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

in 1997. I took up the new position as Moscow was celebrating its 850^th anniversary and Russia, with Boris Yeltsin reelected for a second term, was firmly on a course away from its communist past. Once again Naomi commuted frequently from Washington, and this time employed the newly emerging technologies of email, Internet, and mobile phone to augment traditional letters and notes to keep friends and family aware of our lives. And both sons along with other family members and friends who remained Naomi’s loyal readership visited the Ambassador’s residence during the next four years, at last able to share some of the experience that Naomi had described over three decades.

      And there was much to share. Russia’s revolutions continued to unfold with drama and unpredictability. The economic boomlet of the mid-1990s came to a crashing end in 1998 with an economic collapse that reverberated throughout global markets and traumatized a society that was barely recovered from the shocks of Soviet collapse. U.S.-Russia relations meanwhile grew more difficult with the emergence of differences over the Balkans, the expansion of NATO eastward, and tensions over Russian links to Iranian nuclear and missile programs. Then as the millennium came to a close Boris Yeltsin, who had come to personify new Russia, confounded his supporters and critics by turning the reigns of state over to a little known Kremlin insider Vladimir Putin, providing more uncertainties and questions at home and outside about where Russia was headed.

      The end of the Cold War and disappearance of the Soviet Union put paid to the bi-polar world and ideological confrontation that defined the Russia and international environment Naomi and I had known in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless as I concluded my time as Ambassador, Russia remained in the headlines and in the minds of Americans who hoped a new century would mean a better relationship between Russians and Americans. By the time we departed Moscow just after the July 4 holiday in 2001, we left a country very different in many ways from what we had first seen in September 1965. Yet many of the qualities that defined Russian life and Russia itself endured. Aspects of life such as the seasons, climate, geography, historical experience, relations among family members and friends, and shared need to master a great and difficult land are at the core of Russia. For those who hope to understand and have a feeling for these dimensions of the Russia we live with today, Through Dark Days and White Nights opens the reader’s eyes to things often overlooked and unseen.

      Through Dark Days and White Nights

      Prologue

      On August 19, 1991, I stood at the edge of our small rose garden in Moscow. Over the low brick wall I watched a convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and missile launchers roll down our street. With their low rumble and deliberate pace, chewing up the pavement they covered, they seemed like a column of unyielding prehistoric beasts.

      Now, at 6:00 in the evening, I stood at the top of our townhouse steps. Greeting a row of guests, trustees of the Gannett Foundation’s Freedom Forum and their Russian and American friends, in the middle of this coup, I tried to imagine an ordinary cocktail party on an ordinary day. The hot mini-pizzas bubbling on the dining room table just inside the door sent out waves of pungent oregano so familiar I could be entering a shopping mall “Food Court.” But I couldn’t block out the rhythmic chants of a churning crowd, thousands of synchronized voices, rising and falling, the words muffled in the large open plaza just beyond the wall of our garden.

      The Moscow evening was heavy with a low ceiling of fat dark clouds, signaling fall. Thunder, lightning, and gale winds had subsided. From a place outside myself, I saw myself standing at the doorway, smiling, shaking a hand, swiveling to the next in line… smile, shake, swivel… as if dropped unexpectedly into a scene in a play. But it was not a play or movie, although it struck me then that a movie imitating this scene would have seemed far more real than this reality imitating a movie. And there was no script. I floated through an unfolding bad dream, burdened by an ominous sense that it would not turn out well. Realizing that the future of hundreds of millions of people turned on this dramatic takeover, I felt guilty indulging my own fear of what might happen to us personally—to my husband Jim, our son Jonathan, and me; and what it would mean to our son Robert back in the States. Was it possible we wouldn’t survive this? Was there something we should be doing to help our chances of getting through this?

      Trapped by growing anxiety, I stepped outside the scene asking the useless question that springs to mind at times like these: What am I doing here? The granddaughter of Jewish émigrés…And not just now, but repeatedly over four decades of my life. (“What were you thinking, Naomi?” the fruitless voice now whines irritably in my head.) But I knew it was for the same reason I was standing here now, on automatic pilot, trying to register a succession of faces, hearing “I’m glad to meet you;” “how nice of you to have us.” And hearing my own voice responding, “We’re so glad you could come.”

      The trustees of the Gannett Foundation’s Freedom Forum had come to work with their Russian and American colleagues to tell Soviet journalists about running a free press. It was the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the era of restructuring and opening the Soviet Union. What timing! Just the previous night, they had hosted a dinner at the elegant Savoy Hotel downtown at which everyone was sky high on the idea of uncensored print and media journalism. Toasting open societies and free press, the Soviet and American guests were bursting with hope and good cheer.

      This evening, we were official hosts in return. Jim had devoted his life to serving in Russia, in a career in the State Department’s Foreign Service. And I was, in official State Department documents, “Dependent Wife”—“dep/wife” on the old rubber stamp now replaced with a computer macro. My other lives now faded. At this charged moment, Jim was in charge of the American Embassy, Moscow, and responsible for the lives of all Americans in the disintegrating Soviet Union.

      I dared not follow this thought further. I realized I was numb, afraid of uncorking the roiling fear that threatened to swell and flood the tended decorum of the evening. Looking down at my feet in familiar beige pumps, as if their planting on the doorstep might confirm the reality of the moment, I looked up to see Jim returning from his office. After a cheerful “hi” and embrace, he joined me on the receiving line. As comforted as I was seeing him, I really wanted to corner him and learn what he could tell me of what was going on, what might happen next, what wasn’t too secret to tell. Will we be targeted, surrounded, and used as hostages, trapped in the Embassy compound? Will we be evacuated quickly in the night? But those questions would have to wait. Instead, he and I walked into the living room, as always, to circulate separately with the guests.

      Some guests were leaning out the windows, straining to see the crowds and hear their chants. A few people—mostly Russian women—were crying. They were scared, fearing the return of a closed, restricted life. They thought the KGB, military and hard- line Communist forces might win. These forces of the past would consolidate their control of the city and kill hopes for a promising future. Pessimism, edginess, and despair in the room were only partially masked by social graces. People pressed Jim to say what he thought would happen; he was non-committal. I suddenly pictured “Molotov cocktails,” named for a Soviet Foreign Minister, and pulled Jim aside to remind him how easily a bottle filled with gasoline and a rag could be torched and hurled into our open windows. Jim looked both calm and alert, but essentially unreadable. I felt the Soviet Union’s future pivoting on this turning point in time, and wished desperately to flip to the last page in a history book to see how it would turn out. Then I reluctantly conceded that I was not feeling half as courageous as I wished I could be.

      1. Encounters with a Closed Society

      “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

      —L. P. Hartley

      The guests returned to their hotel rooms after the reception the night of the coup attempt, August 19, 1991. While I stood in the kitchen wrapping leftover mini-pizzas in Saran wrap, my mind flashed back to the days living under Soviet rule, an atmosphere that could be returning, from the look of things. I saw, like an old black-and-white movie, our earliest days in Moscow in 1965-1966, living in the student dormitories of Moscow State University. The gloom of a long, dark winter; the isolation and fear, grimness and monotony. Feeling discouraged and powerless, I eased into bed.