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

I mumbled to Jim as he dozed off. Unable to sleep even in our comfortable king-sized bed, I pictured our old dorm room at Moscow State University only eight miles away. I saw myself twenty-five years earlier lying on the narrow steel-frame cot, tugging on my small rough woolen blanket, green, with a white snow flake pattern, trying to keep my shoulders warm while preventing my toes from popping out at the other end and wondering what anyone over 5’4” would do. Looking at the 12-foot ceiling looming overhead, a ceiling higher than the width of the room, I felt as if a giant had dropped me into a deep box.

      Our last night in the dormitories, Wednesday, April 20, 1966, I had also lain sleepless. Fear had sharpened my sense of the room, revealing things I had not noticed before: the embossed flower pattern in the beige walls, the linseed oil and beeswax smell of the parquet wood floor, the dimness of the ceiling light we had left on as an amulet. A cockroach lurking in the shadow of the radiator had watched us. The tilted chair we had wedged between the door handle and floor to barricade ourselves in, as we had seen done in movies, had given the room an unsettling look.

      Two feet away from me that night, Jim had lain on the identical cot, with the same controlled breathing. We had almost convinced ourselves that this barricade and our careful breathing could protect us from arrest and imprisonment by the KGB, the State Security Force commonly known as Secret Police. We were absolutely silent, knowing that our room was bugged, and that any inkling the KGB had of our unexpected departure could foil our plan. Although the long hallways outside the room were empty, I imagined I heard footsteps approaching, and flattened myself out still further on the bed, trying to become invisible. Like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, I felt we had been framed. Unlike Joseph K., we had some idea of what the accusation would be, but knew our innocence would make no difference. We, too, would be incarcerated, captive to the capricious will of arbitrary forces. Escape was all I could think of.

      Jim and I had first arrived in Moscow on September 13, 1965, at 10:15 in the morning at the Belorussian Railway Station. I was 23; he, 26. We had been married for two years.

      After ten days at sea and three more on trains, we were relieved to be greeted by professionally chipper Russian students equipped with a van, and a one-ton open-back truck with a canvas tarp, to collect us with our baggage for our trip to the dormitory. Our footlocker contained “stuff” for the academic year: clothes, pillows, Melmac plastic plates and cheap forks and knives, an electric frying pan, toiletries, sanitary napkins, deodorant, aspirins, toilet paper, Band-Aids… Our greeters, with English far more fluent than our Russian, had been hand picked—and gender-matched to us—by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel) to be friends to each of us for the year.

      “How was your trip?” Nina asked me earnestly.

      “We hope everything goes well,” Ivan told Jim.

      We piled our footlockers into the truck and ourselves into the van that headed for the “Old University”—the historic downtown campus of Moscow State University dating back more than 200 years. Right across from the Kremlin, these crumbling painted stucco and light brick buildings still held active classrooms, and housed libraries and offices for professors and administrators. We entered a decaying administration building. Stepping up over a two-inch threshold, the men ducking to avoid hitting the lintel overhead, we descended two unevenly worn stone steps, and walked along a concrete corridor to the office of student stipends. There an official counted out 200 rubles in cash to Jim, equivalent at that time to $240. Accustomed to the distancing of money transfers through checks, I was taken with the nakedness of a raw cash transaction, pay-for-study. But at that moment, I had no idea that cash was the only option: there was no credit card or checking system in Russia then, nor would there be for more than a quarter of a century.

      We were fortunate, rich by our own standards. The 200-ruble stipend was generous, about four times what Russian students received. (Levels were set by official government agreements.) The money went far. Unlike Russian students, we had no need to buy clothing or household goods, and had no children or parents to feed or support. We could use our rubles for food, laundry, souvenirs, books, occasional travel and restaurants. The currency was not convertible to dollars, so there was no point saving any of it. The ruble stipend was supplemented by a few hundred dollars of hard currency for the year, dollars we hoarded for our planned year abroad to follow.

      With the cash in our pockets, we climbed back into the van to head for what was then called Lenin Hills. After driving along miles of mustard and tan stucco and brick buildings, we saw in the distance the newer Moscow State University. One of seven Stalinesque “wedding cake” buildings that dot Moscow, this massive white castle sits imposingly on a hill rising along a graceful bend in the Moscow River. How foolish, I soon learned, to try to get your bearings on any of these buildings, since they all look alike. The dormitory with its 17,000 students (we were told) covered well more than one city block on the ground, soared over 20 stories at its highest, and sat at the epicenter of radiating symmetrical structured gardens with tree-lined walks and formal plantings. Protected by giant fences, gates and guardhouses, the structure had controlled admission through a student pass long before U.S. institutions required any IDs or security measures. No one could enter the building without a pass, a propusk, but the only place to obtain a pass was inside the building. This experience made Catch-22 easy reading later that year.

      Despite its size, the building was well heated, freshly painted and cleaned. The four wings of the building were identical. Very few in the bank of elevators functioned. Most stairways were locked for reasons we never learned, but assumed it was either to control the building population, or to prevent the need for cleaning. We were grateful to be no higher than the sixth floor. But I marveled at the architectural irony of the structure: dedicated not to emperors but to the common man in a socialist state, its heroic proportions were so monumental and overpowering in scale as to dwarf mere human beings.

      Designed to showcase Soviet life, to model the look of the future, the university building contained not only bedrooms, but also classrooms, libraries, bookshops, cafeterias, food stands, and well-furnished lounges on each floor. These common rooms, resplendent in Victorian potted palms, Oriental carpets, wood wainscoting, and stuffed chairs, hardly fit our picture of what Socialism or The Future looked like. But it didn’t much matter, because the doors were tightly locked, except for three holidays a year, the November 7, January 1, and May 1 Soviet holidays. It also didn’t take long to see that the bookstands carried a limited range of ideologically acceptable books, those surviving censorship; and the cafeterias and food stands stocked only limited fare. But some of these observations unfolded gradually over time like the red banners and buntings that were to emerge unexpectedly at holidays to brighten a few gray days.

      On our first day, our student hosts led us through the gates and guardhouse. A guard blocked our entry, insistent on reviewing our full documentation. The guard was not only the first female sentinel I had ever seen, but also old enough to be my grandmother. (There’s so much to write home about…my mental list was toting up…) Our escorts spoke to her in rapid Russian, and we were whisked through the gatehouse. Then, in our small suite, I was cheered to see we had our own toilet. It sat in a room so tiny it gave meaning to the term “WC” (Water Closet), and had a pull-chain flusher suspended from a high white porcelain tank. The students at other universities had only the hole-in-the-floor toilets, or seatless “western” toilets, in the shared bathrooms at the end of each floor. I felt not only far from home, but deep into the past.

      Another little room contained our sink and stall shower. Two narrow bed-sitting rooms accommodated our two cots, along with two wooden straight chairs, two small wooden tables, two secretaries, two lamps, two small Oriental rugs, and two water flasks and tumblers. The rooms were comfortable for two, but normally housed four students, and sometimes their undocumented relatives. The rough-hewn wooden furniture and shoddy bath fixtures belied the building’s youth, a mere 15 looking like 50. But everything I had seen so far seemed heavy, massive, and old... I was beginning to feel weary—and hungry.

      When we had caught the “Orient Express” from Paris to Vienna three days earlier, we had provisioned ourselves with bread, cheese, and fruit on the advice of our German friends Peter and Gerda. They knew the vagaries of train dining cars, and the limits of our pocketbooks. When we transferred to the “Chopin Express” in Vienna,