Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague
One day in the Spring of 1969, when Jim and Tom and Mike and Mark and I were about to graduate from Colorado College, my feared-and-beloved Russian teacher, Mariamna Soudakova, told our second-year class that a program was being organized by Southern Illinois University for a group of students who already had serious language study to spend the summer in Leningrad in an intensive course with native Russian teachers who spoke no other language. She asked for a show of hands: “Who’s interested?” Two or three hands went up from the small class.
Mara was a wonderful teacher, beautiful and fierce, which had a way of being both a blessing and a curse. Her family had fled Soviet Russia, and as a young woman she had found herself in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII. I remember her telling how she had been married there with her leg in a cast, but giving no further details. I always regretted not hearing the rest of that story.
When she looked at someone, demanding that person’s attention, there was no doubt as to who was the subject of her gaze. Now she looked at me.
“Aren’t you interested?”
“I’d love to go, but I can’t afford it. I have to work this summer,” I answered.
“I did not ask if you could afford it,” she snarled. “I asked..for people..to show hands..if you are interested.” She paused, letting her eyes do their work.
“Are..you..interested?”
“Sure I’m interested. But...”
“Then raise..your..hand.”
After class, the two of us talked. I repeated that I simply couldn’t afford the cost of transportation; couldn’t even afford to take the summer off work. She fixed me with her squinty tiger eyes: “Dean, you are going to the Soviet Union if I have to hock my car.”
Somebody scraped together a thousand dollars to send me to Leningrad for the summer. It was clear that Mara had put that in motion. I didn’t find out how, or who was the source of the money, until my wife and I were having gin and tonics in Mara’s apartment in Colorado Springs twenty years later during a class reunion.
I was with a delightful group of people, students who were mostly about 4 years younger than me because of my hitch with Uncle Sam. They were intelligent, decent, and to a person thrilled to be embarked on such an adventure.
I shared their excitement, but never truly fit in. My Vietnam experiences led to some very interesting conversations – I still remember one on an airliner when we very animatedly discussed a then-current Esquire article about Vietnam by Michael Herr, which later became part of his book Dispatches. So we had things to talk about, and did. But besides being occasional material for conversation, my experiences, and the way I carried them, set me apart. That was much more my fault than theirs.
We took a Soviet passenger liner from London to Copenhagen, then to Helsinki, then to Leningrad. The two things I remember about the trip were the pastries in Copenhagen and a moment in the ship’s bar when an on-duty ship’s officer came in, paused at the bar, ordered and quaffed a water glass of vodka as if it were, well, water - and went back to work.
Our classroom was on an upper floor of a drab Soviet-era building of the Leningradskii Politekhnicheskii Institut at the end of a tram-ride from the older part of the city built on the banks of the River Nevá 300 years ago by Peter the Great.
It was an interesting time to be in Leningrad. The Vietnam War was still in its most violent months; I had spent the previous summer in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia as a journalist and two years before that had been a combatant in Vietnam. Now I was living and studying with citizens of the superpower that supported the other side. The North Vietnamese students lived one or two floors above us, and at least once lowered anti-imperialist notes on strings down in front of our windows. A sign in the lobby, which we walked past at least twice a day, said “Brotherly greetings to the courageous Vietnamese people, leading the heroic struggle against the aggression of American imperialism for the freedom and independence of your homeland!”
The plan for our summer studies was to attend Russian language classes for five hours each morning, break for a late lunch, then in the afternoons visit a Soviet historical site. These excursions were, of course, organized by our watchdogs from Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency.
One day, after language classes and lunch, the bus was loading for a historical site. I believe it was the Finland Station, where Lenin had re-entered the country in 1917 in a sealed railroad car after his exile in Europe.
Nearly everyone was aboard. I told a couple of people I’d see them later, and turned to go. “Where are you going? We’re ready to leave.” “I’m not going with you. I think I’ll miss this one, go into the city, hang out in Letnii Sad, see if anybody wants to talk.” I was, and am, always hungry for stories. Letnii Sad was the justly famous Summer Garden, a large lovely park in Leningrad where people strolled with their families when not working, and where old people sat on park benches and enjoyed the brief weeks of summer sun before the recently-departed northern winter came howling back.
It seemed as if winter had arrived the moment I spoke. A couple of our new Russian friends had come to the bus to see us off; I saw fear suddenly invade what had been smiling faces. The Intourist guy was particularly dour. His darkest fear was looming: less than 100% participation. There goes my perfect record for the week... here comes an ass-chewing by the Boss...
At first he tried being nice: “How would you feel if we were visiting the United States, and we refused to go to a famous place where George Washington did one of his great deeds?” But he wasn’t nice. Not really. He was a scared petty bureaucrat whose meal ticket was based on his ohsoslightly privileged position in a system which could crash down on him with awful force if the slightest ripple in the perfect Soviet pond could be traced to him. I didn’t like him, I didn’t like the other cheerleaders like him with their phony enthusiasm, and I was tired of pretending that I did.
“Fine by me. If you wanna go, go. If you don’t, don’t. George Washington’s not going to care, and nobody else probably is either.” I turned to leave.
“Dean...” he played his last card, with a shrug that said he was sorry he had to do it, but he had to pull rank. “This excursion is mandatory.” But “mandatory” is too weak a word here. The word he used was obyazatyel’no, one of two words I remember from that summer which, when pronounced, seemed to initiate a great cosmic grinding of the gears of the State, set in motion to reduce the bones of the offender in question to a greasy spot on the sidewalk. The other word was vospreshchën: forbidden. If something was obyazatel’no, you did it, period. If something was bospreshchën, you did not do it. Also period.
But I didn’t go along that day, or any of the other days when I chose not to; and the next time I saw the Intourist guy he didn’t have a hatchet buried in his back, and pretty much left me alone. Maybe he and the other apparatchiki decided to write me off as a bad apple, and cut their losses at 94% participation, or whatever it was. I frankly didn’t give a rat’s ass, as we would have said in the Marine Corps.
A few of us met one evening for a sort of clandestine little party – clandestine meaning only that there were no Party minders present – with some Russians we’d met about our age. It was the only time I ever saw anyone open a bottle of wine by wrapping a towel around the bottom of the bottle and slamming it so hard against a concrete wall the cork was forced out the top. What was pretty much agreed on for the evening was that we would just talk, frankly, as people, saying whatever we wanted to say about our lives, without worrying that somebody’d get in trouble for speaking freely.
I remember being in a conversation that night with a young Russian guy and asking him, “So. Are you going to join the Party?” His response lodged in my brain so thoroughly that, almost 40 years later, I still remember the Russian: “Nu, konechno. Byez etovo, nedalyeko ne uidyësh.” It would translate as Well, of course. Without that, you don’t get far.” But there’s a nuance to the u prefix which means “to go away from a place or situation,” and can also carry a sense of escape, or fleeing, that reminds me of the Mexican phrase salsipuedes: get out if you can. Of poverty, that is. There’s an earthquake fault (and some other geographical features) in California named salsipuedes. The young would-be Communist, in that honest moment, reminded me of business-oriented college students in the United States who “just want to get ahead.”
I had read about the Russian Revolution, and had taken an excellent course in Soviet politics from Professor David Finley. I remember a story told by Professor Finley in his Soviet Politics class. But to retell it, I have to say something about Russians and ice cream.
The main thing I remember about food that summer is that I don’t remember it. Soviet food, to my taste, served to get you through the day, not to make it special. Sort of like English food. But ice cream was a different story. Someone had said that Russians made a lot of ice cream because, while their milk production was high, their ability to keep liquid milk refrigerated lagged behind their ability to keep it frozen. Possibly because for half the year, at least in a place so far north as Leningrad, little energy was required to keep anything frozen.
Russians famously loved their ice cream, and with reason: it was wonderful. Our favorite treat that summer – mine, anyway – was a champagne float from one of the shops along Nevsky Prospekt. The champagne was good, too. Anyway, Professor Finley’s story went like this. He began by telling of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 at the head of half a million soldiers. The Russian General Kutuzov, knowing better than to tackle the behemoth army head-on, kept pulling back and harrassing Napoleon’s flanks, using up the summer, abandoning Moscow. By mid-October, Napoleon had to leave with nothing to show for his invasion except a great city with no people. The Russian winter, and Kutuzov’s army, whittled his army to ten thousand survivors, and crushed his power in Europe.
That was the preamble to his story about Churchill and Stalin. It seems that at the bleakest point in the battle on Germany’s Eastern Front, when Stalingrad was in danger of falling to the German Army, the two leaders were in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, overlooking Red Square. They were glumly discussing the bleak prospects of holding Stalingrad, which, if it fell, would loose the German army’s tanks into the Russian heartland, threatening the entire Allied war effort.
They were looking out Stalin’s window at a snowy mid-winter scene in Red Square. There were two long lines of people in the square, bundled against the cold. “What are those people waiting in line for?” Churchill asked.
“Well, the shorter line is people waiting to go through Lenin’s tomb.” (In 1969, it was still there in Red Square, tucked close to the Kremlin Wall. Lenin’s head and shrunken body were on visible display – the body covered by a silk drape - in a sealed glass case, which we and other visitors filed past.)
“And the longer line? What are they waiting for?”
“Ice cream,” Stalin replied.
Churchill was stunned. “Ice cream?”
“Ice cream. We Russians love our ice cream.”
Churchill pondered that a long moment, then said, “If those people are waiting in that cold for ice cream, Hitler doesn’t have a chance.”
And so it was.
Professor Finley’s classes had given me a jump-start toward understanding the history and politics that were wrapped up in the places we visited that summer, the people we met, and the language we spoke. But now I had a chance to actually walk the ground of those events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Blockade of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944.
Once after class I was walking along the sidewalk that forms a cap for the concrete channel of the River Nevá where it runs alongside the Hermitage Art Museum. (In 1917, the Hermitage was still the Winter Palace.) In the tumultuous days of that October, the cruiser Avrora was in the channel of the Nevá near the Winter Palace. Some of the sailors had already switched their loyalties to the Bolsheviks([1]), and the crew refused an order to steam out of the river. On the evening of October 25 (New Style: before the revolution, the Russian nation used a calendar that was 13 days behind the one we use now. So October 25[N.S.] was October 12 [O.S.]), the Avrora fired a blank round from one of her 6” guns at the palace. Kerensky’s fragile constitutional government gave up: the Avrora was right across the street!
That same day I walked from a spot on the bank of the Nevá near where the Avrora had been that day in 1917 – I think it was a couple of kilometers or so - to where Lenin and Trotsky had their headquarters at Smolny, which had been a school for daughters of noble families before events canceled that category of persons and gave the building a new purpose.
One afternoon I went to Piskaryovskoye Kladbishche, alone, and the promise I had made to myself that August day three years before, throwing my weapons and gear aboard the truck to leave Chu Lai, changed somehow. I didn’t suddenly have any answers to the question Why war? which had been the lens through which I saw much of life since then, and would be for decades to come. But, in a moment and then for the hours I spent at Piskaryovskoe, the magnitude of what I needed to understand became clearer to me. The destruction and misery I had taken part in at Tho An had affected me so profoundly as to become the major turning point in my life, but this....
There is a small museum in one of the blocky pavilions at the entrance. It contains a German document dated September 29, 1941([2]), containing Hitler’s orders for the reduction of Leningrad, in three languages. The English translation reads, in part:
1. To achieve clarity in the Naval War Fleet’s measures in the event of the capture or surrender of Petersburg([3]), the Chief of the Staff of the Naval War leadership raised the question of further war measures as regards this city with the General War Command. This document informs about the answer.
2. Der Fuhrer decided to wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there is no interest in the further existence of this large population concentration. [About 3 million at the start of the war.]
....
4. It is proposed to blockade the city tightly, and through artillery shelling with all calibres and uninterrupted air bombardment, level it with the ground. If as a consequence of the following situation in the city requests about surrender are made, they will be denied, as the problems of defending and feeding the population cannot and shall not be solved by us. From our side, in this war for life and death, there is no interest in keeping even a part of the population of this large city.
Also in the museum is a photograph of Tatyana Savicheva, with a copy of the final pages of her diary. (I had seen reproductions of those pages in Salisbury’s book.) Tanya had had a thick diary before the blockade, but had burned it for heat. Her sister Nina had disappeared (she had been evacuated without the family’s knowledge); their mother then gave Tanya a notebook which had been Nina’s. In pages of her new diary from late December 1941 to May 1942, Tanya recorded the deaths of her family, one death to a page, in large writing: her sister Zhenya, her grandmother, her brother, her uncle Vasya, her uncle Lesha, and her mother. The last three entries are: “Savichevs died. Everyone died. Only Tanya is left.” She was 11 years old.
In August 1942, she was one of 140 children evacuated through the blockade. She died on July 1, 1944, of disease resulting from the siege.
I walked through the squared arch at the entrance and stopped. Funereal music
broad paved paths stretched from the entrance to what was clearly a monument at the far end. The monument was too far away for me to discern its shape, but I was in no hurry. I had come to Piskaryovskoye determined to stay until I was ready to leave, with
no pressures from friends or itineraries; if possible, with no pressure from anyone or anything other than the reality I already knew was there. I wanted to experience the place alone, and quietly, without discussion or historical analysis by me or others.
I had read Harrison Salisbury’s monumental The 900 Days before leaving Colorado Springs for Europe and the Soviet Union. So I knew that this city had lost the better part of a million people – no one knows how many - during the German blockade of the city from September 1941 to January 1944. And I knew that, although there had been many military and civilian deaths from bombing, artillery, and combat on the outskirts of the city, most of the dead – military and civilian men, women, children (many, many children), - had perished of starvation and freezing. And I knew that about 600,000 of them were here, to my right and my left and all around, in Piskaryovskoe. Six..hundred..thousand. Give or take.
Since I heard my first scream from a child terrified by armed soldiers – one of whom was me – or saw my first bullet hole, up close, in a human being, no number of casualties, no number of dead or wounded or missing, has ever made me see or imagine that number. I see, instead, the bullet holes, and my imagination multiplies the wounds, visually.
The broad paved paths toward the monument were bounded by mounds – each, I would say, 24” to 30” high. Each measured, oh, eight or ten paces along its narrow edge, that being the edge that bordered the walkway, either right or left. The long leg of each rectangle was maybe twice the length of the short leg. Each mound had sides sloped from base to top, and grass grew on the sides and tops of the mounds and on the earth between.
At the end of any given mound that bordered on the path to the monument was a simple stone into which was chiseled a year: 1941 (there were many mounds marked 1941), 1942 (many), 1943 (many), 1944 (not so many; the blokada had been broken in January of that year), and a symbol: hammer and sickle for civilian remains, a star for military remains. 800 railroad cars of granite were brought from the Ukraine for these stones, and for the other memorial works in Piskaryovskoye.
I walked in, slowly. And walking slowly, I came abreast of the only human within my near vision, an old woman in a dark coat and gray shawl. She was seated on one of the stones marked 1942. Her head was bowed. She was silent and still.
I walked past her, past more mounds, past more mounds, past more mounds..past more mounds. The monument at the end of the paths was nearer. Then I was there. It is a statue of Mother Russia. She is a strong woman with arms spread wide in a gesture of openness, welcome, generosity, and a pleading question. The physical attitude of her open arms at once embraces and offers the bones of all the Leningraders in all the graves. She holds an oak branch between her outstretched hands. She stands in front of a granite wall inscribed with a poem. The poem is by Olga Berggolts, who lived through the entire siege in Leningrad. (So did the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who refused Stalin’s offer to smuggle him out of the city, choosing instead to stay with his people.)
Berggolts’ poem is Rekviem: Requiem. The poem’s best known line is near the middle:
No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.
One night I came back to the Institute – not for the first or last time – on the last tram from the heart of the city. It was during White Nights – June, the longest days of the year, and with Leningrad so close to the Arctic Circle, even a while after one o’clock in the morning it wasn’t dark. A gaggle of other students from the Institute had ridden the same tram, and as we unloaded ourselves in front of the dormitory, something about the warm, reluctantly fading light seemed to cast a convivial character on the place and the people. It probably also had something to do with the fact that most of us had been drinking. Leningrad in 1969 was at the height – or depth – of the Soviet era, with not a neon sign advertising doughnuts or jewelry, or other corrupt pleasures, to be seen. The city was as drab as the stones it was made of.
Still, bars could be found on back streets of the city, and I had found at least a couple, after long walks. So, apparently, had the other students who now milled about in front of the dormitory (on this night, no other Americans), all of us seized by a reluctance to give up the day that reminded me of Walt Whitman’s
Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of nightfall deepening,
...loth, O so loth to depart!
Garrulous to the very last.
But we didn’t know what to do. We were from all over the world – Cubans and other Latinos, Africans from various nations, some Asians, some eastern Europeans - people from every place where the Soviet Union had influence or was trying to aquire it. Some smatterings of conversation started, in Russian because that was our common language. But it was halting. The group’s energy had us milling about like a school of fish or a flock of birds, then found its center: some African guy produced a tired and venerable guitar, began to strum it, began to sing. It took hold, among every goddamned one of us, no matter our first language, and we were braying into the sky that refused to darken:
Hey, Jude (beat, beat) don’t let me down (beat, beat)
sing a sad song, and make it be-eh-eh-tter...
The last week in July I was in a laundromat I had found after much searching in the back streets of an industrial part of the city I’d taken to prowling in the afternoons, partly because I’d found a place near one of the factories where there was sometimes parked a trailer that looked like the “water buffalo” trailers we’d had in Vietnam for the awful-tasting but safe drinking water that the Seabees purified for us. Indeed, it was a WWII – era vehicle, and could well have survived from the months of American aid to the Soviet Army during that war.
Only this trailer held kvass, a sort of Russian brown beer. The guy operating the trailer had a couple of generous-sized glass mugs, and you’d stand in line until it was your turn, he’d open the cock and pour you one, you’d step aside and drink it so someone else could use the mug, then get back in line.
The laundromat was nearby, and it was my first time there. So of course I had trouble figuring out the system. The stolid woman who staffed the booth in the corner sat silently through all my frustrations until I walked up and pleaded for help. You had to buy this little cardboard ticket, she informed me reluctantly, then cross the room back to the machine and insert your ticket. (It seemed to some of us that most of the Russian folks who worked in restaurants, public buildings, and other places which in the West would have been considered “service” jobs, were a grumpy lot. This for a simple reason: they weren’t serving us, the public. They were serving The People in the form of The State, and didn’t much give a damn what individual people thought of their comportment or service. They’d as soon scold you as look at you.)
But still the machine wouldn’t work. I went back to the lady in the corner. “Nado zhdat’:” You have to wait.
So I returned to the machine and stared at it for a while longer, and it finally, in its own sweet time, kicked itself into gear. I sat down to read and wait.
A Russian guy came in with his laundry. He looked like somebody from one of the factories. It apparently was his first time too. He put his laundry in the machine and thumped it and looked around in bewilderment. Not wanting to expose myself as a foreigner, especially an American, I told him in simple phrases that he had to buy a ticket from the lady in the corner and put it in the machine. (Again, she was stonily silent through his frustrations.) I deliberately laid my book on the machine near him so he could see its title; it was Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s memoirs, in Russian. Maybe it’d spark him to tell a story or express an opinion. He was a working man; so far, we were comfortable with each other.
But his conversation got a little ahead of me, he used a word I didn’t recognize, and I asked him to explain it. He took a sidelong glance at my book, which was quite thick (and which I was reading very slowly), and asked me, “You mean you’re not Russian?” The jig was up. “Nope,” I said, “I’m American. I’m just here studying Russian.”
His face lit up: “You’re American? Really? That’s very good.” He was pleased. Americans had landed on the moon a couple of days before, and Russians were generally thrilled by it, including my new working-class friend. Our whole class had watched TV coverage of the moonwalk along with some Russians, and they seemed as excited as we were. So we blabbed for a while about his life and mine. He paused and looked around, obviously to see who might be listening. Then he leaned close to me and asked conspiratorially, “Tell me. Do you really have unemployment in your country?” He’d clearly heard some of his government’s propaganda, and just as clearly didn’t know how much of it to believe.
“Yup. Quite a bit, actually.”
He looked around, saw the coast was still clear, then leaned in again. “Don’t let ‘em kid ya...” he tapped his chest – “so do we.”
On one of our last days of class before graduation in late July, we had a visitor, a man who was the director of the language program at the Institute. Our teacher, a stalwart woman in her fifties, introduced him and respectfully stood aside.
The gentleman was generally relaxed and friendly, asked us how we’d liked our classes, what we thought of the quality of instruction, that sort of thing. It was easy to give a civil answer: I don’t remember anyone saying that the instruction was less than very good or excellent. I certainly agreed.
But the encounter settled into a conversation involving how to ask for a knife, fork, and spoon and such things in a restaurant, which I thought was a waste of the director’s time, and ours. He’d invited us to ask questions. So I raised my hand.
My question was something like this: This is Leningrad, the city of the Blockade. You have hundreds of thousands of your people buried here in Piskaryovskoye Kladbishche. You had Stalin. You had the Battle of Stalingrad. Right now your country and ours are in a struggle that could result in a nuclear confrontation, and are on opposite sides of a war in Southeast Asia. Shouldn’t we be talking about something more serious than knives and forks?
The director got quiet and looked down for a long moment, then looked back up at me. I’d thought he might get angry, but he didn’t. “You speak Russian very well,” he said, then turned and left the room.
In early August we found ourselves in Kyiv (then usually transliterated “Kiev,”), the capital city of Ukraine, which was still a Soviet Republic.
I remember our group being aboard a bus in or near the city, and someone – the driver, or our Intourist guide, who would likely have been Ukrainian – pointing off to the right and saying “Babii Yar is right over there.” Of course we were familiar with Yevgenii Yevtushenko’s powerful poem, “Babii Yar,” about the history of the ravine where, on September 29-30, 1941, Nazi SS soldiers and Ukrainian police marched the city’s Jewish population to the edge of the ravine, forced them to undress, killed them with machine guns and pistols so that they fell into the ravine, and buried them, caving successive sections of the ravine’s bank onto each new layer of corpses.([4]) Apparently to conserve ammunition, the SS soldiers, who did the actual shooting, did not shoot the younger children, but tossed them into the ravine to be buried alive. The official Nazi count of executed Jews was 33,771, but Soviet and other more objective observers put the total of people shot and buried in the ravine at Babii Yar, in the period beginning that September 29, at nearly 100,000, of whom about 80,000 were Jews.([5])
A 12½-year-old boy named Anatoly Kuznetsov who lived in the area, apparently not considered a dangerous witness by the Nazis because of his youth, and because he was not Jewish, hung around and watched events and kept a diary. He continued to watch and record his observations in following months as the Germans brought new groups of prisoners, including Gypsies and Soviet POW’s, to the ravine, executed, and buried them. Kuznetsov compiled his notes into Babii Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, recorded it on 35mm film, and smuggled it out when he later defected to England from the Soviet Union. The book includes the story of one of very few known survivors of those two days, a young children’s drama teacher named Dina Mironovna Pronicheva, whose father was Russian and mother a Ukrainian Jew. Standing in a line along the cliff above Babii Yar with other Jews about to be shot, she decided to jump instead. She survived the fall onto the corpses below, played dead until after dark, and escaped the corpse-filled ravine. She later told the story to Kuznetsov, who included it in his book.
In 1961, the young Soviet poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko, who had heard about the murders at Babii Yar and had also heard of Soviet plans to build a sports stadium at the site, visited the place. Anatoly Kuznetsov was his guide. Yevtushenko was so moved by the visit and the knowledge he now carried and by his own government’s apparent disrespect toward the meaning of the entire episode, that he wrote his famous poem, Babii Yar, he says, in one day.
The poem’s opening is
Over Babii Yar
there are no monuments.
The line refers both to the Soviet propensity to memorialize everything to do with Nazi atrocities and Soviet suffering in World War II, and the resounding silence about Babii Yar, with its attendant complicity by Soviet authorities – in the silence – and by Ukrainian police and civilians, in the original deeds.
The poem changed things. The sports stadium was not built. At least two monuments were finally erected, and a pleasant park now exists near that terrible ravine which had gone from being a mass grave to being a garbage dump. The world’s attention was called to the virulent strain of anti-Semitism present among both Russians and Ukrainians. That anti-Semitism was exacerbated by Soviet repression of subject Ukrainians, who sometimes supported Nazis out of a desire to be free of Soviet domination, to the point of complicity in the Nazi genocidal campaign against Jews.
So what had begun as a young poet’s angry and principled attempt to stop the building of a sports stadium at a place which he thought should be preserved and memorialized turned into such a profound national and international recognition of the truth of what he said in the poem that Yevtushenko soon began filling existing sports stadiums with people who came to hear him read his poems – chief among them being Babii Yar.
I’ve heard and read comments to the effect that Yevtushenko’s fame, and his ego, are bigger than his poetic ability, and that may be so. But sometimes there’s more to a piece of writing than its artfulness, and here I choose to defend Yevtushenko. He spoke a naked truth that needed to be spoken, while others danced around it. I even heard such a criticism of him from Mara Soudakova. I also heard her say once, in class as we spoke of favorite authors and I mentioned Hemingway, “Pah! Hemingway was a journalist!”
Okay. So was Walt Whitman, and so was, and is, Gabriel García Márquez. Having been a working journalist and, on some of my better days, a poet, I consider the two vocations closely related, when they’re done well: you pay attention to the deeper realities of the situation before you, and you struggle to get it right in language.
We flew from Kyiv to Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea. My memories are of a sere landscape punctuated by oil-drilling and –refining equipment belching black smoke into a sky that was still trying to be blue, and music on the radio from Iran, Azerbaijan’s next-door neighbor. And surrendering my beautiful Zodiac Seawolf indestructible diving watch, which I had bought with a Lance Corporal’s pay in the Post Exchange at Camp Sukiran, Okinawa, to a watch repairman near the beach, emphasizing that all I needed was a new pin for the band. Then I’d listened to his hammering for twenty minutes behind a curtain, to do a job I could have done with the tip of a blade of my pocket knife in 30 seconds, if he’d just sold me the pin. (The pins were spring-loaded; all they required was to flick out the old one, compress the spring on the new one, and slip it into place.) I’d gone swimming the next day in the Caspian Sea only to watch my treasured watch fill up with water before my eyes. It brought to mind the “red vs. expert” duel in the Soviet Army during WWII, when the parallel command structures of career military officers with combat experience sharing authority with political commissars who tended to be professional ideologues in charge of each unit’s doctrinal purity. My watch was a relatively tiny case, but related: the guy didn’t actually have to know what he was doing, because his job was protected by ideology.
The putative reason for our visit to Baku was to give us a short holiday after more than a month of rigorous study, and to allow us to socialize with Soviet students our age who were there at a Komsomol (the Communist Party’s youth organization) recreation camp. I don’t remember ever being told decision-making details about the formation of our itinerary, but come on: the People’s Republic of Viet Nam, the Soviet Union’s proxy, at least in terms of financial, ideological, and armament support, was currently waging a very hot war against our proxy, the Republic of (South) Viet Nam, in which United States troops – recently including me – were massively involved. Of course our presence in the Soviet Union that summer, and in Baku in particular, was a ripple, albeit a small one, in the Cold War pond. Somewhere up the respective chains of authority – both of them - the changing of hearts and minds was being talked about.
One evening at a dance at the camp in Baku, I noticed an obsidian-haired, dark-eyed beauty on the dance floor who didn’t seem to be attached to anyone in particular, who was just having fun in the company of some girl friends. Fantasies I’d formed while reading poems by Pushkin and Yesenin about gypsy lovers were probably tangled up with this real woman I’d managed to cross paths with, and - uncharacteristically of me (I was notoriously shy in the company of women, even in more familiar circumstances) – I marched onto the floor and asked her to dance. Astonishingly, she smiled and said yes. Her name was Tatyana Shevtsova. We danced a few times that evening, and I visited her tent the next day, which she shared with two other women, who greeted me and quietly made excuses for leaving so Tatyana and I could be alone for a little while. I remember being surprised and delighted when she asked if I’d seen the French movie Sherburgskiye Zontiki (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and talking about it for a while and discovering that we both liked it a lot.
We wrote letters back and forth for some time after I started graduate school in the fall in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tatyana returned to her home in Khabarovsk, on the Amur River in Soviet Siberia, very near the Chinese border and not far north of Vladivostok.([6]) Her father was a Soviet Army officer there. Our correspondence went along nicely until I decided to broach The Big Issue – the possibility of nuclear war between her country and mine – and mentioned Herman Kahn’s book, Thinking about the Unthinkable, and suggested that we talk about it, or at least about the subject. I never heard from her again. I hoped her father didn’t get in trouble over our letters and get sent to... well. He was already in Siberia.
We were back in Moscow after Kyiv and Baku, and were waiting in line for our Aeroflot flight to Vienna. As was usual with me – for that matter, with most Vietnam vets I know – I was so uncomfortable in lines and crowded places that I waited for the end of the line before boarding.
Someone else was waiting: a woman in about her fifties seemed to be gingerly keeping herself apart from everyone else, waiting like me for the press of bodies to clear before boarding the plane. I felt a kinship with her, and began to watch her. She had a fresh bandage on her throat. She seemed nervous; maybe that was the reason.
We landed in Vienna and were ushered into a large lounge seething with travelers heading many directions, with announcements of arriving and departing flights closely following one another in German, French, and English. At any moment, there must have been a couple of hundred people in the room, or passing into or out of it. We were told we’d have to wait in that lounge for our flight to Prague, because we had no visas to leave the airport and enter the city.
I noticed the woman with the bandage at her throat who had boarded the flight from Moscow at the same time I had, sitting among other passengers. There were people all around her, but she seemed alone. There were virtually no seats vacant; besides I felt more comfortable moving. I walked around the lounge, stopped to chat with some fellow students, walked around some more. My attention kept coming back to the woman with the bandage. The more I looked at her – trying to be unobtrusive about it – the more I thought that, although she made no movements and spoke to no one, there was something not right with her. She seemed afraid. Finally I thought I needed another opinion, because I couldn’t let it go. I asked my friend Robin Foor to discreetly look at the Russian lady (I thought she was Russian), and tell me if he thought anything was amiss. We walked by where she was sitting, and Robin took a closer look at her. He didn’t think anything seemed wrong with her.
Still uncomfortable about something I couldn’t name, I asked two young women students from our group to do the same. They did, and their answer was the same as Robin’s: nothing wrong. I continued wandering, trying to tell myself to let it go, it was none of my business. But I couldn’t. Finally a seat next to the mysterious lady became vacant. I went over and sat down. Then I knew. With no more movement than an occasional turn of her head to look about, this woman emanated fear. Seated next to her, I could feel it as surely as if she had been screaming. I became certain that she was terrified, but I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid that I, a husky 26-year-old male stranger, would further frighten or offend her, just by presuming to speak to her.
So I sat next to her, feeling her fear continuously, and decided that I must do something, and do it as gently as possible. Finally, trying to seem casual and respectful, I turned and spoke to her in Russian: “Do you live in Moscow? We boarded the plane at the same....”
Her words came in a cascade. She was Greek. Her son had married a Soviet woman. She spoke Greek and Russian, but could read or write no language. She had had throat surgery three or four days before. She had been trying to understand the polyglot announcements flowing around her in the airport, but couldn’t. She was lost in the multitude.
I listened to her story at some length, stood, and told her I was going for help. A look of terror occupied her face. I was her only connection with humanity, and I was leaving. No, please....
I promised her emphatically that I would return, with someone who could help her. I went to a ticket counter, walked up to a young woman working there, and asked her if she spoke Russian, English, Spanish or French, preferably one of the first three.
“Yes sir, how may I help you?” her English was better than mine. I explained the Greek woman’s situation.
“Take me to her.” She spoke in German to a colleague, nodded to me, and we threaded our way back through the crowd.
That young woman was a blizzard of competence and caring. I asked her that we might proceed slowly, so I could get the languages right. She looked a long moment at the Greek woman, and knew the truth of what I had told her. She also understood me, probably better than I understood myself. With gentle, measured directness, she asked: Where is she going? I translated, trying to imitate the young Austrian’s manner. Athens. May I see her ticket? She read the ticket, nodded, smiled reassuringly. What surgery did she have? A tracheotomy to bypass a throat obstruction. What were the doctor’s instructions for post-operative care? Rest. Freedom from stress. Diet? Warm milk, eggs. Nothing else for several days, then gradual resumption of normal diet.
That young Viennese angel took care of both of us. Mindful that both the Greek woman and I were working with Russian as a second language, and in a stressful situation, she parsed her words in short, clear English phrases, so I could do the same in Russian: Her flight has left. As the terror returned to the Greek woman’s face, the younger woman was ready: But there is another flight to Athens soon. She paused, studying the older woman’s face for acknowledgment, saw that acknowledgement soften her features after the quick surge of fear, continued: Tell her that I personally – she leaned in, communicating with her body and eyes so that the Greek woman could understand them, while making sure that I understood her words – I personally will guarantee that she is on that plane. Ask her for a phone number for her family in Athens. I will call them. I will ask them to meet the new flight. I will give them the flight number, the arrival time, the gate number. Tell her that now, right now, I will escort her to the infirmary downstairs, where she will be assigned a personal nurse. Tell her I will give her doctor’s instructions for care and diet to that nurse. Tell her that nurse will stay with her until she is on the plane. Tell her there is no staff member currently in the airport who speaks either Greek or Russian. But there is a staff member not here now who speaks Russian. Tell her that I will call that person, and she will come immediately here, and stay with her, and answer any questions, and get any help she needs, until she is on the plane. Tell her I will inform the plane’s crew of her situation. Tell her that a member of the crew will attend to her throughout the flight, and will walk with her off the plane in Athens, until she is in the arms of her family. Give her my personal guarantee of all this.
I translated the young Viennese woman’s lucid phrases; she’d made it easy for me. We could see the fear slide off the older woman like a wet cloak.
Somewhere in the disorganization of my storage shed, a few yards from my log cabin in Wallowa County, Oregon, is the letter (if the pack rats haven’t eaten it) in Russian from the Greek woman’s son, thanking me for helping his mother.
It was mid-August, and we landed in Prague just as the city was seething with tension at the approach of the first anniversary of the Soviet military invasion on August 21, 1968. We’d started our day in Moscow, flown to Vienna, waited and milled around there for a few hours, and finally ended up in a Prague restaurant in time for a late dinner. We were hungry.
Some of us started to ask questions in Russian, since the menu was in Czechoslovakian, which uses a Roman alphabet, and was confusing to us. Since Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet blok, there should be no problem. I remember our waitress, a serious-looking young Czech, straightening her spine until she was an inch or two taller, and saying in loud, clear Russian: “Ladies and gentlemen, in this restaurant we do not speak Russian, ever!” She chose to use the pre-Soviet words for “ladies and gentlemen,” rather than the Soviet comrade or citizen.
So we had to make do with the words we could transliterate, quietly, from the Czech words on the menu, back into Russian, then point to the item on the menu. I ordered rabbit, because I recognized the word and it was meat.
The next morning in our hotel a young Czech man was telling some of us about the events of the year before. His friend had burst into his room and awakened him before dawn. “Hurry! Get dressed! The Russians are in Wenceslas Square! Soldiers, tanks....”
They and everyone they knew rushed to the square, and formed a human wall in front of the tanks. Then, he said, one tank, or some tanks, opened fire with the machine guns on their turrets. He paused in his narrative and placed the tip of his right index finger in the middle of his forehead. “My friend was standing right next to me. He was shot. Here.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
On the evening of the 19th some of us went to Wenceslas Square with the Czech students. Soviet soldiers in armored personnel carriers and on foot with submachine guns were there too. Czech citizens were shouting at them. We tried to understand what they were shouting – it sounded to some of us like “GES-TA-PO!” but we were never sure. Someone saw an old woman beating on one of the APCs with her cane. Finally the Soviets decided things were getting too unruly, and tear gassed our section of the crowd. Robin Foor remembers hearing gunfire. We ran from the tear gas – I remember being in some sort of underground passageway, which also had been gassed – and dispersed.
There were other conversations with Czech students about their situation. I remember one in which a young man in our group asked the student who was speaking, “Why don’t you fight?”
The speaker turned to him and spoke as if he were addressing a child, or an idiot: “Because..we..don’t..have..any..guns!”
Since then, that remark, together with the events of those days, have formed the core of my opinion about gun control: while I don’t approve of a lot of yahoos running around with assault rifles just to prove... I don’t know what, I have believed since that day that no government, ever, must be allowed to have, or control, all the weapons in a society.
Mariamna Soudakova had given me a special mission. There was a note with an address in Prague, and some help on how to find it. There was the name of a man to ask for. No one else. It might be difficult. Okay, it would be difficult. I would say certain words to this man. He would hand me a full-sized, traditional Russian samovar. It was very precious to her. I could not ship it; I must carry it, undamaged, in my own hands, and put it into hers.
There was a subtext to Mara’s request. It wasn’t “Hey Dean, if you get a chance, stop by this address and pick up something for me, will you?” It went as far as this: I did something pretty big for you. Now you must do something big for me. It will be difficult. But you’re a few years older than the others, you’ve been around, you’ve been under the gun. This samovar is from my family. You’re the only one I trust with it. I won’t even tell you its story, but there is one, and it is worth the trouble. Do not fail me.
We had been spending our time in the heart of the city. When I got off the tram in search of Mara’s samovar, I was in a totally different part of the city from the metropolitan bustle and boiling military presence at the city center. Here, though there were many apartment buildings – mostly newer – and some businesses, it was strangely quiet. Eerily quiet. The area didn’t seem deserted; I could feel the presence of people, a lot of them. I just couldn’t see them. Doors were closed, windows curtained.
I knew I was somewhere near where I was supposed to be, according to Mara’s directions. But I needed help. I went into an apartment building I thought was near where I was supposed to be, and knocked on a door. No answer. Another door, another knock, no answer; and a couple more. I knew there were people here. Finally a door unlocked itself – two or three locks – and a human eyeball peered through the crack. I asked for the address, received a curt reply, and the eyeball disappeared and the door re-locked itself the same number of times. But the eyeball with a voice had given me a direction; I took it and knocked some more, asked some more. A new eyeball asked me whom I was looking for. I used both English and Russian, hoping to dilute the fear I felt all around me. I gave the man’s name, per Mara’s instructions, and the eyeball looked at me for a longer time. The crack widened. “What do you want?”
“I’m an American student. My Russian teacher in the States gave me this name and this address, and asked me to pick up a samovar and deliver it to her in Colorado.”
He opened the door, told me to come in quickly, stuck his head out and looked around just as quickly, and closed and locked it. “Wait here,” he said, after looking me over some more. He disappeared into another room.
He came back with the samovar([7]), ill-concealed in a worn paper bag that wasn’t big enough to cover the top. He handed it to me. He seemed relieved to be rid of it, and now wanted to be rid of me. No small talk; no “So... how’ve your travels been?” - none of that. He marched to the door, unlocked it, and motioned for me to come close so he wouldn’t have to hold it open long. I did that, he opened the door, I stepped out, he closed and locked it behind me.
We left Prague by train shortly before noon on August 20th; next day would be the anniversary of the invasion, the city was in turmoil, and everyone, it seemed, wanted us out of the city. I sat with the samovar on my lap to Munich, and a few days later on another train across fields of tulips in the Hook of Holland, then across the English Channel aboard a ferry, aboard the flight from London to New York, and a final flight from New York to St. Louis.
There I took a taxi to the Greyhound station in St. Louis, which was, let us say, not in the snazziest part of town. I wanted out of there, but my bus wouldn’t leave until the next morning. I looked across the street. There was a hotel, of sorts. I went there, left my duffel in the room, wrapped the samovar in a shirt, and left with it in search of food. I left the key with the desk clerk, told him I just wanted to eat something, and wouldn’t be out late. I crossed the lobby and opened the door. “Hey!” I heard behind me.
Over my shoulder, the clerk gave an easy nod to the left. “Go that way.” Then with a curt movement – more of a twitch – to the right, “Don’t go that way.”
A couple of days later, pretty bedraggled, I knocked on the door of Mariamna Soudakova’s apartment, the ragged bundle in my arms. She opened the door, let me in, searched my face with her eyes. I handed her the bundle. She turned and walked to her dining table, set it down, unwrapped it, picked it up and turned it in her hands and looked it over. All over.
She turned to me, searched my face again. “Thank you, Dean,” she said. She had expected no less.
[1] This was a partial reprise of the sailors’ mutiny aboard the battleship Potëmkin in 1905. In both cases, conditions for ordinary sailors were so severe, and the exercise of authority by officers so arbitrary and cruel, that rebellion was all but inevitable.
[2] The same day the mass executions of Jews began at Babii Yar, a ravine outside Kiev,650 miles to the south.
[3] St. Petersburg was the name of the city before the Soviets renamed it Leningrad; it took the name back after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[4] There are first person accounts of the executions in Babii Yar in Klee, et.al., “The Good Old Days, pp.63ff. The killing was organized so that the corpses formed layers in the ravine. When their turn came, the required number of Jews would be marched around a bend that had shielded them from seeing the execution site. They would be lined up on the rim of the ravine, machine gunned, and tumble down onto the previous layer, now covered by a thin layer of earth. Junior officers then walked on and among the corpses, executing with their pistols at close range anyone still alive. The primary concern of those cited seemed to be the psychological effects of the repeated “blowback” – bits of skull and brain – on the shooters.
[5] See http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/47568/Baby-Yar; also http://www.brandheis.edu/gradjournal article by Victoria Khiterer.
[6] Throughout the Vietnam War, particularly in its later years, rumors would circulate about both Soviet and Chinese advisors being spotted, killed and/or captured while serving with North Vietnamese units in South Vietnam. Of course.
[7] A usually ornate (Mara’s was) metallic vessel (hers was silver or nickel) used in Russia, and some other countries, to heat water for tea, and then to keep the tea hot.
