Looking Into the Flame : Learning to Love Her: A Soviet Exile’s View

The Statue of Liberty, meticulously patched and fitted with a new flame, turns 100 this week. Through the years, the statue has been transformed from a symbol of fraternity between France and the United States into the pre-eminent symbol of freedom, a beacon for millions of immigrants and a patriotic symbol of unrivaled emotional intensity. It has inspired poetry and song, speechmaking and caricature. But mostly the statue has been a personal symbol, to millions around the world, of the hopes and promise of a nation that proclaims itself dedicated to individual liberty. Five very personal perspectives:

Vassily Aksyonov, 53, is the author of the novels “The Burn” and “The Island of Crimea.” Before he was exiled from Moscow in 1980, he was a member of the Metropol group of writers who banded together to publish their rejected works outside the Soviet Union. He has taught at UCLA and now lives in Washington, D.C.

Apart from its American grandeur, the Statue of Liberty paradoxically also represents a weighty part of Soviet heritage--as a symbol of evil. We knew this gigantic sculpture with a spiky halo around its head from our kindergarten years. Rumor had it that there was a bulletproof elevator inside. Stalin, upset by New York gigantism and in an effort to out-size Lady Liberty, erected his own metal depiction in full generalissimo uniform between the Volga and the Don. A four-ton truck could make a U-turn on the flat top of it.

Innumerable cartoonists in the Soviet ideological media have gone out of their way to depict the Lady as ominously as possible. Her nimbus has bristled with gun barrels or shark-like missiles; her torch has been raised above the planet as a nuclear sword of Damocles. Sometimes, the same cartoonists, for unknown reasons, have been imbued with overwhelming empathy toward Lady Liberty, and that rather frequent--albeit inexplicable--switch usually turned the statue from a merciless goddess of war and havoc into a bag lady seeking some pathetic donations on a corner of Wall Street while wearing a wreath of barbed wire.

The Soviet ideological journalists always kept the pace: The invariable title “In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty” has become a sort of trademark for their American (anti-American) reports throughout the Soviet epoch, from Lenin to Gorbachev. I can’t recall any impartial--let alone favorable--mention of Lady Liberty in the Soviet press.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that all symbols of freedom were disregarded in the Soviet Union, the only land of “genuine freedom.” For example, the famous Delacroix canvas, “Liberty Leading the People,” was tolerated and a copy displayed in the local art gallery, even though the lady holding the tricolor and saber on the barricades was rather scantily attired--topless, specifically, which gave our fourth-grade class a golden opportunity to broaden its outlook while visiting a painting gallery.

It is needless to say how little we, the post-Stalin “thaw” generation, trusted the Soviet media. In a way, its anti-American zeal nurtured our pro-American feelings. Unlike us, the previous generations of Soviet intellectuals and artists had a lot of biases toward America. The revolutionary writers of Russia to a large extent belonged to the European “left” that was mesmerized by Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West.” America was the uttermost western West.

The first Russian revolutionary writer ever to visit the United States, Maxim Gorki, was awfully vexed by what he saw over here. He called New York the “City of the Yellow Devil” and, with his notorious absence of artistic flair, stigmatized jazz as “music for the gross.”

Subsequent visitors, such as novelist Boris Pilniak, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, while enraptured by American technology, were indignant at the tremendous indifference of Americans toward the major event of their lives, the Bolshevik Revolution. No matter how much some of those writers missed the elegance and comfort of “the past,” they all considered the Revolution a sort of a new Great Flood, an overwhelming cleansing process come to replace decaying Western civilization with a new society. And here was a gigantic country paying catastrophically little attention to the roar of Russia. This U.S.A. took into account neither Marx, Spengler nor Lenin. It merely didn’t have time to contemplate the decadent issue of the “twilight” of capitalism, for it worked through the night, and “time is money.”

The Russian Revolution writers subconsciously perceived the United States as an alternative to the violent Marxist revolution. It was not without reason that the poet Mayakovsky, in a convulsion of prophecy, said that America might become the “last fortress of capitalism.” Such treacherous thoughts could have cooled, at least for a moment, inflammatory minds: “It doesn’t look like a decadent country, even though capitalism holds the reins. What if everything is wrong and the Revolution itself is none other than the ultimate product of decadence, with American society representing something new and as yet unclassified?”

The grandchildren of those first visitors, our generation of Soviets, have created a cult of the U.S.A. Without pretending to analyze but merely looking back from the distance of several decades, I would dare say that this cult is based on our subconscious counterrevolutionary feelings. By the time of our youth, the so-called revolutionary romanticism had vaporized in the routine of Stalinism, which was as bloodthirsty as it was tedious. America loomed through the propaganda as an alternative to the nauseating “class struggle.”

As an antithesis to ceaseless brainwashing, a strange, idealized, enormously lionized, twisted, distorted--and nonetheless probably genuine in a certain “astral” sense--image of the United States, a perpetual carnival “in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty,” has been created in the imagination of the “Russian boys,” as Dostoevsky described them.

Thirty years later, some of us arrived on these shores, having been booted out of the homeland. It didn’t take long to realize that the United States is not the enchanted “Rhapsody in Blue” all the time, that dark sides of American life so viciously exploited by the zealots of Soviet propaganda exist in reality.

We had undergone a torturing process of alienation due to American parochialism and some tasteless forms of the American “mass culture.” I cannot rule out that this process had something to do with the subtle reconstruction of our bodies’ cells. We could see this alienation as the crash of a myth: We could develop a sort of bitterness and squeamishness toward certain local habits, ways and styles until we recognized that in order to become a true member of this society we should get rid of this home-grown “cult of the U.S.A.” Then we would find another revitalizing sense of American life.

Today, I am almost American. I have gotten used to what used to vex me: the smell of popcorn in movie theaters, American coffee, football in which the feet touch the ball at most 10 times a game. At the start of letters, I now put the month before the day. If something is too expensive, I shake my hand in the air as if burned. I scream “ouch” instead of a Russian “oi ,” and “oops” instead of “ op .” I even discuss Mr. Stallone’s advantage over Mr. Schwarzenegger. But besides that, there is something more important: Sometimes it seems that I have perceived a great metaphysical sense of this society as a golden opportunity given to humanity to oppose the destructive forces of revolutionary decadence, as exemplified by the Soviet totalitarian regime. And what’s most amazing is that sometimes this society seems strong enough to fulfill this historic task.

Powerful but liberal, sketchy, patchy, helter-skelter but united by some enigmatic benevolent force--had America been a monolith in the Soviet or Iranian fashion, the defense of it would never have become a spiritual goal of modern humankind. Determination to stand for the United States is determination to stand for a new liberal civilization with all its multifariousness, with its “left wing” and “right wing,” with its ideological and aesthetic kaleidoscope, with its hedonism and generosity, motley ethnos and Anglo-Scottish foundation, with its inequality and technology (which brings more equality to the masses than Marx and Mohammed put together), with its religious ecumenism and commercial paganism, with its bankers and tramps, superstars and farmers, preachers and muscle builders, homosexuals and wrestlers, palm readers and mathematicians, street musicians, punks, Soviet dissidents, vogue models, Chinese cooks, go-go girls and even with its real-estate agents--all this enchanting marketplace!

Looking from that angle, one can’t help but admit that anti-Americanism today smells of the concentration camps. Whatever psychological reasons some modern writers like Gunter Grass or Gabriel Garcia Marquez have for their anti-American feelings, they favor envisioning our future as the barracks rather than the market. However paradoxically, America, in order to defend itself, should defend its anti-Americans, too.

This free marketplace or, if you please, “the last fortress of common sense,” should be protected against all odds, and first of all against those irrational destructive forces of revolutionary decadence that try to compensate for their lack of creativity through excesses of violence and perfidy. Whenever those forces try once again to humiliate America, I wish I were young enough to join the Marines.

Well, with my new patriotism I sometimes feel like an aging celibate who’s involved for the first time in a love affair--that is, awkward. Actually, I don’t care how much varnishing and gilding the Statue of Liberty has received for her anniversary, thanks to Mr. Iacocca’s efforts. I love her, rain or shine, probably because this symbol of American integrity has always been a part of my youth’s dissidence.