Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  One afternoon I had Lisovsky, a totally genial man, and my two guides up to my room at the old Astoria Hotel in Leningrad for champagne and caviar, when another telling event occurred. Suddenly Lisovsky, such a charming and rational man, was sputtering at me inexplicably.

  "You Americans ... are always criticizing us," he was saying. "No hot water. No amenities. No..." By now all three sets of deep Russian forest eyes were glaring at me. Friendly only a moment before, the looks now were shrouded and angry.

  "Now wait," I interjected as calmly but firmly as I could. "Think a minute. I've never criticized anything here. Nothing at all."

  They all looked at me in utter astonishment. What I had said was true. But to their minds my very being there was a kind of built-in, implicit criticism.

  That same afternoon, when we sat for hours eating and drinking, Lisovsky at one point asked me, "Now, tell me please, what do you not like about the Soviet Union?"

  "Let me tell you first what I like," I said. And I outlined several areas -- the egalitarianism, the respect for work, the quest for cultural values. "But there is one thing I could not abide, living here. That is the fact that your entire society is built upon dishonesty. You all live it every minute, you speak it, and sometimes even you yourselves don't know where honesty ends and dishonesty begins."

  To my surprise these words were greeted with total silence. Lisovsky looked down at the table, stared at it. The two women looked away from me. No one would meet my eye.

  ***

  It was also telling to talk (on those rare occasions when you could) with the officials, with the Soviet "apparatchik," and to see the subtleties and complexities of their minds and utterances. One day in Moscow it was arranged for me to visit Ivan Tikhonovich Komov, a member of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and a powerful force. Unblinking, gray, he received me sternly in his office.

  "Perhaps this is not interesting to you," he started, "but we have a new program. We are trying to bring up a new generation in the experience of the former generation."

  That struck me as a monstrously ungrateful task, but I restrained myself -- and listened with considerable interest.

  "We have now a new generation that has not experienced war and has not suffered the hardships of revolution," he said. "On the other hand, ideological subversion has increased. Some Western ideologists -- they are actually propagandists -- are trying to take youth away from the class struggle and from speaking of patriotism so they will not defend the country as they used to. Different sociologists of the West speak about the 'no-class society,' of societies divided only into good and bad. There is also the theory that capitalism and socialism are coming closer. That's why, in order to fight these ideas, we are trying to educate our young people in the spirit of 'Proletarian Internationalism.'"

  Then he actually criticized Russian youth: "For example, the idea of free education -- they take it for granted," he said somberly. "They do not know how it was achieved, at the cost of how many lives and how much labor. The younger generation must know these things. Among the young there is very often the idea that all the exploits are over. In peacetime what can they do? Our task is to give young people the idea there is still heroism."

  Just hints, but real hints? Youth was not as patriotic as it should be -- they were worried about it. Youth took too much for granted -- youth was not grateful. Youth was, even, disloyal? That was what I got out of that -- and that was an extraordinary revelation.

  Despite everything, I was learning. I was learning how, in closed societies like this, you learn things. You learn, not by direct questions or comments, but by the inflections, by comparing innuendos with the types of innuendos the people used the last time. You learn what is real by pauses and coughs. You learn what is true through what people do not, will not, and above all psychologically cannot do or tell you.

  Everywhere I went, the same journalistic and intellectual conundrum awaited me. You do not simply report on Russia: you can't. Here is a society where virtually everyone is living on a level of dishonesty, where interpretations are so different from ours as to be from a totally different world. How as a reporter do you deal with this? Do you look for any "window" or any slip and then grasp it -- or is that dishonest? Do you take them at their word -- that would surely be dishonest? You find yourself sifting every grain of talk and truth, trying to find out what is real, and in the end you wonder if you will ever know reality again, anywhere. Russia is a torment for an honest journalist, and the torment lasts long after one has closed the door on that isolated and strange land.

  ***

  Henry, a fine photographer and friend, was also an anxious traveler. As we made our way across Russia that first month, he became more and more enraged by their idiosyncrasies and stupidities. "Tell me," he kept saying, sometimes almost desperate, "tell me that when we get to Moscow we'll go to a nightclub ... and have a good meal ... and dance...." I soothed him, as women have

  always soothed men, and I told him we would -- I was actually far from sure.

  It was a Friday and late when we got to Moscow and (one of the things people do not expect from Russia) no one met us. We could have escaped into that sea of mystery, but instead we went and checked into the vast Rossiya hotel. The rooms were nice. They awoke you with chimes playing "Moscow Nights." Promising.

  Saturday morning we raced around getting things, arriving back at the hotel at noon for lunch. While waiting for Henry in my room, I felt a considerable sense of satisfaction: we had made it all the way across Russia; we had good material (considering the situation) and now it would be easy. Now we would find the nightclub. I could not have been more wrong.

  At noon, Henry came suddenly to my room with a look of stupefaction on his big, ruddy face. "They've stolen my cameras," he said as though he were sleepwalking. "I had them locked in the cupboard in my room and they've stolen my cameras." I told him it was impossible. We were in the workers' paradise where there was no crime -- was he perhaps imagining it? What would Hoffer say?

  What would Saul say? I grinned, despite myself.

  Although my Russian was not good at the time, I went immediately, not to the grisly floor woman who ruled over everything, but to the maids on the floor.

  "Who was the person who went into Mr. Gill's room earlier?" I asked.

  The women looked startled, disturbed. They began chattering like magpies.

  "There was no one but him," one said.

  "At what time?" I asked.

  "He came in, oh, about ten o'clock," another offered.

  After I had got a full description, and only then, I told them that this man standing with me was Mr. Gill. It took a while to convince them and all the while they grew more and more distressed. They had clearly let in a man who was not "Gospodin Gill." This information was to save us when we had to face down Russian officialdom.

  In the manager's office downstairs we got a first look at officialdom -- and it was nasty. Henry, a big, square man, faced the woman manager, who was an almost equally big woman. She was unwilling to admit that the situation even existed. After all it was clearly "crime," and there was no crime in the Soviet Union.

  "Maybe, Mr. Gill," she said at one point, "you took the cameras yourself!"

  I intervened just before Henry could take a swat at her. We then sat in her office, in a state of unmitigated confrontation that would make the Israelis and the Libyans look like allies, until five o'clock that evening. At that moment Henry scored what may have been the eventual breakthrough.

  "I am not leaving this country," said Henry, who could be very mean, "I am not leaving until either I get my cameras back or I am paid for them." I seem to recall seeing her flinch at this suggestion of having Mr. Gill on Russia's hands in a state of perpetual care. Later I became convinced that this "promise" turned the tide.

  From there we went to eat, if you can call what you do at mealtime in Russia eating. The Rossiya had an enormous -- but enormous -- dining room with all the charm and i
ntimacy of a roller rink in The Bronx. It was exactly two blocks long. We entered at one end, exhausted from the rather full day, only -- naturally, for this is Russia -- to be placed at a table at the very other end of the hall and at the only table where people were sitting. Unwilling to argue any further, we sat down with the two others, who appeared to be workingmen, only to witness another extraordinary scene.

  The man next to me was drunker than anyone I have ever seen (even in Chicago). He had his napkin in his shirt, like a baby, and his eyes were closed. I blinked as I realized he was asleep at the table, little lines of slaver trickling down both sides of his mouth.

  Just then the other man took his napkin, spread it out on the table, and gathered everything into it, including the uneaten chicken, the bread and butter, the beer bottles, and the salt and pepper shakers. Carefully, never looking at us as we sat there spell bound (I was afraid finicky Henry might vomit), he tied it up like a bum's knapsack and staggered off through the front door. Just then he remembered his friend. So he staggered back in, jammed the friend in the ribs to wake him, and both staggered out.

  That was the end of our first day in Moscow. The little episode also confirmed the impression that we were all too ready to accept that virtually the only pleasure people have here is drinking them selves into oblivion.

  Henry was like a bulldog after the cameras. Daily he was atop the manager's desk, sitting there and staring her down for hours. They had detectives working, and it was clear that they were highly embarrassed not to find the cameras. Despite his threat Henry was going to leave a week later and we didn't really know what more to do. The afternoon of our departure he walked into my room with another stunned look on his face.

  "They just called me," he said, "and I went down. She handed me five hundred rubles and said, 'Now, Mr. Gill, see what you can do with these.'"

  We tried to think how -- legally -- we could get rid of the rubles for dollars since any such money transactions were totally forbidden. And I could not use them. Suddenly it dawned on me. I called our friend, Henry Bradsher, the bureau chief for Associated Press.

  "Sure," Henry said, "bring them over. I can exchange them with no trouble."

  At the airport they were waiting for Henry. "Don't you have some rubles, Mr. Gill?" the woman at the money exchange desk asked him, leading up to the wonderful moment when she would then tell him she could not exchange them.

  "No, I don't," Henry said, "but I do have a check on the Chase Manhattan Bank." And then he strode forward ... out of Mother Russia.

  ***

  Often, nights, after the interviews, after long days of fighting for every crumb and being constantly insulted by people who knew not the slightest thing about the outside world, I would retire gratefully to the foreign currency bars in the hotels, the only haven we had. These were places where foreign visitors like myself could buy drinks of all kinds, but only for foreign currency. It was a way to get the foreign exchange and to give all the foreigners a place to play -- together and alone. In Leningrad one night the Hotel Astoria bar -- in sharpest contrast to the tiresome order outside -- had the mood of a city besieged, where anything goes. It was the last night of the world, a kind of Soviet Babylon. People were falling out of chairs and sprawling across tables. Buxom and braless girls shook frenetically on the dance floor, and at the bar men pawed the women like un-tethered wild animals. Otherwise sedate and proper Europeans I had seen earlier in the hallways of the hotel were behaving as though they were in the Berlin bunker the night Hitler's Reich was falling.

  We all got quite desperate.

  Some nights this wildness would come over me the way a wildness suddenly overcomes my cat, Pasha, when his ears go back and his eyes get black and you just know he can't stop himself from biting you. One night in Kiev, after sitting and drinking with some African students, who were always in varying stages of desperation in the Soviet Union, I went out on the street and ran ... and ran ... and ran. I must have run for an hour, up and down hills, until finally I drained all the anger and frustration out of myself.

  Another night, in Kiev the next trip in 1971, I met two young sculptors and their wives, all delightful people. One evening we got away from Nellie, my guide. They took me to an incredible party, one that could have come straight out of Dostoevsky, at the apartment of the famous Armenian movie director Sergei Paradjanov.

  Here was a perfectly ordinary Soviet apartment: as boxlike and sterile as any other in the Soviet Union. But how they had transformed it! Paradjanov, a short stocky man with quizzical eyes, of tremendous personal assurance and a devilish beard, had made it into a lair of old Russia. I expected to see Rasputin any minute, stepping out, rolling his eyes, and licking his lips over some ripe peasant girl. In one room was a long, carved-wood banquet table, on which was spread every sort of fish, caviar, cold meat, and delicacy. Wine was served in hung animal skins. Icons, hand-woven cloths, and scabrous old crosses filled the room, while the young men and women who lolled insouciantly against the tables with their curious feline smiles seemed to be escapees into some strange netherworld. One young woman artist immediately showed me her sketches of Dante's Inferno and they seemed somehow appropriate.

  The party, which started about 8:00 p.m., was just beginning to pick up in spirit and passion when I had to leave. Nellie and I were catching a plane to Odessa, the beautiful old French-designed city on the Black Sea, at the uncivilized hour of 1:00 a.m.

  As I hurried to leave at about eleven (Nellie had not the slightest idea where I was) Paradjanov went about the apartment and plucked things off the walls: a hoary old cross and a beautiful piece of Ukranian handwork for me, an embroidered jacket which he asked me to deliver to the novelist John Updike, etc. ... He stuffed them all in a pillow slip and I went running out with all of this, like a furtive robber with a pack of treasures.

  ***

  There were places to "have fun" ... if you knew someone. Another night in a central Russian city, after dining with a high-level party official, I agreed to go dancing. We walked into a nondescript building with a public restaurant in the front, crossed through the dining room, and came into another building in back. He flashed his party card at the door and we entered a type of nightclub that was about as common in the Soviet Union as a stock exchange.

  "Can anyone come here?" I asked as we sat down at a table in a discreetly lit room with candles and a large dance floor.

  "Why, yes, of course," he said as he ordered some Scotch, which you would never find in a Russian restaurant. A floor show (!) came on after midnight; girls in skimpy Western nightclub costumes began dancing to the theme from Dr. Zhivago (!), and couples began doing a clumsy Russian version of the twist without anyone's coming over and telling them it was immoral.

  At the end of the evening, slightly tipsy, I turned to my escort and whispered again, "Who can come here?"

  He smiled knowingly. "We can," he whispered back.

  ***

  On my second trip, in 1971, when I returned to finish research for my book on Soviet youth, I had to work out a much more complicated means of accomplishing this. On my first day in Moscow, Pavel Gevorkian, one of the Novosti chiefs and later identified in the U.S. as a major KGB man (which I had taken for granted), took me out to lunch. "I am sorry, Georgie," he said, "but Novosti cannot work with foreign correspondents anymore. The policy has been changed." I was speechless. I had depended upon this one aid. In effect I was on my own for two months, and to be on your own in Russia is to be almost helpless.

  That afternoon I sat down in my elegant old room in the czarist-era Hotel National across from Red Square, threw down a couple of cognacs, and thought. I felt like lying there and whimpering, which is what I always did when sick and alone overseas. What I clearly needed, in this country of plans, was a plan.

  First of all I analyzed the situation. Here I was, with two months yawning ahead of me, in a totally closed totalitarian country where almost no one would want to risk talking to me. My timing could n
ot have been worse, yet I was determined to get to people despite all the odds. Since the official route was closed, I had to develop new routes of my own. But where do you start in a country that does not even have a telephone book?

  I took out a yellow pad. On it I wrote down the names of every body I knew or could know in Moscow: embassy officials of all nationalities, journalists of all nationalities, the few Russians I al ready knew. I reasoned that in a country and in a situation like this, you couldn't ask too much of any one single person but you could ask a little of everybody before implacable resistance set in.

  I decided to ask each person I knew to help me with one appropriate interview. I would ask a journalist for one phone number or to help me arrange to see someone he or she might particularly know. I would ask a diplomat to help me with one official he might know. In addition, with obvious, noncontroversial people, I would ask Nellie, my excellent Intourist guide, to help.

  Then I wrote down the names of the people I wanted to see. This included everybody from Komsomol leaders to playwrights to women sociologists. Then I matched them up with my first list and systematically began to go about contacting people.

  This time-consuming route proved quite amazingly successful. Correspondents who had lived there for years had not been able to see the people I saw, or really to see anyone. Also the fact that I was coming in quickly and leaving quickly -- the fact that I would not be around to remind them of what they had said or not said -- served in good stead. It is not a help to be around Russia too long!

  One of the major new stars in the youth firmament, for instance, was Andrei Volkonsky, a famous pianist and a romantic figure to many Russians partly because he was the grandson and namesake of the immortal "Prince Andrei" of War and Peace. But -- how to find him?

  One foreign diplomat made the obvious suggestion that I go to performances and then use the acceptable custom of going backstage afterward to greet performers. This I did. I went to one of his performances, went backstage, stood in line, greeted him in Russian and--as this very sophisticated man literally gawked at the sheer brazenness of it--asked him for an interview. He agreed; and he met me at the hotel the very next day, his eyes still rather questioning.