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

cleanliness scale—a matrix of names running down the left column; dates across the top; and grades from 1—5 in the grid. I figured we had sufficient disabilities as The Enemy without adding dirt to the list: we kept our rooms clean and earned high ratings on the chart, and showed up for kitchen cleaning duty when scheduled.

      I wrote home on November 11, 1965:

      Jim is now doing his “cleaning duty” on the floor. About once each month, each person is granted the opportunity to clean the common kitchen at 7:30 a.m., sweep the corridor, and then serve a five-hour shift answering the single telephone on the floor.

      I’ve wondered how long the Sanitary Commission lasted after our time, and whether it still inspects the increasingly run-down rooms of the university today.

      Cleaning the kitchen’s layers of grease, garbage, and stickiness took a strong stomach. Without detergent, sponges, cleansers, and steel wool, the kitchen suffered from hopelessly entrenched dirt. That is why I still remember the moment real life imitated television advertising art.

      Jim’s turn to clean the kitchen came. He marched in with our can of Ajax, unknown in the USSR, rubbing years of stains and grease from the white porcelain sink and stove. Oblivious to his surroundings, Jim did not see behind him, watching in utter awe, the tiny cleaning lady (uborshchitsa) of our floor, old, toothless, amazed. Witnessing the miracle, she afterward treated him almost like a god. Far better than walking on water, he had cut right through the water to the bottom of the sink!

      She was so taken with Jim that when she had a special joy in her life, she came to see him and share the moment with him. She invited him into the kitchen, conspiratorially, to reveal—as she unwrapped the newspaper surrounding the item—one plucked skinny dead duck, a duck she had purchased unexpectedly, and triumphantly, for her family’s holiday dinner. She could not have been prouder if she had shot it herself. Jim expressed the admiration she hoped for. At the end of our stay, Jim presented her, along with our gratuity and probably far more precious, the remains of the can of Ajax.

      We were surprised at the Victorian decor of the university lounges, of hotels and living rooms, in the country we had imagined to be out of Brave New World. But just as surprising were the remnants of what seemed Victorian attitudes, a gap between the doing and saying, what was practiced and what was discussed or displayed. For men and women to show affection in public, to hold hands, or exchange kisses was considered socially unacceptable. But privately, and before the ’60s revolution took hold in the States, unmarried people were engaged in what we would have considered promiscuous sex. Unprotected, since there were virtually no condoms, diaphragms, or other family-planning measures available. The measure of last resort, abortion, was widely used, but not by choice: no woman relished this surgical procedure performed without benefit of anesthetics, and often without the level of hygiene to prevent infection and sterility. But abstinence did not seem a popular alternative. (Is it ever? I wondered, when I thought even about the married couples we knew with unplanned pregnancies.)

      Our friend Emily, a graduate student from Great Britain, learned another lesson in the suite she shared with her Russian roommate, Irina. Emily washed and hung her underwear to dry in the bathroom they shared. “How can you allow your underwear to hang in the bathroom when male visitors might visit?” Irina implored Emily, appalled at her immodesty. This might not have seemed odd coming from a virgin, but Irina had been having sexual relations with a number of different men during the year. And she was not unusual. The incongruous prudery that governed public life contrasted with the casual and serial sex practiced privately. Not professed, just performed.

      At the same time, in public places, blue-collar women, women construction workers, plasterers and painters, and other laborers on scaffolds and on the ground (women, as always, serving as the heavy labor force of Russia) thought nothing in hot weather of removing their blouses and working in their brassieres. And nobody seemed to notice, except foreigners like us.

      Proper behavior in public was enforced, I learned the hard way, by the babushki, the keepers of tradition. I still hear the shrill voices of old ladies screaming at me, “Girl, what are you doing?” This question was addressed to me when I sat with my legs crossed; or conversely, in trousers, sat with my legs akimbo; and sometimes when I didn’t even know what I could be doing wrong, although I knew it must be on that mysterious List.

      There seemed to be a correct or conventional way to do everything. “Doing your own thing” was not imagined. It seemed that formulaic behavior in daily life mirrored religious practice, also highly structured, formal, and ritualized. Was it a comfort to people to observe established patterns forged by tradition, knowable and known? Long before individualism was excluded from the Socialist and Soviet agendas, it was also absent from traditional Russian life. The pressures to conform combined with prescribed rules for carrying out daily activities made foreigners, or citizens who deviated or dissented, more conspicuous and isolated than they might have been in a land in which diverse ways of doing things are as common as set ways, uniqueness as familiar as uniformity. At the time, I knew we stuck out, looking odd and alien. Since then I’ve wondered whether this narrow gauge thinking has made ethnic and cultural variety still discomfiting to Russians today.

      Daily life offered stock ways and words to navigate buses, make change, buy food, stand in line. On buses, trams, and trolleys, drivers were boxed off in their own space, devoted only to driving. Paying was on the honor system. But the phrases for passing coins along through the jammed bus to reach the pay boxes and collect the ticket receipts; the elaborate ways in which people made change, often among multiple people; and the language for entering, exiting, and passing fellow passengers, were fixed expressions in what amounted to highly ritualized language and behavior. Not random and chaotic like New York, nor quiet and nontactile like Washington. I wrote my parents that:

      In each vehicle, two little boxes contain tickets that each passenger is to take after he or she drops the correct change into the box: five, four, or three kopecks for a bus, tram, or trolley. Not having correct change, a passenger initiates a prescribed conversation on—let’s say—the 25-kopeck piece he has. Coins start passing from hand to hand throughout the crowded vehicle in exchange for other coins, until finally a correct total per person per trip is achieved—say for five people at five kopecks each. The 25-kopek piece is passed to a person near the box, who is requested to deposit it and draw five tickets which, then in turn, are passed back to their respective five purchasers, all of this in stylized phrases.

      Travel was never quiet, while people settled confusion, disputes, or problems among themselves. The penalty for not paying was a 50-kopeck fine, and finding one’s name posted in the newspaper and on bus notices. The honor system was backed by random spot- checkers. I was eager not to be found wanting.

      Below the surface of our daily activities, undercurrents of surveillance, suspicion, and manipulation percolated up. The authorities in the Soviet Union were fairly successful in their efforts to preserve the intellectual isolation of Soviet citizens, and they wanted to keep it that way. Sealed off from radio, television, and print communication from the outside world, people in the Soviet Union remained ignorant of alternatives, of a life outside. Most had no experience beyond their hermetically sealed environment. What bits of information filtered into the country confused people’s thinking about the world even further, since Soviet media and an active rumor circuit reported a random assortment of items without relation to one another or to any whole picture. A murder here, a day of war there, a law passed somewhere else, a flood or tornado. No context or coherence, just unrelated snippets.

      Telephones were not yet universal in homes: coin-operated public phones were widely used. For inter-city calls, people had to go to special sites, from which such calls could be placed. We could not make international phone calls from university telephones, or from public phone boxes. To arrange a call to the U.S. (which we did only once because of the high cost), we trooped downtown to the Central Post Office and Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street, a half-day’s excursion on multiple Metro trains, to schedule and then await the overseas call. Russians and foreigners alike stood in line, put in the order for their call, then sat and waited. If and when the call went through, the caller was assigned a phone booth in which she or he could hope to hear the overseas party above the scratchy interference of the lines. We