workers there are artfully letting rot. Naturally we don’t go in to work that day, but we get our usual salaries. So I guess it costs the state a lot to have a professor rummaging around in the rotting potatoes. There was a joke in a movie I saw: A Ph.D. put his card into every sack of potatoes he handled, so the customer would know who had done this highly specialized task.
The workers at the vegetable warehouse consider us slaves and never miss an opportunity to show their power: We’ll let you go home when we feel like it; if you don’t work well, we’ll tell your boss. And they hang around doing nothing. The worst is always the director of the warehouse. Usually it’s a fat peroxide blonde with teased hair and many diamond rings. She comes to work in her own car or the business Volga. She’s full of majesty and self-love. Of course, these ladies lead a hard life. It’s not easy making all the deals they do, and they could end up in jail. But according to the saying, no risk, no champagne.
Today was like every other time. We came at eight and hung around for a half hour, waiting for our assignments. Finally we were told to chop cabbage for sauerkraut. The workers gave us big knives, dirty aprons, and whisk brooms and showed us to our workplace, outside under a canopy. There was a cold drizzle, and our hands froze in the wet gloves. We chopped cabbage on the tables and tossed it onto a moving conveyor belt. Then it was allegedly washed and placed into large urns for pickling; these were underground, with the openings at floor level covered with wooden boards. Workers walk over them from time to time in their dirty boots. It helps pack the cabbage down. They say the fermentation kills bacteria, but I’m not going to buy sauerkraut anymore. By one o’clock I had started to go
crazy. My hands and feet were freezing, and I needed to go to the toilet. But the toilets here are so bad that you have to shut your eyes and hold your breath, so it’s better to wait until you get home. We started winding up around two, cleaning off the tables, sweeping the floor. At two-thirty we went to the exit, showed our bags (to prove we weren’t hiding a head of cabbage worth seven kopecks), and headed for the bus. I sat in a corner on the way home, trying to warm up and thinking how lucky I was. I was going home to my own apartment with a hot shower, food, and comfortable bed. But a few decades ago women like me worked twelve-hour days in minus-forty-degree weather, went home to damp filthy barracks, ate disgusting gruel, and slept under rags. I am truly lucky not to have been born in Stalinist times.
MARCH 2 0. Today I watched a Soviet movie from the thirties on TV. The movies made in those terrible years are so full of charming simplicity and marvelous lies. The Stalinist era created an attractive myth. It took hold in all art forms—literature, film, painting, architecture. A whole system of archetypes was created: the hero, the villain, the good and bad women, the typical conflict situation, and so on. The system became so developed over the years that the good guys all combed their hair the same way, had the same smile, and used the same expression, while the bad guys were all alike, too. If you were to feed everything into a computer, you could produce the model novel of the Stalinist era.
The most amazing thing is that the signs of those times
have a magical effect on me. It may be due to my childish recollections of the fifties. When we would come from a party late at night, I often would lie on the backseat of the car and look up at the heavy, clumsy Stalinist buildings. They represented the protection of my happy way of life as a child; after all, we had also lived in a communal flat of the late forties. I liked the exquisitely tasteless statues of Pioneers, phys ed majors with oars in their hands, and the young naturalists. It was reliable and uncomplicated. There were marvelous songs on the radio. “I know of no other country where a man can breathe this free’’ or “Oh, it’s so good living in the Soviet land, so good!” There was a joke about that song in the seventies: An inspection commission came to a mental home. A patient chorus was enthusiastically singing the song. One patient was silent. The commission asked why. “He’s almost cured,” the doctor replied.
I have to give this era its due: It has stayed on in my memory as a time of abundance. The big stores in the middle of town displayed huge hams, various kinds of sturgeon and salmon, black and red caviar. Jewelry stores had unique antique diamonds, and the fur sections of department stores had luxurious fur coats and fur collars of all kinds. We couldn’t afford any of it, but it was there. My parents occasionally splurged on caviar since it was supposed to be very healthy for children.
I know what the times were really like, and my emotional attachment to them is more of a nostalgic whim. But there are still many people who believe the myth and mourn the lost grandeur of the Stalinist superpower.
MARCH 25 . My work was always in the category ‘Tighter on the ideological front.” A fine fighter I was, my head stuffed with Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and other Western news services. At least I knew “the enemy’s face” well. Sometimes the enemy seemed so attractive I wanted to hurry into battle . . . and give myself up.
But we were supposed to fight the “false propaganda” of the Western way of life—that is, prove that a crowded trolley was much more comfortable than some Cadillac because our medical care was free or that a vacation at a dirty tourist base was better than a trip to Hawaii because we had free education. We followed the principle expressed in the song “At least we’re making missiles, covering the Yenisey River, and even in the sphere of ballet we’re ahead of the rest of the planet.”
We had to cover up the “small drawbacks” of our society (that’s our historical burden!). If you were in a restaurant with foreigners and a cockroach was swimming in your cup, you had to swallow it so that the ideological foes wouldn’t see it. If the roach was in a foreigner’s cup, you had to hypnotize him (the foreigner, not the roach) and tell him that it was an unground coffee bean. If the water was turned off at the hotel during a heat wave, you had to think of some huge accident in America that would make this incident seem like a trifle. You needed incredible erudition and extraordinarily quick thinking.
Also, you had to appear to be the model Soviet person— happy, businesslike, and of high morals. You had to have on hand a story about your cloudless family happiness, your healthy Pioneer children and Komsomol brothers. And God forbid you should ever fall for the charms of a foreigner. The ideological foe had to be a sexless and unattractive creature for you. And
if you felt the slightest hint of weakness, you had to run for the hills.
But the ranks of fighters thinned. The “fallen” girls came back after a while to visit their parents, looking prettier and happier. This raised some doubts with the rest.
Of course, it’s easy to write about this now with light irony. Luckily the “ideological front” is gradually falling apart. But just a few years ago there was real paranoia. Incidentally, for the sake of justice, it is said that Americans had similar feelings about us. I find it hard to believe.
MARCH 28 . The eternal argument: spiritual Russia and unspiritual West. My artist friend recently said, “We are so devilishly spiritual because we don’t have anything else.” I’m not prepared to discuss this issue on a global level, but I think that there is something hysterical in our spirituality, especially lately. We like to read about tragic fates, travel back mentally to the horrible Stalinist times, and talk about the end of the world. I think this is some form of penance for our sins. We must go through the bloody horrors once more, mentally, before moving on. But it’s turning into an unhealthy situation; we’re stuck in the moment of redemption. As Bulat Okudjava says in his song, “Don’t make an idol for yourselves out of the sins of our eternal Russia.” Of course, that’s in the Russian character, too: We like to pick at our wounds. We keep upsetting ourselves and being under stress.