The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

  We walked up to the lake. I was hissing at Lora, recalling Melkumov’s order, since we were already running late. She just laughed in response and did whatever she pleased. (We made sure the ambassador didn’t hear us arguing, of course.) O, great is the power of woman! How right Lora was in everything, listening to her intuition and acting in accordance with some sixth sense. I was forced to follow her into the lake. Maurice and Alla didn’t swim, and Lora didn’t have a bathing suit. And so right in front of the ambassador’s eyes, she began undressing and climbed into the water in just her slip, which immediately conformed to her body, and when she came out of the water, she looked not just naked, but naked twice over. She came out of the water several times and walked around on the shore looking like this. Poor Maurice!

  Whenever we swam out from shore, I would hurry Lora as much as I could, reminding her of Melkumov’s order to return to Moscow no later than five. She just waved me off.

  At this time, according to Kunavin, Gribanov was sitting near the receiver, listening to the reports from the scene of the events. They told him about Lora’s swimming. Gribanov couldn’t contain himself any longer and called her a prostitute.

  In half an hour the prostitute—or, better yet, the mermaid—got out of the water and somehow got dressed. We got into our cars and continued on to Moscow. We split up at the fork near the Danilov Market. The ambassador took Lora home. Along the way they arranged for him to come see her in forty minutes.

  Iurii Krotkov, The KGB in Action

  305

  Upon returning to the embassy, Maurice changed and got a new chauffeur, for some reason. He took Boris, as if realizing that he was more dependable.

  As soon as De Jean walked into Lora’s apartment, she showed him a telegram lying around on the table, which she had “received” the day before from her “husband.” The telegram said that he was arriving the next day. At the end it said, “Love, your Misha.” (As might be easily guessed, this was a KGB forgery.)

  And what followed would have been unbelievable even in the movies. Only in the Soviet Union, where the KGB was all-powerful, could this take place.

  Lora and Maurice, naturally, having been left alone, gave way to human temptation.

  Gribanov and Melkumov, pressing up against the speaker, or maybe wearing headphones, were listening to everything going on in the neighboring apartment. Perhaps one of them may have even envied De Jean. But they were waiting for the pre-arranged signal, the code word. Lora herself had come up with this word in the private booth at the restaurant at the Metropole. She had to say the word “Kiev” in some phrase. As soon as she said the word, Gribanov would give Kunavin and Misha the go-ahead. But Lora drew it out and out and out, all but frazzling the remnants of Gribanov’s nerves of steel. And Kunavin and Misha got completely soaked in sweat in their geological expedition gear.

  “Kiev!” Gribanov and Melkumov distinctly heard, “Kiev.” Lora had clearly said, “Kiev. . . .”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Vladimir Azbel, Siberian Adversity

  In the 1970’s the Western press was filled with reports about the “refuseniks.” These were Russian Jews who petitioned the Soviet government for exit visas, principally to Israel. Under fierce international scrutiny, the government acceded, and previously unimaginable numbers of refugees left the country. Vladimir Azbel’s story is set within this period. His very relocation to Irkutsk in Siberia was a direct consequence of his family’s filing papers to leave the USSR. Taken from Vladimir Azbel’, “Dva goda v Sibiri” [Two Years in Siberia]. New York: The New Review, No. 116, September, 1974.

  In 1972 I was completing the tenth grade of a secondary school in Moscow. During this time frame, our family submitted the required documents for moving abroad. Three months prior to final examinations, I had to leave school since presenting these documents to OVIR [The Department of Visas and Registration of Foreign Citizens] would have led to immediate expulsion. Now, having become a “refusenik,” I had to decide where and how to continue my education. I began by submitting documentation to the division of external studies and took the final exams for the tenth grade. The next problem was more difficult—entry into an institute. I had long planned to enroll in a medical institute, but this was impossible in Moscow. Column five of the questionnaire impeded this [nationality]. Then, on the advice of relatives and acquaintances living in Siberia, in Irkutsk, I decided to enroll in the Irkutsk Medical Institute. Judging by accounts, there was not as much anti-Semitism there as there was in central Russia. This turned out to be true. Without thinking too long, I bought a plane ticket and after a seven-hour flight, I arrived at the capital of eastern Siberia—Irkutsk.

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  307

  Irkutsk was the city of my birth. When I was one-and-a-half years old, my family moved to Moscow. We came to Irkutsk twice after that to visit our relatives. During these trips we saw Siberia almost in the way that foreign tourists coming to Lake Baikal see it. The beautiful embankments of the Angara River, several new buildings in the center of town, a trip to Baikal, the new city of Angarsk—all this left a good impression. Now, having been a resident of Irkutsk for two years, I observed other, seamier sides of Siberian life.

  I had very many acquaintances in Irkutsk; thus I was able to observe the life of Siberian society. From the beginning it was noticeable that the inhabitants of Siberia differed from those of Russia’s western provinces. It was surprising that no one expressed dissatisfaction with their lives. They considered that everything which occurred was in the scheme of things. Thus, for example, in Angarsk (forty kilometers from Irkutsk), the air was constantly poisoned by gases coming from the chemical plants. There were filtration systems, but they only operated during the week. Saturdays and Sundays were off days. The management went to their dachas. But the factories kept operating in order to fulfill the plans more quickly. The harmful gases were released bypassing the filters. This speeded the process but the people in the city choked. No residents spoke against this openly. Protests were heard only within circles of close friends and relatives. If the air was poisoned by gases, that meant that it was the way it had to be. The majority of the population was convinced of this. Generally speaking, very few people in the Soviet Union voiced their protests openly. The majority preferred to remain quiet. This was particularly noticeable in Siberia.

  To this day people in Siberia live in the Stalinist atmosphere of terror before the national security organs. Siberians will never engage a foreigner in conversation and never mention their difficult life in the presence of a stranger.

  An asphalt road leads from Irkutsk to Listvianichnyi Bay on Baikal, the part of the lake closest to the city. For forty years, only one boat has traversed Baikal. Even if people do reach distant spots on the lakeshore, only the local taiga dweller or hunter can live there. Therefore, the people of Irkutsk, living only fifty kilometers from the lake, go to the Black Sea for vacation even though in terms of beauty there is nothing comparable to Baikal. The mountain ranges and the taiga of Baikal remain as wild, remote, and unexplored as hundreds of years ago. I made it to places which civilization had not yet reached. There were remote Buriat settlements where people led a nomadic life of cattle-breeding and hunting. They spent months in the saddle returning to their own terrain only in winter.

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  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I also spent some time in Siberian kolkhozes. Students who were not assigned to construction brigades in the summer were obligated to work on a kolkhoz. Beginning with this year, students were forcibly enrolled in construction gangs. Earlier, when the initial brigades were formed, students signed up willingly, since they could earn some money. Under the compulsory system, students working on the most demanding construction projects received less money than workers. Komsomol leaders announced that students were obligated to help the nation that year in achieving the goals of the five-year plan. Thus, the mandatory “third labor semester�
� was introduced. Nobody protested, even though many were unhappy. In the USSR students were quiet and cowed. They little resembled western students. Every student knew that it only took a criticism of some injustice on their part to be expelled from the Komsomol. (At the Irkutsk Medical Institute, expulsion from the Komsomol signified automatic expulsion from the institute. Thus, students did not even have a say about their vacations.)

  Therefore, in September 1973, having advanced to my second year of studies, I was sent to a kolkhoz for a month. We left Irkutsk in an overcrowded train and traveled for twenty-four hours, and then another 100 kilometers north by vehicle. The place where we arrived was isolated. The taiga stretched for hundreds of kilometers in all directions and a dirt track led to the village. The village stretched along the banks of a rapid and broad river. We were settled in the gym of the village school. We all slept together without undressing, in our boots and padded jackets on roughly hewn plank beds. Everybody was given a dirty mattress, a pillow, and a thin blanket. Forget about sheets. It was cold at night. Water in the pails froze. For a whole month we were promised that the heat would be turned on, but it wasn’t. The boiler was broken. The bath-house, where we could go once every ten days, was heated primitively (the smoke escaped through the windows). Students were given a daily ration of food which they prepared themselves. Few people owned cows in the village. The cows from the kolkhoz were sent to the slaughterhouse in the district center. So, in order to obtain meat, the cows had to be taken to a slaughterhouse more than 100 kilometers away, and the meat brought back. But the kolkhoz could not assign a vehicle for this purpose. The chairman decided that the students themselves should slaughter the cows. In this fashion, we advanced to a state of complete self-service.

  During my first day at the kolkhoz I heard an unknown language being spoken in the village. It turned out that these were Chuvash people deported from the Volga. Later I met some Russians. These were exiles. Among them were laborers from Rostov-on-the-Don. I made acquaintance with one of them. He told me that when Khrushchev instituted his monetary reform in 1961, one of the Rostov factories announced a strike. The KGB searched out

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  the organizers of whom my acquaintance was one. He received a ten-year prison sentence. After release in 1972, he was exiled. He was not allowed to leave the village. His family remained in Rostov-on-the-Don. They could not visit him for lack of money.

  It turned out that there were exiles not just in this village but also in many others. Villagers frequently hid convicts who had escaped from the camps. Only the students worked the fields. The kolkhoz dwellers preferred to work on their own vegetable plots at this time. Our village was called Burkhun, which meant “residence of God” in Buriat, but this was far from a heavenly place. The poverty was staggering. One felt he had walked into the previous century. The homes were old, crooked, and unpainted. The roofs were grown over with moss. The yards were small and dirty. The street, which went the length of the village, was totally rutted and there were heaps of manure everywhere. The people were grim and came to life only at the stall where vodka, sticky dirty candy, and soap were sold. There was a store with humble wares: bottled kerosene, hunting boots, cologne, a doll with a fierce face, bread, and the ever-present vodka which was delivered regularly. Almost the whole male population was at the store each morning. By mid-day not a sober person could be seen, from the mailman to the drivers. The drivers and vehicles were sent from town to the kolkhozes to help in harvesting. Every evening the drunken drivers came to the club, the only place of entertainment and relaxation, in order to fight with the villagers or the students. The only entertainment was films which were shown nightly in the club. But they were all old ones, some twenty years old or so. New films were rare, and there were never any foreign films.

  Every morning we were taken out to the fields. The kolkhoz fields stretched for many kilometers but nobody worked them other than our group. Half of the harvest was left in the fields. Potatoes, turnips, carrots, and beets froze in the ground. There was a fair amount of mechanical equipment on the kolkhoz but it was all broken. Machinery, tractors, and combines were left under the open skies and were rusting away. The kolkhoz was served by two truck farming operations in town. Some trucks brought potatoes from the fields to the warehouse, others from the warehouse to town. One group of students in the field gathered potatoes in buckets and filled a dump truck which then went to the warehouse. The potatoes were dumped right on the ground, and another group of students, again using buckets, would load a truck which then went to town. As was later explained to us, the town and the trucking operation could not agree on trucks going directly to town.

  Once, the kolkhoz chairman came and told us that if we moved all the potatoes out of storage, we could go home. We had ten days of work left. In order to return to Irkutsk earlier, we organized the work in three round-the-clock shifts.

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  Chapter Thirty-Two

  We emptied the warehouse in three days. Satisfied with our successful effort, we went to the chairman to get our accounts squared. But he categorically refused to release us, saying that there was much work yet to be done on the kolkhoz. We students were indignant and refused to go to the fields the next day. The chairman ordered that we be denied food. Two days of unwitting hunger strike commenced. On the morning of the third day the director of agriculture, the secretary of the regional Komsomol, and a representative from the institute arrived by car. We were not allowed to say one word in self-justification. Only the director and the secretary spoke. They demanded to know who was the first person to suggest the work stoppage. The students replied that they all went out together, there was no first person. When the “commission” found out that the chairman had denied us food, they pretended to be very angry and promised to reprimand him. The regional secretary declared to the kolkhoz chairman that the Komsomol had its own methods of combating such negative phenomena. As a result, we had to work another week.

  I found out accidentally that not only students were brought to work on the kolkhoz. Once I had to go to the regional center to make an emergency phone call to Moscow. To do this I needed an off day, but we had to work without them. I asked the team leader to assign me to the grain threshing operation on the night shift. In the evening, a covered truck arrived there. Fifteen prisoners, guarded by three sub-machine gunners, stepped out of the truck. I found out that they were from the nearest concentration camp. Another group of students from our class worked at the storage facility. They had been doing so for a whole month side by side with prisoners loading potatoes into freight cars.

  All the students returned from the kolkhoz together. Four dilapidated, shaky cars were added to the freight train. But the students noticed nothing since this was payday. For a month of work we were allotted thirty-five rubles, but after taxes we were each given thirty.

  Two cases of vodka appeared immediately in the railroad car. The medical students were celebrating something akin to a harvest festival. By morning the cases were empty and we were all dead asleep. Drunkenness in the USSR was a constant problem. Everybody drank, and drank a lot, especially the youth. On the streets of Irkutsk, one could see drunken people from morning to night. Girls and women drank; school children and students drank. In the vestibule of the Irkutsk Medical Institute there was a wall placard called the “Komsomol Spotlight.” It was titled “War on Drunkenness.” Every week the names of students who wound up in the city’s medical drying-out ward were listed on it. Sometimes interns from sixth level classes made the list.

  Young doctors working in villages were especially prone to alcoholism. Not a single student party took place without vodka. I knew students from the

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  Polytechnic Institute and journalism majors form the University of Irkutsk. It was the same picture—an absence of enthusiasm and interests. They got together to drink, tell the latest jokes
and leave—no, crawl away. Young women drinking on an equal footing with the men was especially unsightly. Obviously, there were exceptions. There were students at the institute who had a passion for music, books, and sports. Maybe this was the case only in Siberia but it seems to me that only in Moscow, Leningrad, and some other large cities was the youth different from that of Irkutsk. Upon graduating from the institutes, people became better educated but not better mannered. This was particularly applicable to those graduating from the higher educational institutions of Irkutsk.

  So passed my two years of voluntary Siberian exile. I was torn away from all the events occurring in Moscow. I learned of them through telephone conversations, occasionally over the radio. Only the radio station Voice of America was heard in Irkutsk. Many members of the local intelligentsia listened to it. They spoke of what they heard in whispers or behind closed doors. If one listens to foreign radio broadcasts, he styles himself a freethinker.

  Irkutsk Jews (and there are many Jews in Siberia) viewed our decision to leave the USSR with surprise and sometimes with negativity. Even though there were people in Irkutsk who would have liked to go to Israel, they would never mention this aloud for fear of losing their job and means of livelihood. They would say: it’s nice for you in Moscow; there are many of you; there are foreign correspondents around; and you organize demonstrations. What do we have? The taiga is the law, the bear is the prosecutor (Siberian proverb). Even complaints to courts of appeal in Moscow never get there. On several occasions I was asked to mail letters in Moscow in order to avoid the district censorship. People were afraid of becoming victims of the arbitrariness of local rulers.