Poor Russia!

  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. 

  Politically speaking, Russia can never seem to catch a break.  It deserves better. 

Hope

  Today, a heavy subject: catastrophe, survival and regeneration.  Bear with me.  My musings sometimes veer toward the darker side.

  We are reminded daily by newspapers of all the disasters that Man and Nature can inflict.  As I write this, my newspaper reports the ongoing slaughter of thousands and destruction of whole cities in the civil war in Syria; random suicide bombings in Iraq; a huge forest fire that has destroyed a suburb of Colorado Springs, mercifully killing only a few.  We scarcely need to be reminded of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year.  And some horrors have become part of our vocabulary—Srebrenica, 9/11, and the cataclysms of the Holocaust, Rwanda and Hiroshima. 

  We also read of and even know survivors of calamities who have carried on—not just muddled through, but reconstructed their lives and planned their futures anew.  How do they do it?  When I lost my wife, I was able somehow to come through that dark night.  Yet what if one's entire existence and community were swept away?  How would one survive then?

  For years, whenever I read about survivors of a catastrophe, sayings from my youth popped unbidden into my mind: Cicero's "While there's life, there's hope" and Pope's "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."  Even in my youth, they were long-since clichés.  Thinking of them so automatically seemed cavalier, a shrugging off of the survivors' pain with a nostrum. 

  On a recent such occasion, again finding those clichés just too pat, I sought a more profound understanding by returning to a book I read many years ago:  Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, a saga of the Stalin years in the USSR.  It stunned me with its window into a modern-day Armageddon, and I have held it close to me since, ranking it with other great Russian epics like War and Peace and Dr. Zhivago.  I decided to re-examine what it says about survival.

  The torments faced by the characters in the book verge on the incomprehensible, even given our latter-day knowledge of those dreadful decades: the tyranny of Stalinism, with its constant terror, purges, imprisonments, torture, executions, and an endemic atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal; the Nazis' invasion of the USSR and their subsequent massacres of Jews and others in occupied territories; and the apocalyptic Battle of Stalingrad, around which much of the plot centers.  Every one of Grossman's protagonists has been either imprisoned in the Gulag at one time or another, usually because of a false denunciation; or lost a parent or a spouse or a child to the Soviet or Nazi camps or the war; or is currently in trouble with the authorities for Kafkaesque reasons.  Grossman himself suffered many of these agonies, including the later destruction by the KGB of all copies of the manuscript of Life and Fate.  (Fortunately for the world, dissidents had made two microfilm copies, which were smuggled to the West.)

  By the last chapter, the survivors of this Armageddon, although having endured unthinkable misery, still clutch onto vital sparks of humanity.  They are epitomized by the matriarch of the main clan of the saga.  She has lost her husband to the Gulag, a son, daughter and grandson to the war, all of her possessions on abandoning Moscow ahead of the German advance, and then lived through the hell of the Battle of Stalingrad.  Yet at the book's end, she is busily planning a move from Stalingrad's ruins to a city further into the Steppe to create a new life for her granddaughter and great-grandson.  So there's the mystery again.  How can a soul like hers be tortured and nearly broken, and still seize on those remaining grains of life?  What makes some of us capable of survival and even compassion when, rationally, we should throw in the towel, go crazy, commit suicide? 

  The sheer fortitude with which Grossman's survivors have overcome each tragedy throughout the book doesn't answer these questions, for fortitude is a surface manifestation of something deeper.  We have to ask, what is its source?  Devotion to ideals, smoldering anger at injustice, desire for retribution?  Maybe for some.  But Grossman's answer lies in a passage on the last page of the book:

" … you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.  It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open.  Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children … "

I believe Grossman is saying that hope for a better future is the all-encompassing source of survival, without which fortitude is an empty display.  Absent such hope, he concludes, there's no life worth living. 

  Maybe Cicero's and Pope's "clichés" were on the mark after all.  Maybe, as a response to disaster, they are as profound as can be.