earlier.
In spring, summer, and fall, women kneeled at the banks of waterways, washing their family’s clothes in rivers and streams. In winter, they washed clothes through a hole in the ice of a frozen river. A photo I took from a distance captures the brilliant red of the washing woman’s hands. Little had changed in centuries. Like pinching one’s self in a dream, we had to look at the bus that delivered us, the local telegraph and (shared) telephone in the single post office, and the signs of electricity, to know that we were in the 20th century at all. Many goods were still hauled by horses or by men and women burdened under massive loads. Motorized vehicles were scarce.
Our first fall, we traveled to Vladimir and Suzdal, and in March, to Yaroslavl, Pereslavl, Borisogleb, and Rostov (the Great). Although all these now seem very small towns, they had been great principalities in the 11th through 14th centuries. Won in bloody battles, they served as centers of power of warring noblemen long before Moscow was the capital, and before centralized government united Russia. Vladimir had been the capital of Rus from the 12th century through most of the 14th century.
Layers of history settled on these authentic remains of great fortresses and fortifications, domed churches, monasteries, elaborate walls, painted frescoes, and icons. Before renovation and tourism, these crumbling remnants retained a robust grittiness that linked us directly to the past, without the filters of restoration, fresh paint, shorings, and landscaping. No tour buses yet, either. It wasn’t hard to imagine the overgrown courtyards and weedy fields filled with medieval noblemen in suits of armor clashing swords.
Twelve of us American graduate students—papers and arrangements laboriously obtained—set out by train for Yaroslavl. We waited a long time for taxis and a hotel room, but settled into a small town small hotel we had (it appeared) successfully booked. The next morning, we toured the historic fortress (kremlin), church, and a 19th century estate. To top off the day, we had a cheerful dinner at the old hotel, the proprietors having cooked a home made meal for the traveling foreigners.
The next day, we continued on to Rostov (“Rostov the Great”) and Borisogleb (Boris and Gleb), two quaint old towns dominated in their dreariness by huge old kremlin domes. Climbing the dungeon- like steep, narrow, dark, and dank stairways on to the parapets, we ran the length of the crumbling fortress, picturing knights peering through the slits in the walls, slits through which they poured hot oil on to any enemy attempting to scale the structure. About one thousand years ago, Boris and Gleb, brothers for whom the town was named, had accepted death, although they were innocent, in order to redeem their people. They became Russia’s first national saints. A haunting photograph in my collection freezes a moment of bleak splendor, the crumbling but majestic monastery surrounded by snow, highlighted by a line of black picket fencing, capturing a Borisogleb almost frozen in time.
None of the towns we visited in 1965 or 1966 had seen many foreigners: we were an oddity, and provided entertainment. Children followed us. Adults stared at us as if we were nude. We felt very conspicuous and different, although we were not discernibly different-looking from Russians. (There were no black students among us.) That evening, when we dined at a small restaurant in town, after a few drinks, we joined the local Russians in singing and dancing in a typically Russian evening, warm and hospitable.
By the third day, when we moved on to Pereslavl, accommodations, food, cold, exhaustion had reduced our number to five. We went on to tour a small church, monasteries, and museums, and saw men restoring an 18th century Rococo church by making their own boards out of logs, precut boards being not yet obtainable in Russia. As visitors, we were shown special sites not normally opened; and one man played us a recording of the chiming of the old Bells of Rostov as a gracious gesture to his foreign guests.
A most touching moment came during lunch in a small cafeteria on the main—and only—street in Pereslavl. We stopped at a typical cafeteria (stolovaya): a rather basic, unkempt establishment that would make a roadside diner at home look luxurious. There was hushed silence while people watched the five of us seating ourselves. Then a waitress walked over to our table, and looked as if she suddenly realized what the place must look like to us. So she quickly reached over, lifted the sticky little mustard pot off the table, and returned in a few minutes with a newly filled, wiped off little pot of mustard in honor of the visitors. We found this a moving gesture.
One memory I could not immortalize in a photograph was the public rest room at the bus station in Rostov. This was not the first hole-in-the-ground rest room without plumbing, running water, or paper I had experienced in Russia: almost all rest rooms lacked actual toilet fixtures, or running water, or paper (not for decades to be seen, and even then not in public facilities). Even the elegant Lenin Library, home for high-level academic and professional figures, had an indescribably primitive bathroom.
But this was about the worst. A sagging wooden outhouse whose smell extended well beyond its walls, the inside was covered so deeply in human waste we were grateful for boots to navigate the floors. Meanwhile, a large, drunk man attempted to break his way into the “ladies” side, while Eva, the other American woman, and I took turns barring the door with all our might. Had it not been freezing cold, and had we not been “downtown” in this small town, we would have selected an outdoor space behind a bush. But that wasn’t an option.
On most of our rural travel (even four decades later), the best plan was to stop the bus or car near a woods, designate one side of the road for women, the other for men; head for the bushes, and finish before the flies and mosquitoes found you. (Why, I wondered, do we capture in photographs and writing sights both beautiful and bizarre, but rarely those disgusting, or simply a little embarrassing…)
Back to the courtyard of the small shack labeled “depot,” we watched buses come and go, packed to overflow with peasants carrying sacks of food, potatoes, onions, carrots; parts or whole slaughtered animals (a pig? a lamb?), random supplies and accessory parts from hubs, like Rostov, to their still smaller villages.
While we awaited our bus, hearing the usual background shouting and arguing, but before we realized what this particular chaos was about, we watched while a few Russians were forcibly ejected from a bus by the authorities. Suddenly, we realized, this expulsion was to clear seats on the bus for us, the “foreigners.” Although upset and protesting, we did not prevail, and were set in place for our trip home. Those sitting securely on the bus seemed to accept the unstated rule that foreigners had priority seating, and didn’t appear to hold it against us. But we felt very uncomfortable.
Another day, on a train trip into the countryside, seated on a “hard coach,” the low-fare wooden bench seats, we found next to us a Russian middle-aged farm hand from Ukraine, headed home. He was returning from accompanying a train car full of apples from his collective farm to the Urals to ensure their safe arrival at the other end. He had to travel about 3,500 miles round trip in his effort—a trip equivalent to going from Boston to Denver and back again. His was not an exceptional journey, but gave the term “inefficiency” real meaning.
Looking out the window, passing ordinary scenes from daily life, he asked us, “Do you have ducks in America?”
“Yes,” we replied, “we do.”
A little later, “Do you have cows in America?”
“Yes,” we responded, not adding that their bones did not stick out in this pitiful way. He advanced to apples, trucks, trees, and other random items. Finally, he leaned over and whispered something into Jim’s ear, to which Jim replied, “Yes.” That, I later learned, was whether we have prostitutes in America. By the time we left he seemed happily confirmed in his view that things were not so different in America from Russia after all; though, he was sure, each of these must have been much better in America. But his image of America, like that of so many Russians, was a collage of bits and pieces, a patchwork not yet assembled.
