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

Soviet train headed through Czechoslovakia and Poland to Russia.

      Crossing through the “Iron Curtain,” we entered another realm. Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., uniformed border guards burst into our compartment, shining bright flashlights into our eyes to jolt us awake. Their rifles were trained on our eyeballs. They barked commands that we knew meant they wanted to see our passports, declarations of currency, listing of goods, and other papers and IDs. One of the guards had a portable office strapped around his neck, a fully stocked desk protruding from his substantial belly: inkpads, stampers, pens, and documents. Other officials searched everywhere—under the berths, under the train; they poked and prodded. In some cases, they seized personal items. They didn’t feel they had to explain themselves.

      At the Soviet border city of Brest, the train halted. We were, I wrote my parents, “hauled out of the train, rounded up, and dragged from place to place to fill out forms, organize trunks, and try to obtain a train ticket from the border to Moscow, with little success.” Inexplicably, we were locked into a small one-room station house for reasons we never learned. Were they trying to avoid contaminating the local population, seeking smugglers, or simply harassing foreigners? With the help of a porter (paid a small gratuity: could that have been the issue?), and after a lot of shouting, we acquired the tickets, and re-entered the train. I felt anxious and unsettled.

      Meanwhile, the train had its wheels changed. At all borders of the Soviet Union, train wheels had to be changed to fit the broader gauge of Soviet tracks. European tracks featured a narrower gauge. Although this seemed at first a whimsical, wasteful, or foolish oddity—or lack of planning—I learned it was none of these, but rather another kind of planning, a strategic effort to prevent trains from most of Europe—Germany, France, Poland, and others—from driving straight into the heart of the Soviet Union. As impenetrable as a fortress wall, the wide gauge tracks halted invasion by train. This was my first exposure to a larger world in which the experience of war and peace shaped people’s thinking, plans, and lives.

      We now crossed into the vast, gray lands of the Soviet Union. The borderlands, empty fields with giant coils of barbed wire, sprouted giant girders supporting brilliant floodlights—the brightest lights I was ever to see in the Soviet Union. Guards with heavy boots, machine guns strapped over their shoulders, faces set in serious- to-menacing expressions conveyed the sense that humor, charm, or lightness were alien to their spirits—and job descriptions. While the train raced hour after hour at high speed across Soviet lands, I began to grasp what Napoleon confronted when he attempted to conquer these Russian lands on horseback and foot, lands that were to conquer him instead. I pictured the settings for World Wars I and II. This was twenty-four years from the 1941 invasion by Hitler’s armies advancing into Russia. And this was still before the first snow fall of winter. It looked very much like an old black- and-white movie of the fields of World War II.

      Seven other American graduate students were on the same train, same car. After a night’s sleep, we all met in the dining car over a satisfying breakfast of rye bread so dark it tasted caramelized, butter, fried eggs, and hot tea. For lunch we consumed our bread, cheese, and fruit in our compartment, looking out the window. And tea. A samovar in each train car burned charcoal to keep water steadily boiling to heat a little pot of concentrated tea leaves and water perched on top, and provide diluting water from the samovar spout below. A porter plied us throughout the day with glasses of hot tea, big sugar cubes, and plain white arrowroot cookies. In the evening, he delivered pillows, crisp sheets and pillowcases, and one blanket and one towel per person. Tips (na chai—the words themselves meaning “for tea”) were expected.

      By dinnertime, I was struck by the contrast between the barren gray lands we crossed hour after hour, and the bright, warm comfort of the interior. Our first-class train compartment was decked out with a small Oriental rug, curtains, a table hinged to the wall under the window, a sink, and various hooks, racks, and shelves. The dining car sported an outfit of declining elegance, threadbare red velvet curtains with gold tieback tassel-pulls, frayed carpet, and well-laundered linen tablecloths and napkins. The smells escaping from the galley—sautéing onions; stewing beef; pan-frying potatoes; and soup steeping in its fennel, dill, and bay leaves—were reminiscent of the aromas that had filled the hallways of my New York childhood apartment building in winter when shut windows bottled in the concentrated smells of East European cuisines.

      After showing us to our dorm suite on our arrival, our student hosts toured the corridors with us, past the locked lounge, to the common kitchen down the hall. I tried to count the people who would be sharing this kitchen, with its two small dirty gas stoves. (That would be some twenty-five suites, of two to four people each, making, 50-100 people, could it be?) The eight burners and two ovens offered unmodulated temperature choices: “on” vs. “off,” and could be started only with matches (because there were no pilot lights). In the sink, murky gray water stagnated, unable to drain through floating fish scales and potato skins, sunken old cabbage leaves, and grease. And there was no refrigerator. The only pristine object in the room was the ironing board. What I didn’t know then was that this room would bring us together with our neighbors too cautious to come to our room, or invite us to theirs.

      There was Anna, diagonally across the hall, focused and thoughtful, soon to become a friend; not yet plagued with the mysterious ailment that laid her up for much of the year. Then Alexander and Maria next door, an attractive, gentle, and non- ideological couple from Siberia, almost finished with their graduate studies, and uneasily awaiting notice of where they would be sent for their first jobs. Directly across the hall lived a mysterious Middle Eastern student, Syrian, we thought, a man who spoke to almost no one—but at the Muslim feast of Eid roasted an entire lamb in the common oven, arousing interest and envy among Russian students with their very small stipends and limited diet. Even I was intrigued, seeing for the first time an intact mammal roasting, eradicating any myth in my mind that the lamb chops I ate were remote from an entire sentient creature.

      Farther down the hall were Previr from India—who ate no meat—whom we came to know only later, and down the other way, Eva, one of two female graduate students in the American delegation. Most of the year there were about sixteen American graduate students, with four spouses, all wives; a few more came for the second semester. These, with a few others in Leningrad, were the only American students in the USSR. We also came to know two North Vietnamese men through an incident in the kitchen; four Mongol students, also male; and an assortment of other foreign students—a male and female student from Great Britain; a man from Nigeria; and many Soviet citizens of various nationalities and from various republics, including the mysterious “Charlie,” who found us one day in that kitchen, and was to reappear in our lives during our later stays in Moscow. But the majority of students were Russian.

      We left the kitchen as our hosts led us to the student cafeteria for lunch. On the stairs down to the basement, I felt my stomach flip from the smells of heavy cooking overlaid on layers of old food odors drifting up toward us from the meal hall. Torn between my good-girl training to be polite to our hosts, who were so effusive in their efforts to please us, and my gut instinct to skip lunch, I tried to act more gracious than I felt. But in my head I pictured the graduate dorms at Indiana University, even before the days of tempting food courts with a range of options that grace the campus today. Lunch might then have been a grilled cheese sandwich, or tuna fish salad, with an apple or banana, chilled milk, a cookie… suddenly, the food we grumbled about there seemed very tempting and familiar—and very far away. I heard behind me one fellow-American student in our group regaling another with stories of intestinal ailments that befell our forebears who ate here…while a little voice in my head whispered: “Naomi, what are you doing here?”

      I let others slide their trays before mine in the food line. I was glad not to be first as the babushkas — literally, grandmothers, but used generically for older women—dishing out the food barked impatiently at us while various mystery-foods landed splat on our plates. My mind hadn’t yet switched to Russian, so I was unsure what they were saying, but imagined that we seemed to them very slow and ungrateful people. We helped ourselves to forks—there were no knives—and a three-inch sheer tissue-paper triangle that was intended to serve as a napkin. I grabbed a recognizable slice of bread and a scoop of raw grated cabbage, both generously offered free for all students, so even the poorest didn’t go hungry. The rest of the