On the Streets of St. Leninsburg

My very first trip to what was then the Soviet Union took place in 1984. As I sat on the plane it occurred to me that the year “1984” had caught up with the title of George Orwell’s famous dystopia, and the thought crystallized all my own misgivings and secret fears.  I had read the book quite some time ago, but my memory still held on to the essentials: Ubiquitous posters with Big Brother’s eyes following one’s every move and his obvious resemblance to Stalin; the Party’s God-like infallibility thanks to its minute reinvention of the past; the permanently institutionalized war; the persistent misery of the common people …

All this expressed with a writer’s skill and insight everything I had every reason to believe from the experience of my own family. My dad and maternal grand-father had fought in the White Army during the Russian Civil War, and I had been born in emigration, a remnant of the “disappeared” past. We had received news of death and deportation from relatives who had not been able to leave the country. They asked us to stop writing, as this would put them under suspicion of treason. Big Brother was indeed watching. As a matter of fact, Dad had tried to convince me not to go even in 1984, though Stalin had long since been dead and buried. His exact words to me were: “they never forget and never forgive.”

            But in the non-fictional 1980s the Cold War, the naming of which some credit to Orwell, had become a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was taking both countries beyond the chronic hostility playing itself out in peripheral regions, and straight to MAD (mutual assured destruction).  It was the concern for the future of my own children, born in the United States, which had prompted me to ignore Father’s exhortations and my own fears. After all, I spoke Russian like a native, and decided to use this advantage to take a look for myself. 

I was traveling with a group of Quakers.  I knew little of their faith, except that it involved some sort of general commitment to peace. The Leningrad portion of that first trip was quite brief, lasting only a few days. My Russian proved pretty much useless, as we were rushed about between palaces and museums. I had hoped to find ways to talk to ordinary people, but either they themselves avoided us, or the Inturist guides shepherded us away.

  I was not even saved the disgrace of culture shock: the gilded statuary at Peterhof, the Russian Versailles, struck me as vulgar, and I had to second the words “drab” and “shabby,” so emblematic of descriptions of the Soviet Union in the American press. Leningrad offered no evidence of modern energy, nothing even like Moscow’s “five beauties,” Stalin’s answer to the American skyscraper. The city which bore Lenin’s name just sat there, no longer the center of empire, slowly crumbling away. Was it doomed to sink back into the swamps from which Peter I had willed it to life?

As I thought this I realized that I had fallen into the mythic language associated with the city: that Peter had created it by fiat, the way God had created heaven and earth, when in fact it had been erected on the bones of thousands of slaves. The poets and writers of Russia had seized upon the city’s history and become co-creators of a parallel city of words perhaps less perishable than the stone monuments of the real thing. When I called upon this word magic, everything became animated with a secret life, and I felt sorry for my traveling companions who had to be content with mere externals. When we walked through the Summer Garden by the Neva, all they saw was a quaint, ill-kept park while I listened to the story of Eugene Onegin’s childhood there in the marvelous early stanzas of Pushkin’s work. When they gazed upon the equestrian statue of the city founder, did they know that it was the “Bronze Horseman” and that at night he flew off his pedestal in pursuit of a nobody, a “little man,” who had raised his fist at him in rebellion: the Tsar’s hubris had been confident of defying nature but had caused a disastrous flood instead and the death of the “little man’s” beloved. And when we crossed some bridge over one of the canals, and they glanced dubiously at the dark water, did they not recognize in it the reflection of Raskolnikov, looking at himself looking at a woman drowning while he did nothing? Or if they looked more closely still, could they not discern the unsinkable body of Rasputin, the dissolute Siberian monk with the magical powers to keep the blood of little Alexei Romanov from flowing all out, still struggling to foil poison, dagger, strangulation and drowning? It was lucky for them that it was summertime, so no ghosts were likely to snatch at their coats, but I was fully aware that Gogol’s “Nose” was about town, and that as an independent entity it would be far more skillful than its erstwhile owner in harassing us with bureaucratic zeal. And as we walked down Nevsky Prospect, once the posh main artery of imperial St. Petersburg, I couldn’t help looking for the latter-day “Underground Man,’ dissident or refusenik, bracing himself to contest the right-of-way on the crowded sidewalk with uppity officers, Tsarist and neo-Tsarist. And then there was more, much more: Andrei Bely, Alexander Block, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Kharms…

The case of Shostakovich, whose name, as we passed Symphony Hall, only I could read from the Cyrillic script, is no doubt different: music is an international language. All the same, can we really hear in his Seventh Symphony the cries of the million Leningraders who died during the 900-day siege of the city in 1941?  I doubt that even Shostakovich’s genius can bring home the desolation of war to those who have never experienced it, especially on their own soil. And yet here we were, trying to cross that very divide. I began to admire my Quaker companions for the very reason that they lacked my own understanding of the highs and lows of this culture, yet still rushed in where angels fear to tread.              

            My second trip to Leningrad took place in 1988.  This time I was traveling with a group of Unitarian Universalists. I knew more about them than I had known about the Quakers, since I had become one of them in 1981. The Unitarian arm of this denomination comes out of the religious traditions of Massachusetts going all the way back to the Pilgrims. But Eighteenth Century “Enlightenment” emancipated many of these erstwhile Puritans from some of the harsher tenets of Calvinism.  President Adams was a Unitarian. Later, this religious movement became associated with New England Transcendentalists such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Emerson and others, as well as the Abolitionist and Feminist Movements. In Europe the denomination boasts Newton, Darwin and Dickens among its ranks and goes back not just to the early stirrings of the Protestant Movement, but to the theological disputes of early Christianity. Essentially, it belongs to the tradition of “rationalist heresies” which have questioned the Trinitarian conception of God, and by implication, the divinity of Jesus. This associates them, if no doubt inadvertently so, with Judaism and Islam. In the Twentieth Century, the Unitarians have concluded a formal alliance with the Universalists, who had early on rejected the notion of predestined salvation: they believed that all God’s children deserve to be saved. Neither the spirit of Unitarian skepticism, nor the Universalist spirit of world-embracing love, is conducive to “final solutions,” “rapture,” “Armageddon,” or nuclear holocaust. And so a number of us embarked on a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union in 1988. 

            Once again the stay in Leningrad was but a brief portion of the projected trip. Once again we were whisked about to palaces and museums, some of the latter housed in churches. The Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan on Nevsky Prospect had been thus appropriated to become the “Museum of Atheism.” There was unfortunately no time to visit the place: all I could manage was a quick glance from the entrance, and walked away with a vision of fat Russian priests vividly depicted enjoying the sins of gluttony, simony and of course the national pastime of strong drink, known as “little water,” or vodka.  Leningrad itself, however, still looked like it could offer very little by way of enjoyment.  And even at that date, now that Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko were yielding to Gorbachev, I overheard our Inturist guides comparing notes about what to report about us to the KGB: they seemed reluctant, but they had to report something. In a candid moment one of them asked me who the “observer” was in our group. I was floored: the thought had never crossed my mind.

Nevertheless, I did manage to have brief conversations with ordinary Russians.  A couple of young people flashed peace signs at us as we were crossing a park, and when I stopped to talk to them, they were eager rather than afraid to do so. They told me that things were changing, and that they would never allow a return to the horrors of the past. Another occasion was provided by one of our group who was taken ill. I was actually allowed to take her to a clinic while our guides took the rest of the group to their scheduled outing. She was not very sick and was willing to try public transportation. We boarded a bus, and it became immediately obvious, from discreet stares, that we were pegged as foreigners. But when I asked for directions in Russian, a half-dozen people offered advice and help. As we prepared to get off, a man whispered to me a Russian version of “let’s make love, not war.”  At the hospital, the doctors and nurses all crowded around us and plied us with questions. One of the questions, however, was: “how come, since we were free to elect anyone we wanted, we had chosen a man like Reagan”? Their question had come even before President Reagan’s famous public announcement “we begin bombing in five minutes,” which happened a little later during this trip. (You may remember that the president had indulged his joke because he had not realized that the mikes had not yet been switched off). The Soviets were not amused, and from then on our attempts at “citizen diplomacy” met with a cool reception.

My third trip to Leningrad took place in 1996, at which point the city had already regained its original name of St. Petersburg. This latest trip was undertaken under professional auspices. I had been teaching Russian language and literature at the University of Arizona, and trying to keep up with events in the former Soviet Union. We were all thrilled, in the Slavic Department, by the momentous changes taking place there: the failure of the coup to overthrow Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s brave stand at Moscow’s White House, the upsurge of popular support for democracy. The news of newly opening archives in Russia was of more immediate interest. I had come across interesting research on the role of nuns in France and Germany as precursors of feminist aspirations, and I thought there might be similar material to be found in Russia. Tsars had routinely relegated unwanted wives or meddlesome sisters to nunneries, and I thought following some of these leads would be promising.  So I applied for a grant and found myself in St. Petersburg on a general tour of archival holdings.

My scholarly interest was hardly political dynamite, but the “secret” I came up against astonished me all the same. I had been directed down a rickety staircase of one of the libraries, and finally reached a platform. An elderly woman sat at a desk surrounded not only by stacks of books and folders, but by pictures of tsars and tsarinas, and great-duchesses and grand-dukes in all their regalia. They were displayed like icons, complete with votive lights: there was no mistaking that I had entered a shrine. But this keeper of the pre-revolutionary flame did not seem to understand the purpose of my research. She tried to convince me, instead, to undertake the reading and translation of the correspondence of Nicholas’ II mother, a Danish princess.

I was definitely looking at a “new” Russia. On a street corner stood a group of middle-aged, ill-shaven men, their chests covered with war medals. They played upbeat tunes on a variety of wind instruments. Free enterprise, by the looks of it, was on the rise, but my own coin was their only cash intake thus far. Further down the street an elderly, poorly-dressed woman stood on the sidewalk, displaying on a rag at her feet three silver spoons, an alarm clock, a small picture frame, and an old calendar. She addressed me in hesitant French, but upon discovering that I understood Russian, poured forth a torrent of grievances. She said that her pension barely covered her utility bills. She said that her niece was a teacher in Ulianovsk, the birthplace of Lenin on the Volga (now sporting its original name of Simbirsk again) and that she and her colleagues were on a hunger strike because they had not been paid for months. She said she knew elderly people who had been killed by gangsters, after they had been conned into signing over their apartment to some “maintenance” company.

When I asked whether she missed the good old days of law and order under the Communist system, she stopped short. She said some people she knew definitely felt that way, but she herself had been an ardent supporter of democratic renewal. Then she made a broad gesture which embraced the peeling buildings, the ill-dressed people, and her own treasures, and said: “but THIS”?  “This” was apparently a stab at Capitalism by way of a wholesale transfer of public assets into private ownership.  Former Soviet technocrats and of necessity Party members, who had been running the mines and oil fields and factories, managed to stay in place by becoming principal shareholders of these enterprises. The famous or infamous oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky is reported to have said that you had to be asleep or brain dead not to make a fortune in the Russia of the Nineties. All you needed was to make alliances: throw a bone to willing officials and, of course, share some of the windfall with all the protective rackets which sprang up in the wildly competitive free-for-all.  Yeltsin’s advisers were willing to submit the country to this “shock therapy,” believing that an extreme phase of Capitalism was inevitable at this early stage. Attempts at legality were feeble. A new constitution was hammered out, but the judicial system, traditionally subsumed under the structure of the one-party system, continued to rubber stamp the activities of the new power structure, otherwise known as Yeltsin’s “Family.” Just in case, however, newly-minted “robber barons” hastened to cash out instead of work their enterprises and stashed their loot abroad. Factories stopped producing. Transportation halted. Salaries dried up. People went hungry. (1)

Elections were in full swing in 1996, and I caught some of the action on TV. I was amazed at the candor of political reporting, and the richness and variety of programs in general. Compared to this no holds barred stream of muckraking our own media with its bland sitcoms, canned laughter, sound-bite news, managed debates, and idiotic commercials were mush. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the champion of Great-Russian chauvinism was not too entertaining a clown, and one wondered what to believe when Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, named names as he accused Yeltsin of selling the country down the river. There was much haggling between liberals and democrats over fine points of principle and policy. Yeltsin, however, was lionized and boosted, and carried the day. I watched and kept my fingers crossed.

 Nine more years passed before I could take another trip to St. Petersburg, which most Russians simply call Peter. The year was 2005 and both my husband Rick and I had retired. For the first time, we could go to Russia together and it was actually going to be a regular tourist trip. We boarded a cruise ship in Moscow, and traveled to St. Petersburg by way of the rivers, lakes and canals that join the two cities. After that, we spent an additional week in St. Petersburg on our own.

It was great not to have to stay in lock-step with thirty other people or follow pre-ordained schedules. We did palaces and museums for Rick’s sake, but also unhurried walks anywhere we pleased, and learned to use the Metro. The Hermitage was as crowded as the Louvre. In contrast to earlier visits, when there had been no souvenirs available, the place was glitzy with every kind of reproduction, elegant coffee shops, and invitations to order on-line with guaranteed home delivery. The rest of St. Petersburg was not as up-to-date, but a general face-lift was underway. Buildings were patched and repainted. Restaurants lined Nevsky Prospect. Their menu offerings ranged from Russian specialties to all-European cuisine, business lunches, pizza, and vegetarian choices. Even waiters behaved like waiters, more or less. Boats lined the canals now, and crowds of tourists, a good proportion of them Russian provincials, toured the waterways.

I wanted to show Rick the Museum of Atheism, but when we entered the Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan, we found ourselves in the midst of a Service: it had been reclaimed to its original purposes. Having been raised in the Russian Orthodox faith in emigration, the liturgy is quite familiar to me. The severe, long-cheeked icons, the burning candles, the long-haired priests in their Byzantine vestments dispensing clouds of incense, and especially the harmonies of well-loved chants and prayers descending from somewhere on high where the choir sang, all this felt like a homecoming. To my own surprise tears welled up and I couldn’t hold them back. In the spirit of the moment, I decided to light a candle. As I walked around, looking for a particular saint to present my offering (there are no pews in Russian Orthodox churches and people do wander around) I stopped in front of a very familiar effigy. It couldn’t be, but it WAS a large and very banal portrait of Nicolas II. Poor, mild, rigid, incompetent, pathetic Nicky had been canonized! My childhood pieties yielded to my Unitarian convictions and we walked out.  

St. Petersburg weather is known for its sudden temperature shifts, and I caught a chill. I used this excuse to stay put in our hotel to check out what Putin’s Russia had to offer on the little screen. I was appalled. The grace period I had witnessed earlier was over. The news came in bland, non-committal statements bordering on Soviet-era solemnity. Putin appeared often, giving brief replies to safe questions. The war in Chechnya was a non-subject. Commercials were the great novelty and struck me as woefully counter-cultural: skinny blondes squeal and wax orgasmic about detergent products in gleaming, American-style kitchens. But who in Russia has such kitchens?

I watched a movie. It was a spy flick with young Sergei Bodrov, a big star. It must have been a rerun, for the actor had already died in an accident. The title of the movie was Brat (Brother) and this “brother” turned out to be a hit man sent on a mission to the United States. Apparently, the Russians see us as a bunch of Chicago gangsters, homeless bums, rich American bitches and Black pimps lording it over Russian slave prostitutes. No wonder the unstoppable Russian hero proceeds to meet out bloody justice in a big burst of bullets. If the vicious violence and self-satisfied xenophobia were not enough, the piece was derivative as well: a Russian version of “Terminator,” only low-tech.

How did all this come to pass? What happened to all the brave hopes of Glasnost and democracy? Why were Russians on a back-and-forth shuttle between naive imitation and rage? Actually, the conflict between Westernizers and Slavophiles is an old story. In this story the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, have traditionally represented “a window on the West” and the erstwhile, indigenous values of Mother Russia, respectively, (though now they have switched places: Moscow is roaring forward while St. Petersburg, in comparison, is napping). The “accursed question” all along had been how or whether to integrate Western ways into a country which was neither ready for it, nor particularly interested. All of the great literature of the Nineteenth Century is one long debate on this issue. Russia was then still an agrarian society while the West was rapidly industrializing. An early Westernizer like Alexander Herzen, who had embraced Western liberalism, was nevertheless appalled to witness the human cost of Capitalism in contemporary England. A hundred years later Alexander Solzhenitsyn could still be called a Slavophile: despite severe persecution at home, he saw no salvation in the commercial values of the West.

Lenin and Stalin, in the meantime, had had no such scruples. They forced the country to industrialize, ready or not, cheerfully crushing as useless baggage those political liberties which had taken root in Russia with such effort. Marxism, however, was hardly a homegrown idea. It was borrowed to boost another big lurch into modernity: if it would take an organized proletarian base to by-pass the ills of Capitalism, they would organize just such a base, called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and sail straight into Utopia. Like Peter the Great they were in a hurry to “catch up” and “overtake,” no matter what the cost in human suffering. Khrushchev’s famous shoe-banging manifesto at the United Nations was in that tradition. The literal translation of his “we will bury you,” however, was a willful misinterpretation of an idiomatic expression which meant “we will overtake you:” the contest was economic.

All the same, this strenuous “catching up” and “overtaking” inevitably degenerated into a military power struggle with the West, initially represented by Europe, and subsequently by the United States. One could blame the West for its repeated invasions of Slavic territories, starting with the Teutonic Knights in the Middle-Ages, renewed by Napoleon in the name of revolution and by the Entente against revolution, and finally perfected by Hitler. And one can blame the Russian and Soviet empires for fighting back or counter-invading. The Slavic peoples suffered regardless, whether in defeat or victory, whether under foreign or internal oppression.

And it seemed that under Boris Yeltsin there had been yet another attempt at rapid Westernization and that under Vladimir Putin, the country was undergoing a typical retrenchment. The West’s twin gifts of Democracy and Capitalism turned out to be of unequal strength. The democratic movement in Russia was genuine, but immature.  Without firmly implanted checks and balances the strong-arm tactics of the past and the innately rapacious drives of Capitalism have organized themselves into a new and unpromising combination under Vladimir Putin.

Who is Vladimir Putin? On the eve of the new millennium, Yeltsin resigned in order to yield to an unknown, uncharismatic successor. This successor had been groomed not to rock the boat, ostensibly of the nascent and fragile democracy, but more importantly of those who had acquired wealth and power under Yeltsin, and expected to go on running the country. Putin had four years to consolidate his position.  At first he worked with the people he was given. Some of these people demonstrated a promising commitment to democratic institutions. At least, oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky had bankrolled independent TV and print media, as did Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  But little by little, Putin moved his own people into key positions. And the people with whom he shares a common language, unsurprisingly, are his old buddies from the KGB. These people are knowledgeable, disciplined, loyal to each other, and used to working behind the scenes. They are also used to getting away with coercive methods.

The media, which had been so instrumental in the political changes under Glasnost, was the first focus of this group’s attention. Putin and his advisers saw no need to leave things to chance for his election, due in 2004, and the media were taken over fairly rapidly. Putin, however, abstained from “campaigning,” leaving this to enfeebled opponents. He thus presented no defined platform or set of policies, but appeared often on TV in the sober act of governing. No probing questions were asked, or if it happened, journalists lost their jobs. He was elected by a 71% majority: he needed a mandate, not an embarrassing landslide.

After regaining control of the media, Putin went on to solidify control over Russia’s greatest source of wealth, namely oil and natural gas. Uncooperative oligarchs were taken to court and generally persuaded to accept the inevitable or seek exile. These oligarchs had graduated to running their companies along more “legitimate” Western lines, and Khodorkovsky was entering deals with British Petroleum and negotiating with Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco.  But the party was over, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky is still in jail. (2)

As I struggled to puzzle out all these contradictions upon my return home, another chance to travel to Petersburg presented itself. Since my retirement from the University of Arizona I had decided to switch gears and begin writing for the general public instead of my academic peers. I found out about a writers’ workshop, some sort of Russian-American cooperative effort, which had apparently been held for some years in St. Petersburg. I decided to apply, and this led to my latest two-week stay in June of 2006.  

The group of writers and would-be writers who attended could not be placed under one defining label, like the Quakers or Unitarian-Universalists of my earlier trips. At least not in the sense of a particular mission: if anything, their individual writing projects were their mission. They seemed glad of the reasonably-priced venue, but Russia itself seemed pretty much incidental to their purpose. Their next venue was going to take place in Kenya. At any rate they behaved like typical tourists, talked incessantly about food and plumbing and all the other expectations of ordinary civilized intercourse (computers, printers, ATMs, cell phones). The younger crowd, however, had no trouble finding suitable watering holes. It appeared that some of them were harassed and it remains unclear whether those who tried to shake them down were vice squads or hoodlums dressed in police uniforms. There were also incidents of pick pocketing. But men of all ages bugged out at the “new” Russian women: sleek chicks in tight mini-skirts and high heels, their blond hair long and silky, their blue eyes perfectly groomed and unsmiling. Everybody missed good-natured American smiles. 

But it would be unfair to overstate my case. Not all were stuck in cultural stereotype, and the organizers of the Summer Literary Seminars tried very hard to mediate cultural boundary crossings with both practical help and learning opportunities. This time I left well-trodden palaces and museums to others, choosing to walk alone or with small groups spearheaded by young and enthusiastic guides. We retraced the steps of the action of Crime and Punishment, walked up to the windows of Rasputin’s last apartment, and visited the Anna Akhmatova museum as well as Vladimir Nabokov’s stately townhouse. A visit to a Russian “banya,” or public bath, was a trip into Russian folklore. When we entered with some diffidence the sacred chamber dense with steam, unsure whether to keep or don our towels, we found there a group of unselfconsciously naked Russian women. I picked up some mutterings about “foreign invasion,” but when I invited them to induct us into the mysteries of the process, they willingly showed us how to wield the fragrant bunches of birch to enhance the cleansing experience.

A handful among the participants of the writers’ workshop had selected the option of staying in apartments rather than at the hotel booked for the occasion. I was among them, but in this instance and despite my cultural head start I too found myself reacting like a tourist. The apartment was located in a presumably reputable neighborhood, yet I had to run the obstacle course of two creaky wrought-iron gates and two reinforced steel doors, using separate sets of electronic and metal keys. Did Russians really HAVE to live in this institutionalized paranoia so reminiscent of Orwell’s “1984”?

The prevailing fear, it seemed, was of street criminals and terrorists. Since the mid-nineties apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities had been dynamited, causing hundreds of casualties. In 1999, however, a bomb was discovered in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan and defused. Evidence pointing to the Federal Security Service (FSB) rather than Chechen terrorists was buried and the whole incident put to rest. Terrorist threat had become a major article of faith during Putin’s non-campaign and tenure. Yeltsin had negotiated a cease-fire with Chechnya in 1996. Putin, however, resumed hostilities. He promised a rapid sweep up and victory, which led his government to condone wholesale atrocities against the Chechen population. The conflict escalated, bringing real acts of revenge back to Russia: the hostage taking of a theater in Moscow and a school in Beslan.

The vote for Putin in 2004 had been a vote for “stability.” People attributed to Yeltsin’s reforms their loss of jobs, non-payment of salaries and pensions, deteriorating health care and educational systems, profiteering in high places, crime on the streets, loss of face in the world, and, of course,  terrorism. Did they know that in voting for him they were also surrendering hard-won political rights, hopes of justice in the courts, and truth telling in the media? These lofty goals could not supersede the immediate reality of poverty, fear, and demoralization. Enough people were persuaded that their very survival depended on a “steady hand” at the top.

So how did Vladimir Putin exercise his “mandate”? Moscow has the reputation of being the world’s most expensive city. Despite this, tourists roam the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and some Russians travel abroad. But few can fix their apartments, afford proper health care, or send their kids to a good school. The notorious lines and shortages of the Communist era are gone, but as I stood behind a young couple in a neighborhood grocery store, I overheard them arguing the choice between eggs OR milk. Early mortality persists and AIDS has reached epidemic proportions. And outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, general stagnation remains the name for Putin’s stability. But there is hope. The windfall from oil and gas revenues will be put to good use: Putin is beginning to overhaul and revamp the armaments industry.

Does this mean a renewed arms race? Has the Soviet Union not been dismembered and left far behind? Besides, we and the Russkis are friends and partners against terrorism: they do Chechnya and we do Iraq. Actually, Putin had bent over backward about Iraq, where Russian oil engineers and businessmen had been poised, the minute U.N. sanctions would be lifted, for profitable deals with Saddam Hussein. And he had been helpful with Afghanistan as well (where Russian experience is well-earned) going so far as to agree to American bases in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. After all, what are friends for?

Russian-American friendship looked really sealed when Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush hit it off personally. The latter was floored when Vladimir admitted shyly that he still has the baptismal cross his mother had given him. It was like cutting their fingers and mixing blood. Back at the ranch, however, the president’s entourage was less prone to soul communion, and the Russians received next to nothing in exchange for their overtures: paltry American investment (especially when compared to China), no cutting back on the missile defense program, no renewal of the ABM treaty, no repeal of trade restrictions (the Jackson-Vanik bill), no staying out of Russia’s quarrel with Ukraine, and finally, after all the refurbishing of St. Petersburg I had witnessed in anticipation of the G 8 Summit there, a veto against Russia joining the World Trade Organization. No wonder they are acting like spurned lovers and sending their virtual hit men to have their way with American evildoers. Or else, tightening their belts once more, and going back to plan B: refurbishing their rusting and leaking arsenals. (2)

This IS depressing: after five trips observing the transformation of Leningrad back into St. Petersburg, and many years of trying to understand Russia and our relations with them, I was back where I started – in 1984. And so, after returning home, I picked up George Orwell’s novel again. This time I was reading an altogether different book. The sinister presence of Big Brother and the oppressive system he incarnates were still valid for aspects of Russia, but now I recognized the much wider application of the syndrome. George Orwell had never been in Russia, although he did have occasion to experience Soviet-initiated high-handedness and back-stabbing during the Spanish Civil War. Still, his intimate understanding of Winston Smith’s predicament surely also comes from the author’s early stint in the British police force in Burma, his times “down and out” among the “proles” of France and England, and his work for the BBC: the media campaign for a sudden switch of alliances from the Soviet Union to Germany at the end of World War II must have been somewhat unnerving. After all, it is Oceania he is describing. I had wondered how he had gotten the stench of dog piss, vomit and cabbage so characteristic of the dark entryways of Russia’s apartment buildings. What he must have known was the universal smell of poverty.

Let us look at the creeds which sustain Oceania. The first creed is WAR IS PEACE. It is quite true, is it not, that we are and have been, and plan to be in a state of continuous war. And this is perfectly acceptable and tantamount to peace because it does not affect us directly. First, war takes place in the intermediate regions Orwell defined so well (parts of Africa, the Middle-East, Afghanistan – and he could have added Vietnam and the Balkans) and it is run by mercenaries. But neither the inhabitants of these regions nor the mercenaries concern us. Cindy Sheehan can stand on her head at Crawford, no one MADE her son join up: George W. certainly knew better at his age.  Second, war is peace because it keeps us employed (the brains and the middle management and the grunts), and will go on doing so because it is an industry with enviable built-in obsolescence.

This takes us to the second creed: SLAVERY IS FREEDOM. Although the war effort keeps us working, it keeps us poor. The military-industrial complex does not care about schools or hospitals or the environment or the arts or social security. But a job is a job and we are not as poor as the rest of the world, so this makes it O.K. There is plenty of “coolies,” as Orwell calls them, (like the geeks from the Indian subcontinent who fix our computers long-distance) we can use for even cheaper labor. This is called free enterprise or the law of the free market, where even commercials are entitled to free speech. But the people massing along the Axis of Evil envy us our freedom, and in order to remain free we have created the Patriot Act. Of course if we don’t like it, we can vote the rascals out. Or can we?

The free media should help, but as George Orwell’s put it, “they were given intellectual freedom because they had no intellect” and the real credo is: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.  The Unitarian Universalists and Quakers, my traveling companions to the then Soviet Union, had done something remarkable: they had torn themselves from their assigned window on the world and undertaken to travel to parts unknown. They had wanted to remedy their ignorance. And sure enough, when they met ordinary Russians, they found them to be very much like themselves. This made them weak and sappy, and I am not at all surprised that the Friends Service Committee should be under strict government surveillance these days. Those professional pacifiers simply don’t understand the psychological advantages of releasing pent-up frustration and hatred at suitable targets. The Romans did it in their arenas and we do it on the little screen: all that sexy violence and heart-warming fantasy allowing us to say with pride: “united we stand.” In short, not to know the Iraqis or the Chechen is to bomb them. Despite all their WMDs they cannot bomb us, but we can bomb them: is this strength or what?   

George Orwell saw these trends back in the forties, but was persuaded to shift his insights into the future. Now it has indeed come to pass that the former Soviet Union and its satellites profess ideologies indistinguishable from ours, while our own actions strive to emulate their practice of using external threats as an instrument of internal control. As to the new official enemy, the Arabs, how exactly are we to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalists and Bible-belt fundamentalists? And now China has matured into the third self-sustaining entity of Orwell’s prophecy. But outright war with China is as unthinkable as outright war with Russia used to be, and we’re stuck in this three-way contest. But by waging perpetual war on the edges of empires, our leaders wink at each other across the no man’s lands they are creating, and wax fatter and greedier in their respective spheres of influence. And it is our separate fears, impoverishment and ignorance which feed them.

 But we have a new challenge even George Orwell did not anticipate: what will happen if Mother Nature, tired of our foolishness, declares a REAL war on us? Right now tsunamis in Indonesia, and droughts in Africa, and floods in Bangladesh or New Orleans hardly faze us because they affect the marginal peoples we have long since given up on. How will it be when big chunks of Florida, Los Angeles and New York are no more (as well as, incidentally, St. Petersburg, most of Holland, and a hundred million Indians and Chinese)? But by that time it will be too late. A disaster of such proportions will only make us desperate and even easier pickings for the sharks and control freaks of this world. If this challenge doesn’t get us going, Orwell’s dystopia is but a pale shadow of what awaits us.

• Satter, David. Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State. Yale University Press. New Haven and London, 2003.
• Baker, Peter and Glasser, Susan. Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution. Scribner. New York, 2005.