equal pay for equal work, and women do about all the jobs that men do.” There is, however, a “women’s lobby,” which is expected to challenge the spread of such complacency and to address imbalances, such as that only eight percent of political offices in the Soviet Union were held by women (as compared, for example, with the House of Commons in Ottawa, where at the time 13.5 percent of the MPs were women—hardly a figure to justify smugness). Perhaps the harshest fact of women’s existence is that though both partners must work, the woman still performs all the domestic functions previously expected of her, and moreover that this presents even greater difficulty than in the West. The father does not usually take part in child care. It is also the woman who spends two or three hours shopping for food for the night’s supper (only to find sometimes, after getting to the head of the line, that the food is spoiled). Women are not social equals. What was called male chauvinism in the West in the 1970s was the common currency in the Soviet Union, though there was no name for it and it was almost completely unremarked on by either gender so far as public discussion went; it was simply part of the culture. If lucky enough to be invited into a private home, the Western visitor was often shocked by how the husband denigrated his wife’s domestic skills as a means of apologizing, needlessly of course, for the lack of what he imagined to be Western comfort. No wonder that 33 percent of marriages ended in divorce, which accounted for 70 percent of all activity in the courts; in more than 98 percent of divorce cases involving children, the mother was given custody. The parting couple paid a 300-ruble divorce tax (until recently 200 rubles—inflation again). Child-support payments were generous but of course that never really solves the problem. The nation might now be self-sufficient in blue jeans, much to the impoverishment of black marketeers and shrewd Western tourists. What it lacked so conspicuously were condoms which, when available at ail, were of unreliable quality. I was told that for Western visitors to give their host or hostess condoms would not be misunderstood but, on the contrary, would seem considerate. Abortion might be free on demand, but it was virtually the only form of birth control worthy of the name. Fully 20 percent of first pregnancies ended in abortion.
Alcoholism was another factor in marriage breakdown as it was in poor work productivity. One of Gorbachev’s first initiatives was the major campaign against alcohol abuse, even to the extent of banning the sale of hard liquor (but not its consumption) on trains and planes. Reaction against the “authoritarian” campaign was among the causes that enabled Yeltsin to get his political comeback underway. One sensed that economic loss, not health, was the primary concern, given that virtually no acknowledgement was made of the fact that 78 percent of adult males and 38 percent of adult females smoked cigarettes. The Soviet Union was, in fact, a nation of inveterate chain-smokers. “Sure, we have free housing, or virtually free,” I was told. One person I talked to paid just 17 rubles a month for an apartment in downtown Moscow, a tiny portion of his middle-class salary. “But the quality is poor. With health care, it was similar. It was free of charge, and available to everyone, but the quality I believe you would call lousy.” I heard stories, which I was not able to confirm, of a drug shortage so severe that patients in polyclinics had died from infection after routine operations such as appendectomies. People wanted change to come and soon, sooner than seemed possible, in fact. The good thing about the present, after all, is that there are no surprises.
Kropotkin Street, named to honour the great anarchist, was formerly known as Blessed Virgin Street. It contains a sinister building partly hidden by a high wall topped with barbed wire; this is one of the psychiatric institutions where dissidents were held against their will and, in a few cases, still were, if rumours were correct. A short distance along is a building that was long home to two elderly women who kept scores of cats. Five years earlier, however, the cats were removed and the house became Moscow’s first cooperative, which is to say free-enterprise, restaurant, known simply as No. 36 Kropotkin. It wouldn’t even accept dollars much less rubles but took only credit cards and was frequented by groups of foreigners or by single foreigners like me, eager to repay the genuine hospitality of some Soviet acquaintances. It was not the most expensive of the seven or eight such eating places in the city; I was advised in a hushed tone that at a Chinese restaurant called the Peking the shark’s fin soup cost 100 rubles. But it was representative, I believe, and symbolic.
Eating in any Soviet restaurant, you were conscious first of all that the printed menu, considered as literature and theatre, served quite a different function than in the West. In our tradition the menu is a basic list. You expect the waiter to ooze over to the table and say something like, “Good evening, my name is Mark, and I’ll be your server this evening. In addition to our menu selections, chef has prepared the following specials.…” Soviet menus by comparison were little encyclopedias, page after page of every conceivable chicken dish, fish dish, vegetable dish. The job of the server was to explain, in response to your enquiries, that the dishes you wanted were not available—until you began to suspect that they had never been available. “So what, then, do you suggest this evening?” you were finally forced to ask.
“Bifsteak.” Boiled beef.
“What would you recommend to go with that?”
“Cabbage.”
“Is there anything else available?”
“Cabbage.”
A cold fish course came first; the meat was the second course and was always boiled. Fresh fruit and vegetables were almost nonexistent. No. 36 was offering carrots that night, but they were cold. It was amusing to see the head waiter in evening clothes and the junior staff in stiff white tunics, trying to suggest the pre-Revolutionary style. They had the snooty looks down pat but kept serving and taking away from the wrong sides. The example might be a small one, but the point was bigger: one of the reasons why individual entrepreneurship was far more widespread and obviously more successful in China than in the Soviet Union, I heard it said, was that in China there was still an old generation that remembered how the salary system worked; 1917 was just that much longer ago than 1949 to make the same continuity impossible in the Soviet Union.
Outside in the street, however, the world before the Revolution is apparent enough, in the old apartment blocks, the former private houses, the hotels or public buildings that serve completely different functions now but are so clearly a part of their own time and place—and class. Even the arrangement of the streets and boulevards shows the wealth that once obtained there. It is like London in that respect, though in general the similarity to the United States seems more pressing and germane: another of those sprawling, powerful, ungovernable countries that can proceed only by lurching from extreme to extreme in a kind of slow-motion ricochet in which innocent people so often get hurt.
I managed to wangle a VIP pass to the May Day parade in Red Square, but was told to bring my passport and visa (the latter is a separate document, not something stamped in the former). Security promised to be tight because this was not an ordinary May Day, or Day of the International Solidarity of the Working People, to give it its full official name. For one thing, it was the 100th consecutive May Day parade to be held in Red Square. Some will be surprised to learn that this was a pre-Revolutionary holiday in new red clothes. It is in fact a pre-Christian celebration of the return of spring; even some of the Russian songs associated with it may date back the better part of a millennium. Some elements of the original ceremony survived into the era when aging patriarchs standing side by side atop the Lenin Mausoleum would give feeble geriatric waves to the endless line of troops and missile carriers passing below. That is the May Day we in the West know from years of television clips, though in fact the displays of unending might have always been more important as a feature of Victory Day on May 9.
In any case, this year was to be very different. No military parade at all and no rogues’ gallery of Red Army generals to take the salute—that would have been too Stalinist
