Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  I was particularly interested in Volkonsky -- as tall, dark, hand some, and haunted-looking as one would rightly expect Prince An drei's seed to be -- because he was the center of a wildly popular revival of (of all things!) old church music. We sat for two hours, talking of this.

  "I am a great-grandson of the Volkonsky of the Decembrist uprising," he started, as we sat in the restaurant overlooking the Kremlin, its gold onion domes gleaming in the sun. "We are related to the czars of the Romanoff family and also to Prince Vladimir of Kiev and to Alexander Nevsky."

  I was properly breathless -- all of the most romantic dreams of the historic Russia I so loved were unfolding right in front of me in this person. Then he said, with just the touch of an ironic smile, "They're just relatives. The family had its own czars and saints. But I have nothing to do with saints anymore." A pregnant pause, then an open, friendly smile. "Besides, I'm not a saint myself."

  In 1965 Volkonsky began what six years later had become a wildly popular renaissance of early pre-Peter the Great (and thus pre-European influence) Orthodox church music.

  "At the time of Peter, there were reforms in the church services," he explained, "and part of the reform was a kind of Europeanization of the service. The old type of music was forgotten. A new singing during the services was introduced that had nothing to do with the old music. I believe everyone must feel very sorry because the music today is poorer. It lost its Russian features."

  Volkonsky had formed a performing group called the "Madrigals," which by 1971 was giving one hundred totally sold-out concerts a year all over the Soviet Union -- but not before he personally had done the mammoth and intricate job of searching out and decoding the music, which lay untouched in old libraries and monasteries. "For thousands of people, particularly students, this ancient classical music replaces pop music," he summed up. "In a way, it's a kind of social experiment."

  His "social experiment" -- and, in particular, the tremendous success of it -- seemed to me something of overwhelming importance.

  ***

  In a country like the Soviet Union, where you cannot ask direct questions and where you cannot believe (in our sense) the answers people do give you, you have to learn to listen on many levels, to catch nuances, to watch for the continuation of themes people may be not at all aware they are revealing to you. Perhaps women, being naturally more empathic listeners, are better at this than men. At any rate, as I systematically and exhaustedly asked young people simple questions like, "What is your greatest passion in life?" or "What interests your generation most?" I was prepared for answers like, "Creating the new Communist man" or "Destroying the bourgeoisie throughout the world and establishing socialism."

  But these questions were met with blank stares or quizzical, bemused smiles. Either they found my questioning curiously outdated or found me ripe for membership in the Central Committee.

  What did come through? One answer, everywhere and always, even in young officialdom: "The spiritual life of man."

  One of the most cogent and provocative answers came from a twenty-eight-year-old physicist-turned-psychologist at Kiev State University, Valerie Melko, to whom I was deliberately -- which in itself was telling--sent by the youth section in Novosti. (One of their rare instances of assistance.) He seemed to incorporate in himself the searching both of objective science and of the inner self. By the time I met him, Valerie, brown haired, with unhurried eyes, a sharp mind, and utter honesty, had tired of pure, dehumanized science and was exploring psychology as an antidote to it.

  "Even if you know how to do things, the problems of what for still remain," he told me as we sat in a small, drab study room of the university that cool October day, talking for nearly four hours. "For what do we use modern technical things? What do they give to man? What do they give on a spiritual level? The world of things is known well. But what concerns man we know least because it is the most complex system. This tendency is quite unlike the Renaissance -- which put man in the main spot, made man the most precious thing in the world." He smiled, shifted in his chair.

  "The formation of the inner consciousness of man is not decided haphazardly, without order. We don't know on what it depends.

  We suppose it depends on social and economic conditions. But what? We don't know. We can only surmise. We hope that many features can be improved in man. But the first thing is to awaken a will in man to improve. To do this, we must know on what the will depends."

  Most Americans would perhaps not recognize what a staggering thing he was saying, because most Americans no longer read history and understand the simple different cultural standards of other peoples. Thinking they are just like us and will react the same way, if treated right, is the utmost in contempt and egocentrism because it denies the other person's and people's own experience, own realm of being. One had to know history and Soviet thought -- at least at its most simple level--to understand how amazing it was to hear a young Marxist, a man quite within the system and indeed a jewel of its intellectual world, saying that his generation did not trust social and economic advances to solve psychological problems. This was taking place in a society that had consistently claimed that men's psychological and personal problems were simply an outgrowth of the social imbalances that communism would solve!

  It was Melko, too, who told me most brilliantly about the changes in ideology in regard to collectivism. "The ideology is changing somewhat," he reflected that day. "Such features as were ideal for one generation -- collectivism -- are changing to solidarity. But this still excludes individualism. It means that, when deciding the problems of all the people, we must pay special attention to the individual needs of everyone in the group. In addition, such features as discipline from outside now have become internal discipline."

  ***

  So, yes, I did find the Soviet Union changing, but I was very, very cautious about making any dramatic predictions on that change -- or allowing myself the luxury of believing either that they were at heart "just like us" (the liberal sentimental idea) or that they were outside of human history, anti-historical, monsters (the conservative version). I saw a totalitarian state with a history that created a mind-set which above all prized authority and obedience. It was the exact antithesis of the American ideas of individualism, human freedom as the predominant value in human life, and existential self-determination. It was no mystery that they therefore had been posited by history both conspicuously against us -- and, in an odd way and on another level that Alexis de Tocqueville understood so brilliantly, very much with us. Both believed in enfranchising the aver age person, but in totally different ways: one in the equality of egalitarian horizontalism, one in the authoritarian equality of totalitarian verticalism.

  So, when I looked at the youth, I saw, yes, a new generation striving for much more in terms of material goods and in terms of personal fulfillment; but I had to predict in my book, The Young Russians, that these desires would only nominally affect the leadership class, which would stay hard and tough and totalitarian.

  Later I would cry and wring my hands over some people in the Carter administration, including most unfortunately the President himself, who really thought that the Russians were just like us, and would respond just like your neighbor in Iowa City if we didn't irk them too much. But I would then wring my hands just as much about the Reagan administration, which looked upon the Russians as almost anti-human. What the Russians wanted from us was for us to act as a credible deterrent -- to stop them from doing certain things -- but the U.S. in the seventies and eighties has not understood this.

  The ideas and experiences and memories behind the mind-sets of the Russians and the Americans are totally and unequivocally different. Linguists have told me that the Vladivostok agreements are so different in the two languages that they could quite literally not be called into effect. Their ideas about information are totally different: the Russians see information not as the search for truth (they have truth) but as a means of furthering their objective, the
spreading of socialism in the world.

  All this points to a major lesson that I had to learn as a journalist. We cannot judge others by ourselves--that is the ultimate and the unforgivable egocentricity. We must go further than just good reporting, we must somehow incorporate into our writing an implicit understanding of the different truths that other cultures are living by -- and dying by. When I was in Russia, Iran was still to come, but in trying to understand Russia and in all the agonies of working there, I learned once and for all of the different shadows in the wings of our histories, the different memories, the different howls in the night that each people hears and that we can ignore only at our deep peril.

  ***

  Often "listening" brought glorious rewards. One gorgeous October morning, with yellow leaves falling on sidewalks still black from the night's rain, I walked into Czarina Katherine's beautiful blue and white palace outside Leningrad in Pushkintown. Reacting to the cold weather we had been having, I was wearing my heavy Russian fur coat on a day clearly much too warm for it.

  Behind the coat-check counter stood a typical old babushka, looking like a gnome in her black cloth coat with scarf tied tight around her temples. When she saw me, she started, then clapped her fat, creased hands together as if to ward off a bad omen. "Oh," she said, her eyes wide and disturbed as she looked at my coat. "Oh, my, you're frightening summer." In Russia, one also found sometimes this tremulous beauty.

  IX.

  Man of Steel

  "Do women have equal rights in America too?"

  --An Uzbek farmer

  As I worked my way deeper into Russian life, trying to unravel the mysteries, I was, as always, deeply interested in the women. I suppose it was a selfish search, for I was searching for myself in them and their "solutions." The Russian revolution, after all, had "freed" women. They were -- in jobs, in education, and in recognized potential -- equal. There was much to admire. But I soon found many contradictions, many conflicts, many conundrums.

  One day in Moscow I was interviewing Ann Martinova, the crisp, dark-haired editor at Literatumaya Gazeta, and eventually I asked her about the "problem" of premarital sex relations. All of her carefully constructed manner of insouciance and sophistication dissolved immediately, and the blood rose in her pale white face, causing a distinct flush. Her lips became more set; then, "WE HAVE NO 'PROBLEM' OF PREMARITAL SEX RELATIONS," she snapped. "Our family life is very solid. This exists only in your country."

  How very interesting, I thought. Another example of Russians facing reality head-on. For everywhere I went, young people told me exactly the opposite. Premarital and extramarital sex among the young (and old) was so widespread, so common and so casual that one could only come to the conclusion that most Russians take it, as the early Bolshevik and free love advocate, Madame Alexandra Kollontai, told Lenin, "like a drink of water." (And he, typically male, answered that he preferred "not to drink from a dirty glass.") And Russian men ... Russian men do not make "passes" (such a gingerly, Western, British word for what they do), they have home runs, or try to, the first moment they decide they want you. They do not approach, they lunge, they attack crudely. I very deliberately watched out for them. When I saw them drinking too much at a table where I was sitting, I often left, for nowhere in the world had I seen such aggressive, crude, and dangerous men as the Russian ones.

  And when, as a woman, I tried to study the Russian women, I came up with some very interesting impressions. The image of Russian women outside is that they have arrived in some kind of nirvana of feminism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women, yes, are equal, but they are "equal" to work outside the home and bring money home, to do all the housework and shopping, to bear the children and then give them up to child care--in effect, to do everything. And the men do not "mind" it; isn't that marvelous of them!

  I was curious to see this "Russian syndrome" occurring just a little later in the U.S. But in 1971 surveys showed that Russian wives had half the amount of leisure their husbands had and one hour's less sleep a night. A Professor Kobalevsky, writing in Molodaya Gvardia or Young Guard, tabulated that in industrial districts working women had three hours less free time on workdays and nine to eleven hours less free time on Sundays and holidays. In consequence, he determined, "the woman slowly neglects herself, loses her former attractiveness, and the onetime love dies out."

  "I came to our school one morning early last week," a teacher in Kiev told me, "and another teacher was sitting there with her head in her hands sobbing and saying, 'I wish I were back in czarist days. At least then I'd just have one thing to do--be a woman at home and have men flatter me and do certain things for me. It's just too much.'" She paused. "Yet we don't want to stay home. We consider that a kind of grave."

  The Russian women were, very simply, conflicted beyond belief. They were overworked. The "macho" Russian men refused to do anything -- anything -- around the house. They were often drunk. They still beat women. But we have to understand this, too, within their specific historical context.

  Russian women have always worked. They toiled in the hardest type of manual labor and they fought in the wars beside the men. Actually, historians have traced three strands in Russian women's history: the subordination of women, equality in hardship, and also creative equality. That last, which in the past existed only for the aristocratic classes of women, is still out of reach for most women in Russia, and elsewhere, today.

  But the Russian women at that time were getting even in a very special way--they were not having children. The birthrate of one child per couple that was, by the 1970s, the norm among European Russians was obviously not going to reproduce the population, which requires 2.2 children per family. Moreover the Asiatic Soviets were reproducing at such a high rate that by the year 2000 they will constitute a majority of the population, thus changing the country's entire racial makeup. I found that the state was utterly terrified of this -- it would mean that Great Russian control over the vast and scattered former "minorities" in the Soviet Union would be diluted and perhaps dead. My own feeling was that this fear had something to do with the invasion of Afghanistan -- like the ancient Roman Empire, they needed an outlet for their minorities; they needed to give their minorities spheres of their own. And who had done this? The Russian women had done it, simply by refusing to give birth. If it was not a direct revolution, it was certainly a direct geopolitical threat to the empire.

  Yet I do not want to intimate that Russian women have not gained great deal, because, to be fair, they have. Attitudes, even in Central Asia, have changed dramatically. I remember one day, just outside of Tashkent, when we stopped in the Uzbek countryside on a little river. An outdoor teahouse, consisting of square piers which hung over the river, was filled with Uzbek men lounging and drinking tea and gossiping over a languid green river. Above were swaying willow trees, and an occasional oxcart trundled across an old bridge nearby.

  Next to us on a nearby platform sat a group of seven Uzbek farmers from a nearby collective farm. In their traditional clothes they could have been out of a world of five hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago--when the emir still kept mistresses and each day threw the one he liked best an apple as she bathed in the pool. Before 1917 these Asian women went out only when completely veiled, and if a woman removed her veil, her husband had the right to bury her alive.

  We sat down at one of the little piers and eventually the man who was the leader of the group next to us, a fifty-three-year-old farmer named Dadsmotov Hosneden, invited us to join them for pilaf, which we gratefully ate with our fingers.

  "Do your wives work?" I asked him.

  "Of course," he said. "If they have small children at home, they don't. But otherwise -- of course. They are equal to men."

  When he asked me how old I was and I said "Thirty-two," he exclaimed, "And you're not married yet?"

  "I travel all the time," I answered. "Maybe in another year."

  "But you should marry while you can enjoy your youth."
<
br />   "I'm enjoying it now," I answered.

  What was so striking was that all the men accepted that it was quite right and natural for a woman to travel about the world alone.

  "Yes, it's true," Hosneden said. "When you're eighty, you'll have things to tell your grandchildren about the whole world." Then he paused and asked, "Do women have equal rights in America, too?"

  ***

  The Soviet state of Georgia is a ferocious land: it is exquisitely beautiful, with dashing Caucasus rivers that swirl and crash down from the wild mountains, with a capital city, Tbilisi, that is as weathered and beautiful as its most celebrated son, Joseph Stalin, was cruel and evil. The Great Russians call Georgia and its ways "Asiatic." It is certainly different from central Russia, although perhaps only in degree -- and what happened to me there is different only in degree from what happens to women everywhere and throughout history.

  In Georgia I saw, firsthand, a less liberated side of male-female relations.

  In my roamings and rummagings about the Soviet Union in 1971 I had planned to go to Mongolia as a "side trip" (to see the homeland of Genghis Khan), but at the last moment, not unexpectedly, the Russian authorities in their wisdom refused to let me go. I was heartbroken, for Outer Mongolia had a hauntingly romantic appeal for me. But what could I do? We included Georgia instead and I was pleased to have a few days rest in a fascinating and historic place.

  The first afternoon in Tbilisi, just as I was beginning to relax after exhausting weeks of trying to work with the Soviet authorities, I went shopping on the main street. I felt at ease in "Russia" for a change, and there were lots of things to buy, Georgia being noted for its folklore and handwork. Tbilisi is also known for its arrogant, dark-haired, mustachioed men and I knew well enough to avoid and ignore them. Even in the hotel restaurants you could not sit down for two minutes at your table without the waiters bringing you note after note from men at surrounding tables, suggesting ... everything. It was Latin America but with a distinctly dark side and sinister cast.