I have spent barely two weeks of
my life in a totalitarian country.
It was a sobering experience.
The year was 1971, when I was invited to present a paper at a conference in
Soviet Armenia. I was excited to
be visiting the USSR for the first time.
Initially, the warmhearted welcome I was given overshadowed
the oppressiveness I knew was the hallmark of the Soviet regime, which soon
became more visible. Remember,
this was not yet two decades after the death of Stalin, one of the most brutal
dictators in all of history, and the apparat he had established was still in control, if a bit attenuated. The Cold War was at its height.
On arriving in Moscow, I was greeted at the airport by a
representative of the USSR Academy of Sciences and brought to the Academy's
hotel in Moscow, there to stay as the Academy's guest. I was immediately given 1500 rubles in
cash as a royalty for the translation of my book Notes on Digital
Communication, which had not long before
been published in Russian. (The
USSR didn't belong to the International Copyright Union, so was under no
obligation to make such a payment.)
I was also offered a car with driver and guide to take me where I wanted
in Moscow during the several days I would be there before going to
Armenia. So, in the first few
hours, my reception had already been overwhelming.
I knew, of course, that my treatment thus far was an
expression of official government courtesy, for which I was grateful. Yet it was amplified many fold throughout
my visit by the personal hospitality and graciousness of Soviet
colleagues. One of them, whom I
barely knew, was so dismayed when I mentioned in passing that I had been unable
to find amber jewelry for my wife (an attempt to spend my rubles, which I
wouldn't be allowed to take from the country) that he gave me his amber
cufflinks, a heartfelt gesture that he wouldn't allow me to decline. The translator of my book (whom I'd
also just met for the first time), finding that I wanted to visit his home city
of Leningrad, helped me overcome bureaucratic objections to changing my visa's
fixed itinerary; I was thus able to spend a day wandering through that lovely
city with him and being shown the marvelous art collection of the
Hermitage. These are only two
examples of collegial warmth, among many.
And, to the extent that I was able to randomly meet the "man on the
street," I also found nothing except expansive helpfulness and cordiality,
much exceeding the treatment strangers usually get in the capitals of foreign
countries.
What have these memories to do with totalitarianism? Nothing per se.
Rather, I feel that they represent the warmth, generosity and nobility
of spirit of the Russian people, even under the yoke of tyranny. I know such a broad conclusion would seem unwarranted were it drawn only from my short and officially delimited
visit, but it is re-enforced by my reading of great Russian literature,
particularly Vasily Grossman's human saga of the Stalin years, Life
and Fate, about which I wrote in a previous posting,
and it has repeatedly been confirmed to me by acquaintances who have lived in
Russia for extended periods during both Soviet and post-Soviet times.
Such was the heartening upside of my trip. The downside—manifestations of the
still-existing totalitarianism—did not really become evident until I arrived in
Armenia for the conference. There,
among the hundreds of attendees, my American colleagues and I discerned Soviet
delegates whom none of us recognized as scientists or engineers in our
field. That was not unfamiliar to
us, because whenever a Soviet delegation appeared at a conference in a Western
country, there were always among them those we couldn't identify. We used to call them
"commissars," our name for agents (from the KGB, we supposed) who
were there to monitor the Soviet delegation, preventing defections, as well as to collect information about the other conferees.
A Russian colleague at the conference invited me to take a
stroll in the woods one evening.
It was a beautiful walk, and we conversed casually until my colleague
stopped dead in his tracks. He had
noticed a dog trailing us, and went over to pet it. I soon realized that he was not acting as a dog lover—he was
actually frisking the dog for a microphone! Reassured that there was none, he proceeded to give me
messages for mutual colleagues in America. These had nothing shocking or sensitive in them, merely
pleasant greetings and technical comments on work of mutual interest.
The incident transferred a bit of my Russian colleague's
paranoia to me, and I henceforth found myself self-censoring even the mildest
of my conversations with other delegates for fear of being overheard and unintentionally
causing trouble for someone.
Paranoia is contagious, easily caught even by the naïf I then was.
I had previously experienced
a smidgen of it during the McCarthy years in America, which had sensitized
me to its harm. I began to see how
destructive it would be to live with for a lifetime.
On returning to the Academy's hotel in Moscow after the
conference, I found myself placed in a double room with a fellow professor from
UC Berkeley. This was very
strange, since we both had been given single rooms when arriving in Moscow
a week before and—judging by the almost complete array of keys still hanging at
the reception desk and the annoyed arguments put up by Russian colleagues who
were with us at check-in—it was clear that many single rooms were still
available.
When we entered the room, my American colleague, also
infected with paranoia, put a finger to his lips, and I immediately understood
his concern that the room was likely bugged. Since I was returning to the U.S. first, and he also had
messages to deliver that he wanted to transfer to me, we took a night-time
"stroll in the woods," except now on the rainy streets of
Moscow. (No dog followed us this
time!) He verbally gave me the
messages that he had been given. I
felt as though I were in a spy movie, surreptitiously exchanging secret
information, although the content of that information was quite innocent. Needless to say, we were circumspect in
our conversation on returning to the room. I was surprised at how easily we had fallen under the pall
of a totalitarian state.
I write this posting under the title Poor Russia! because that country has been so darkened by
centuries of autocracy, a night from which it cannot seem to emerge. One had such great hope in 1989, with
the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Russia would again draw close to Western
Europe, whose cultural life it had shared for centuries before the Bolshevik
Revolution, and whose political freedom one now dreamed it would adopt. Yet the heritage of those centuries of
despotism has taken its dreadful toll.
It appears to be so ingrained that Vladimir Putin—well trained as an apparatchik of the KGB—has all too easily aggrandized to himself
the power of a tsar or Communist Party chairman.