in unspeakable nightmares. Africa still was freeing itself from colonial rule, and China remained in the Maoist grip.

  But, Russia? What was Russia, this "world" that had been set up by history as our nemesis, our antagonist, our enemy? How could we deal with something we knew so little about? How could we reach it -- and reach into it?

  Gradually, as Russia unfolded before me, little insights and events piled up upon little insights and events and began to show me "how." One night in Irkutsk, a charming old Siberian city where the political exiles built churches and forts in challenge to the czar, I went over to talk to the Komsomol youth in the university. As Komsomolski they were or should have been the most totally indoctrinated of the lot; and they were. At one point the young woman leader and I were arguing about the U.S. Finally I pointed to a poster emblazoning the wall marked, "Kill the Yanqui gorillas in Latin America," the "gorillas" being the American-backed military.

  "I don't think that is so friendly," I said with a distinctly miffed air.

  I fully expected her to argue with me. Instead she went over to the offending poster, looked at it for a moment pensively, then took it down. Underneath it was one reading, "Release
political prisoners in Greece!"

  "There," she said soothingly, "we can all agree on that!"

  In this and other situations I tried to watch for signs -- of anxiety, of sudden interest, of whatever--that would show me what people really were wanting and thinking. In Novosibirsk at the Institute of Electrical Engineering, for instance, I sat all afternoon with fifty high school students. The usual questions were repeated hostilely and by rote: "How could you respect Steinbeck anymore when he came out in favor of the Vietnam War?" "Why did we go into Hungary? -- Hungary fought against us in the great war.... " Etc., etc., etc.

  Then suddenly the conversation shifted -- and I could sense it shifting to the things that really interested them. Finally one boy stood up and said wearily, "That's enough of politics." Then they all began asking with great eagerness, "What do American students do at night? Where do they go? Do they worry about their futures? How do they get jobs?"

  This curiosity for the "personal" later was reinforced and interpreted by Dr. Vladimir Lisovsky, the USSR's preeminent youth sociologist. I looked him up at the University of Leningrad and got to know him -- and like him -- as well as anyone I met. In his studies on youth, for instance, he found that they wanted, in this order: to get an interesting job, to receive a higher education, to visit foreign countries, to be well off, to have good housing conditions, to improve one's qualification (for work), to find loyal friends, to bring up children to be worthy people, to find one's true love, to build a family, to buy a car, to receive secondary education, and to move to a housing project under construction.