I turned down an alley between wrecked warehouses [Zoya continues] and found myself facing the archway I was looking for. I tapped on the door in the pattern I had been told to and waited. After a few moments the door opened and I stepped inside a single, candlelit room. As I turned I found my heart thumping madly. I had of course expected that the man I was to bring the food to would be old, that’s to say my father’s age, in his fifties perhaps. But the tall, slender figure in Western jeans looking down at me was no more than twenty-three or four.
“Please sit down,” he said, pulling a crate closer to the small fire. “I didn’t expect a girl, I mean someone like you.”
“I didn’t expect someone like you,” I blurted out. And felt covered with embarrassment.
He stood holding the half-quart in his hand. “You must be Zoya, Joseph Densky’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“My name is Anton.”
“Anton,” I repeated stupidly.
I looked around at the crumbling walls and tattered blankets hanging over the window. “What will you do?” I asked him. “You can’t live like this.”
“Many people do, Zoya,” he said. “You’ve seen them out there, people that the Soviet system has used, broken and tossed aside. And they’re the ones who are still free.”
“You’re against the Soviet system then?” I said with awe.
“As long as it continues to put the good life for the few above justice for the many, I’m against it in the same way your father is.”
Of course I had heard my father talking over the years, but I think he must have been careful to hide from me the full extent of his opposition. I had continued to believe that dissenters were Moscow intellectuals with strong Western links, poets and writers who made money from running down their own country in the books they sold abroad. It seemed to shatter everything I had believed in to see my father and someone like Anton in the same light.
“My father loves Russia,” I said. “I’ve often heard him say he would never live anywhere else.” I was speaking desperately, with images of the flailing police batons on the Blue Bridge and the cold denials from the militia fresh in my mind.
He put a warm brown hand on my arm. “Zoya,” he said, “surely a man can love Russia and despise the Soviet system.”
I suppose I must have looked as stunned as I felt. Was it really possible that those two thoughts could exist together?
Perhaps he saw the shock I had suffered. He reached for the half-quart. “Will you have some of this?” He lifted the bottle. “There are no glasses I’m afraid.”
I have never drunk vodka in my life, but I had no intention of losing the opportunity of drinking from a bottle his lips had touched.
“You first,” I said.
He drank and passed the bottle to me. I raised it to my lips. Lost in my reverie I was completely unprepared for the rush of fire that entered my mouth and coursed down my throat.
He saved the bottle from crashing to the floor by snatching it from my hand, I gasped, spluttered. Vodka snorted from my nostrils and streamed from the corners of my mouth.
He was laughing. “My God,” he said. “You looked so much older.”
Mortification overwhelmed any conceivable fear as I made my way back across Vasilyevsky Park that night. How can we suffer the blasts of two contrary emotions? Desperate to see him again, it was at the same time the last thing in the world I felt I could bear.
Chapter Two
The death of Leonid Brezhnev after so long an illness could not have been expected to have had the impact which a sudden collapse might have had.
Much of the credit for the easy transfer of power must undoubtedly go to the octogenarian Mikhail Romanovsky who had become, effectively, leader of the Soviet Union from the time of Brezhnev’s first unpublicized hospitalization and was sworn in as President of the Soviet Union on the morning of Brezhnev’s death.
The world and the Russian dominions had no doubt that President Romanovsky was a caretaker president. He was, to begin with, even older than Brezhnev. In the mid-eighties he was, however, still a solid, impressive figure, well able to stand upright in driving snow while welcoming foreign dignitaries, or to endure the interminable speeches of the Palace of Congresses.
He had been a close friend of President Brezhnev since their childhood in the Czarist steel town of Kamenskoye where they were both born. Over three-quarters of a century stood between the unpaved streets, the dugout cottages, the huddled buildings of the Tailors’ Synagogue of their youth together, and the moving funeral oration Romanovsky delivered at his friend’s death. It was three-quarters of a century in which Romanovsky, always in the background, had absorbed the Brezhnev style and the Brezhnev approach to Party and international affairs. When he became President, Mikhail Romanovsky simply and deliberately extended the Brezhnev years.
Then, after less than three years of power, the new Soviet leader, on a visit to Oslo, collapsed on the steps of the presidential aircraft and pitched forward onto the runway.
Before Soviet security men jerked the cameras away, Romanovsky was shown gasping for breath, trying to raise himself on one hand.
He was flown immediately back to Moscow and a Tass report described the incident as an accident due to oil on the runway.
In the West, hours of television time were taken over by the incident. Hundreds of newspaper articles explained that President Romanovsky had not reached the runway when he fell, that doctors rerunning the film saw that his legs had buckled under him, that it was not a simple slip, but much more a collapse of the muscular system indicating the possibility of a heart attack. The few feet of film as he lay on the runway was equally examined. It was pointed out that he was levering himself up on his right hand only. Did this suggest a stroke? Everybody agreed that there was a certain contortion of the features. But might not this be simply the pain of the fall? The West waited impatiently. From Moscow there came no word.
Nobody now doubts that for the Soviet Union and the world, 1980 to 1985 were the fateful years.
At the root of its looming problems was the simple fact that the Soviet Union was an empire comprising fifteen totally different nations, one hundred languages, a racial spectrum from Slav to Mongol, a half dozen different residual religions.
At the center of the empire stood the Russia of the Czars, proud, patriotic, the first among equals. But as the 1980s began it was not necessary to be a Ukrainian, an Estonian, an Armenian or an Uzbek to be aware that Soviet triumphs were now ringing from a cracked bell.
In so many ways it was the Soviet Army in which many of these nationalist stresses were concentrated. Not surprisingly, people in the West reading of the vast defense budgets announced by the Kremlin, thought of the Soviet army as a highly trained and integrated force.
Yet the truth was far from that. The truth was that the Army was the point at which all those promises to the Soviet Union’s non-Russian peoples ended. Every training camp for conscripts might well have had a sign over the gate reading: Local Languages and Cultures Stop Here.
The truth was that the Soviet Army was one vast school for the Russification of the Union’s one hundred different nationalities.
In the 1970s a typical conscript might leave his home in the grazing lands of Uzbekistan in southern central Asia. He would be just over eighteen years old, literate in his own language but barely able to speak Russian. The northwest of the Soviet Union, the lands of the Slavs, would have been totally unknown to him. Yet he would be entering a Russian army where Russian was the only language, where almost every senior officer was Russian or at least Ukrainian, where the need for technical expertise had directed the Slavs into aviation, armor and artillery and the less highly educated Asiatics into pioneer and construction battalions. Some young men from the Soviet Asiatic Republics claimed they did not know their nations were colonies until they entered the Red Army.