by Jim Malusa
This is the province of Tambov, where people know hunger. Starvation, actually, following a drought in 1920–21. America and western Europe were aware of the famine, but as H. G. Wells wrote in his Outline of History , “None of the tolerance that had been shown to the almost equally incapable and disastrous regime of the Tsar was shown to the Marxist adventurers.” At the time, the only crime of the Bolsheviks against the West was their utter rejection of capitalism, but that was enough. While Russia starved, the West acted slowly or not at all, with fingers crossed.
Lenin, the earnest revolutionary who dreamed of a just society, had in 1918 declared “war communism,” a policy that entitled the Bolsheviks to snatch a portion of every peasant’s harvest for the cities. After the drought reduced the people of Tambov to hunting acorns, the Red Army unwisely persisted in taking the acorns.
Alexander Antonov, himself a revolutionary who’d fought the tsar, massed an army of tens of thousands of famished locals into the “Green Army” representing the Union of Working Peasants. The Bolsheviks, hinting at the lethal bureaucracy to come, responded with the “Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik party for liquidation of banditry in the Tambov Gubernia.” The Red Army cut the Green Army down, with artillery, armored rail cars, and, most horribly, poison gas.
My hunger is just a little thing, a tightness as I ride past fields of black clods bordered with yarrow and blue asters. I can see the town of Uvarovo long before I reach it, a tight cluster on a low mesa dropping on one side to the Vorona River. Along the shore, willows toss in the wind.
In the oldest part of town (Uvarovo dates back to 1699) is the most decrepit hotel yet, a sagging shotgun cabin of seven rooms. After I ring the buzzer and the woman recovers from her surprise, she leads me to the “administration.” The floor is freshly painted, and sunlight shines through lace curtains onto a vase of daisies. Her name is Tanya, and she somewhat gravely explains that the room will be twenty rubles a night—between one and two dollars.
Of course there’s no hot water. There’s not even water. Tanya must fetch it in a bucket. But it’s only fifty feet to the outhouse, and meanwhile Tanya warms up a couple of gallons of water with a hotplate so I can sponge myself off. She cooks my ramen noodles, too. Brings me a table lamp, while rambling softly in Russian. Tonight there’s no place I’d rather be.
With my east-facing room I expect an early rousing by the sun, but the next morning it’s suspiciously dark. Pull open the curtain: rain is thrashing the streets. Feel the glass: it’s freezing.
Tanya asks me to fill out the usual registration form. What, I ask Tanya, is the name of this place? Hotel, she says. What day is it? she asks. I don’t understand. She points to a calendar, I point to the day, and she fills out half of the form before giving a little shrug that means, What’s the difference? She points to my birth date and indicates that she was born the same year. We grew up with the same fears, which happen to be detailed in the only official poster in this hotel. It’s instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Duck and cover, except in the Russian version you end up in a cellar with a barrel full of potatoes.
When the rain gives up I leave Tanya with an Arizona postcard and a little fanny pack I brought for just this purpose. It’s not her birthday, but it’s close enough. Like me, she’s a Sputnik baby, 1957. Unlike me, she’s staying put in Uvarovo. I ask her how far it is to the next town, Borisoglebsk. But she’s never been there, and doesn’t know the way.
TWO MILES OUT from Tanya’s hotel is a sign no larger than a loaf of bread. Café, it says—and an arrow points to what looks like a prefab warehouse but is immensely attractive when it’s 40 degrees outside. It’s dark and quiet, and for my pleasure the owner hits both the light and the music. I have a tomato salad and tea while listening to the disco hit “I Need a Superhero Lover.” After my eyes adjust to the 25-watt bulb, I see that the walls are covered with Formica and shower curtains—all the easier, I imagine, to hose off after a boisterous wingding.
When I’m back on my bike and riding all day through one-cow towns where everything is so tired that the power lines are actually holding up the utility poles—well, then it’s easy to get the impression that there’s no reason for celebration in Russia. But people aren’t just sitting around, waiting for a miracle. In a town not quite as big as its name, Novonikolainevski, I find the only café occupied by a party. I sit outside and bide my time, calculating that if any mother spies this skinny bicyclist . . .
Bingo. Come inside and eat all this extra food! It’s a wedding party!
Actually, it’s the wedding rehearsal dinner, but my Russian is so lousy I don’t understand. So I’m surprised when, the next morning, the bride’s uncle finds me—in the only hotel in town—and escorts me back to the café and the big event. Newlyweds Ina and Volodya are young and blond and happy. The bride’s mother, Lila, and her grandmother, the babushka, get to work feeding me while the others pass around a bottle of champagne for everyone to autograph. I’m soon surrounded by slabs of roast beef, eggplant topped with chives and red peppers, garlic bread and carrot salad and grilled fish and pickled watermelon. And that’s only the plates I can reach.
A toast is made, and the vodka vanishes. An accordion player starts squeezing some life out of his instrument. Everyone else is fancied up in suits or dresses; he, true to the international dress code of accordion players, appears to be from a neighboring planet. But he can make music. A woman sings, the old folk sigh, and the teens yawn. The tempo picks up as the bride and groom cut their cake and hand out slices in exchange for dropping some rubles into a hat. Another toast, and a woman starts dancing on a chair. I’m asked to make a toast. To the new wife and the new . . . but nobody hears the part about the groom. The party is taking off.
My glass is refilled by Sasha, a doctor with the hands of a serious gardener. He speaks enough English to make a toast, “America and Russia—friends!” Obviously, I have to drink.
Natasha is one of the women who speak to me from a distance never greater than six inches. Her face is flushed and her eyes are wide, but she’s just friendly. “Please,” she asks, “please for the newlyweds . . . ” She flips through the pages of my dictionary and finds, to my horror, the word sing. “Please sing for the new man and new wife.”
I’m no singer, but after a few toasts I’m ready for the “Star Spangled Banner.” Yet at the moment the only song that comes to mind is “I Need a Superhero Lover.” The lyrics are within my grasp (“I need a superhero lover, super lover, super lover!”), but the audience reaction could be less than favorable.
Natasha is pleading “Sing, sing!” when the babushka decides that it’s her duty to feed me. She butts in to say, Sing? He needs to eat! And not only does she set down another plate of veal cutlets, she actually forks one up and stuffs it into my mouth. I am so grateful. Natasha gives up and joins the dancing.
Ten minutes later, while the babushka is delicately sucking the meat off a chicken skeleton, I’m yanked out of my chair to join a dance that is just four women and me. They hold their hands high and snake them around like gypsies, they stomp their feet, they sing. When the song ends they explain it to me in English. “No love! Yes love! The story of life!”
The accordion gives out. The tape deck is commandeered by a young man in black, and the speakers jump with Disco Collection #1. The young will forget our parents’ songs, and everything else will change, too.
Except weddings. No love, yes love, the story of life.
WHEN THE WORLD is wrapped in what looks like ice fog, it’s hard to leave the great hot feast of a Russian wedding and pedal on. But I must reach the Caspian sooner or later. Probably later—I’m addled by too many toasts to the newlyweds, and can’t find the little road out of town. It’s shown on the map as a thin gray line, a reflection of the mapmaker’s doubt that the road exists.
So I take the train, the slow and rocking local to the next town, which the map shows
connected to a thick yellow line I hope is an actual road. The town is Frovolo, and it’s the train conductor’s hometown. He promises that the hotel is only a hundred meters from the train station. He’s right—and he knows exactly where to find me the next morning.
Andrei wants me to come to meet his family. I want to take advantage of a sudden increase in temperature and ride on to the town of Log. Andrei wins, and in his 1994 Lada, which looks like a 1974 Datsun, he takes me to his home.
Andrei’s wife, Irana, and her sister Natasha are young and supple and earthy in the Russian female way, with gold teeth and hair dyed in colors I’d believed were limited to minerals, like oxidized copper and gypsum crystals. The house was built in 1940 of what appears to be corrugated roofing. There’s no plumbing. Nothing fancy, says Andrei, but it’s rent-free: the house belongs to his grandmother, a nameless babushka who seems to live in the kitchen outbuilding.
The living room is intensely packed with oriental wall rugs and big black puffy armchairs and the usual color TV and VCR. Andrei pulls out a stack of photographs eight inches high, and I settle in for pictures of his red-carnation wedding, pictures of toddlers in sailor suits, pictures of pure white people on a Black Sea beach, and pictures of people buried alive in fur hats and thick coats, balanced atop snow drifts. I ask, Siberia? No—here, Frovolo.
Time to head south, but then Babushka silently delivers pickled mushrooms, dumplings, sour cream, and crab salad. Presumably she’s taking very small steps in her shapeless house dress reaching to the floor, but the slow gliding effect is of an electric grandma on hidden wheels.
A feast wouldn’t be complete without a toast or two, maybe three. Then back to the photo archive—still three inches to go. There are so many baby pictures that my heart flies back to my family in Tucson, and when my eyes begin to cloud I must excuse myself—how can I explain that I miss my son? But they understand—Andrei has two children in school. When it’s time to go, he says, “Good-bye—and please take this for your son.”
It’s a foot-high stuffed pink bunny, wearing a polka-dot bow tie. Very nice, I say, but where do I put it? When I ride off in the direction of Log, the pink bunny is standing tall on my sleeping bag.
I’m out of the fertile black earth country and happy to be riding through a lumpy sandy land, with hunches of scrub oak on the rises, and poplar tracing the watercourses. The wind, a surprisingly warm wind out of the southeast, swells until it overwhelms. In one hour I pedal three and a half miles, which must be a flatland low-speed record. I stop, exhausted, on the shoulder near a dump, and stand amid a scatter of broken bottles. A bus passes and thirty heads turn in spontaneous synchrony, staring.
Yesterday I was merely odd; today, with the big pink rabbit on my tail, the Russians assume I’m nuts. I desperately want to ride on, past melon fields and goat herders—the enticing signs of aridity—but I admit defeat and retreat to the Hotel Frovolo. I ride the same three and a half miles in only nine minutes, with hardly a turn of my pedals.
I’ve grown surprisingly fond of this cold-water hotel that falls dark after the tea pot blows a fuse. I hear nothing but the radio in the beauty parlor next door, tuned to a smoky lilting sax carried on the wind.
It blows through the night and into the morn. Anxious to beat the winter, I pedal out of town, around roadkilled hedgehogs, and into a dust storm. Hungry for a shish kebab, I turn too quickly into a roadside eatery and fail to spot a slick of sheep fat. The crash leaves the uncaring rabbit unscathed, but the wind will not stop and I end up on the train, humbled, alongside quiet men with sand under their nails and sacks of melon between their feet, and schoolgirls clutching Spice Girl notebooks. We all rumble and nod into Volgograd, a city reduced to rubble by one of the most terrible battles of WWII.
Volgograd was reimagined and rebuilt by Stalin’s team of Soviet planners. This does not sound like the recipe for a pleasurable place, but I’m learning, and a change of heart comes easy for a man who hasn’t had a shower in four days. Freshly scrubbed after a night at the frankly regal Intourist Hotel, I stroll the esplanade that embraces the immense sweep of the Volga River with a chain of linear parks. Kids flit by on in-line skates, sober adults walk drooling basset hounds, and the semisober sit at sidewalk cafés with big mugs of beer. The 1950s housing and shops, built of stone blocks or a reasonable facsimile, are the next step in from the river, and the factories and busy roads are set well back. I really could not have picked a better place for my computer to break down.
It’s only four keys that refuse to work, but I’d never realized the importance of O and L until I need them. (The semicolon and dash I can do without.) In a mild panic I visit the American Business Center. They summon computer repairman Alex Shopochkin to my rescue. I tell him that if he fixes the computer I will put him in my story and a hundred billion people will know of his technical savvy. He replies, “And if I can’t fix it, I think I will still be in the story.” This guy is smart—he’s certain to fix it.
Meanwhile, the staff of the Center, which helps American companies set up shop in Russia, delivers glum news on the economic scene.
“After the crisis hit,” says Karina Ray, “the Pall Mall minivans disappeared. They would park on the street and open up the doors and blast music out the back. They had black lights inside the vans—and even underneath. They’d attract attention, and the Pall Mall girls would hand out cigarettes. They target young men, and light the cigarettes for them.”
Cigarettes are the first taste of America for many Russians. The apartment blocks at the edge of Volgograd feature ten-story-tall Marlboro men, and when I visit the central market I find an entire aisle lined with towers of cigarette cartons. “Cossack” smokes are only 15 cents a pack, yet American brands are selling briskly at $1.60.
It’s the busiest market I’ve seen since Moscow. Now I know where Russian women buy Blondex hair color, where girls get the picture pins of Leonardo DiCaprio, and where men pick up Speed, a tabloid reputed to promote safe sex but whose current cover shows a defenseless man in a steam bath being assaulted by three lasses armed with tiny towels and loofahs.
The meat market is slice and whop and long steel tables laid out with cows reduced to a leg, a head with a blank eye, a pair of bull balls. Less disturbing is the domain of the sunflower seed vendors—just follow the sparrows to the mounds of seeds that apparently induce calm not only for the chewers but also for the sellers, who recline in various states of repose on big burlap sacks. Everyone else is busy selling, a scene with the promise of becoming what Maurice Hindus saw here in 1923, when the market “teemed with caravans of carts, drawn by ox, horse or camel. . . . NEP had struck its stride, and trade was booming in the bazaars and shops.”
The NEP was Lenin’s New Economic Policy. It was capitalism. Lenin called it a “strategic retreat”—putting communism on hold for five years.
It was a wily move, and Joseph Stalin was just as effective as his predecessor. Volgograd was once called Stalingrad, after the man who, like Lenin, knew when to back down to achieve a larger goal. Stalin allowed the temporary resurgence of the church during WWII, if only because the people are more willing to die for their country if they believe heaven awaits. Russia’s dreadful losses during the war are remembered in the monumental statues of Volgograd—a bare-chested man heaving a hand grenade seems to stand on every other street corner. The Battle of Stalingrad was the fulcrum of the war—the Germans lost over 300,000 men, and the momentum shifted to the Russians.
To walk through Volgograd today is to confront the paradox of Soviet communism—how things got better and worse at the same time. Stalin exterminated millions by starvation and gulags, and for the survivors Stalin built the lovely Intourist Hotel and the comfortable city of Volgograd.
Even Volgograd’s old state cafeterias are the nicest I’ve seen, with one featuring perhaps the world’s only aluminum bas-relief of dumplings. They look like the plump clouds that slide over the city at dusk. There’s a silken breeze off the Volga, and
the riverside parks fill with families and lovers and drunks. Teen girls in clunky black shoes walk arm in arm past the most stirring Battle of Stalingrad monument, the blasted shell of a flour mill.
But tonight it is easy to forget the war. Especially if you’re staying at the Intourist, the first place outside Moscow where I’ve encountered actual tourists. Not many. In the lobby café there is a fleshy German man, ruddy with booze. On his knee sits a woman, a slinky giggler half his age. After I take a seat he points to the café’s matron and says without prompting, “This lady can get you anything you desire in Volgograd.”
He’s repulsive, but it’s true that the Russians seem extra-considerate of wandering men. It’s 10 PM when the Welcome Wagon rings me in my room. This mystifies me. It’s a big hotel, and there are a lot of empty rooms. How, I ask the caller, how did you know that I was in this room?
“I did not,” she says. “I call all the room numbers. Are you sure you do not want a sleeping woman tonight?”
I’m sure. I have a wife.
“And I have a husband. But I understand. You are good husband. Good night.”
The nicest prostitutes! I like feeling wanted, but I have a late-night appointment with the computer fix-it man, Alex Shopochkin. He delivers my laptop in perfect order, but also delivers the less happy news of his current employment. His job as a computer specialist at the Imperial Bank vanished with the ruble’s crash. The bank is history, too. He’s fed up with Russia. “I want to emigrate,” he confides. “Russia is no place for people. History, yes, politics, yes—but it is no good for people.”
Not everyone agrees. In the lobby café for breakfast, I meet the buoyant Alex Limanov. He likes what he calls the “Stalin baroque” architecture of the city, yet doesn’t mind covering it with ads for his Danish employer, Stimorol Chewing Gum. “We do not sell just chewing gum,” says Alex. “We sell fun. Our ads show the jungles, the ocean, the beach—Stimorol is adventure. Teenagers like it very much.”