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

remained a real and not unfounded fear. A bulging tote bag signified successful foraging and ensured that life would go on. Almost impossible to imagine, I found it to be, to picture what it actually felt like to know there is no food at all—not just this type of food, not just in this shop, not just today, but all food, gone. How would I live my days with that haunting vision?

      Sustenance apart, meals and tea in Russia traditionally held greater meaning. They served (and serve today) as occasions for expressing friendship; as symbols of sharing; signs of success; shows of hospitality and prosperity in displays of generosity and extravagance.

      People gathered to break bread together; newcomers were (and are) greeted with the traditional ceremonial offering of bread and salt (pull a piece of bread from the loaf, salt it, and eat it while your hosts wait expectantly); holidays were celebrated with feasts; friendships were cemented with shared home-cooked preserves or pastries. It is hard to imagine business that didn’t begin over drinking tea together, or an evening with friends not set around an oilcloth-covered kitchen table topped with tea glasses in ornate filigreed holders, sugar cubes, fruit preserves, chocolates, simple white cookies or rich French-style cream pastries. So central to the culture was (and is) gathering around a table to eat and drink— for business, pleasure, family gathering, or friendship—that the Russian language has a single word for this “at-the-table” phenomenon (zastolye), a word without easy translation.

      For us, in settings from homes to restaurants, dorm kitchens to food shops, procuring, preparing, and sharing meals were to play a role during every period of our returns to Russia. From the 1960s through the turn of the 21^st century, it was hosting and being hosted, from gatherings of friends or neighbors around a kitchen table to state dinners toasting summit meetings of presidents of the United States with their Soviet or Russian counterparts—sharing a meal or tea, an enduring activity.

      For a foreigner, venturing beyond Moscow was not easy during Soviet times. Today’s freedom of travel was unimaginable: travel was restricted and monitored; permission was required, and often denied; logistics undependable. Our trips in the 1960s were the most affecting, since they allowed us to cross the threshold into the enduring, yet untouristed realms of rural Russia.

      When we headed out of Moscow on a railroad train or rented bus, we left a world of paved streets, high-rise buildings, indoor plumbing, and central heat for the life of the villages and small towns that had survived intact for centuries. Entering each village or town was like stepping into a movie set for an 18^th- or 19^th-century story. Muddy or frozen rutted dirt roads wended along lanes edged by low wooden picket fences. Within each enclosure sat a sagging, tilted log cabin, usually decorated like a gingerbread house with elaborately carved wood-framed windows and doors.

      Like a Chagall painting, the rooflines of cabins perched and pitched at random angles, making the artist’s depictions seem less whimsical than photographic. Smoke from charcoal or wood stoves spiraled out of chimneys. Inside, in contrast to the bleak, tumbling- down village around, potted plants thrived on windowsills, and colorful curtains, carpets, and pillows provided cozy warmth that belied the colorlessness outdoors. Children and adults walked to and from the village pump at the well, carrying buckets of water home for washing, cooking, and bathing. Toilets were outside, in outhouses: hot and pungent in summer; icy cold in winter. Around the cabins, geese and chickens wandered erratically, pausing at the well, then squawked off out of the way of a woman with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, a water bucket suspended from each side. I saw a very resigned old horse dining on weeds, while his master, a bearded old peasant on his sled, waited patiently with his milk cans for their afternoon journey.

      Riding past villages that flourished during medieval and early modern times, we could tell the seasons from the horse-drawn carts: during spring, summer, and fall, they had wheels; in winter, sled blades. The design of these sleighs would have been familiar to Tsar Peter the Great more than two centuries earlier.

      In spring, summer, and fall, women kneeled at the banks of waterways, washing their family’s clothes in rivers and streams. In winter, they washed clothes through a hole in the ice of a frozen river. A photo I took from a distance captures the brilliant red of the washing woman’s hands. Little had changed in centuries. Like pinching one’s self in a dream, we had to look at the bus that delivered us, the local telegraph and (shared) telephone in the single post office, and the signs of electricity, to know that we were in the 20^th century at all. Many goods were still hauled by horses or by men and women burdened under massive loads. Motorized vehicles were scarce.

      Our first fall, we traveled to Vladimir and Suzdal, and in March, to Yaroslavl, Pereslavl, Borisogleb, and Rostov (the Great). Although all these now seem very small towns, they had been great principalities in the 11^th through 14^th centuries. Won in bloody battles, they served as centers of power of warring noblemen long before Moscow was the capital, and before centralized government united Russia. Vladimir had been the capital of Rus from the 12^th century through most of the 14^th century.

      Layers of history settled on these authentic remains of great fortresses and fortifications, domed churches, monasteries, elaborate walls, painted frescoes, and icons. Before renovation and tourism, these crumbling remnants retained a robust grittiness that linked us directly to the past, without the filters of restoration, fresh paint, shorings, and landscaping. No tour buses yet, either. It wasn’t hard to imagine the overgrown courtyards and weedy fields filled with medieval noblemen in suits of armor clashing swords.

      Twelve of us American graduate students—papers and arrangements laboriously obtained—set out by train for Yaroslavl. We waited a long time for taxis and a hotel room, but settled into a small town small hotel we had (it appeared) successfully booked. The next morning, we toured the historic fortress (kremlin), church, and a 19^th century estate. To top off the day, we had a cheerful dinner at the old hotel, the proprietors having cooked a home made meal for the traveling foreigners.

      The next day, we continued on to Rostov (“Rostov the Great”) and Borisogleb (Boris and Gleb), two quaint old towns dominated in their dreariness by huge old kremlin domes. Climbing the dungeon- like steep, narrow, dark, and dank stairways on to the parapets, we ran the length of the crumbling fortress, picturing knights peering through the slits in the walls, slits through which they poured hot oil on to any enemy attempting to scale the structure. About one thousand years ago, Boris and Gleb, brothers for whom the town was named, had accepted death, although they were innocent, in order to redeem their people. They became Russia’s first national saints. A haunting photograph in my collection freezes a moment of bleak splendor, the crumbling but majestic monastery surrounded by snow, highlighted by a line of black picket fencing, capturing a Borisogleb almost frozen in time.

      None of the towns we visited in 1965 or 1966 had seen many foreigners: we were an oddity, and provided entertainment. Children followed us. Adults stared at us as if we were nude. We felt very conspicuous and different, although we were not discernibly different-looking from Russians. (There were no black students among us.) That evening, when we dined at a small restaurant in town, after a few drinks, we joined the local Russians in singing and dancing in a typically Russian evening, warm and hospitable.

      By the third day, when we moved on to Pereslavl, accommodations, food, cold, exhaustion had reduced our number to five. We went on to tour a small church, monasteries, and museums, and saw men restoring an 18^th century Rococo church by making their own boards out of logs, precut boards being not yet obtainable in Russia. As visitors, we were shown special sites not normally opened; and one man played us a recording of the chiming of the old Bells of Rostov as a gracious gesture to his foreign guests.

      A most touching moment came during lunch in a small cafeteria on the main—and only—street in Pereslavl. We stopped at a typical cafeteria (stolovaya): a rather basic, unkempt establishment that would make a roadside diner at home look luxurious. There was hushed silence while people watched the five of us seating ourselves. Then a waitress walked over to our table, and looked as if she suddenly realized what the place must look like to us. So she quickly reached over, lifted the sticky little mustard pot off the table, and returned in a few minutes with a newly filled, wiped off little pot of mustard in honor of the visitors. We found this a moving gesture.