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

housekeepers and laborers appeared in the dormitory of Moscow State University. They unsealed the doors of the Victorian-style student lounges on each floor; cleaned and polished all surfaces (often with dirty rags); rolled out the red carpet (a cliché come true); and scaled scaffolding to hang enormous red banners and buntings. More lights were lit, illuminating by contrast how very dim and gray normal had become for us.

      Because I did not fear arrest for photographing patriotic manifestations (as opposed to numerous other arbitrary but punishable offenses I might commit with my camera), I took many photographs of the university decked out in celebratory gear. At the time, I did not much value these photos, which seemed formalistic and sterile. I do now. Today when Americans consider Soviet history, we spotlight the red banners and buntings, the martial displays, the exhortatory posters, as comforting evidence of an inscrutable but static, structured past. But in their original setting, those images seemed greatly stylized, hackneyed, and uninspired; even irrelevant, which, in part, they were.

      Winter came. Our room faced north in a straight line to the Arctic. Icy winds rattled our double windows and leaked in around the edges, freezing the sausages sitting on the inside sill. We stuffed the cracks around our double windows with rags and paper, wedging small pieces into crevices with a knife, then taping the stuffed cracks shut with masking tape we had brought with us. Then we piled all the clothing we were not wearing at the moment on and around the windows’ edges, to stem the drafts, changing supplies daily while we exchanged warmed outfits for chilled ones.

      The winter of 1965-1966 was one of the coldest winters in Russian history, a history not lacking in cold. For a long spell, the temperatures dipped down around 40 degrees below zero, rising sometimes only to zero F. When accompanied by cutting winds or frozen fog—air filled with suspended droplets of ice—it seemed even colder.

      When I walked the mile walk from the Metro station to the dorm, ice crystals formed on my eyelashes, brows, and the front of my hair peeking out between my hat and the scarf across my nose and mouth. A photo captures me standing among a row of frosted trees, ice drops clinging to my eyelashes, bangs, and eyebrows, the rest of my face, hair, and neck wrapped tightly in hats and scarves. Everything around me glittered as I viewed the world through the diamond dust coating my eyelashes. The handkerchief in my coat pocket froze stiff, crisp as a potato chip.

      Indoors, I prepared dinner. Little beef chunks and sliced onions soon sizzled in the electric frying pan in our room. Beef cuts were anonymous: hacked up chunks of muscular cows that could no longer provide milk. It seemed more gracious to cook the beef in our room than to flaunt it in the common kitchen where most Russian students, too poor to buy beef, relied on bread, potatoes, cabbage, sausages and cold cuts, cheese and soup.

      The hearty meat smell that filled the room covered layers of stale odors: traces of old garlic and onions; beeswax and oil rubbed into wooden floors; damp woolen coats. It almost felt like Christmas, that icy December of 1965. The Russians were scurrying to buy gifts, gather delicacies, and prepare for the big New Year’s holiday and the visit by Grandfather Frost (Dyed Moroz). Close to 40 degrees below zero outside, and I was warm and content preparing “Beef Magu,” a special, named by our British friends, to play on the Russian acronym for Moscow State University, “M.G.U.” (em-geh-oo). “Beef M.G.U./Beef Magu.” The recipe was always the same— sauté onions, sauté beef chunks, add a little water, salt and pepper and cover pan; add potatoes and carrots at the appropriate time, and cook until the beef became tender enough to chew.

      That afternoon in a burst of year-end cleanliness and recognition of limited supplies, I had decided to clean the three dish sponges we had brought with us for the year—and couldn’t, of course, replace. So I set them up—a pink one, a yellow one, and a blue one—to boil in a little pot of water on the stove in the common kitchen, and went back to our room to read for a while. When I returned to retrieve the sponges, a crowd had formed around the pot, sniffing, looking, and questioning one another.

      Buzzing, they surrounded me. “Is it sausage?” one man asked. “No,” I said, “it isn’t.”

      “Then what is it?” someone else asked.

      “Sponges” was a word I had never been taught in Russian. These neighbors tossed a succession of possible Russian words at me to try them out, while I fielded each by shaking my head harder. Even the universal language of mime failed me, in my attempt to demonstrate the use of a sponge. Still looking skeptical and baffled, they left, without understanding, it seemed. These were not exotic bright pink, blue, and yellow sausages, as they thought, or, in fact, edibles at all. But I could almost see them musing, scratching their heads, asking, “Then why cook them?”

      The idea of cleaning sponges by boiling them had occurred to me only after seeing the laundry room in the basement of our dorm. I knew that we would have to find some way, beside using our little bathroom basin, to wash clothes. In a city of some seven to eight million people, there was only one laundromat with modern (American) machines. To reach the facility required two buses, followed by standing in line for a few hours. That didn’t inspire me.

      Then in the basement I found the “laundry.” For thousands of students, it contained one four-burner gas stove, one huge kettle/pot in which to boil water, a long wooden stick to stir the clothes; and two non-automatic agitator washers (ca. 1942 vintage), each with a hand-turned wringer. (My head was buzzing, time warp, time warp.) Only four items of clothing were allowed in the little washer at one time—two pairs of pajamas or four tee shirts. No rinsing, only washing was allowed. In one corner of the room sat an industrial- strength, gray-green iron centrifuge to be used only by the official housekeeper of the room (dezhurnaya), she as iron-willed as the machines. In another corner on a table sat a non-electric flatiron, a heavy piece of solid iron that had to be heated on the stove, then used to press clothes - a tool for the intrepid only. I found the dank basement room at the end of long, dark tunnels like a scene from a bad dream, and knew I’d go there as rarely as possible.

      I watched students arriving to wash their clothes. They carried one outfit and stripped down to their underwear to wash their other outfit, the one they were wearing. Without self-consciousness. They dropped the clothes into the huge pot of water on the stove and boiled them with flakes of soap they shaved off a bar with a small knife. Then they rinsed the clothes by hand, wrung them out, whirled them in the centrifuge (or, rather, surrendered them to the keeper of the machine), and then took the clothes back to their rooms to string up to dry (giving real meaning to “I have nothing to wear”). In the powerfully heated rooms of winter, drying didn’t take long. But I wasn’t surprised years later when washers and detergents quickly supplanted socialist theory as items of interest and discussion.

      I used the quaint little washer (skipping the pot-boiling part), wrung the clothes, and carried them upstairs to rinse and dry. I rinsed them in the yellow plastic dishpan we had brought with us, one of the most valuable items we imported.

      But by flouting the set system, resisting stages in the formal laundering process, I left the housekeeper angry and frustrated. At the time, I thought her an old witch. She resembled the toothless harridans in fairytales. Her angry epithets of my ignorance and incompetence pursued me, echoing down the basement hallways.

      “Girl, girl…” and a string of accusations. I pretended not to understand her screaming demands. She probably knew I was pretending.

      But one day walking down the hall, back to our rooms, with my dripping load, I pictured her going home at night and telling her grandchildren the grievances of her day: what unseemly habits and disobedient attitudes these foreigners have! And only years later, did I come to feel compassion for this tired old woman with a 41-hour a week job in a dark, damp basement, disrespected by the students.

      I didn’t want to be there any more than she wanted me there. I had followed my husband Jim to Russia. We were not idealists nor ideologues, just graduate students. Jim had majored in Russian history and literature at Harvard College, then in Russian studies at Indiana University’s graduate school and Russian and East European Institute. He had succeeded in his application to become an exchange student to the Soviet Union under the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants awards, later to become IREX, International Research and Exchanges Board. At the time this was virtually the only