“It’s like this,” the writer replies. “Just imagine that you get up early in New York, go to the station, get into a crowded train. You arrive in Washington a few hours later, run around the stores all day, and finally find a stick of sausage, naturally
not the kind you’d like, but sausage nevertheless. You come back to New York that evening, exhausted but happy.”
The cabdriver couldn’t get it. And really, how do you explain it to a New York cabby?
DECEMBER 30. I think I’ve defeated my tormentor. Lately she’s been truly intolerable. She went to all the rooms and told a fantastic lie about me: that I was practically an underground millionaire. If only that were true! I was doubly hurt because I’m having financial problems right now.
I picked a moment when we were alone, and I let her have it. I told her that I wouldn’t put up with her nonsense anymore and that I was declaring war. A few days later she turned into my best friend and defender. With friends like that who needs enemies? But this was a lesson for me, although a dangerous one. If you start fighting people like that with their own weapons, you won’t even notice becoming one of them. Of course, our whole system is built on that: Be like everyone else, part hypocrite, part intriguer, part deceiver, and in total a simple, open, and unobtrusive Soviet person.
JANUARY 2 , 1989. As there is everywhere else, there are love stories at work. There are lonely women and local lotharios. Students fall in love with teachers, and teachers with students. Students here are adults, so there’s nothing necessarily bad about it. We already have one happily wedded couple.
One of our young men falls only for tall brunettes. Another likes all pretty women and, according to reliable sources, has already slept with four and wanted to marry two (even though he’s already married). His affairs have led to touchy moments and scenes of jealousy in the halls. One seduced and abandoned girl, suspecting nothing, bawled on the shoulder of her replacement. The girls shared sweet, intimate details about him. They could have held a scholarly symposium on that man.
The most unpredictable people are lonely women. Periods of frenzied work alternate with episodes of mysterious love. The work attacks are harmful to the rest; they sweep everyone out of their path. On the love days they are dreamy and lovely. They float down the hallways (despite their girth), smile at everyone, and forget their heightened work discipline of a few days ago.
The most dangerous people are the lonely, jealous women when they fall in love with staff members. Then you have to keep away from their chosen ones, even on business. They’ll turn you to ash with their gazes, make up lies, and avenge themselves over nothing. So you have to be aware and keep up with the romance department to stay out of trouble. We have women who know all. You can come to them at any moment for the information you seek. When you’re in a bad mood, you can ask them to fill you in on someone. It’s like a soap opera. You can forget your own problems and follow someone else’s life drama.
When I was getting a divorce, I didn’t tell anyone because I knew that my problems could become someone else’s amusement.
To tell the truth, I enjoy good gossip myself. Sometimes, if we don’t finish stories at work, we call each other in the evenings.
I have my “agents” who gather my information (what the boss said about me, what others replied, and so on). Naturally I spy on their behalf, but bear in mind that there is counterespionage at work, too, like the KGB and the CIA with all their departments.
JANUARY 3. About ten years ago what I am writing here would have been enough to put me in prison or have me declared insane and fired. Just for describing my life and my feelings! And there’s a whole generation like me. A recent sociological poll tried to paint a portrait of various generations. My generation was dropped; a ten-year period was skipped. I guess there’s nothing to say about us; we’re nothing. Or perhaps nothing unites us besides emptiness and apathy. Everyone survived in his or her own way.
We caught a piece of the Khrushchev thaw when we were children. Our parents took us along when they went to visit friends—not to party and drink but to read Khrushchev’s letter to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party or Yevtushenko’s autobiography. We’d get home late at night (those retyped pages would be available only for one evening), and I’d imagine Black Marias on every street corner. I am grateful to my parents that they did not spare my young mind or imagination. They knew that I’d never be a young builder of communism anyway, and knowing the truth was painful but necessary. I was allowed to read banned adult books, and they spoke frankly about politics at the dinner table.
Despite the grim revelations, the Khrushchev times were
THE INTIMATE DIARY OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN 111
filled with naive and sincere optimism. People danced the twist, drank wine, fell in love, went to literary evenings, read poetry, and believed in the future, though, of course, not the radiant Communist one. I watched my older cousin enviously when she put on dresses with full skirts and went off to dances. I waited for my turn, but it never came.
Our high school and university years were different. We were again stuffed with Marxism-Leninism; we were again told that Stalin hadn’t been so bad, that he had raised the country out of ruin and created a world power. But I knew better. . . . Studying at an elite Soviet college, I was surrounded by the children of bureaucrats—the luxuriously dressed girls and the obnoxious boys who were driven to school in black Volgas. Sometimes they made me feel inferior, for I dressed modestly. It was hard for a professor’s daughter to compete in that area with the daughter of a Central Committee chauffeur.
We were plunging headlong into the era of Brezhnev corruption. It was a time of total permissiveness for some and total hopelessness for others. Money could buy anything—an African lion, a trip to New York, a Hero of the Soviet Union star. And at the same time you couldn’t go visit friends in Poland or Hungary, you couldn’t correspond with Americans, you couldn’t read Solzhenitsyn. When I returned from the house of a Dutch friend (that was daring, having a friend like that in Moscow) with a copy of The Gulag Archipelago in my bag, I was risking everything—my father’s job and career, my future. There were many incidents when people were approached in the metro, taken into a room, and searched. A relative of a friend of mine got caught like that. As a precautionary measure, my friend’s family “evacuated” their dissident library from their
ELENA SUKHORUKIKH ROMINE 112
home to the country and waited for a search that luckily did not come.
We were afraid of one another. Our small crowd at college had two snitches: one out of conviction, the other out of need (he had almost been expelled for bad grades).
We walked with horror past the Serbsky Institute, where political prisoners were kept. What could be more terrible than a healthy person’s being forcibly and painfully treated in a psychiatric hospital?
An entire family paid for an incorrect move from the Soviet regime’s point of view. If a young woman married a foreigner, the father was fired from work. A sister’s happiness depended on the unhappiness of her brother. People were afraid to have anything to do with emigre relatives. They hated themselves for it, but they had to survive.
Of course, compared with Stalinist times, this was heaven. We went to sleep knowing that we would wake up in our own beds. Life went on. It’s just that we were dying inside, unnoticed, drop by drop, every day.
In our leisure time my girl friends and I preferred to sleep. We never called each other before eleven on Sunday. In my dreams I often traveled to other countries. I have clear memories of the Eiffel Tower and the cathedral in Cologne, and I stood and wept, unable to believe that it was true. We were served up a romantic song as consolation for us: “Don’t be sad, friend, about Paris. Look, the Siberian taiga is all around us. You can have Montmartre by a camp fire and tea instead of cognac,” and so on. By the way, the singer eventually emigrated to Israel or America.