Eight Pieces of Empire (2 page)

After 1991, I never really left the former Soviet Union again. I was bureau chief for Reuters in the turbulent Caucasus region of the former USSR from 1992 to 2000, and then worked for NPR (National Public Radio) from 2001 to 2008, including four years as NPR’s Moscow bureau chief.

My early experiences in the late 1980s through nearly the end of 1991 allowed me the rare gift of immersing myself in the day-to-day life of the imploding empire. I lived it before I ever reported on it.

Even as a journalist, I was given a rich vantage point from which to view events: Being based for several years as a full-time correspondent in the Caucasus Mountains—the scene of violent conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Chechnya—freed me from much of the desk work and press conference–laden reporting that one encounters as a Moscow-based staff reporter. The dissolution of the Soviet Union took place among the spiral arms and fringes to which it was attached: in this case, now-former Soviet republics and far-flung parts of Russia itself. Conflicts erupted that few have heard of—such as those between the ethnic Ingush and Ossetians. New police states in Central Asian places like Uzbekistan emerged. Then there was the post-9/11 American war in Afghanistan, itself often called “The Graveyard of Empires.” The miserable Soviet experience there helped lead to the USSR’s demise.

As we mark twenty years of the empire’s collapse, few speak about the USSR anymore or of what became of it. Westerners viewed it as a monolith. We largely failed to predict its demise—an object lesson about the ephemeral and perhaps our own sense of mortality, as nations and as human beings.

Aerial view of the Petrogradskaya Storona neighborhood of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia, in June 1990. The yellow cupolas of St. Vladimir’s Cathedral are visible (
lower left
) and directly across (
lower center
) is the building housing the communal apartment where the author spent the summer of 1989 as the USSR began to disintegrate.

I
n 1989, most Western
Kremlinologists were still giddy with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his “reform” package to cure the ills of the Soviet Union. Known as “Glasnost and Perestroika” (“openness and restructuring”), the program was designed to bring the “Evil Empire” in from the cold (as it were). The prevailing view among the Western Kremlin watchers was that the Soviet Union was not destined for total collapse. Even after the end of that year, as Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, Poland, and even Maoist Albania had either fallen or were teetering, this view of the USSR as re-formable remained intact.

It was not just “Kremlinologists” who got it wrong. The notion of the Soviet Union going belly-up was incomprehensible to many Westerners. Empire is a seductive concept—reassuring, monolithic, predictable, and comforting—and we Americans (and they, the “Soviets”) had cuddled up to the idea for about seven decades. During school drills, we’d huddled in fallout shelters with the telltale nuclear symbol, imagining our “foes” engaging in the same, predictable rite.

Waking up to find the Soviet Union gone was too mind-boggling to contemplate. If the society of our archenemy of the Cold War, the one we spent generations fearing, could collapse with such ease, what did that suggest about our own assumed immortality? Could not our American “empire” at some time unravel just as unexpectedly?

Those around me—in a once-posh but by then rundown Petrograd neighborhood—paid little attention to Gorbachev’s long-winded speeches on state television. Some didn’t care; others were oblivious. Most people were just too busy eking out a living. Yet in hindsight the empire’s days were clearly numbered.

A CIVIL WAR OUTSIDE MY DOOR

I
look though the smoky-colored
windows of our communal apartment, toward St. Vladimir’s Cathedral and its saffron-colored exterior. The empire is unraveling, and below, there are signs of the creeping chaos.

The scene around the cathedral is a source of practical information. Combatants converge around St. Vladimir’s—on one side are the growing flocks of worshippers—on the other, the growing groups of drunks, whose numbers surge over the summer, proof that yet another Communist Party effort (spearheaded by Gorbachev himself) to battle Russians’ love of the bottle is running dry. The image of drinking and of Russia may indeed be a Western stereotype. In fact, half the population imbibes little, if at all. Yet the drunks are there, right before my eyes.

The drunks favor the area for a simple reason: Out of spite or ignorance, the city authorities opened a skid row beer stand, or
pivnushka
(which in the official hierarchy of the Leningrad Municipal Department of Public Eating Places is literally at the bottom of the barrel—restaurants, cafés, and cafeterias rank higher), right next to St. Vladimir’s, a cathedral sheltering one of Orthodoxy’s most sacred icons.

Announced with a sloppily painted sign reading pivo (“beer”), the
pivnushka
is just an open-air shack. There’s no pretense here. The patrons, mostly bleary-eyed men who’ve seen better days, line up to get smashed—quickly and cheaply. Warm, brackish-tasting tap beer is poured into scratched-up mugs and passed into trembling hands.

By noon, drunken men are all around the beer stand. They spill into
the street around St. Vladimir’s and into its courtyard. They pass out on benches. They wave their drinking glasses. They spit, they shout.

Then the skirmishes commence—the pious, most of them women, scatter the drunks away from St. Vladimir’s with raised hands, swinging purses. Many might be described as “babushkas.” But “babushka” is another Western caricature—a balloon-cheeked granny in a multicolored scarf. These women are of all descriptions: gaunt, urban matrons with birdlike arms; college girls; wobbly, roly-poly peasant mothers, some of them with their grandchildren in tow to teach them to know their icons. This is new and daring. Two years previously, such catechism exposed oneself to the prying eyes of potentially informer priests.

The Saints usually win these daily conflagrations. With sweat popping off their foreheads, the Sinners retreat to their rear base down Talalikhina Lane near the
pivnushka
.

And in reality, both sides are winners, are they not?

For both, freedom has indeed been found! For the Saints, who now worship in public without looking over their shoulders. And for the drunks, who indeed would have been rounded up as parasites or miscreants just a few years back. They stand around, drinking and laughing and shouting in animated if inebriated conversation, oblivious to the robed priests and head-scarved women entering St. Vladimir’s Cathedral, ironically in this year of 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of its consecration.

Yet to others, that freedom, the empire’s demise, is a symbol of the impending anarchy, unpredictable and threatening.

A FEW STEPS
separate St. Vladimir’s Cathedral from our building’s entrance at Talalikhina Lane 7/9.

Nina Nikolaevna and I pass through the entranceway, she making a deliberate attempt to ignore the loitering drunks. We slowly ascend to the fifth and final floor of the dark, winding staircase, stopping on almost every landing. Her legs are riddled with gout, victims of the
World War II Nazi blockade of the city, which killed nearly a million Leningraders—and barely spared Nina’s life.

Our corner of the communal is the first room on the right. Privacy is a piece of cloth hung over a rope drawn across the middle. Nina Nikolaevna’s bed occupies a sacred corner—the sheet of fabric serving as room divider is almost never pulled all the way back. I sleep on a small, hard divan near the door.

There is a black-and-white television set, a small table, a bookshelf. The tablecloth is pristine, the floor swept and scrubbed to a gloss. This is the inner sanctum, away from the shabby common areas in the hallway, toilet, and kitchen.

A ubiquitous “people’s radio” is bolted to the wall, obligatory in any Soviet flat. It offers no choice of frequencies—just buttons to push for three government radio stations.

Interspersed with music, announcers read ominous-sounding Communist Party bulletins. The ring though the tinny speaker consists of stern warnings to the leaders of independence from the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia who are already well on their way to seceding from the USSR.

NINA NIKOLAEVNA
is sturdily built, with a wisp of grayish-white hair and warm but steely eyes that hint of a long, hard life. She makes the trip up and down the deep stairway several times a day on those gimpy legs. She might, one could presume, because of the exile of her daughter, or the hyperinflation devouring her pension, have less reason to defend the system than many other people. But that is not the case.

Nina is no Stalinist, not even a party member. Yet to her, imagining the demise of the empire is like imagining the sun won’t come up tomorrow. She turns to the subject of the seceding Baltic republics, the first major crack in the empire. “The Balts are all full of empty talk.” She waves her hand dismissively. “What’s done has been done.” In other words, the Baltic states will always be part of the Soyuz (Soviet Union)
because they became a part of it (by whatever means) and were thus stuck being part of it for eternity, like it or not. Even at this terminal stage of the empire’s existence, food stores emptier by the day and decent shoes scarce, Nina Nikolaevna is convinced that the Soyuz will survive.

I AM A
blockadnitsa
,” says Nina Nikolaevna weightily. Her eyes glow in an extinguished sparkle, as if the phrase needs no elaboration. The experience of surviving the nine-hundred-day Nazi blockade defines the city’s spirit, and makes any hardship a trifle by comparison.

“The siege is the most tragic in the city’s history, and I think it was then the name Leningrad was finally adopted by the inhabitants who survived,” wrote the celebrated poet Joseph Brodsky in his essay “Guide to a Renamed City” (1979). He was about three years old when it began.

Nina Nikolaevna was eighteen when the siege started on September 8, 1941, the date the Wehrmacht completely encircled the city. She was untold decades older when it was finally lifted on January 27, 1944, with the Nazis starting their retreat that would end with Hitler’s suicide in his Führerbunker on April 30, 1945.

But that was later; that was victory.

Back in the autumn of 1941, then the spring of 1942, then the autumn of that year, and then all of 1943 into early 1944, defeat loomed over the city as it was pounded by German artillery and aircraft.

“It was not the sound of the bombs, but the silence on the streets in between the bombardments that was the most frightening thing,” Nina Nikolaevna says.

Fuel had run out. What little remained was requisitioned by the army. No fuel meant no vehicles moving about—just the occasional sound of boots still healthy enough to hit the pavement.

Early on, the authorities began rationing food—canned goods from state stores, and then anything grown in garden plots: cabbage, onions, and carrots, mainly. When domesticated animals such as cows and sheep ran out, butchers turned to horses to make sausage, and then to cats, dogs, and rats.

“There was one case—they wrote about it in the newspaper—where a man came to his relatives and saw that their dog was still alive, even if just a bag of bones,” Nina Nikolaevna recalls. They had already talked about the dog, about the fact he would have to be eaten. Then, when the man came to the apartment, the dog compliantly walked up to him as if completely cognizant of his final duty—to be someone’s dinner.

Starvation finally arrived, and bodies piled up on the streets. Rumors abounded about human meat being hacked from the cadavers and hawked at the main bazaar.

“Eventually, they cut our rations to stale bread,” she related. “Then a slice, then half a slice, soon half a slice of flour mixed with sawdust, and then sawdust mixed with crumbs and water.”