A life-long dissident loses all hope
by Jeffrey Tayler
For decades the Soviet media depicted their citizens as prolish masses marching in voluntary lockstep toward a bright communist future, with a few ahead of the rest in matters of culture, science, and sport. Western media, per contra, focused on Soviet dissidents and their political aspirations, as well as on the putative misery of the lockstepping masses. After the collapse of the Soviet Union more balanced reportage began, but soon a new set of subjects came to dominate coverage on both sides-resurgent communism, organized crime, and Yeltsin's health, to name a few. The media, whether Western or Russian, have failed to convey an accurate picture of former Soviets as people not because they got the facts wrong, but because journalism, no matter how scrupulous, is no substitute for personal contact. It's harder to understand another country, or community of people than it is to understand its individual members. Knowledge begins with the personal.
In the hope of rectifying this situation I offer the following memoir of my 14-year friendship with an ethnic Russian citizen of the Ukraine, Oleg. A 50-year-old member of the proletariat once hallowed by Soviet dogma, Oleg, even if he has no gulag years behind him, has always been a dissident; he is one of the few people his age who never joined a single Communist Party organization (membership was close to compulsory in the Octobrists and the Komsomol-youth organizations). His dissidence has been innate; it sprang from his heart. Oleg has, in fact, lived for ideological debate and through a belief in democratic ideals and principles.
Now is the time for this memoir. With parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled during the coming year, Russia is entering a period of instability, with Yeltsin firing one prime minister after another, with talk of a state of emergency being introduced as a pretext to prevent a transfer of power, with fighting breaking out again in the Caucasus, and with more and more high-level corruption scandals coming to light. What does it mean that this is happening now, eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and 13 years since the beginning of Perestroika? Oleg has begun to look back and reflect, to draw conclusions. So will I here.
It was August of 1985. I was a 24-four-year-old graduate student in Russian and East European history. When I arrived in Kiev, the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, I had been traveling for two months around the Soviet Union with a group of Americans. Immigrant friends of mine in the States had asked me to take pictures of their Kievan relatives, Oleg and his wife, Valya, an ethnic Ukrainian. From a pay phone on Khreshchatik, Kiev's main boulevard, I called their apartment. Without hesitating or asking questions, Oleg bellowed directions into the receiver; I was to come over for dinner the next evening.
State store shelves in Kiev were bare then, but he and Valya managed to throw a sumptuous party in my honor and had invited various other relatives. A table the length of the well-worn living room was covered with mushrooms, black and red caviar, sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, bread, fresh butter-an inventory of prized comestibles acquired through black market connections and backdoor deals with supply clerks.
The television played at full volume during our dinner (a custom at Russian fêtes); gray Party faces droned on and on about this or that state farm and its production quotas, about the evils of President Reagan and oppression in America, about model Soviet workers ....
"Listen to those fatheads!" Oleg bellowed, after knocking back a hundred grams of vodka, his face looming large over mine, then retreating, looming large then retreating. "How do you think I feel having to look at their ugly mugs every day. 'We are heading toward a bright future! The Soviet Union is the bastion of peace on earth!' They go on and on and half our doltish citizens believe them! They should be put on trial for committing intellectual genocide-they've made our people dumber than cattle!"
For pre-Perestroika talk like this, Oleg could end up in trouble with the KGB. Valya looked over at us. "Oleg, quiet down!"
"I'll shout if I want to and let those Party morons hear me! I'll never be silent! Listen, Jeff, my brother-in-law was thrown out of this hellhole for standing up to those bastards. You Americans are too easy on them-how disgusted I am when one of your politicians comes here on a 'peace mission' to shake those murderers' hands."
Valya was now leaning over his shoulder. "You're drinking too much."
He ignored her and moved closer to me. "You'd drink too if you were sentenced to life in this gulag."
I liked Oleg and Valya from the first. Both were in their late 30s. Oleg was a repair technician; he was tall and fair-haired, shaggy-bearded and potbellied, with something of the hippie about him. He rocked back and forth in a curious, almost autistic way when he talked, leaning into his words for emphasis, then backing off, leaning in and backing off, imparting a pendulum-like rhythm to his diatribes, turning them into theatrical soliloquies. Indeed, he perceived Russian history as a high tragedy played out by principled protagonists, irredeemable villains, and bungling naifs-a sustaining context in which to come to grips with and live out an otherwise Soviet-issue role in life. Although Valya agreed with him, she remained aloof. She worked for a state machine-tool enterprise; she was blonde, and she spoke with a trace of a lisp that made her speech seem pleasantly Patrician.
I asked Oleg what had turned him against the Soviet regime. "Even as a kid I knew I hated communists," he said. "They were like rotten meat, stinking and foul and always ruining my fun. You don't have to be told not to like rotten meat, now do you? Look at their faces"-the Politburo were filling the screen-"the mothers who gave birth to degenerates like that ought to be sterilized.
"Listen, I'll tell you something. When I was a soldier in the Soviet army, I hated the communists so much I would have gladly sold my entire brigade to the enemy. They are murderers, the destroyers of not only my country but every people around us."
On television, faces changed but the rote intonations and lengthy addresses of the cadre newscasters stayed the same, as did the succession of threadbare synthetic suits, clip-on ties, and careworn eyes. The Soviet government, it seemed, was determined to bore its people into submission with its media. Yet on Oleg this tactic had the opposite effect: each new commentator provoked him to fresh harangues at higher decibels, to more shots of vodka, to wilder rocking back and forth. Valya and the others quietly voiced agreement with him; they were concerned, however, that he might be tiring me. On the contrary, I found Oleg's diatribes unique and liberating. They screamed the obvious where everything was tight-lipped deceit.
I spent the next week with them. Their lives were cramped-they shared the apartment with Oleg's mother-but Oleg was an avid jazz and rock aficionado and Valya a devoted reader, and their pastimes afforded them artistic release from their close surround. However, Oleg spent much of his free time drinking with friends; Valya was saddled with keeping house and queueing up for groceries, all of which she somehow performed without rancor. This was, I learned, a typical state of affairs for a Soviet household. But it pained me to see two such vital people, people who were becoming good friends of mine, stuck in the mean-spirited Soviet charade of conformity, scarcity, and surveillance, and I told them so. If only, we said, the Soviet system could be dismantled. If only-we couldn't even imagine how good life would be here then. A people so long enslaved, once freed, would diligently defend its liberty and eagerly set out on the road to prosperity. If only ... None of us had an inkling of the coming Perestroika. Despair always edged into our talks. Always despair.
I left Kiev and seven years passed. During those years the Soviet Union disintegrated. I wrote Oleg and Valya and heard nothing, but then letters often "went astray." In the summer of 1992 I moved to Uzbekistan to establish a Peace Corps program. In 1993, with the program set up, I quit and began hitchhiking across the former Soviet Union.
When I made it to Kiev I spent a week with Oleg and Valya. Notwithstanding his enthusiasm for the changes taking place in Russia, Oleg had had a tough time the previous few years. Alcoholism had nearly killed him, but he had gone cold turkey and taken up bicycling to restore his health. With the decline of Ukraine's economy, he had lost his job, but the rigors of his new sport and certain ideological considerations left him disinclined to work anyway ("Why should I work? I refuse to work for communists. Communists control everything here"), and his lack of employment placed a burden on Valya (with whom he now lived alone; his mother had died). While he biked around Kiev all day, feeling better and better, Valya toiled in a state enterprise that looked about to go bankrupt. It became clear to me that Oleg was, like many members of the Russian intelligentsia to which he felt affinity, supremely impractical, disposed to mix fiery discourse on the fate of his land with shameless indolence. Still, he ballasted my life-we shared perceptions of Russian history as tragedy, and no matter what happened, I could count on Oleg for spirited commentary.
In the autumn of 1993, Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet (the communist-dominated parliament) were squaring off. As during the coup attempt of 1991, so now, the fate of the new Russia seemed to be at stake. If the Supreme Soviet won out, the communists would return to power; if Yeltsin prevailed, the country, it appeared, would be safe for reform. I started phoning Oleg in Kiev every night from Moscow, where I had moved after my trans-Russia trip. He was livid.
"Those mongrel bastard communists are finally going to get theirs. When they do, Yeltsin will be able to ban the Party and put their leaders on trial. Communism and fascism are the same thing. We need a Nuremberg Trial for communists, and Russians need to repent for the ruin they have brought on themselves and so many other peoples. Now it looks like that may happen."
Oleg's voice rang loud in the receiver. He regaled me with predictions of hellfire for the communists, of glorious retribution, of liberty spreading across the former Soviet Union. The Russian president's victory, if achieved, would also augur a new era for the independent Ukraine (which had no reformist equivalent of Yeltsin). I reported on what I had seen in Moscow: street demonstrations, the bombardment of the Supreme Soviet, and the surrender of the deputies.
The violence didn't end with the bombing of the Soviet. A curfew was imposed, and my neighborhood reverberated with machine gun fire every night for two weeks-reportedly, Chechen guerrillas were hiding out in a nearby apartment building. I could rarely sleep, so often I called Oleg.
"This is necessary to rid the country of the communist bastards," he said one night. "You're going to have to put up with some noise for a while."
There was a pounding on my door. "Open up this door! Militia!"
I fell silent. I put down the receiver and tiptoed to the door and looked through the peephole, espying three men holding Kalashnikovs.
"Open up!"
What if they were rebels on the run? I froze.
A minute later they pounded on the door of my neighbor-a young woman. "I'm not opening this door for anyone! Please, spare me and go away!" she shouted.
They did. I returned to the phone. "You see," Oleg said, "you are not protected. No one is. When a revolt gets going in Russia they just start shooting and arresting. You'll never have time to show your passport. But God willing, it is for the best. The communists must be crushed."
It was odd: for two weeks, I was scared at night but my talks with Oleg put my fear in the context of the great drama of Russian history-the drama that had lured me to living in the land and traveling it. I felt as if I could take a bullet for this passion-I never considered leaving the country. Having Oleg as a friend, even if he lived in Ukraine, made Russian politics as personal for me as they were for him, or almost.
In December of 1994 Yeltsin sent troops into Chechnya and crushed the aspirations of millions of former Soviets who hoped that Russia might have ceased relying on force to govern. Oleg, at first, didn't know how to accept the change in Yeltsin's policies, and wondered if it could be a prelude to an invasion of Ukraine. "I won't survive if the Russians invade," he told me. "Emotionally, physically, I won't survive."
The age of expectations that had begun in 1986 with Perestroika was beginning to wane. Indeed, my pre-1994 conversations with Oleg, with their heady sense of liberation and infinite possibility, were painful for us both to remember, so great was our mutual disappointment over where Russia was now headed. The dynamic and polemics of Russian history had begun to change. No longer was Yeltsin's fight Oleg's fight; Yeltsin, on whom almost every reform-minded liberal had placed his hopes, suddenly looked like a monarch concerned with only his own survival.
The next spring I visited Kiev. Oleg had found a job riding a floor-polishing machine around a sporting arena but Valya had lost her place at the state enterprise, and was selling family heirlooms at the tolkuchka, or open-air market. "Our economy is collapsing," he told me as he poured himself a glass of port wine in the kitchen. (He now drank on occasion, without apparent ill effect.) "The mafia runs our businesses. Russia has brought us to our knees."
The bare branches of the apple trees splayed the autumn sun into soft rays that burnished the chimney smoke hanging above our heads and gilt the bottles of vodka and cognac standing on the oak-slab table. It was October 1997. I was sitting in the backyard of a dacha outside Kiev with Oleg; we were to celebrate Indian summer, and the last warm days before winter.
The economy of Ukraine had not collapsed. Ukraine had introduced its own currency and it was holding stable. Russia had not invaded, and life had gone on for Oleg. He was now making the equivalent of $60 a month; in her new position at a trading company, Valya was earning $150 a month. They had enough to survive on, and even more. Oleg had suffered acute appendicitis and been hospitalized; Valya had to pay for medicines, bribe the doctors to perform an appendectomy, and act as nurse in the hospital, but he pulled through. On the whole, despite his complaints, he looked fit and strong now.
But although he occupied himself less than ever with the depressing subject of politics he was moping for another reason: his cycling club, which had used a state premises for free, was being evicted by a new private owner. I suggested that the members they might collect enough dues to rent another locale, but Oleg exclaimed, "It's all over! Renting means looking for a place and paying money. The new owner is a businessman who doesn't care about cycling or our health. Consider me done for."
Soon others joined us in the backyard of the dilapidated dacha. Valery, Tolik, and Igor were in their late 40s, educated men whose predilection for dissidence had made them lifelong friends of Oleg's. During the Soviet era, each had been a member of the informal intelligentsia-their identities had been rooted not in their professions, which only put food on the table, but in quiet opposition to the regime. Now, they were doing about as well, or as poorly, as Oleg: Valery, a trained engineer, took on odd jobs since he no longer received a salary at his state enterprise; Tolik's hotel souvenir stand was losing money and he was looking for other work. Igor had moved to Russia and was prospering as a photojournalist.
They took their seats on the wobbly benches. Tolik did the ritual pouring.
After drinking, Valery shook his head. "Nothing unites us Russians. We are simply a country of people thrown together."
Oleg rocked back and forth over his vodka. "Better said, we are all cellmates sentenced to the same prison." His voice was hoarse; his words lacked their old vigor.
Valery nudged me. "Jeff, you, as an American, have a country to be proud of. We just wake up and look at each other and say, 'Oh, how did you get here?' All across the Soviet Union no one feels any sense of unity. There's no common good where there's nothing in common. There's nothing to act for."
"And our cycling club is finished. Because of that businessman," Oleg added.
Tolik poured again, they upended their glasses. To talk about the Soviet Union in the present tense was no mere habit; Oleg and his friends, in their shared dissidence, belonged to the Soviet past. If, during the Soviet era, they believed that their opposition to the regime was doomed but valiant, ennobling even, now, years after the liberating convulsions of 1991, they languished in irrelevancy.
More vodka flowed. They pontificated in turn, but Oleg expressed it best, at full volume, with bleary, vodka-reddened eyes.
"Look at us Russians. We lurch through history always seized by one 'great idea' or another to save humanity. We always think there is some 'Russian way' and that some savior with an idea will come along and unite us. We don't want to work. We followed the Czar, then Lenin, then Stalin. Then Yeltsin. Always looking for the Russian way. I tell you, we just don't want to work, and building any sort of democratic system takes work. We don't need Russian ideas, or saviors. All we need to do is establish a democratic regime, like in the U.S. All we should want to have is a normal life."
Since Perestroika, Oleg and his friends had been awaiting a utopia; rendered passive by their Soviet upbringing, they were ill-equipped to bring it about. Still, the years since 1991 had clarified uninspiring truths for everyone: no teleological hand-guided history, there was to be no dénouement orchestrated from on high, no Judgment Day, and without the Leninist-Stalinist Enemy Party there was no one to blame for one's discontent except oneself. But self-recrimination offered none of the diversion and catharsis permitted by diatribes against the Enemy.
The evening waned in boozy haze and muzzy discourse. Later, we cleared away the bottles and readied ourselves for the trip back into town, having reached no conclusions about where we, Ukraine, or Russia were headed, or even about how to keep alive the cycling club. As before, we would allow time to bear us away toward a destination of its own choosing.
In May of 1999, as snow whirled about Moscow during the coldest spring in more than 50 years, Yeltsin fired his government and another 1993-style confrontation with the Parliament seemed possible again. After our meeting at the dacha, Oleg had quit his job (he hadn't been paid for months); Valya, he said, was about to lose hers. I called him from Moscow and asked about the latest crisis.
"Politics is like going to the bank," he declared. "You hand in your check to the cashier and expect to get your money. If you don't get your money, you've been deceived. Well, after all these years no one has given us our money. A situation like the one before the 1917 revolution is taking shape. Yeltsin is falling apart and the communists are getting stronger." He paused. "Our hopes have come to nothing." He paused. "At times like this I'm happy to have so few years left. I don't want to talk about politics any more. I'm tired."
I had no answers for him. A silence followed that I dare not break.
Jeffrey Tayler is a frequent contributor to WorldView and the Atlantic Monthly. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco from 1988 to 1990.
