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

had agreed to go along for the company and experience. We agreed we would spend the following year in London where I could complete research and writing of my Ph.D. dissertation on the ferment of ideas surrounding blasphemy, heresy, and political subversion in revolutionary 17^th-century England. Was it religious heresy or political subversion that Cromwell sought to obliterate? Was there a difference?

      Cultural history—ideas that underlay “Western” thinking— intrigued me. Because I had to give up a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to go to Moscow, we agreed to save from our fellowships and assistantships to accumulate the $3,000 we would need to get through the following year in London. And so I became in Moscow an unintentional observer of an incomprehensible land.

      When I re-imagine the times, I picture the United States we left behind, led by President Lyndon Johnson building up troops and war efforts in Viet Nam, with U.S. involvement growing in all aspects of the war. “American Planes Reported Dropping Napalm Bombs in Vietnam” was a headline of the times. Johnson, having filled President John Kennedy’s term after his assassination in 1963, was one year into his own term as elected president. Headlines of the period read “Johnson Installed; Stresses Great Society” and “LBJ Signs Civil Rights Act.”

      Meanwhile, popular culture was taking a new turn with the advent of the Beatles. “Beatles Invade America,” one headline read. And miniskirts appearing on the scene for the first time elicited headlines, debates, and cartoons.

      In the Soviet Union in which we landed, Leonid Brezhnev ruled as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (and later as its General Secretary). He had ousted Nikita Khrushchev from that position about a year before we arrived, “surprising most observers,” the newspapers said. From what we could see as soon as we arrived, virtually all visual and visible signs of Khrushchev’s period, his legacy and rule, had been totally obliterated. Mentions of Khrushchev, his actual name, his speeches, pictures, and memory were completely eradicated. It was as if he never existed. He had truly become a non-person. Very eerie. Brezhnev’s rule meant not only the disappearance of Khrushchev and his reforms, but also a return to Communist orthodoxy and a hardening of the Cold War atmosphere. “Soviet Union Is Now Using Spy Satellites” was another headline of the time.

      Winter was long and dim. On a cold, dark day in January, I marked my twenty-fourth birthday sadly, far from close friends or family beyond Jim; no cake, candles, cards, or gifts. I felt very foreign and very old for twenty-four. By February, gray prevailed. People, I noted in my diary, were “plodding and pushing a path through gray slush on gray days dressed in gray.” I was bored by the sameness of things—of products and shops and prices—all numbered and uniform throughout the land; the “nothing-to-do-ness of it all.”

      In February, I wrote my parents how cut off we were from any news from outside Russia: there was no radio, TV, magazine, or newspaper that was not controlled by the Communist party. The land was sealed shut.

      This was also not an easy time to be an American in the Soviet Union. But we were there for the reasons graduate students travel: research in unique collections in archives and libraries, shards of history that could not be found elsewhere. And so it was that Jim spent his days at the archives—the Central State Archives of Ancient Documents, the Archives of the Historical Museum, the Manuscript Division of the Lenin and University Libraries. He read 17^th- and 18^th-century records and manuscripts and early printed books for research on Peter the Great. The archives were cold. The smells from the bathrooms in the basement carried up the stairs; a single tap of cold water was available to those who had the courage in the underheated buildings to take off their gloves.

      The libraries I used—the Moscow University Libraries, the Gorky, and the Lenin (now, Russian Library) - were, unlike the archives, warm, comfortable, and well-kept. I loved the cozy rooms, wooden floors and bookshelves, large chairs, oriental rugs, and large potted tropical plants, windows steamed with people’s breath. Hourly the tiny transom window (fortochka) at the top of the enormous casement windows would be opened for five minutes to air the rooms of people smells that accumulated (without deodorant, mouthwash, and detergents). Surprisingly welcome, the way- below-zero-degree air would rush in, freshening and cleansing the room, waking any snoozing readers.

      Access to books, I learned, was a political decision, based on need to know. That is, some bureaucrat would determine what categories of books I could read. He or she would issue a card that would set (and limit) what collections would be open or closed to me. Incremental degrees of access were awarded people according to their status: party member, Academician/scholar, graduate student, undergraduate, the general public. Certain trusted Russians earned the right to read foreign literature; most did not. So I presented myself with trepidation for my treasured card. Happily, as a foreigner, I was issued a card sufficient to read “foreign” literature. But if I hadn’t felt sufficiently “foreign” before, now I knew that reading in English sealed my status. In the “Foreign Literature Reading Room,” I found myself in the company of a handful of mature Russian professors and a few other foreigners reading works in English and other Western languages. The collections were good, indeed; but, like most research libraries, not circulating. However, Moscow State University’s library lent books, and even acquired books on request through inter-library loan. I felt very fortunate, much luckier than the researchers in the archives, or those who researched fields deemed sensitive. I had access—and steam heat. For exchange students in sensitive fields (contemporary, political, military), we learned, life would be hell.

      With books, I was at home. There was no television available to us, but when we glimpsed broadcasts, we saw that Soviet-controlled stations (that is, all stations) featured an excess of men on tractors or men in trenches. I preferred my books. The American Embassy library and gift bookshelf for Russians stocked American authors. These presentation books I read carefully, not to mar the pages or crack the spines—and guiltily—before giving them to Russian friends. I had almost convinced myself it was O.K., since I had no other source of books. (Situational ethics, Naomi, a voice now chastises me.) Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Anderson, Joseph Heller, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty…a U.S. government curriculum of worthy American writers, a selection that today would seem rather “white” and “male.” And I had brought a few books along, books outside the canon, or by non-Americans, including Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando; Camus’ Plague, and Kafka’s The Trial, in addition to well-known Russian novels, best read in their context.

      Deep into Look Homeward, Angel one evening, I heard an urgent knocking on the door. I opened it to a group of highly agitated North Vietnamese students whom we had previously met in the shared kitchen. North Vietnam was at the time an enemy of the U.S. I had met the students one day when I had walked into the kitchen and heard an Arab student exhorting one of the North Vietnamese students (in Russian):

      “Viet Nam is your country, not the Americans’. It’s your country.”

      I focused on watching a pot of water come to the boil. Meanwhile, the Arab student left the kitchen. In the silence, one of the Vietnamese fellows turned to me and asked, “Where are you from?”

      Uncertain of the reaction I would receive, I affected poise and replied, “I’m an American.”

      He smiled and responded cheerfully about his studies in Russia and other small talk. After that, whenever Jim and I met these young men in the halls or kitchen, they always exchanged friendly greetings. I’m not sure I know why.

      So when I opened the door that evening, the only mystery was what was agitating them. In accented Russian, they said, “Your husband is in trouble in the kitchen. Come quickly to help—he is making explosions!”

      Of course, I followed them; my heart rate ratcheted up. Reaching the kitchen, I peered in quickly, only to find a cheerful Jim, happily popping popcorn.

      Popcorn was one of his favorite treats. With some popping corn he had shipped with us, he was using a small covered pot over a hot flame. He was a pro, and the pot and corn were under control. But what a fearful sound, the menacing echoes bouncing off the hard tile walls and floors. And why—I could see them wondering—