Documentary : Bidding Goodby to Russia’s Chaos

The call came from the Ministry of Defense, from a valued source. “John, we must meet,” the voice on the phone said. “The old place?”

By 3 p.m., I was there--parked on the sidewalk outside the Pushkin Museum. Why did the Russian military officer need to see me? “Vitya,” as I’ll call him, hadn’t said. But when he talked, he usually revealed some fascinating things.

A few minutes late, Vitya opened the passenger’s door of my Volvo sedan. He was wearing an overcoat that masked his uniform and carrying a battered attache case. “Zdrastvui,” we greeted each each other familiarly, and I waited for an explanation.

“You know, John, times are hard,” the officer began. “My son was admitted to a military academy, and I have to buy him uniforms. The way the economy is going, I think the only way to guarantee my future is to buy land outside Moscow. Then there’s the telephone. I need one at home. Getting promoted may hinge on it. But you’ve got to pay a $300 bribe.”

I said nothing, but my insides were churning at the turn our meeting had taken.

“Dear friend John, I’ve come to propose an arrangement,” Vitya forged on. “As a reporter, you need information. I need money. We can help each other.” He opened his plastic case and extracted a red folder. His eyes bright with excitement (was he thinking of how marvelous it would be to have a telephone in his apartment?) he thrust a sheaf of typewritten papers at me.

“So,” Vitya asked, putting his seditious brainstorm in its crudest terms, “how would you like to buy some of the official documentation prepared by the General Staff for Russia’s defense minister?”

In the Moscow of yesteryear, this was the fateful moment when the men in leather coats would swoop down, catching the overly curious American correspondent in flagrante delicto and bagging yet another hostage for the horse-trading of superpower politics.

But my encounter near the Kremlin with the Defense Ministry official this past September continued without KGB interruption. In the uncertain moral climate that has come to characterize Russia today, it seemed almost normal. After all, Vitya appeared to reason, if we are trying to build a true free market economy, why shouldn’t a government official have the right to peddle documents he is privy to?

“In our country, it was not a revolution that took place, but chaos,” exiled Nobel Literature Prize laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn mused this year as he considered the recent history of his homeland.

As I packed up late last month after nearly seven years of covering the astonishing events and processes that led to the breakup of the world’s largest country and the end of the divide between East and West, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis seemed as well the most likely forecast for Russia’s near future--”chaos” in the economy, in society, in the country’s administrative building blocks, in relations between leaders and what the Communists referred to as “the masses.”

“It is a long time since we have had genuine politics,” economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky, who wants to become Russia’s next president, said. “What we have seen does not merit the term ‘politics,’ although we are often told that people are fed up with politics. . . . This is like saying . . . the Russian people are tired of wind-surfing! Most Russian people have only seen it on television, if at all.”

*

When I arrived here on a Tupolev 154 jetliner from Paris one cold and snowy November evening in 1986, equipped with two suitcases and a good working knowledge of Russian, I might have been setting foot on a different planet, one where the usual laws of humankind didn’t apply. The pimply KGB border guard who scrutinized my visa on flimsy violet paper was the first cog I met in a continent-sized machine that, at the time, appeared capable of grinding on forever.

Then-President Reagan was being caricatured in the official press (the only one in existence) as an SS (Nazi elite force) trooper. AIDS, the Soviet media implied, was the result of a Pentagon experiment gone wrong; in any event, socialist morality would keep it at a safe distance.

When the head of the official Journalists Union asked me in which state I attended journalism school, I answered, “Virginia.” “Da, “ my interlocutor said smugly. “When I hear ‘Virginia,’ I think of racism.” (The Soviet Union’s own frenzy of inter-ethnic violence was to commence that very month, with a race riot in the republic of Kazakhstan.)

In the blink of an eye, it now seems, the universe I came to report on was gone, along with its encoded verities (“Tass is authorized to state . . . “) and rites like the May Day parade of scripted worker “enthusiasm,” complete with piped-in cheers. As for the cult of Lenin worship that once reigned, when I checked the V. I. Lenin Museum near Red Square a few months ago, they were hawking Italian-made women’s panties in a boutique on the top floor. And the basement had been sublet to a mutual fund.

Being in Moscow during these momentous years was the intellectual and journalistic adventure of a lifetime. To borrow the words of a placard that one disgruntled citizen toted in a protest march across Red Square, I had the luck and privilege to be present when Russia’s “72 years on the road to nowhere” came to an end.

The actors included some true giants of our time, and thousands of ordinary people usually bewildered by the maelstrom of change rising around them. I shared strong Georgian tea and conversation with the late Andrei D. Sakharov in his kitchen only days after he returned to Moscow from internal banishment, then returned with Yvonne, my wife, one sad evening after the world-famous champion of human rights suddenly died at age 68. In the slush on Chkalov Street, grieving Muscovites left evergreen boughs, candles or touching handwritten notes like, “Andrei Dmitriyevich, forgive us!”

Ever beguiling Mikhail S. Gorbachev, last president of the Soviet Union, once repaired my tape recorder when it failed during an interview in his office. Gorbachev gave the machine a sharp blow with the meat of his right hand--”That’s how we fix things in Russia,” explained the fallen leader who, it can be argued, destroyed every institution he set out to reform. But he made my tape recorder run.

In one adrenaline-pumping incident, I buttonholed a returning Boris N. Yeltsin at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to ask whether, as the hostile Communist Party organ Pravda had reported, he had indeed been soused during his first trip to the United States. “Lies and slander!” the future master of the Kremlin roared in my face, with not a trace of alcohol on his furious breath. Going into the trenches in the ethnic war in Nagorno-Karabakh seemed to me far less risky.

For 15 months, while awaiting an apartment from the Soviet government agency in charge of aiding (and keeping tabs on) foreigners, Yvonne and I lived in a seamy hotel, the Yuzhnaya, where refugees from ethnic wars in the Caucasus were housed in uncertain misery. We cooked on a hot plate and did the dishes in the bathtub by heating up water with giant versions of the catalytic coils that college students use to make a cup of soup. (“We’re building memories,” Yvonne said gamely.)

We expected little better, because this, after all, was Moscow, a Cold War hardship post that American wags had dubbed the “Big Potato,” and further, we were living far better than most Russians.

And what, after all, were fruit and vegetable deprivation, 40-below temperatures, getting punched by a KGB goon during a refusenik demonstration, month after month of 14-hour workdays, tens of thousands of miles racked up on cramped, odorous and late Aeroflot jets and the other minuses alongside the arresting spectacle of a nation waking from a long nightmare?

While others our age were obtaining their first mortgage, we had glasnost, perestroika, the death of the U.S.S.R., Russia’s rebirth and a chance that past correspondents could only dream of: getting to know an entire gamut of Russians as good and trusted friends. It was a splendid trade-off.

The blooming of liberty on the hard Russian earth (and the simultaneous wilting of authority) were breathtaking, but also surreal if you had known the authoritarian ways of old.

I once wangled an invitation to the formerly top-secret space center in Central Asia where the first Sputnik was launched in 1957. Along with Russian colleagues, I walked along the dun-hued steppe as a frost-dusted rocket was trundled on a flatcar to its launch pad. About 100 yards from the gantry, we were told we could go no further. The Russian reporters exploded in protest, and a colonel was summoned.

“Look guys,” he told us. “The last time we let you get close, some of you unbolted pieces of the rocket and took them as souvenirs!”

That insanity epitomized for me how freedom in Russia could so easily degenerate into license. For the fear and conformity that had been the indispensable pillars of the old regime have crumbled for good.

In his epic “Boris Godunov,” the poet Alexander Pushkin has a phrase that could summarize the often tragic history of his nation: “And the people fell silent.” As we in the Moscow press corps listened, dumbstruck, the Russians and their neighbors in the Soviet Union recovered their voice--and, it is true, began to speak some things the West didn’t like.

On the Arbat, a central pedestrian mall, throngs formed as bards of all breeds declaimed their pain and anger. Dale Carnegie’s capitalist primer “How to Win Friends and Influence People” became more visible on bookstands than the tomes of Marxism-Leninism. And what value was the old Kremlinology when a Western reporter covering events like the maiden session of the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies might find himself side-by-side in a Kremlin men’s room with a marshal of the Soviet Union or an influential member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee?

*

What stuns me even today is how fast the old order fell. In the cream-colored hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, I caught my breath one day in October, 1988, as a member of the Supreme Soviet, scientist Roald Z. Sagdeyev, cast the first “no” vote in history against a bill endorsed by the Communist hierarchy. It was one Establishment member’s declaration of independence from craven orthodoxy.

Perhaps that moment--and it occurred just five years ago!--is when the monolithic Soviet system of government developed the microscopic crack that would destroy it.

Some of the people I met were ready to pay the ultimate price for change, and did--beaten to death by Soviet soldiers’ entrenching shovels in Tbilisi, Georgia, or crushed by the tanks in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Some opponents of the old order were driven by fanaticisms no less inhumane than the system they fought. But it is the quiet reason and resolve of a Lithuanian file clerk, Jadvyga Beliasukiene, that I remember best. Petite and intense, the 59-year-old Roman Catholic activist had spent a dozen years in Soviet prisons. I met her as she and her fellow nationalists in the small Baltic state were calling on their neighbors to pray together and lay flowers to mark Lithuania’s short-lived independence between the World Wars.

“We want to raise the consciousness of people so that they remember they have the right to be free,” Beliasukiene explained to me in her apartment.

Lithuania’s puppet government flooded the streets with police and vigilantes to keep the populace out of the churches and stifle other manifestations of “anti-Soviet” behavior, and succeeded. Yet subsequent events showed time was on the side of the gentle-voiced Christian who dared speak of “the right to be free.”

Whither Russia now? The great challenge, I think, is to foster a participatory democracy and sense of civic obligation in a land where traditionally the state has been everything and the individual little more than exploitable raw material. The temptation to backslide into wielding what Russians call “the strong hand” is mighty. “I am worried by the fact that . . . some officials have acquired a taste for the state of emergency,” President Yeltsin told members of his Cabinet last week.

Changing the country over to a presidential system or choosing a new legislature, as Russian voters will do next month, will only be a tiny step toward building a nation where each individual is entitled to respect and knows it.

There is so much to be done. Last January, my driver and good friend Nikolai Nikolayevich Zaitsev, who personified the gentle strength that is one of the finest qualities of the Russians, unexpectedly died of cancer. The last time I saw Nikolai, emaciated on his bed and clutching at a sheet, he was speaking with pathetic hope about a miracle suppository that a quack healer had said might restore his strength. In a fashion that, to me, seemed all too typical of the haughtiness with which Russians in authority tended to deal with the narod --the people--his doctors never told Nikolai he was dying. They just sent him home with instructions to rest.

*

More than 200 years ago, Louis Antoine Saint-Just, a French revolutionary who himself was to die under the blade of the guillotine, called happiness a new idea in Europe. That must be true a million times over for Russia.

How has it changed since that day when I landed here on an Aeroflot flight from Paris? I found no more succinct summary than what First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar told me one day. His verdict is not the whole story, since it omits the growth of crime, a widespread sense of national shame--and the sort of despair that would bring a career officer to try and peddle classified documents to a foreigner to get dollars. (I turned Vitya down, by the way.)

“I don’t think you ever had to travel 500 or 600 kilometers every week to buy two kilograms of sausage,” Gaidar, the economist in charge of building capitalism in Russia, told me. “You don’t know what it is to queue for two hours almost every day to buy staples. You don’t know the feeling of helplessness and humiliation when your money can’t buy you anything if you have no connections.

“That used to be a huge part of our lives, and it’s now vanishing into the past in such a way that some people are being hurt--those people who had access to perks, who had the time to stand in line. But on the other hand it is a very big advantage for those who had neither,” Gaidar said.

“A friend of mine from the city of Tomsk was asked what the reforms in Russia had given him, and he said, ‘In January, 1992, I bought a can of condensed milk--a thing I hadn’t been able to do for 20 years.’ ”

Dahlburg’s next posting will be in New Delhi.