Even after fifteen years I sometimes slip into saying “the Soviet Union” or “USSR.” When I first went there, only a couple of years before the great scary bugaboo of my generation virtually collapsed under the weight of its dogma and internal corruption, it still had that aura of 1984 like totalitarianism. The 3000 room Rossia Hotel was still rumored to be bugged; KGB were supposed to be stalking tourists; and the austerity of a country that lived, at least at the proletarian levels,in perpetual “guns over borscht” asceticism. Even though remnants of these conditions are still resent in Russia, the following essay, aired in 1988, seems an anachronism of a time further distant than it really is.
Paint chips off funnel of idled river cruiser.
©1988, James A. Clapp
The customs agent at the border, her seemingly surgically- implanted scowl of suspicion unbroken, motioned for me to open my suitcase for inspection. I had indicated on my declaration form that I was taking out something that I had defined as “art.” What I had was a modest, contemporary intarsia plaque, barely a work of art, not an authentic Russian religious icon for which the border guards would be on the lookout. Satisfied that I was not taking out of these valuable “images” she made a closing motion with her hands and I was on my way into Finland.
Internally I smiled; there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about the icons in my head, the images I had in my mind’s suitcase of my visit to the USSR. Unwittingly, she had supplied me with a couple more paradoxical icons: the officially atheist nation concerned about the pilfering of its religious art; then, in perfect English, which for apparent purposes of intimidation she had elected not use on me, she asked the next tourist whether he was taking out any rubles, the currency that trades for five times the official rate on their black market for dollars, those officially-despised emblems of capitalism.
What would she have thought of the “icon” I had acquired the previous day, where in Sunday-thronged streets I encountered hundreds of Leningraders eating chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream on a stick, some carrying a half-dozen of them in their paper wrappers. Tracing back to their source by a process of observing how many bites had been taken out by successive passersby I came finally to a queue people stretching for over one hundred yards, patiently awaiting their chance for one of these conventional confections. Three vendors were offering the same choice (or non-choice), much as the several vendors outside the Hermitage just down the street all offered only Pepsi-Cola. I decided that vanilla wasn’t worth what looked like at least an hour’s wait.
In fairness I must say that there was a Baskin and Robbins in our hotel, but I never got a chance to discover whether there would indeed be 31 flavors; it was closed every time I went there.
The anecdote stands for two broader “icons” of the USSR. One is the dearth of variety in consumer goods, documented by the fact that the Soviets, young ones in particular, want to buy or trade for just about anything a Westerner is wearing, and that the famed, enormous GUM department store is of little commercial attraction to Westerners not interested in products and styles from the 1950s. A second revelation is the lack of incentive to work; shops and offices regularly shut their doors in the faces of long lines of customers, a behavior that leaves profit-mongering Westerners both frustrated and murmuring praises for capitalism. Coupled with shoddy workmanship that characterizes everything from toasters to automobiles to apartment houses, the lack of variety and incentive are glaring evidence of a long overdue “perestroika.”
But there are other icons, of a non-paradoxical sort. The ubiquitous monuments to what is referred to as the “1941-45 War,” reminding us of the omissions in our history books that the Soviets were in the “big one” as long as we were, but suffered losses in any one city that dwarf all of our own. In parks, squares, even along rural roads, they abound, topped here with a tank, there with a cannon, often draped with fresh flowers that indicate the closeness and indelibility of that war in their minds. Where those monuments aren’t, Lenin is, jaw jutting, Asiatic eyes peering into the Bolshevik future, leaning into the winds of rigorously managed change. Always erect, he is supine only in his glistening mausoleum (if it’s really him?) in Red Square. So much for official atheism.
But my preferred icons are of the people, and here at last we have some variety. They throng Red Square for the changing of the guard, to place a rose near the flame of the unknown soldier nearby, or have their obligatory photo in front of St. Basil’s: Asian eyes from the eastern soviets, Mongol and Tarter, dark eyes from the south, colorful folk costumes from villages in the Ukraine, Western-looking Estonians, or be-medalled old vets in shabby suits, every little girl with Olga Korbut bows in her hair, all gawking, more tourists than us, at the temples of this Mecca of Communism.
Yet my favorite icons of all are of that young father who brought his son to the side of our bus by a rural road to join the other kids receiving bubble gum and gifts from us. I won’t forget his odd peace gesture, softly clenched fist on a bent arm overhead, his teary eyes, his shaking vigorously every hand he could reach. He didn’t speak a word, but the old woman museum guard at the Summer Palace, with Russian history in every line of her face, did. As I walked by her, seated in her chair she spotted the little pin I had of the American flag and the CCCP flag, fused together, almost as the same moment I noticed a tiny worn paper American flag barely stuck to her shabby grey sweater. I could see her admiration for my shiny new pin, and in the spirit of glasnost, I removed it and handed it to her. “Mir,” she said softly, “peace,” with eyes that confirmed unmistakably that she sincerely meant it. It sure made up for the lack of ice cream.
___________________________________
©1988, ©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.22.2004)
Public Radio Essay No. 30, aired KPBS-FM, Public Radio, August 26, 1988