was allowed. In one corner of the room sat an industrial- strength, gray-green iron centrifuge to be used only by the official housekeeper of the room (dezhurnaya), she as iron-willed as the machines. In another corner on a table sat a non-electric flatiron, a heavy piece of solid iron that had to be heated on the stove, then used to press clothes - a tool for the intrepid only. I found the dank basement room at the end of long, dark tunnels like a scene from a bad dream, and knew I’d go there as rarely as possible.
I watched students arriving to wash their clothes. They carried one outfit and stripped down to their underwear to wash their other outfit, the one they were wearing. Without self-consciousness. They dropped the clothes into the huge pot of water on the stove and boiled them with flakes of soap they shaved off a bar with a small knife. Then they rinsed the clothes by hand, wrung them out, whirled them in the centrifuge (or, rather, surrendered them to the keeper of the machine), and then took the clothes back to their rooms to string up to dry (giving real meaning to “I have nothing to wear”). In the powerfully heated rooms of winter, drying didn’t take long. But I wasn’t surprised years later when washers and detergents quickly supplanted socialist theory as items of interest and discussion.
I used the quaint little washer (skipping the pot-boiling part), wrung the clothes, and carried them upstairs to rinse and dry. I rinsed them in the yellow plastic dishpan we had brought with us, one of the most valuable items we imported.
But by flouting the set system, resisting stages in the formal laundering process, I left the housekeeper angry and frustrated. At the time, I thought her an old witch. She resembled the toothless harridans in fairytales. Her angry epithets of my ignorance and incompetence pursued me, echoing down the basement hallways.
“Girl, girl…” and a string of accusations. I pretended not to understand her screaming demands. She probably knew I was pretending.
But one day walking down the hall, back to our rooms, with my dripping load, I pictured her going home at night and telling her grandchildren the grievances of her day: what unseemly habits and disobedient attitudes these foreigners have! And only years later, did I come to feel compassion for this tired old woman with a 41-hour a week job in a dark, damp basement, disrespected by the students.
I didn’t want to be there any more than she wanted me there. I had followed my husband Jim to Russia. We were not idealists nor ideologues, just graduate students. Jim had majored in Russian history and literature at Harvard College, then in Russian studies at Indiana University’s graduate school and Russian and East European Institute. He had succeeded in his application to become an exchange student to the Soviet Union under the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants awards, later to become IREX, International Research and Exchanges Board. At the time this was virtually the only way for an American to study in the USSR.
I was a Ph.D. candidate in history and had agreed to go along for the company and experience. We agreed we would spend the following year in London where I could complete research and writing of my Ph.D. dissertation on the ferment of ideas surrounding blasphemy, heresy, and political subversion in revolutionary 17th-century England. Was it religious heresy or political subversion that Cromwell sought to obliterate? Was there a difference?
Cultural history—ideas that underlay “Western” thinking— intrigued me. Because I had to give up a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to go to Moscow, we agreed to save from our fellowships and assistantships to accumulate the $3,000 we would need to get through the following year in London. And so I became in Moscow an unintentional observer of an incomprehensible land.
When I re-imagine the times, I picture the United States we left behind, led by President Lyndon Johnson building up troops and war efforts in Viet Nam, with U.S. involvement growing in all aspects of the war. “American Planes Reported Dropping Napalm Bombs in Vietnam” was a headline of the times. Johnson, having filled President John Kennedy’s term after his assassination in 1963, was one year into his own term as elected president. Headlines of the period read “Johnson Installed; Stresses Great Society” and “LBJ Signs Civil Rights Act.”
Meanwhile, popular culture was taking a new turn with the advent of the Beatles. “Beatles Invade America,” one headline read. And miniskirts appearing on the scene for the first time elicited headlines, debates, and cartoons.
In the Soviet Union in which we landed, Leonid Brezhnev ruled as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (and later as its General Secretary). He had ousted Nikita Khrushchev from that position about a year before we arrived, “surprising most observers,” the newspapers said. From what we could see as soon as we arrived, virtually all visual and visible signs of Khrushchev’s period, his legacy and rule, had been totally obliterated. Mentions of Khrushchev, his actual name, his speeches, pictures, and memory were completely eradicated. It was as if he never existed. He had truly become a non-person. Very eerie. Brezhnev’s rule meant not only the disappearance of Khrushchev and his reforms, but also a return to Communist orthodoxy and a hardening of the Cold War atmosphere. “Soviet Union Is Now Using Spy Satellites” was another headline of the time.
Winter was long and dim. On a cold, dark day in January, I marked my twenty-fourth birthday sadly, far from close friends or family beyond Jim; no cake, candles, cards, or gifts. I felt very foreign and very old for twenty-four. By February, gray prevailed. People, I noted in my diary, were “plodding and pushing a path through gray slush on gray days dressed in gray.” I was bored by the sameness of things—of products and shops and prices—all numbered and uniform throughout the land; the “nothing-to-do-ness of it all.”
In February, I wrote my parents how cut off we were from any news from outside Russia: there was no radio, TV, magazine, or newspaper that was not controlled by the Communist party. The land was sealed shut.
This was also not an easy time to be an American in the Soviet Union. But we were there for the reasons graduate students travel: research in unique collections in archives and libraries, shards of history that could not be found elsewhere. And so it was that Jim spent his days at the archives—the Central State Archives of Ancient Documents, the Archives of the Historical Museum, the Manuscript Division of the Lenin and University Libraries. He read 17th- and 18th-century records and manuscripts and early printed books for research on Peter the Great. The archives were cold. The smells from the bathrooms in the basement carried up the stairs; a single tap of cold water was available to those who had the courage in the underheated buildings to take off their gloves.
The libraries I used—the Moscow University Libraries, the Gorky, and the Lenin (now, Russian Library) - were, unlike the archives, warm, comfortable, and well-kept. I loved the cozy rooms, wooden floors and bookshelves, large chairs, oriental rugs, and large potted tropical plants, windows steamed with people’s breath. Hourly the tiny transom window (fortochka) at the top of the enormous casement windows would be opened for five minutes to air the rooms of people smells that accumulated (without deodorant, mouthwash, and detergents). Surprisingly welcome, the way- below-zero-degree air would rush in, freshening and cleansing the room, waking any snoozing readers.
Access to books, I learned, was a political decision, based on need to know. That is, some bureaucrat would determine what categories of books I could read. He or she would issue a card that would set (and limit) what collections would be open or closed to me. Incremental degrees of access were awarded people according to their status: party member, Academician/scholar, graduate student, undergraduate, the general public. Certain trusted Russians earned the right to read foreign literature; most did not. So I presented myself with trepidation for my treasured card. Happily, as a foreigner, I was issued a card sufficient to read “foreign” literature. But if I hadn’t felt sufficiently “foreign” before, now I knew that reading in English sealed my status. In the “Foreign Literature Reading Room,” I found myself in the company of a handful of mature Russian professors and a few other foreigners reading works
