Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing a Changing Russia. Naomi F. Collins

      

      Through Dark Days

      and White Nights

      Also by New Academia Publishing

      Russian History and Culture

      PASSION AND PERCEPTION: Essays on Russian Culture, by Richard Stites

      MOSCOW BELIEVES IN TEARS: Russians and Their Movies, by Louis Menashe

      IMAGING RUSSIA 2000: Film and Facts, by Anna Lawton

      BEFORE THE FALL: Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years, by Anna Lawton

      RUSSIAN FUTURISM: A History, by Vladimir Markov

      WORDS IN REVOLUTION: Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912-1928, A. Lawton and H. Eagle, eds., trs.

      WE’RE FROM JAZZ: Festschrift in Honor of Nicholas V. Galichenko,

      Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk, eds.

      REMEMBERING UTOPIA: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, eds.

      THE SOVIETIZATION OF EASTERN EUROPE: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period, Balazs Apor, Peter Apor and E.A. Rees, eds.

      THE INNER ADVERSARY: The Struggle against Philistinism and the Moral Mission of the Russian Intelligentsia, by Timo Vihavainen

      RED ATTACK, WHITE RESISTANCE, by Peter Kenez

      RED ADVANCE, WHITE DEFEAT, by Peter Kenez

      ASPECTS OF BALKAN CULTURE, by Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric

      Fiction

      TO KILL A TSAR, by G. K. George (alias Alfred J. Rieber)

      ON THE WAY TO RED SQUARE, by Julieta Almeida Rodrigues

      Memoirs

      JOURNEYS THROUGH VANISHING WORLDS, by Abraham Brumberg

      FOREVER ON THE ROAD: A Franco-American Family’s Thirty Years in the Foreign Service, by Nicole Prévost Logan

      Read an excerpt at: www.newacademia.com

      Through Dark Days

      and White Nights

      Four Decades Observing

      a Changing Russia:

      Impressions and Reflections

      Naomi F. Collins

      Washington, DC

      Copyright © 2008 by Naomi F. Collins

      Published in eBook format by SCARITH/New Academia Publishing

      Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-9845-8326-3

      Printed in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Control Number 2007940796

      ISBN 978-0-9800814-0-4 paperback

      

An imprint of New Academia Publishing Washington, DC

      

[email protected] www.newacademia.com

      I dedicate Through Dark Days and White Nights to our wonderful sons Robert and Jonathan, who shared many of the ups and downs of these experiences; and to their children and future generations whose “todays” will be built on our “yesterdays.”

      Illustrations

       Figures 1-6

       Figures 7-10

       Figures 11-15

       Figures 16-19

      All photographs are from the author’s collection.

      Acknowledgments

      Without my husband Jim Collins, who generously supported my writing and who impelled my unexpected lifetime of journeys to and from the former Soviet Union, then Russia, I would not have had the opportunity to witness and report four decades of static and dramatic life in that compelling nation.

      And because of the encouragement of several friends, including Anne Garside, Janet Rabinowitch and Regina Foster, whose professional judgments I value deeply, my diaries and letters have become the basis of this book. Other friends and colleagues know who they are, and I am deeply grateful to them for championing this endeavor.

      Sensitive editing by Josephine Woll, and support from my publisher, Anna Lawton (New Academia Publishing), have helped polish the prose and realize the publication. Of course the book’s content and views are solely my own. Some names in the text have been changed to avoid intruding on the privacy of friends and colleagues.

      Foreword by Strobe Talbott

      Russia has come a long way from the Soviet era, but it is still a country as perplexing as it is important. In the decades I have spent visiting Russia as a journalist, diplomat, and policy analyst, I have come to appreciate books that provide useful insight into what has changed—and what hasn’t—in that giant country that straddles Europe and Asia, spanning eleven time zones. This book so qualifies. Through Dark Days and White Nights goes beyond an engaging memoir of life in Russia during an important period, from the 1960’s through the turn of the 21^st century: it captures a sense of Russia as a work-in-progress. Rather than a musty snapshot of an earlier era, or an account of a short stay, the book is more like a script for a documentary spanning four decades when an especially astute and literate observer watched Russia emerge from stagnation and enter a period of dramatic economic, social, and political change and, on many fronts, upheaval.

      Because of the scope of Naomi Collins’ experience with Russia, she is able to provide a sense of continuity in the development of a country whose daily life advanced from static to dramatic, yet retained enduring features that the author also discerns and describes with great skill and clarity. She recognizes how much of Russia’s past lives in its present, how long and dark a shadow the Soviet system casts over what we can now safely (if apprehensively) call “the Putin era.” She also has an acute eye and ear for Russian daily life; she understands and conveys how a talented but often beleaguered people have learned to buoy their spirits— including during periods of stagnation and upheaval—through an appreciation of the richness of their culture, the intensity of friendships, the natural beauty of their country, the rotation of the seasons, and the respite of holidays. The policies emanating from the Kremlin play their part in her story, but so do the pleasures of a weekend in the countryside and an Easter celebration. Her book is further enlivened by her self-awareness: she acknowledges how her own perspective has shifted and her reflections matured as her own life has progressed during a period of transformation in Russia’s.

      That perspective began when she and her husband, Jim Collins, lived in a dormitory at Moscow State University in Lenin Hills in the mid-1960s; she returned with their two- and five-year-old sons a decade later, and again in the 1990s, when Jim—one of my closest friends and colleagues in the State Department—served as ambassador, resident in Spaso House, the splendid Italianate mansion in downtown Moscow.

      A trained historian with