Going Back - IX

(continued)

Writing this now, nearly forty years later, I’m conscious that much has changed in the world and in Moscow since those slightly eerie days of the mid-Cold War. Back then, the mere sight of anything “Western” - nye nash - on a Moscow street was enough to arouse suspicion, and alert the ubiquitous enforcers of order and discipline as well as those who sought to elude them. If one wore jeans, one was likely to be asked to sell them; if one was discovered to be carrying a bag full of Kellogg’s cornflakes boxes, Kit-Kat biscuits, cartons of sterilized milk and jars of Nescafe (shopping was often done for several members of the group), one was likely to get a similar request, or even simply have the things taken away by an officious "citizen". At GUM (the large universal department store) or along Gorky Street, it was usual to be approached by touts trying to conduct the illegal exchange of Western currency for rubles. There was therefore quite a strong motivation to remain anonymous and nondescript – being conspicuously Western was not such a good idea. The American postgraduates in the hostels really took this to heart, and most of them went out and bought Soviet clothes, which they wore on a permanent basis, trying to mingle with the “natives”. The Brits, on the other hand, tended to preserve their Britishness, and dressed accordingly. Perhaps because the fashion sense of British “scholars” was somewhat restrained – understated, might be a better word for it – Brits didn’t stick out quite so much on the streets as Americans did, and so we were generally tolerated as generic inostrantsy (foreigners), who could have come from almost anywhere in the outside world.

I think that by the third or fourth week following our arrival in the Soviet world, many of us in the group began to feel, if not actually homesick, then at least disoriented. Insomnia was a common complaint, and on visits to one another’s rooms we noticed that some people really did seem to having difficulty in adjusting: one group member had even begun to paper the walls of his rooms with the wrappers of Mars chocolate bars he had bought at the Embassy store.

At this stage, we were only vaguely aware of the tensions that lurked beneath the apparently calm and controlled surface of the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime. I was beginning to get to know Viktor, my block neighbour, and had met one or two of the somewhat ghostly though always meticulously polite figures who visited his room, sometimes for hours on end – I could hear them talking through the wall, and from time to time was invited in to share the vodka and incredibly heated conversation, which nearly always seemed to be about articles in Grani or Posev (two emigré journals), with mention of VSKhSON, Ogurtsov, and other “controversial” subjects. Such subjects were, of course, related to the extreme wing of the Soviet dissident movement. On the other hand, some of Viktor's visitors appeared not to be dissidents at all, but were rather from the other side - i.e. the KGB, which had a "cell" attached to the Komsomol in Zone V. For a while, I wondered about Viktor. But later, after we'd become friends, I changed my view.

One morning, while shopping at GUM with a friend, I witnessed something I hadn’t seen before: from a point on the second tier of the balconies around the store, a young woman suddenly threw a bunch of leaflets into the air, and there was a brief flash of metal as she chained herself to the railings. The leaflets fell among the crowd of shoppers below. No one picked them up. Suddenly, I heard two or three voices chanting what later turned to have been slogans. Then the young woman was gone, and the chanting stopped. It was all over within about a minute. The demonstrators were removed by police, and the crowds went on with their shopping as if nothing had happened.

(to be continued)


See also: Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III
Going Back-IV
Going Back-V
Going Back-VI
Going Back-VII
Going Back-VIII