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

public rest room at the bus station in Rostov. This was not the first hole-in-the-ground rest room without plumbing, running water, or paper I had experienced in Russia: almost all rest rooms lacked actual toilet fixtures, or running water, or paper (not for decades to be seen, and even then not in public facilities). Even the elegant Lenin Library, home for high-level academic and professional figures, had an indescribably primitive bathroom.

      But this was about the worst. A sagging wooden outhouse whose smell extended well beyond its walls, the inside was covered so deeply in human waste we were grateful for boots to navigate the floors. Meanwhile, a large, drunk man attempted to break his way into the “ladies” side, while Eva, the other American woman, and I took turns barring the door with all our might. Had it not been freezing cold, and had we not been “downtown” in this small town, we would have selected an outdoor space behind a bush. But that wasn’t an option.

      On most of our rural travel (even four decades later), the best plan was to stop the bus or car near a woods, designate one side of the road for women, the other for men; head for the bushes, and finish before the flies and mosquitoes found you. (Why, I wondered, do we capture in photographs and writing sights both beautiful and bizarre, but rarely those disgusting, or simply a little embarrassing…)

      Back to the courtyard of the small shack labeled “depot,” we watched buses come and go, packed to overflow with peasants carrying sacks of food, potatoes, onions, carrots; parts or whole slaughtered animals (a pig? a lamb?), random supplies and accessory parts from hubs, like Rostov, to their still smaller villages.

      While we awaited our bus, hearing the usual background shouting and arguing, but before we realized what this particular chaos was about, we watched while a few Russians were forcibly ejected from a bus by the authorities. Suddenly, we realized, this expulsion was to clear seats on the bus for us, the “foreigners.” Although upset and protesting, we did not prevail, and were set in place for our trip home. Those sitting securely on the bus seemed to accept the unstated rule that foreigners had priority seating, and didn’t appear to hold it against us. But we felt very uncomfortable.

      Another day, on a train trip into the countryside, seated on a “hard coach,” the low-fare wooden bench seats, we found next to us a Russian middle-aged farm hand from Ukraine, headed home. He was returning from accompanying a train car full of apples from his collective farm to the Urals to ensure their safe arrival at the other end. He had to travel about 3,500 miles round trip in his effort—a trip equivalent to going from Boston to Denver and back again. His was not an exceptional journey, but gave the term “inefficiency” real meaning.

      Looking out the window, passing ordinary scenes from daily life, he asked us, “Do you have ducks in America?”

      “Yes,” we replied, “we do.”

      A little later, “Do you have cows in America?”

      “Yes,” we responded, not adding that their bones did not stick out in this pitiful way. He advanced to apples, trucks, trees, and other random items. Finally, he leaned over and whispered something into Jim’s ear, to which Jim replied, “Yes.” That, I later learned, was whether we have prostitutes in America. By the time we left he seemed happily confirmed in his view that things were not so different in America from Russia after all; though, he was sure, each of these must have been much better in America. But his image of America, like that of so many Russians, was a collage of bits and pieces, a patchwork not yet assembled.

      No trip to Russia seemed (or seems) complete without a pilgrimage to the home of Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glade). What was then his country estate now seems comparable to a suburban home in any major city in the U.S.; but its setting in a lovely countryside scene promised a glimpse into this artist’s world. I was struck then by, and never forgot, his tall Underwood manual typewriter still sitting in his den, as if awaiting his return to imprint the words of another lasting novel.

      I also knew how hard (if not impossible) it would have been to acquire such a fine imported object at the time of our visit in the mid-1960s. But the typewriter was emblematic of another era, of a time before the Bolsheviks had isolated Russia from the rest of the world. Until the Communists took over and sealed the country shut, artists, writers, and businessmen traveled freely to and from the West. Educated Russians read and spoke French and German, and could cross cultural and physical borders with relative ease. Traveling to Tolstoy’s home and tomb brought us one step closer to that previous cosmopolitan age, and to the great author, while leaving the ineffable quality of his art a mystery.

      Sojourns into small towns and villages of rural Russia illuminated even more than Moscow the two sides of being a foreigner: the exotic and the privileged. If we stood out—which we always did, even dressed in our plain, well-used clothing—we were also treated as special guests. People exerted touching efforts to please, and to meet what they imagined to be our expectations, but you could see that they felt they could not have succeeded. For all our stays in Russia, the image remains of that fresh little mustard pot set down on our table in a grim, grimy cafeteria, with its sticky tables and chairs, marred floors, and smells of unrefrigerated sausages, cheeses, and buttermilk, stale odors of overcooked onions, cabbages, beef bones, and soups. The contrasts of generous hospitality and warm reception with pungent odors.

      Living in Moscow, we, like Russians, took advantage of theatres, museums, music, parks, historic sites, and other entertainment and arts. Tickets were cheap. We saw a memorable performance of the opera Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi, in which Boris was massive and masterful, and the settings monumental; and a theatre performance of Brothers Karamazov staged with the passion of those who became the Karamazovs. We were cheered by shows at the Puppet Theatre, the repertory circus, and the circus on ice with its now famous performing bears. Odd, how quickly the bears seem human, and “reality” shifted. And we witnessed numerous concerts and ballets, including those we would see throughout our stays in Russia: the enduring Swan Lake, Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet.

      At performances, the intermissions provided an occasion for a spread of special delicacies. In theater lobbies and lounges, lines formed quickly at the “bufyet” (buffet table) to buy flutes of champagne, glasses of coffee, bottles of plain or fruity mineral water; open-face canapes of salami-type sausage, or a dot of red caviar. Chocolates, cookies, or frosted cakes supplemented the other treats—and served for many theater- and concert-goers the supper that could not be scheduled between leaving work at 6:00 p.m. and the performance at 7:00. Later I discovered in Europe the same lovely practice of experiencing the arts interspersed with touches of edibles enjoyed with friends at cafe tables during the intervals. And still more recently in the U.S.

      Enter Lev Vlasenko, concert pianist. Well before we left for Moscow for the first time in 1965, Jim had met Lev when the latter visited and performed at Harvard in the late 1950s. During our stays in Moscow in the 1960s and ’70s, we attended any of his performances we saw advertised and visited him briefly backstage. Sadly, he and his wife felt that any unauthorized contact with foreigners—with us—might harm their careers and personal life.

      “We hope you understand,” he would say, looking imploringly into our eyes, “we hope you understand why we cannot get together, why we cannot ask you to our home.” He had tears in his eyes. In that moment, all abstract writing about arbitrary, authoritarian or totalitarian government and its repression, became real, focused, and human, in the face of a friend in tears, pleading (through his eyes), “If you’re really a friend, you will keep away from me, and forgive me for having to ask this of you.” Of course we understood and spared them our presence. But each time Lev traveled abroad, to East Europe, Israel, or South America, he sent Jim a little picture postcard, through which we were to track him for the rest of his life.

      Living in the former Soviet Union was not just about living isolated and enclosed, sealed from the outside world. To re-imagine that time and place, for Russians and for ourselves, we have to feel again the heavy and pervasive hand of authority, the scrutiny and secrecy, and the arbitrary and oppressive behaviors. Although we often felt spooked by surveillance, we came closest to encountering Soviet police the December 1965 night the university was raided for subversive students. I wrote home:

      About 1:30 a.m., Jim and I returned from a late visit with a friend upstairs