Chapter 2

Having drowned his initial withdrawal pains (from friends, flames, and tokes) in Why I came here now, he acted on his words, trying to make contact, find some adventure.

Into the Whirlwind
One must live by one's wits here. Volodya wangled tickets for us to "Heart of a Dog" at the Stanislavsky Theatre on Gorky Street last night. They are never on sale at the box office - only through Intourist for delegations or dollars, or through your workplace or trade union, or better yet - contacts. Volodya knows Lena the woman selling refreshments in the theatre buffet, an attractive but lonely woman, a former librarian sacked from her job when they discovered she was a lesbian, weighed down by a society in which she doesn't exist. I'll give Lena a mickey of whiskey and some Winstons. It sends waves of melancholy over me when I feel their disappointment with life, and realize the pleasure these decadent hints of heaven provide in the midst of the bland uniformity of Soviet society.
The play was competently staged and followed Bulgakov's plot with no gimmicks, letting you reflect on the relevance of the text today. The uncomfortable, even horrible, relevance. This is in contrast with the production at the Young People's Theatre down the street, which stars a very sexy Sharik, who shows his torso to good effect, swears a great deal (always a shock to Russians in public), and which features dazzling costumes for the surreal opera-within-a-play - Aida. Both are blatantly 'anti-Soviet' and anti-revolution, the hero being an aristocrat-doctor who creates a Stalinist-bourgeois monster out of a stray dog and a lumpen brain.
It was in last night's performance, when Dr. Preobrazhensky complains of his galoshes being stolen from the apt. hallway (under 'socialism', it is necessary to keep your galoshes safely locked up), that I realized the plot was describing my possibly misguided dabbling in Soviet socialism. During the performance, I had to remove my uncomfortable Soviet prole boots which replace the nice western ones stolen at the Sandunovsky Baths, a mere one week into my new life here. Still the Soviet ones were cheap, not attractive to covetous eyes, and, to add pathos to irony, made by blind workers.
The Soviet brain transplant (the revolution, Sharik, my thief, myself) can't grow into a beautiful socialist man. Socialism can only grow out of the slow absorption and development of the best of the old societies. The charm of the pre-revolutionary society is contrasted with the cynicism, naivety, inhuman bureaucratic relations, and sheer brute stupidity that flocked to find a niche in the 'new society', and the cream of which is a Sharik, a Stalin. That's not the way I saw socialism before, or Russia. That's the view that packs Moscow's theaters today.
The other thing that struck me was the doctor's relations with his assistant. His fatherly relation becomes emotional, even passionate, as their tribulations with Sharik draw them together, much like my relations with favorite students. The age difference vanishes or better yet, heightens the relation.
Those hours of meditation ended, and I set off for home alone on foot. A friendly request for matches soon landed me in a grotty storeroom of a generic Sausage Bar with two waitresses, Ira and Tanya, and a poet Volodya, who turned out to be one month younger than me. We drank and ate sausages as the women descended into their cups and became more and more gloomy-Russian. Soviet. Ira's front teeth were rotten, though her body was strong and graceful (and she knew how to use it). She disappeared and came back with another bottle, which I refused to touch. She was starved to hear English and desperate to leave what was obviously a depressing grind. Perestroika to her meant working twice as hard for her 150 rbls a month selling sausages. I felt like I was with someone who was drowning, and was clutching at me, trying to pull me down with her. I promised to bring her a copy of Moscow News (my job here is style editor there) in Russian and to visit them at home sometime (they live on Red Army Street).
It felt surreal sitting with attractive Europeans who seemed to see me as an angel or Martian - an apparition in their dreary lives, from some paradise where you have all the material goods you want, and of course personal happiness to boot. Their hospitality was genuine, but it was the hospitality of the native on first meeting the white man. They couldn't understand why I chose to come to work here, though they were happy about it.
Extracting myself meant missing 4 trolley buses while Ira and Tanya got ready (even putting on make-up) and locked up. Volodya had another girl brashly offering herself on the street "Matches? Of course! We have everything here," he said as he strutted about. As the doors of the trolley closed, I watched Tanya fall to the ground, and waved good-bye to these 3 drunken but lovable Russians (actually 2 Russians and 1 Ukrainian).
Soon, however, I had 2 young streetwise fellow travelers warming up to me, this being the last trolleybus and we being the last passengers. We got out together and Sergei went to search for vodka from an ex-con friend. Sasha told me at the stop of his aunt in New York, his work as a street policeman cum KGB, and his hockey career with Dynamo, not much of which seemed credible. Being slightly drunk, I almost invited them back, but intuition prevailed over instinct, and I demurred, giving them my work number. My impression is there'll no doubt be more such incidents than I want. They were solidly macho - Sergei's brother is a Liubertsi [a suburban gang], and Sasha's military father had him quite convinced that Soviet arms are far more advanced than American ("After all, we must do something right"), but America was still his dream.
I hope I'm getting over the numbing predictability of this level of interaction. There is a strong undercurrent, even in communists I've met, against the apparent perversity of the system. It's somewhat masochistic as well, as expressed by Abuladze's Repentance, and simple Volodya, the poet - "We're all to blame for letting this go on." Volodya and friends are Russian Orthodox, with the emphasis on Russian (ie, they drop the odd anti-Semitic statement). Says Volodya, "I'm not going to leave. I was born here; this is my country. Let them go," as he glances slightly up and to the side. However, these drunken pearls seemed to be sincere in their praise of MN, and it will be interesting to hear their reactions to its liberal politics.
It's a bit like riding a roller coaster, if you dare to climb on, bouncing from one side to the other, trying to keep a minimum of control over the situation(s). On the other hand, it's easy to fall into a monastic solitude here, which in dingy, overcast Moscow in the winter is much like a prison sentence. When it comes down to it, what you feel is all in your mind anyway. Moreso here than in the West, where there's more glitz out there to blind you.
A working day may be just the opposite here. The only editing I bothered doing (or that bothered me) one day this week I did after working hours, having read Pravda ("to lose weight", as Bulgakov says through Preobrazhensky), eaten a fattening 2 hr lunch at the Peking restaurant, cups and cups of tea, and had chats and phone calls.
My blind date at lunch, Lena, was an Armenian Liza Minelli, temptingly single, charming, witty, intelligent. She took a month off work (by taking on the medical bureaucracy single-handed) and read every journal of every stripe from Nash Sovremennik to Ogonek. Her cynicism was clear from her dismissal of the fascist racist bore who insulted her in Pushkin Square on our stroll after lunch as a "clearly Soviet type" as opposed to simply a Russian peasant who was hungover.

Georgia in February
Achiko I met in 1980 during a sightseeing trip to Georgia and Armenia through the Friendship Society. He was a not unattractive fellow then, with fiery red hair and merry eyes. He subsequently came to Moscow to visit me and we slept together in a creaking sagging bed in a cavernous room on Gorky St. for two nights, though he chose to ignore my surely obvious hints. When a letter came from him out of the blue to Canada in the mid-80s, I became obsessed with the idea of returning to the SU and eventually Georgia to pick up on our relation, which I fantasized as blossoming into something greater.
10 years on, Achiko was for the most part bald, with a wispy beard, a restless bachelor henpecked by his mother for not yet getting married and producing grandchildren for her. His own fantasy of me was clearly the Westerner whom he hoped to somehow integrate into his rather mundane existence as an economist-planner. Apart from a bizarre though possibly meaningful afternoon wandering alone along the bluff overlooking the city, jacking off in a glade near the ruins of an old church, and unsuccessfully cruising a fierce-looking guy there, I was glad to climb on the plane after a week visiting him in Tbilisi back to my refuge in Moscow.
At last my new apt. was ready - 11 Builders' St., a solid 2 rm affair built in the '50s with high ceilings, not far from the University metro stop. This would be the scene of my renaissance - my wild and crazy affair with Denis, and after he was conscripted, the Global Forum, my Moscow State University friends, the Danilov Baths, a few faltering attempts at romance, Dorothy and the start of my Greenpeace period, Shtukun, Daniel and the soldiers...

Mirrors
Making this leap to the SU has ruptured my links with friends and family, cut me off from my contacts which had given me some kind of self-definition in the past. I had drifted into working as a library technician, and my friends were like myself, on the fringes of society and slightly neurotic, generally disaffected lefties without much use for society and careers. And then, of course, there were my students. Drifting along on dope and cynicism into my '40s was a depressing thought.
The leap has brought me face-to-face with myself, pushed me to the edge, where formerly I lived in a mist a few steps back from the edge. My insecurity hits me on occasion now with a frightening impact - usually before or after I've experienced a bit of self-confidence. With no dope to descend into, my energy sometimes turns into paranoia and panic.
I'm continually struck by seeing aspects of myself in others. I feel like a seer at times, able to follow the workings of others' minds. It's a terrible chilling feeling, the positive side being the fact that I recognize the trait or illusion in the person for itself, though I don't have something better to replace it with.
Take the naive French Canadian communist Maria studying at the Pushkin Institute. She is angry at life, perhaps partly because she is not attractive, and has become a communist to vent her rage. Russia for her is superior because it is 'not ours', in spite of the shambles it is in. She would sell her mother to land my job as a stylist at MN, have her own apt. and be a princess in a land of frogs. She needs her morning fix of nicotine to get going. In fact she is a bore. There, but for the grace of God, and the naivety of the born-again communist, go I.
Then there's Volodya from Novgorod. He is also full of anger, and is a kind of reverse image of Maria, liking capitalism and the West because it's 'not ours'. He covers up his self-hate (if indeed that is the case) well, being a successful hustler and go-between for his artist-lover Pasha, bringing in lots of currencies, phoning France, Germany and America, collecting the latest rock albums and recording cassettes of dubbed Western movies for exchange among fellow movie-buffs. He loathes going to work (sound familiar?) and is wangling a job which requires only 2 days a week as a translator. He lies in bed till noon on the weekend (I've started to lounge in bed later and later, hating to get up and face the day). He hurries unpleasantly in the street, as do I, almost fleeing, or trying to outdo others in a pathetic, restless way. Why do I feel worried on the way somewhere, usually being slightly late? Is it basic masochism? Volodya's got a lot on the ball, however, and has a quite adequate sex life, it appears, having come to grips with his homosexuality, so he's at least that far ahead of me.
The frightening mirror for me is Bob Meyerson, the troublesome American stylist at MN, who is 'here on pension' and a 'born loser' according to the spunky and slippery British stylist, Suzanna. The other American stylist, Joanne, identified his sad eyes as giving away his chronic insecurity. But I've been told I have sad eyes, and when I landed the job back in September and Pichugin said I would stay here forever, it felt like my life was over, and I was voluntarily putting myself out to pasture. Bob's clearly neurotic. A withdrawn fellow, a born-again Jewish Christian, the local contact for Toastmasters of America, for which he organised a speakers club at the university. It's very unlikely there's a happy ending for him.
There are some subtle differences, though. My eyes don't have to look sad. Sometimes they're ironic, and sometimes full of lust and aggression. I do my best not to get walked on too heavily, and I at least have some ambitions to write and reflect on the whole bizarre trip I'm on. I try to catch myself when I'm whining. Still, my cynicism saps me of ambition. For me, Yoga and Buddhism hold the key, probably because they are from a different culture, and my neurosis requires that I struggle for survival in another world to find self-definition. Bob is still projecting his neurosis onto the society here - 'the problem's out there' - which I hope I can get beyond. The worry I have is "Is there enough of a spark inside to keep me going?"
There are other faces in which I see my reflexion strongly and which bother me, though they're a study on contrasts. Jim Baker, the SEE school history teacher with whom I went to Cuba in January, is a functioning alcoholic and repressed gay, though successfully adapted to upper middle class society (if his controlled self-torment can be called that). His adaptation was at the price of selling out, making his life revolve around material pleasures. ("Show me one happy poor person. It's easier to be happy if you're rich than poor.") He does have lots of interaction with teenagers, as I would like, but without the intimacy. Somehow, his alcoholism and drive for money are compensation for stifling his authentic feelings. He is afraid of the students' sexuality (Phil's "smell"), and drowns his own sexuality in alcohol, just as I was doing with dope. My interest in 'such dreary places' as he called my fascination with Cuba and the SU has given me greater personal intimacy than his smooth bourgeois environment. However, he has his kingdom and certain amount of intellectual respect at SEE, and certainly a good dose of discipline.
My student Ken is heavily into drugs, which he justifies as part of his search for a higher consciousness. His father beat his mother, and he definitely reflects this in his hesitancy and depressed state. At 25, he's a 'sad case' as Brian Kenny put it (like me at 37?).
The person that sums me up politically and is a 'sad case' for very different reasons is Farrid from Afghanistan. We met by chance in the MN buffet where he was brooding over his dark fate. Having participated in the 'coup' of 1978, as he characterized it, he came to Moscow to study at the Institute of World Relations. He sees the 'revolution' as a horrible disaster now - inner party fighting, persecution of religion - 'too many mistakes which prevented the coup from becoming a truly popular government.' Now, having spoken frankly on the TV interview program Vzgliad, he has been sentenced to be shot and is seeking political asylum in the SU. From youthful (dogmatic) idealism to cowardly cynicism - not a pleasant turn in one's life, but one that follows the wisdom of age.
Finally, Kyle, the Australian 1st Consul, has been a long time Russophile, having studied at MGU (Moscow State University) the year before I did, doing his MA in Soviet theater. He worships Vysotsky and has maintained his romantic love through thick and thin. An unapologetic egotist, he quoted Granin to the effect that nature must be transformed by man to be beautiful. As he said this, I realized that this mistake was at the heart of the ecological crisis, and that Kyle's obvious accommodation to East and West was something I have outgrown, rather than missed out on. I imagine myself with just this extra little bit of self-confidence which he has, and don't miss the trappings.

Is the whole idea of revolution mistaken? Marx, Lenin and me
That seems to be the direction thinking is taking here. The Bolsheviks themselves were a motley crew: Lenin, marked forever by the execution of his brother; Trotsky, the Jewish intellectual gadfly who came into the fold at the last minute; Stalin, the paranoid fanatic full of hate and cruelty; Bukharin, the youthful, immature and passionate utopian, ready to give his all to the cause without a thought (till it was too late).
The big question, of course, is "Was Stalinism inevitable?" But what revolution has ever gone smoothly and succeeded in creating a happy supportive citizen whose life is indisputably better? A revolution has to 'fail' almost by definition since it bases itself on hypotheses and ideals, negations of existing social conditions. Revolutions inspired by religions (Christianity and Islam for instance) perhaps come closest to refuting this, but the advent of Christianity was more an evolution, a merging of a decaying empire with a faith based on humane principles, whose leader consciously relinquished personal power. In spite of all the hype surrounding the resurrection, it can't be denied that Christ's crucifixion was a major blow to the growing temporal power of his movement at the time. Christ's 'revolution' was 'overthrown', establishing a sacred legend, which centuries later, resulted in a more enduring triumph, after years of experience and persecution. There's a nice dialectical irony in this - victory through defeat.
If Lenin was really such a brilliant politician, he might have prepared the defeat of the revolution (either right away or with free elections in the 1920s) creating a powerful icon, which would grow in credibility and bear edible fruit much later, if industrial social democracy is really the way of the future, which is debatable. Another irony makes its appearance - countries which have had no Communist revolution (Sweden, Germany, France) are arguably closer to the ideals of socialism than Russia, after all its struggles and suffering in the name of Communism.
So maybe Lenin was a lousy politician - a cynical self-aggrandiser, a manipulator, scarred forever by a cruel and silly political system. I used to find the film clip of him unveiling the statue to Marx in front of the Bolshoi Theater inspiring, even breathtaking - what a triumph for the ideas of Marx, what an affront to the evils of past civilizations. But Stalin merely took statue building to its extreme, with poor Mayakovsky staring out fiercely and mindlessly like a Soviet King Kong, on an oversized inhuman square, not to mention the thousands of Lenins (and for a few decades Stalins) scattered meaninglessly across 1/6 of the globe. And then there was the Red terror, and of course War Communism, which Bukharin was so fond of, and both of which Stalin stored away for future use. And then there was Stalin himself, whom Lenin seemed happy to make use of until it was too late.
Was NEP then the gentleman communist's way out of the increasingly nasty reality of the revolution? Economic liberalism leading to a political retreat? It certainly would have kept eroding the belief in the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', but in leading the way to temporal defeat, this might just have been the way out of a dead-end. Communists are perhaps meant to be more a threat than a reality, a political conscience for a mass society mesmerized by 'goods', and quick to forget the spiritual needs of the human species.
Contrast Lenin with Gandhi, whose political influence began not much later than Lenin's, and whose legacy is much more resilient, without the cult of personality which really is inherent in Lenin's. Gandhi's strength was in his nonconspiratorial tactics - he fought the much more vigorous and powerful forces of the Boers and British Empire openly without weapons. His death, while tragic, had none of the tragic consequences of Lenin's. He was not power-hungry, but rather had a low opinion of political power. Gandhi's revolution took many years - it's still going on in South Africa - and it is interesting that while the Communists are the leading political element in the clandestine opposition, Gandhi's ideas are the inspiration for the masses.
One can argue (as I have in the past) that the Russian Revolution is the most important political event of this century, and has inspired (through opposition movements in the West) our own shift towards social democracy. Maybe it would be more accurate to argue that it is the most important political failure, poisoning all subsequent attempts at socialist revolution, and inspiring fascist and neo-fascist political movements ever since.
Hypostatising labour - making it an icon - is at the heart of the problem. Marx glorified physical labour as the source of value, as indeed it is for a purely capitalist economy. But this has nothing to say about how to build a just society. Perhaps you don't 'build' a just society, just as it's impossible to 'build' a just empire. It's a question of the old 'revolution within' which I suppose I've known all along but resisted tooth and nail in my intellectual quest.
Back to earth, I don't envy any of the larger-than-life historical figures, or the larger-than-life contemporary fat cats, East or West. I do envy someone who has a mutual loving relationship (as it seems for all my own angst, my parents did). I hate anyone who tries to deny this to someone else (guess who?!). My fascination with Russia and all things intellectual has been a search for this, but maybe on the wrong level. What's mutual about it? Apart from my relationship with Russia, I've found communion with great minds - Plato, Hegel, Marx, Freud. They have helped me clarify my thinking and mature, but have left me still searching. So here I sit in Russia - with my books.