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

course this was before international or long distance calls could be direct dialed even in the U.S., but calls could be placed from home telephones via an international or long-distance operator, a live human voice. It would have been hard to picture everyone in New York heading for the Central Post Office to call overseas.)

      The same site downtown served to send packages overseas. We had to arrive with loose objects, not previously packed boxes. Only after postal personnel examined each object, could we pack each, on site, for shipping. Homebound Russian books and little wooden painted souvenirs began their journey there. Single-site monitoring simplified the government’s oversight of citizens’ overseas connections.

      Once the international exchange programs began shipping idea-bearing foreign students to the Soviet Union, and the authorities realized they could not erect physical barriers to these outspoken guests, they used psychological pressure to prevent deep mixing. It worked fairly well. And it became the darker underside of our existence.

      How did they do it? By constructing and manipulating an undercurrent of fear, they could control both citizens and foreigners. Deception could provide a useful weapon in psychological warfare. At the university itself, Soviet authority was represented by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel). The Director was a formal, remote man, housed in the back office, delegating day-to-day responsibility to Natalya, an attractive young blonde. Her soft, pleasant features masked a steel center. She melted at mention of her young daughter whose picture adorned her desk, while calculating destructive manipulation of foreign students. She proffered friendship to lonely American students, acting on orders from the KGB-connected bureaucracy to which she was 100 percent loyal, and that paid her in privileges and perks. She helped me understand how powerful dictators like Stalin and his successors could staff and institutionalize their ambitious and destructive goals from day to day, manage and administer their wills, one document and one person at a time.

      Her strategic plan was to befriend students, cozying up, becoming familiar, confiding, insinuating her way, conveying “I’m on your side; trust me; I’m your ally against other forces.” Since we all saw a lot of her—she served as intermediary for us in the university and sometimes traveled with us on student trips— several students fell for her apparent friendship.

      From that base, the Office for Foreign Students directed a damaging effort to drive out one particular American student, “John.” His research interest was 20^th-century Soviet politics, a topic they deemed sensitive and preferred to protect from scrutiny. Targeted for ouster, John became the object of a campaign to isolate and discredit him, and to destroy his will to stay.

      The first stage was a quiet campaign of whispered confidential hints dropped to other American students. “How is John doing? Is he well?” Natalya would ask with some doubt in her voice, looking sympathetically into the eyes of one of John’s American friends. As the campaign escalated, the questions evolved into a more direct, urgent seeding of doubt.

      “What problems is he having?” “He doesn’t seem right, does he?” She would press his closest American friend, who himself was becoming doubtful of John’s strength. Because we all suffered health problems—exhaustion, intestinal parasites, coughs, bronchitis, staph, and strep—none of us probably seemed “right.” But John soon collapsed in a deep faint in downtown Moscow. He had pneumonia, we learned. He was sent back to the States. And I learned more about the dark side of power than I had wanted to know.

      The day he succumbed, he and “Tim,” another American student, were heading from the archives for lunch at the Hotel National. The old hotels—the National, Metropole, Ukraina, and Praga—were not yet refurbished in the retro-splendor they enjoy today, but they provided the finest dining available. At one of their cafés, one could get little dumplings or pastries, soups, and more substantial dishes for lunch; and in their restaurants, a full course meal at mid-day or evening. For a city the size of Moscow, a city of some seven to eight million people at the time, there were very few proper restaurants (as opposed to snack bars or buffets)—one or two dozen. Of these, most were housed in hotels. They aspired to be not just restaurants, but nightclubs with entertainment, with a band for dance music, usually featuring a female singer, in tight, sequined attire, bleached, teased hair, and lots of makeup.

      Restaurant dinners at mid-day or evening often included the range of traditional courses. First a soup—cabbage, beet, sour grass, or potato, sometimes fish or meat; followed by an optional 100 grams of sour cream set in a stainless steel stemware cup, and topped with a sugar sprinkling. For the main course, “bifstek,” a rendering of “beefsteak,” a small beef fillet, was most popular; but I always headed for the sturgeon with mushrooms baked in sour cream sauce, a sort of sturgeon Stroganoff, when it was available. The side dish was frequently, and not unexpectedly, potatoes— commonly pan- fried. Then there was “salat” (cold potatoes, cooked peas and carrots mixed with mayonnaise)—a course I passed up; and for dessert, stewed dried fruit or vanilla ice cream. Fresh fruits and vegetables ranged from rarely seen to nonexistent; oranges or apples occasionally appeared at a restaurant or food stand.

      The restaurants’ printed menus aroused immediate hope of rich variety and plenty. Well-worn menus listed dozens of hot and cold salads, appetizers, soups, entrees, and desserts, pages of apparent choices far more extensive than any fare the establishment offered. But when one tried to order, the waitress peremptorily informed the hopeful eater: “We have beefsteak or Chicken Kiev.” Then, more impatiently, “What’d’ya’ want?” I couldn’t figure out then or since why anyone thought that highlighting so large a gap between potential plenty and actual scarcity, falling so visibly short of a professed goal, seemed desirable propaganda for the success of the regime. But most likely the two bureaucracies, the one that created and printed menus, and the one that stocked restaurants, never met. Or perhaps the missing food items could be accounted for in some other way. Rumor had it then, as later, that desirable foods went missing en route, off the farm, dropped from the truck, from the warehouse, or out the back door of the kitchen.

      About one hundred years earlier, I later learned, Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice Underground, Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, had journeyed to Russia in the midst of writing his Alice books. In his visit to a hotel restaurant in 1867, he noted that it was some consolation to find that during dinner,

      we furnished a subject of the liveliest interest to our six or seven waiters …who ranged themselves in a row & gazed in a quite absorbed way at the collection of strange animals that were feeding before them... Now & then a twinge of conscience would seize them, that they were after all not fulfilling the great object of life as waiters & on these occasions they would all hurry to the end of the room, & refer to a great drawer, which seemed to contain nothing but spoons & forks. When we asked for anything, they first looked at each other in an alarmed way—then, when they had ascertained which understood the order best, they all followed his example, which always was to refer to the big drawer… (The Russian Journal of Lewis Carroll, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935)

      We ate in restaurants only every few weeks, but as foreign graduate students, we were also allowed the privilege of the professors’ dining room. Unlike the student cafeteria in the sub- basement, this somewhat nicer establishment was set higher in the dormitory, and had small tables rather than refectory seating. The food fell short of hotel or tourist quality (not itself terrific), but like some faculty clubs, pegged itself a few notches above student fare.

      Food was a serious preoccupation for Russians even in the 1960s. Sufficient food supplies still spelled survival, especially for those who endured the starvation or profound hunger of the World War II years and afterwards. As late as 1947 a major famine killed a great number of people through starvation and disease, and took a toll on the health of survivors.

      Although the War had ended about twenty years before we arrived, its ghosts still haunted the streets of Russia. There was a conspicuous shortage of men over forty (compared to women); and those that remained bore heavy evidence of injury, suffering severe handicaps. Beside the eight to ten million soldiers lost in the War, another 15 million Soviet citizens died from starvation and cold, illness, prison, and labor camps. (I try to picture the entire population of New York State, all of it gone.) Another