“Because I have a fever,” I answer. Feeling our way in the dark, we find the doors, locked with a padlock. We enter, the woman turns on the light. I see the bed. “You know,” I say to her, “there are these American postcards, on which is written ‘Happiness is …’ and then various drawings representing what happiness is. For me,” I say, “now, happiness is seeing a bed.”
“Yes, you really are sick,” she says, and after a time brings me a pot of hot tea and a whole collection of various jams and candies on a tray.
She asks me what nationality I am.
Like peasants the world over who begin each conversation with reflections on the subject of crops, and Englishmen who start every exchange with a discussion of the weather, so in the Imperium the first step in establishing contact between people is a mutual determination of one’s nationality. For much will depend on this.
In most instances, the criteria are clear and legible. Here’s a Russian, here’s a Kazakh, here’s a Tatar, here’s an Uzbek. But there is a large percentage of citizens of this state for whom self-identification presents serious difficulties, who — to put it otherwise — do not feel part of any nation. Take, for example, my friend Ruslan from Chelyabinsk. His grandfather was a Russian, his grandmother a Georgian. Their son, Ruslan’s father, decided that he would be a Georgian. He married a Tatar. For love of his mother, Ruslan declared himself a Tatar. At the university in Omsk he married a friend — an Uzbek. They now have a son, Mutar. What nationality is Mutar?
Sometimes these genealogies are even more complicated, so that many do not feel associated with any nationality whatsoever. This is the Homo sovieticus—he is not what he is because of any particular consciousness or attitude; his sole social determinant is membership in the Soviet state. Now, after the fall of this state, such people are searching for a new identity (those, that is, who even stop to think about this at all).
THIS ETHNIC Homo sovieticus is a product of the history of the USSR, a significant portion of which comprises unceasing, intense, and massive migrations, displacements, transportations, and wanderings of the population. This movement begins in the nineteenth century with the deportations to and colonization of Siberia, as well as the colonial expansion into Asia, but it gathers strength only after 1917. Millions of people lose the roof over their head and spill out onto the roads. Some are returning from the fronts of World War I; others are setting off for the fronts of the great civil war. The famine of 1921 forces subsequent millions to roam in search of a piece of bread. Children whom the war and the Revolution have deprived of parents, those millions of miserable bezprizorny, form hunger crusades that traverse the country in all directions. And later, throngs of laborers in search of work and bread travel to the Urals and other corners of the country, where they can find employment building factories, foundries, mines, dams. For more than forty years, tens of millions of people make the martyr’s journey to the camps and prisons scattered over the entire territory of the superpower. The Second World War erupts, and subsequent multitudes are displaced in all directions, depending on where the front is. At the same time, behind these front lines, Beria directs the deportation of Poles and Greeks, Germans and Kalmuks, into the depths of the Caucasus and to Siberia. As a result, entire nations find themselves in lands foreign to them, in unfamiliar surroundings, in poverty and hunger. One of the goals of these operations is to create the uprooted man, wrenched from his culture, from his environment and landscape, and therefore more defenseless and obedient vis-à-vis the dictates of the regime.
And to this picture of ceaseless and massive forced migrations of peoples let us add the dozens of more voluntary “Komsomol enlistments,” the scores of migrations occurring under such slogans as “The motherland needs metal,” “Plow the fallow lands,” “Conquer the taiga,” and so on. Let us remember too the waves of refugees that set forth with each ethnic conflict and spill across the country.
And today thousands of people are camped out still, in airports, in train stations, in barracks, in slums, in tents. The spirit and atmosphere of nomadism are still present and alive here, and an often-heard saying goes: “My address is not the number of a house, nor the name of a street, nor the name of a city, my address is the Soviet Union” (today, the Commonwealth of Independent States; I do not know what the Imperium will be called tomorrow).
And so, with these great and uninterrupted migrations, with the mixing of races that has gone on for generations, it is the similarity between or the uniformity of human types rather than their variety and distinctiveness that draws the attention of those who come into contact with the inhabitants of the Imperium for the first time.
THE FEARS of the Russian woman from 117 Pouchin Street are exaggerated fears: they do not touch Russians here. An Uzbek might fight with a Tajik, a Buryat with a Chechen, but no one will come near a Russian. Mickiewicz reflected upon this phenomenon, which seemed, at first glance, incomprehensible: A single czarist official drives an entire column of Tuvinians (a Siberian tribe) to a hard-labor camp, and not one of these unfortunate vassals will revolt. After all, they could easily kill this official and vanish into the forest. But no, they walk on obediently, meekly execute his commands, endure his verbal abuse in silence. The reason, Mickiewicz explains, is that, in the eyes of the enslaved Tuvinians, this official personifies the might of the all-powerful state, which arouses their fright, terror, dread. To raise a hand against the official is to raise a hand against the superpower, and none of them can bring himself to do that. The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, in his book Portrait du colonise, accurately presents this composite of hatred and fear that characterizes the attitude of a colonized man toward his ruler, the colonizer. Fear, Memmi observes, will in the final calculation always dominate over hatred, will suppress and paralyze it.
One need only see cities over which a wave of ethnic conflict has recently rolled — even Fergane or Osh. Among the burned and devastated houses of Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, or Tajiks are visible the untouched houses of Russians. For who stands behind a poor Karachi, attacked by an infuriated Turk? At most — another Karachi. And behind a Russian? A kalashnikov, a tank, a nuclear bomb.
AND YET my Russian from Baku, at the first stirring in the street, at the first echoes of approaching armed bands, which — as everyone knows — are coming to bash in the heads of Armenians, and of Armenians only, packs her suitcases in haste and rushes to the airport, happy that she succeeded in getting out of hell. But where is this hell? Where is it to be found?
It is within her, within her consciousness.
I AM REMINDED of Africa, the sixties, scenes at the airports in Algiers, Léopoldville, and Usumbura; then, in the seventies, the same scenes at the airports in Luanda and Lourenço Marques. Camped out on their bundles, semiconscious from exhaustion and fear, crowds of white refugees. They are yesterday’s colonizers, former rulers of these lands. Today, however, their sole desire is to get away from here, to get away immediately, leaving everything — houses awash in flowers, gardens, swimming pools, sailboats. Whence this desperate haste and determination? What is it that drives them to Europe so suddenly? What titanic force expels them so violently and ruthlessly from these comfortable, magnificent places warmed by the tropical sun? Perhaps the natives have begun the mass slaughter of their white masters? Perhaps their luxurious neighborhoods have gone up in flames? No, nothing of the sort is happening.