The last days of the Soviet Union

It was 1990 and the Soviet Union was crumbling. I had the privilege of seeing it during its last days, when old conventions were falling by the wayside but the new market orthodoxy had not yet caught Russia in its iron grip.
When I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, I smiled at the passport official, a young lad who appeared to be about 17 years old, and he smiled back, involuntary, as he was obviously quite unused to people smiling at him. This exchange of joy was premature, as my luggage failed to arrive from Milan. Outside, the temperature was minus one degree and my coat was in my suitcase. Friends rallied around and managed to lend me a jacket that someone had acquired on a visit to Jugoslavia. It kept off the snow but did not keep out the cold.
The University Hotel was a classic piece of Soviet architecture. The rooms were Spartan and old fashioned, the lift creaked alarmingly, and the red plush in the lobby appeared to be suffering from mange. The dining room was spectacular. On acres of dark brown carpet stood 120 dark brown tables and 480 brown chairs. The ceiling was dark brown and there was a huge, furry brown wall hanging. When food arrived, it too was dark brown; presumably soup and stewed meat, it was difficult to tell. It was served with cavalier disdain by a group of young girls who evidently suffered from a chronic superiority complex. Upstairs, such was the soundproofing that when I sang Neapolitan songs in the shower I was applauded by other guests along the whole corridor
We retrieved my luggage a day later from the airport. As there was a shortage of cars (in fact, there was a shortage of everything), I had to borrow a 47-seater bus--and of course its driver--to get to the airport and back. We celebrated by eating in one of those exclusive restaurants near the Bolshoi Ballet where they served sturgeon and wild mushrooms--but to foreigners only.
There is a sort of brotherhood among academics and it soon had me invited to the house of two of the senior fraternity, Professor Sergei Myagkov and his wife. They lived in a tiny apartment at the end of one of the metro lines, an opportunity to find out that, although the central metro stations were very grandiose, the periphery was much like any other urban jungle, a wilderness of concrete and graffiti. The Myagkovs did not have enough space for two desks, and so Sergei gallantly let his wife have the study and did his work in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with a board strapped around his neck to serve as a desk. He was fortunately a man blessed with a keen sense of relativism and an equally strong sense of humour. He had great need of both. We sat down in their tiny dining room and they served us delicious food, but they had collected most of the vegetables and fruit in the woods around Moscow, for there was little to buy in the shops. It was an emotional celebration, as they gave us what they could and we appreciated it all the more for the depth of their generosity when they had so little to give.
One evening we set off for Kazan', the capital of the Tatar Russian Soviet Republic. The station was pleasingly oriental in design and the Tatarstan Express stood at the main platform with the steam heating hissing gently in its ornate, royal blue coaches. We bedded down in a 'soft' class sleeping compartment and the resident Babushka brought us tea in Delftware china cups from the samovar at the end of the corridor.
In the Soviet Union people married very early, often when they were barely out of childhood. This was apparent on a Saturday morning in Moscow when the weddings were being celebrated and the couples lined up on the heights above the city for photographs. They were all teenagers and probably had little idea what they were getting into. Our guide, Alsu Fedorovnaya, was one of those who had married absurdly young. She was a raven-haired beauty, at 24 more ravishing than she must have been at 16. But clearly there were pacts of conjugal non-interference, for on the train she disappeared for the night into the same sleeping compartment as Kostia Petrovski, a muscular Tatar, himself married to a girl in Moscow and the father of a small brood of children.
The railway line to Kazan' is anything but well-engineered. In fact the journey, only a few hundred kilometres, takes between ten and 13 hours and the train never exceeds 80 km/hr. There is constant jolting and grinding as it sways and rumbles over the poor quality track. Night came before we had reached the outer suburbs of Moscow and we slept fitfully, as the swaying, irregular rhythm of the train was anything but lulling. In the morning we pulled up the blind to see the pine trees of the Ural Mountains outside covered in crisp, white snow, which twinkled in the moonlight. We crossed the River Volga at dawn and it was an unforgettable sight: Mother Russia, freezing and brilliant in the pearly light; sentries with bayonets fixed to their rifles stamping up and down the bridge to warm their feet, their breath forming clouds in the still, cold air.
Kazan' gave a kaleidoscope of impressions: ancient wooden housing subsiding into the muddy land on the banks of the Volga, the Grecian splendour of the Opera House, the green onion domes of the churches, many of them abandoned. The Orthodox crosses on the cathedral glinted in the pale golden light of autumn. The lanes and fields next to the river looked exactly like something out of a 19th century Impressionist painting; indeed, the resemblance was uncanny. I visited an Orthodox wedding (somewhat insensitively, as my presence irritated the congregation, but I was too curious to leave). The sonorous and impassioned singing and clouds of incense wafting among the icons were unforgettable.
One morning I sat in Lenin's seat at the University of Kazan', a place with a remarkable 18th century atmosphere and ferociously tropical central heating. In the afternoon I was taken for a walk in the Taiga. There amid the majestic pines was an ancient monastery, used as a reform school for juvenile delinquents, whose shaved heads appeared over the parapet and stared angrily at me as I passed. Looking back, the towers and onion domes of this complex were outlined against the pale sky in the failing light of dusk, surrounded by a frame of pine trees. As darkness fell the taiga appeared to be suffused with infinite mystery and age-old dignity.
We ate dinner one night at Kostia Petrovski's parents house in the new quarters of Kazan', a cubist wilderness of Soviet new-age buildings. Like most other Soviet families they lived in large numbers in minimal space. In deference to we foreign guests they all retreated behind a screen in the corner of the room and refused to come out when we begged them to come and enjoy the food with us. In fact, we had paid for the food: it had to be purchased on the black market and only we had the funds to do that. The Georgian-style profiteroles in confectioner's custard were particularly excellent.
In the auditorium of the Lenin Museum, then still just about dedicated to Vladimir Illich Ulianov, I stood up and gave my speech to 360 delegates from the assorted parliaments of the Soviet Union. Having studied the language I managed to recite some of it in Russian, which they seemed to like. I was, however, somewhat hampered by the loss of my lecture notes, which I had used as toilet paper earlier in the day, as that particular commodity was practically non existent in Soviet conveniences. I was also disconcerted by the sudden departure of my translator in the middle of my speech. Tatars generally do not deserve their reputation for harshness and ruthlessness. She was a beautiful, black-haired girl with a soulful expression and large, dark eyes that positively oozed tenderness. But she was useless as a translator and on being stood down from the podium she disappeared for ever out of my life, before I could finish my speech and say a tender goodbye to her.
One morning we visited the Kazan' department store, but in its cavernous halls there was very little to buy. I came out with a Russian Soviet flag and a Tatar fez, and that was all. On walking around Kazan' at lunchtime we soon found that it was useless to look for a place to eat. Restaurants were open, but they did not have any food in them. As the satirical magazine Krokodyl wrote, the very best that was on offer was Soviet multiple choice: meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat.
Yet the Tatarstan hotel had a restaurant that we were invited to in the evening. Dinner started early and their was a band and dancing. The band played in a variety of styles, New York rap, Latin American rhythms, bossa nova, and so on, but with the words to the songs rigorously in Tatar, a Turkic language that sounded vaguely familiar from my time spent doing fieldwork in central Anatolia.
On the other side of the room lurked a bevy of Soviet academic women. They were massive battleships and gave the impression of being as strong as oxen. In short, they were the intellectual equivalent of the typical Soviet road-mending crew, which invariably consisted of beefy, muscular women. As soon as the music started they launched out, grabbed the nearest man, and steered him around the room with his hands firmly grasped in their huge fists. One in particular, a tall, powerfully built lady in a powder-blue dress, so scared me that I hid under the table.
The dinner consisted of an endless alternation of bottles of Georgian champagne and Stolichnaya vodka. About half way through the evening a bun was served together with a plate of watery broth, but that was all. At a certain point I went back to my room in the hotel to relieve myself and when I came back to the restaurant I witnessed a curious scene. In Kazan', a city of a million inhabitants, good quality alcohol was only to be had at the Tatarstan Restaurant. The only people who were allowed entrance to that establishment were foreigners, military officers, members of the Communist Party and people who were wealthy enough to bribe someone substantially. The entrance door was manned by an old war veteran, his chest covered with medals, who put a metal clamp on the handles to stop the hoi polloi from coming in.
But it was the end of the Soviet era. As I stood outside an Ordinary Citizen came up. He was dressed in standard issue Ordinary Citizen clothes: the regulation black leather jacket and baggy jeans with turn-ups (did they, I wonder, have a central stores where they issued Ordinary Citizens with these garments?). Angrily he rattled at the door, which was clamped shut. Suddenly the door flew open and there was the manageress, elegant in a navy-blue tailleur and awe-inspiring in her rage. Her foot was about level with the Ordinary Citizen's stomach and without hesitating she drew it back and delivered him a massive kick. He clutched his torso, retched and staggered back down the steps, whereupon two ex-KGB operatives delivered a well-aimed professional right-hook that laid him out until an ambulance could cart him away to hospital. I felt very sorry for him, but I must admit that since then I have dined out many times on the story of how the manageress of the restaurant kicked the customer in the stomach.
There were many things in the Tatar Republic that had not changed for at least a century. Perhaps one of these was the exploitation of ordinary people and a contempt for their welfare. The signs were everywhere. They were particularly apparent when we visited a mosque (the Tatars are predominantly Muslim). We were introduced to a young nuclear physicist who had been at Chernobyl on the fateful day of the meltdown four years previously. He was obviously dying of radiation sickness. It was a salutary and chastening experience to talk to him. Despite his obvious poor health he had received no official help whatsoever, not even with evacuation from the Ukraine. Only his brethren at the mosque had helped him, and there was little that they could do.
So we returned to Moscow and eventually I arrived back in Italy. I carried with me many memories. The mists coming off the Moscow River and swirling through the graveyards on its banks, fingers of vapour wrapping themselves around the Orthodox crosses and caressing the walls of the monasteries with their stacked towers and polished onion domes. Tatar music blaring out of the radios of dilapidated Lada taxis in Kazan'. The snow on the cart-tracks and sliding off the fir trees in the Urals, the reformatory-monastery dark against the indigo sky in the taiga. The sense of tragedy and exploitation in the people we spoke to. The dumpling-shaped Babushkas, with their hair tied up in spotted scarves, who ruled with rods of iron the landings and corridors of public buildings and hotels.
On one occasion in the Moscow University hotel we were sitting at a table, alone in the deserted restaurant when two friends of Kostia Petrovski came in. As there were 477 empty chairs, Kostia fetched two of them over so that the couple could sit at our table. But this broke the unwritten rule: only the waitresses were allowed to move the furniture and they marched out and snatched the chairs back. Kostia was furious at this absurdity and grabbed them again. There followed a protracted tug of war. Kostia pulled for all his might, his face black with rage. But although he was muscular enough to win prizes at weight-lifting, he lost the contest against these Soviet waitresses and was humiliated. So perhaps it is clear who really ran the mighty Soviet Union, in its day the world's second superpower. Even if we ignore the battle of the sexes, the different between capitalism and Soviet socialism was manifestly clear: under capitalism, man exploited man, while under Soviet socialism, it was the other way around.