It seemed that formulaic behavior in daily life mirrored religious practice, also highly structured, formal, and ritualized. Was it a comfort to people to observe established patterns forged by tradition, knowable and known? Long before individualism was excluded from the Socialist and Soviet agendas, it was also absent from traditional Russian life. The pressures to conform combined with prescribed rules for carrying out daily activities made foreigners, or citizens who deviated or dissented, more conspicuous and isolated than they might have been in a land in which diverse ways of doing things are as common as set ways, uniqueness as familiar as uniformity. At the time, I knew we stuck out, looking odd and alien. Since then I’ve wondered whether this narrow gauge thinking has made ethnic and cultural variety still discomfiting to Russians today.
Daily life offered stock ways and words to navigate buses, make change, buy food, stand in line. On buses, trams, and trolleys, drivers were boxed off in their own space, devoted only to driving. Paying was on the honor system. But the phrases for passing coins along through the jammed bus to reach the pay boxes and collect the ticket receipts; the elaborate ways in which people made change, often among multiple people; and the language for entering, exiting, and passing fellow passengers, were fixed expressions in what amounted to highly ritualized language and behavior. Not random and chaotic like New York, nor quiet and nontactile like Washington. I wrote my parents that:
In each vehicle, two little boxes contain tickets that each passenger is to take after he or she drops the correct change into the box: five, four, or three kopecks for a bus, tram, or trolley. Not having correct change, a passenger initiates a prescribed conversation on—let’s say—the 25-kopeck piece he has. Coins start passing from hand to hand throughout the crowded vehicle in exchange for other coins, until finally a correct total per person per trip is achieved—say for five people at five kopecks each. The 25-kopek piece is passed to a person near the box, who is requested to deposit it and draw five tickets which, then in turn, are passed back to their respective five purchasers, all of this in stylized phrases.
Travel was never quiet, while people settled confusion, disputes, or problems among themselves. The penalty for not paying was a 50-kopeck fine, and finding one’s name posted in the newspaper and on bus notices. The honor system was backed by random spot- checkers. I was eager not to be found wanting.
Below the surface of our daily activities, undercurrents of surveillance, suspicion, and manipulation percolated up. The authorities in the Soviet Union were fairly successful in their efforts to preserve the intellectual isolation of Soviet citizens, and they wanted to keep it that way. Sealed off from radio, television, and print communication from the outside world, people in the Soviet Union remained ignorant of alternatives, of a life outside. Most had no experience beyond their hermetically sealed environment. What bits of information filtered into the country confused people’s thinking about the world even further, since Soviet media and an active rumor circuit reported a random assortment of items without relation to one another or to any whole picture. A murder here, a day of war there, a law passed somewhere else, a flood or tornado. No context or coherence, just unrelated snippets.
Telephones were not yet universal in homes: coin-operated public phones were widely used. For inter-city calls, people had to go to special sites, from which such calls could be placed. We could not make international phone calls from university telephones, or from public phone boxes. To arrange a call to the U.S. (which we did only once because of the high cost), we trooped downtown to the Central Post Office and Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street, a half-day’s excursion on multiple Metro trains, to schedule and then await the overseas call. Russians and foreigners alike stood in line, put in the order for their call, then sat and waited. If and when the call went through, the caller was assigned a phone booth in which she or he could hope to hear the overseas party above the scratchy interference of the lines. We were told that there was only one international telephone channel in Moscow.
(Of course this was before international or long distance calls could be direct dialed even in the U.S., but calls could be placed from home telephones via an international or long-distance operator, a live human voice. It would have been hard to picture everyone in New York heading for the Central Post Office to call overseas.)
The same site downtown served to send packages overseas. We had to arrive with loose objects, not previously packed boxes. Only after postal personnel examined each object, could we pack each, on site, for shipping. Homebound Russian books and little wooden painted souvenirs began their journey there. Single-site monitoring simplified the government’s oversight of citizens’ overseas connections.
Once the international exchange programs began shipping idea-bearing foreign students to the Soviet Union, and the authorities realized they could not erect physical barriers to these outspoken guests, they used psychological pressure to prevent deep mixing. It worked fairly well. And it became the darker underside of our existence.
How did they do it? By constructing and manipulating an undercurrent of fear, they could control both citizens and foreigners. Deception could provide a useful weapon in psychological warfare. At the university itself, Soviet authority was represented by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel). The Director was a formal, remote man, housed in the back office, delegating day-to-day responsibility to Natalya, an attractive young blonde. Her soft, pleasant features masked a steel center. She melted at mention of her young daughter whose picture adorned her desk, while calculating destructive manipulation of foreign students. She proffered friendship to lonely American students, acting on orders from the KGB-connected bureaucracy to which she was 100 percent loyal, and that paid her in privileges and perks. She helped me understand how powerful dictators like Stalin and his successors could staff and institutionalize their ambitious and destructive goals from day to day, manage and administer their wills, one document and one person at a time.
Her strategic plan was to befriend students, cozying up, becoming familiar, confiding, insinuating her way, conveying “I’m on your side; trust me; I’m your ally against other forces.” Since we all saw a lot of her—she served as intermediary for us in the university and sometimes traveled with us on student trips— several students fell for her apparent friendship.
From that base, the Office for Foreign Students directed a damaging effort to drive out one particular American student, “John.” His research interest was 20th-century Soviet politics, a topic they deemed sensitive and preferred to protect from scrutiny. Targeted for ouster, John became the object of a campaign to isolate and discredit him, and to destroy his will to stay.
The first stage was a quiet campaign of whispered confidential hints dropped to other American students. “How is John doing? Is he well?” Natalya would ask with some doubt in her voice, looking sympathetically into the eyes of one of John’s American friends. As the campaign escalated, the questions evolved into a more direct, urgent seeding of doubt.
“What problems is he having?” “He doesn’t seem right, does he?” She would press his closest American friend, who himself was becoming doubtful of John’s strength. Because we all suffered health problems—exhaustion, intestinal parasites, coughs, bronchitis, staph, and strep—none of us probably seemed “right.” But John soon collapsed in a deep faint in downtown Moscow. He had pneumonia, we learned. He was sent back to the States. And I learned more about the dark side of power than I had wanted to know.
The day he succumbed, he and “Tim,” another American student, were heading from the archives for lunch at the Hotel National. The old hotels—the National, Metropole, Ukraina, and Praga—were not yet refurbished in the retro-splendor they enjoy today, but they provided the finest dining available. At one of their cafés, one could get little dumplings or pastries, soups, and more substantial dishes for lunch; and in their restaurants, a full course meal at mid-day or evening. For a city the size of Moscow, a city of some seven to eight million people at the time, there were very few proper restaurants (as opposed to snack bars or buffets)—one or two dozen. Of these, most were housed in hotels. They
