In the south — Astara (the border with Iran) or Termez (the border with Afghanistan)
A huge area of the world. But then the surface of the Imperium measures more than twenty-two million square kilometers, and its continental borders are longer than the equator and stretch for forty-two thousand kilometers.
Keeping in mind that wherever it is technically possible, these borders were and are marked with thick coils of barbed wire (I saw such barriers on the borders with Poland, China, and Iran) and that this wire, because of the dreadful climate, quickly deteriorates and therefore must often be replaced across hundreds, no, thousands, of kilometers, one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.
For the matter does not end with the wiring of borders! How many thousands of kilometers of wire were used to fence in the gulag archipelago? Those hundreds of camps, staging points, and prisons scattered throughout the territory of the entire Imperium! How many thousands more kilometers were swallowed up for the wiring of artillery, tank, and atomic ranges? And the wiring of barracks? And various warehouses?
If one were to multiply all this by the number of years the Soviet government has been in existence, it would be easy to see why, in the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a hammer, never mind a knife or a spoon: such things could simply not be produced, since the necessary raw materials were used up in the manufacture of barbed wire. And that is still not the end of it! After all, tons of this wire had to be transported by ships, railroad, helicopters, camels, dog teams, to the farthest, most inaccessible corners of the Imperium, and then it all had to be unloaded, uncoiled, cut, fastened. It is easy to imagine those unending telephone, telegraphic, and postal reminders issued by the commanders of the border guards, the commanders of the gulag camps, and prison directors following up on their requisitions for more tons of barbed wire, the pains they would take to build up a reserve supply of this wire in case of a shortage in the central warehouses. And it is equally easy to imagine those thousands of commissions and control teams dispatched across the entire territory of the Imperium to make certain that everything is properly enclosed, that the fences are high and thick enough, so meticulously entangled and woven that even a mouse cannot squeeze through. It is also easy to imagine telephone calls from officials in Moscow to their subordinates in the field, telephone calls characterized by a constant and vigilant concern expressed in the question “Are you all really properly wired in?” And so instead of building themselves houses and hospitals, instead of repairing the continually failing sewage and electrical systems, people were for years occupied (although fortunately not everyone!) with the internal and external, local and national, wiring of their Imperium.
THE IDEA of a great journey was born in the course of reading the news about perestroika. Almost all of it originated from Moscow. Even if it concerned events in a place as distant as Chabarovsk, it was still datelined “Moscow.” My reporter’s soul would rebel. In such moments I was drawn to Chabarovsk; I wanted to see for myself what was going on there. It was a temptation all the stronger because, even with my slight knowledge of the Imperium, I was aware how much Moscow differs from the rest of the country (although not in everything), and that enormous areas of this superpower are an immeasurable terra incognita (even for the inhabitants of Moscow).
But doubts at once assailed me — was I really right to search for perestroika outside Moscow? I had just read a new book, published in early 1989, by the eminent historian Natan Eydelman, Revolution from the Top in Russia. The author regards perestroika as just one more in a series of turning points in Russian history and reminds us that all such turning points, revolutions, convulsions, and breakthroughs in this country came about because they were the will of the czar, the will of the secretary-general, or the will of the Kremlin (or of Petersburg). The energy of the Russian nation, says Eydelman, has always been spent not on independent grass-roots initiatives, but on carrying out the will of the ruling elite.
The message between the lines: perestroika will last as long as the Kremlin will allow it to.
So, if one wished to know the direction and strength of the wind, perhaps it would be better to be in Moscow, near the Kremlin, and to observe the seismographs, thermometers, barometers, and weather vanes that are situated around its walls? For Kremlinology more often reminded me of meteorology than of knowledge such as one gathers at the crossroads of history and philosophy.
IT IS AUTUMN 1989. My first encounter with the Imperium in years. I was last here more than twenty years ago, at the start of the Brezhnev era. The era of Stalin, the era of Khrushchev, the era of Brezhnev. And before that: the era of Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander III. In what other country does the persona of the ruler, his character traits, his manias and phobias, leave such a profound stamp on the national history, its course, its ascents and downfalls? Hence the rapt attention with which the moods, depressions, and caprices of successive czars and secretaries-general were always followed in Russia and around the world — how much depended on this! (Mickiewicz on Nicholas I: “The Czar is surprised — the inhabitants of Petersburg tremble with fear, / The Czar is angry — his courtiers die of fear; armies are marching, whose God and faith / is the Czar. The Czar is angry: let us die, we will cheer up the Czar!”)
The czar has been considered a god, literally, for centuries, for Russia’s entire history. Not until the nineteenth century was there a czarist decree to remove the portraits of the czar from the Orthodox churches. A czarist decree! Without it no one would have been so bold as to touch such a portrait, or rather, icon. Even Bakunin, that anarchist and subversive, Jacobin and dynamiter, calls the czar “the Russian Christ.” And just as the czars are the vicars of God, so Lenin and Stalin are the vicars of world communism. Only after Stalin’s death does the slow process of secularizing the rule of the Almighty begin. Secularization — and with it the gradual erosion of omnipotence. Brezhnev complained about this. In the fall of 1968, criticizing Dubček and his people, who wanted to reform the system in Czechoslovakia and as a result drew Soviet tanks down upon their heads, Brezhnev lamented: “You thought that because you are in power, you can do whatever you please. But that is a great mistake! Even I cannot do what I would like — of all the things I would like to have come true, I can perhaps realize barely a third” (Zdenek Mlynar, The Frost from the East).
SO, THE AIRPORT, passport control. In the little window a young soldier from the border guards. The checking of the passport begins. Looking, reading, but, first and foremost, searching for the photograph. There it is! The soldier looks at the photograph, and then at me, at the photograph and immediately at me, at the photograph and at me. Something does not seem quite right to him. “Take off your glasses!” he orders. At the photograph and at me, at the photograph and at me. But I can see that now, without the glasses, it seems even less right. I can see concentration in his pale eyes and sense that his mind is starting to work feverishly. I think I know what this mind is working on at this moment — it is searching for the enemy. The enemy doesn’t have his credentials stamped on his forehead; quite the contrary — the enemy is masked. So the trick is to unmask him. It is precisely in this skill that they school my soldier and thousands of his colleagues. Here you have a hundred photographs, says the sergeant, among them one is of a spy. Whoever guesses correctly which one it is will receive a week’s vacation. The boys stare and stare; sweat breaks out on their foreheads. A week’s vacation!