Buying the Night Flight (25 page)

He smiled knowingly.
"We
can," he whispered back.

***

On my second trip, in 1971, when I returned to finish research for my book on Soviet youth, I had to work out a much more complicated means of accomplishing this. On my first day in Moscow, Pavel Gevorkian, one of the Novosti chiefs and later identified in the U.S. as a major KGB man (which I had taken for granted), took me out to lunch. "I am sorry, Georgie," he said, "but Novosti cannot work with foreign correspondents anymore. The policy has been changed." I was speechless. I had depended upon this one aid. In effect I was on my own for two months, and to be on your own in Russia is to be almost helpless.

That afternoon I sat down in my elegant old room in the czarist-era Hotel National across from Red Square, threw down a couple of cognacs, and thought. I felt like lying there and whimpering, which is what I always did when sick and alone overseas. What I clearly needed, in this country of plans, was a plan.

First of all I analyzed the situation. Here I was, with two months yawning ahead of me, in a totally closed totalitarian country where almost no one would want to risk talking to me. My timing could not have been worse, yet I was determined to get to people despite all the odds. Since the official route was closed, I had to develop new routes of my own. But where do you start in a country that does not even have a telephone book?

I took out a yellow pad. On it I wrote down the names of every body I knew or could know in Moscow: embassy officials of all nationalities, journalists of all nationalities, the few Russians I al ready knew. I reasoned that in a country and in a situation like this, you couldn't ask too much of any one single person but you could ask a little of everybody before implacable resistance set in.

I decided to ask each person I knew to help me with one appropriate interview. I would ask a journalist for one phone number or to help me arrange to see someone he or she might particularly know. I would ask a diplomat to help me with one official he might know. In addition, with obvious, noncontroversial people, I would ask Nellie, my excellent Intourist guide, to help.

Then I wrote down the names of the people I wanted to see. This included everybody from Komsomol leaders to playwrights to women sociologists. Then I matched them up with my first list and systematically began to go about contacting people.

This time-consuming route proved quite amazingly successful. Correspondents who had lived there for years had not been able to see the people I saw, or really to see anyone. Also the fact that I was coming in quickly and leaving quickly -- the fact that I would not be around to remind them of what they had said or not said -- served in good stead. It is
not
a help to be around Russia too long!

One of the major new stars in the youth firmament, for instance, was Andrei Volkonsky, a famous pianist and a romantic figure to many Russians partly because he was the grandson and namesake of the immortal "Prince Andrei" of
War and Peace.
But -- how to find him?

One foreign diplomat made the obvious suggestion that I go to performances and then use the acceptable custom of going backstage afterward to greet performers. This I did. I went to one of his performances, went backstage, stood in line, greeted him in Russian and--as this very sophisticated man literally gawked at the sheer brazenness of it--asked him for an interview. He agreed; and he met me at the hotel the very next day, his eyes still rather questioning.

I was particularly interested in Volkonsky -- as tall, dark, hand some, and haunted-looking as one would rightly expect Prince An drei's seed to be -- because he was the center of a wildly popular revival of (of all things!) old church music. We sat for two hours, talking of this.

"I am a great-grandson of the Volkonsky of the Decembrist uprising," he started, as we sat in the restaurant overlooking the Kremlin, its gold onion domes gleaming in the sun. "We are related to the czars of the Romanoff family and also to Prince Vladimir of Kiev and to Alexander Nevsky."

I was properly breathless -- all of the most romantic dreams of the historic Russia I so loved were unfolding right in front of me in this person. Then he said, with just the touch of an ironic smile, "They're just relatives. The family had its own czars and saints. But I have nothing to do with saints anymore." A pregnant pause, then an open, friendly smile. "Besides, I'm not a saint myself."

In 1965 Volkonsky began what six years later had become a wildly popular renaissance of early pre-Peter the Great (and thus pre-European influence) Orthodox church music.

"At the time of Peter, there were reforms in the church services," he explained, "and part of the reform was a kind of Europeanization of the service. The old type of music was forgotten. A new singing during the services was introduced that had nothing to do with the old music. I believe everyone must feel very sorry because the music today is poorer. It lost its Russian features."

Volkonsky had formed a performing group called the "Madrigals," which by 1971 was giving one hundred totally sold-out concerts a year all over the Soviet Union -- but not before he personally had done the mammoth and intricate job of searching out and decoding the music, which lay untouched in old libraries and monasteries. "For thousands of people, particularly students, this ancient classical music replaces pop music," he summed up. "In a way, it's a kind of social experiment."

His "social experiment" -- and, in particular, the tremendous success of it -- seemed to me something of overwhelming importance.

***

In a country like the Soviet Union, where you cannot ask direct questions and where you cannot believe (in our sense) the answers people do give you, you have to learn to listen on many levels, to catch nuances, to watch for the continuation of themes people may be not at all aware they are revealing to you. Perhaps women, being naturally more empathic listeners, are better at this than men. At any rate, as I systematically and exhaustedly asked young people simple questions like, "What is your greatest passion in life?" or "What interests your generation most?" I was prepared for answers like, "Creating the new Communist man" or "Destroying the bourgeoisie throughout the world and establishing socialism."

But these questions were met with blank stares or quizzical, bemused smiles. Either they found my questioning curiously outdated or found me ripe for membership in the Central Committee.

What
did
come through? One answer, everywhere and always, even in young officialdom: "The spiritual life of man."

One of the most cogent and provocative answers came from a twenty-eight-year-old physicist-turned-psychologist at Kiev State University, Valerie Melko, to whom I was deliberately -- which in itself was telling--sent by the youth section in Novosti. (One of their rare instances of assistance.) He seemed to incorporate in himself the searching both of objective science and of the inner self. By the time I met him, Valerie, brown haired, with unhurried eyes, a sharp mind, and utter honesty, had tired of pure, dehumanized science and was exploring psychology as an antidote to it.

"Even if you know how to do things, the problems of what for still remain," he told me as we sat in a small, drab study room of the university that cool October day, talking for nearly four hours. "For what do we use modern technical things? What do they give to man? What do they give on a spiritual level? The world of things is known well. But what concerns man we know least because it is the most complex system. This tendency is quite unlike the Renaissance -- which put man in the main spot, made man the most precious thing in the world." He smiled, shifted in his chair.

"The formation of the inner consciousness of man
is
not decided haphazardly, without order. We don't know on what it depends.

We suppose it depends on social and economic conditions. But what? We don't know. We can only surmise. We hope that many features can be improved in man. But the first thing is to awaken a will in man to improve. To do this, we must know on what the will depends."

Most Americans would perhaps not recognize what a staggering thing he was saying, because most Americans no longer read history and understand the simple different cultural standards of other peoples. Thinking they are just like us and will react the same way, if treated right, is the utmost in contempt and egocentrism because it denies the other person's and people's own experience, own realm of being. One had to know history and Soviet thought -- at least at its most simple level--to understand how amazing it was to hear a young Marxist, a man quite within the system and indeed a jewel of its intellectual world, saying that his generation did not trust social and economic advances to solve psychological problems. This was taking place in a society that had consistently claimed that men's psychological and personal problems were simply an outgrowth of the social imbalances that communism would solve!

It was Melko, too, who told me most brilliantly about the changes in ideology in regard to collectivism. "The ideology is changing somewhat," he reflected that day. "Such features as were ideal for one generation -- collectivism -- are changing to solidarity. But this still excludes individualism. It means that, when deciding the problems of all the people, we must pay special attention to the individual needs of everyone in the group. In addition, such features as discipline from outside now have become internal discipline."

***

So, yes, I did find the Soviet Union changing, but I was very, very cautious about making any dramatic predictions on that change -- or allowing myself the luxury of believing either that they were at heart "just like us" (the liberal sentimental idea) or that they were outside of human history, anti-historical, monsters (the conservative version). I saw a totalitarian state with a history that created a mind-set which above all prized authority and obedience. It was the exact antithesis of the American ideas of individualism, human freedom as the predominant value in human life, and existential self-determination. It was no mystery that they therefore had been posited by history both conspicuously against us -- and, in an odd way and on another level that Alexis de Tocqueville understood so brilliantly, very much with us. Both believed in enfranchising the aver age person, but in totally different ways: one in the equality of egalitarian horizontalism, one in the authoritarian equality of totalitarian verticalism.

So, when I looked at the youth, I saw, yes, a new generation striving for much more in terms of material goods and in terms of personal fulfillment; but I had to predict in my book,
The Young Russians,
that these desires would only nominally affect the leadership class, which would stay hard and tough and totalitarian.

Later I would cry and wring my hands over some people in the Carter administration, including most unfortunately the President himself, who really thought that the Russians were just like us, and would respond just like your neighbor in Iowa City if we didn't irk them too much. But I would then wring my hands just as much about the Reagan administration, which looked upon the Russians as almost anti-human. What the Russians wanted from us was for us to act as a credible deterrent -- to stop them from doing certain things -- but the U.S. in the seventies and eighties has not understood this.

The ideas and experiences and memories behind the mind-sets of the Russians and the Americans are totally and unequivocally different. Linguists have told me that the Vladivostok agreements are so different in the two languages that they could quite literally not be called into effect. Their ideas about information are totally different: the Russians see information not as the search for truth (they
have
truth) but as a means of furthering their objective, the spreading of socialism in the world.

All this points to a major lesson that I had to learn as a journalist. We cannot judge others by ourselves--that is the ultimate and the unforgivable egocentricity. We must go further than just good reporting, we must somehow incorporate into our writing an implicit understanding of the different truths that other cultures are living by -- and dying by. When I was in Russia, Iran was still to come, but in trying to understand Russia and in all the agonies of working there, I learned once and for all of the different shadows in the wings of our histories, the different memories, the different howls in the night that each people hears and that we can ignore only at our deep peril.

***

Often "listening" brought glorious rewards. One gorgeous October morning, with yellow leaves falling on sidewalks still black from the night's rain, I walked into Czarina Katherine's beautiful blue and white palace outside Leningrad in Pushkintown. Reacting to the cold weather we had been having, I was wearing my heavy Russian fur coat on a day clearly much too warm for it.

Behind the coat-check counter stood a typical old
babushka,
looking like a gnome in her black cloth coat with scarf tied tight around her temples. When she saw me, she started, then clapped her fat, creased hands together as if to ward off a bad omen. "Oh," she said, her eyes wide and disturbed as she looked at my coat. "Oh, my, you're frightening summer." In Russia, one also found sometimes this tremulous beauty.

Man of Steel

"Do women have equal rights in America too?"
--An Uzbek farmer

As I worked my way deeper into Russian life, trying to unravel the mysteries, I was, as always, deeply interested in the women. I suppose it was a selfish search, for I was searching for myself in them and their "solutions." The Russian revolution, after all, had "freed" women. They were -- in jobs, in education, and in recognized potential -- equal. There was much to admire. But I soon found many contradictions, many conflicts, many conundrums.