The Good Soviets

I don't know if anybody can explain the source of their obsessions, interests, or passions, but the Soviet Union is undoubtedly one of the most important phenomena in modern human history.  This is true for a variety of reasons.  In the first place, the Soviet Union represented in some imperfect way the culmination of the wider socialist project of European intellectual history.  Bolshevism is related to all of the modern processes of European history, including industrialization, rationalization, colonization, and modernization.  We simply cannot analyze the meaning of the generic, ongoing Leftist critique of capitalism and modernity without understanding the Russian ideology of October, leaving aside none of its spectacularly visible triumphs and none of its egregiously terrible failures.  Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the other Old Bolsheviks were the inheritors of a revolutionary tradition that stretched back at least as far as Robespierre and the French revolutionaries.  They understood the Enlightenment tradition of political economy and participated fully in a historical dialogue about equality, fraternity, and liberty.  1917 is inextricably linked to 1789 and 1848.  What's fascinating is the extent to which the Soviet Union's collapse, in 1989, is also tied to 1789, although twenty years of introspection hasn't exactly helped contemporary Russians to understand their own place in the continuous history of revolutionary aspirations.

The Russian Revolution is a big moment in the history of humankind for a second reason:  it led, in short order, to the radical expansion of the revolutionary dream.  The expansion of this dream was so radical, that China is only one of many different countries that was transformed by their contact with Marxism.  While European power would have collapsed under any circumstances, Bolshevism helped to inspire some of its most successful opponents.  The Soviet Union has played a central role in twentieth century global history.  The country was one of the largest empires in the history of the world, and of course defeated Europe's second Napoleon, Adolph Hitler.  This alone would justify intensive introspection about the role of the Russian Communist Party and Bolshevik state.  The crimes of the regime are also intrinsically worthy of study.  Lenin's system of government led to unmitigated tyranny, famine, political terror, and demographic catastrophe.  To have lived through the early decades of the Soviet Union's existence, was to have survived revolutionary spontaneity, Civil War, economic dislocation, purge, colonialism, collectivization, famine, and global war.

The Soviet Union was an exercise in black government.  But it was also an engine of unprecedented experimentation.  At the time, there had been few similar adventures in atheism, central planning, socialist economics, or proletarian mobilization.  The Soviets attempted to re-write history.  Their faith in technology was absolute.  However misguided, Russian Communists produced something radically different from other villainous regimes:  they produced a serious critique of Western modernity.  In some ways, the Soviet Union remains the only plausible alternative to capitalism the world has ever known.

Understanding the full horror of Stalin's purges and gulag labor system makes it difficult to sympathize with the Bolshevik dream, but not impossible.  To understand Bolshevism, we must look to the revolutionaries of 1917.  Although Lenin made a long series of cruel decisions, his opposition to colonial exploitation, capitalist economic theory, tsarist oppression, and global militarism are admirable. But after Lenin and his colleagues had been swept away by Stalin, we must wait until the 1960s to rediscover the Soviet impulse for positive change.  In the 1960s, bloody Khrushchev became an unlikely champion of a benign future.  Notwithstanding his personal participation in Stalinist mass murder, Khrushchev had imbibed something good from his Party upbringing.  Indeed, he believed that the Soviet Union could successfully compete with its American and European rivals in the production of economic wealth.  The Soviet Union was, after all, outrunning the American economic growth rate by a factor of two or three, or so it appeared to both American and Russian economic experts.

Like Khrushchev, ordinary Russians in the 1960s had every reason to believe in their country.  We might well ask how this belief was possible when so many average citizens had relatives who had suffered so terribly at the hands of Stalin's lieutenants.  But Americans believed in the U.S. Constitution  even when millions of African-Americans were legally enslaved.  In fact, it was hard for Soviet citizens to ignore their government's propaganda about the unequal status of the slaves' ancestors even in modern, 1960s, America.

The novel, Red Plenty, helps us to understand this moment in 1960s Russia, after Stalinist brutality had faded, but before the limits of Soviet economics had been reached.  In the 1960s, Russia remained a heroic alternative to the imperialist West, friend of Cubans, Vietnamese, Polish, and struggling peoples all over the world.  In the 1960s, Russia was still a leader in nuclear armament, space exploration, and athletic competition.  The Russian economy wasn't perfect, but it wasn't apparently propped up by unemployment and inequality.  The secret was centralized planning.  During the 1960s, Russian life was good and getting better.  Housing shortages were getting better;  wages were getting higher;  consumer goods were becoming more plentiful.

If you read the Soviet Constitution, you get a sense of the Soviet promise.  According to that constitution, the Soviet regime was democratic but orderly, planned, and unified.  While Western critics talked about tyranny, many Soviet citizens may have once accepted their government's foundational documents at face value:  Russians, Ukrainians, and Uzbeks alike were heirs to a civilization of radical, proletarian equality, and logical, rational, and technocratic good government.  In the 1960s, most Russians understood that their system of government had overcome a dark past to overcome fascism, educate a backward country, and produce a space-age material culture.

Khrushchev's visit to America, which is discussed at length in both K Blows His Top and Red Plenty, is symbolic of this high water of Soviet pride.  Khrushchev landed in American in a gigantic airplane, larger than anything in the American commercial or military fleet.  The plane was so large he needed to climb down from it with the help of a ladder.   Khrushchev's visit was a strange mixture of braggadocio and insecurity.  Like many of his countrymen, the Soviet premier both admired and pitied America.  America was a truly great power, more dynamic by far than its decadent counterparts in Western Europe;  and yet Russia had come much farther in a much shorter space of time than America had.  If the trend continued, surely the Soviet Union and its communist imitators had nothing to fear from peaceful competition.  Khruschev had seen the future, and it worked.

Memorial

A few months ago my stepmother told my fiancée that Grace Shouba, my mother, was a constant presence at her home.   The statement struck me as odd at first:  Grace died twenty-five years ago, and of course had never even visited my stepmother’s current home, let alone my stepmother’s previous home.  Her pictures were not on any wall.  Her things--what few inherited objects that were left to us--were mostly relegated to the basement.  But of course my father’s “new” wife had helped to raise my brothers and me, and so had lived for the past two decades with hundreds of shared remembrances of our most cherished memory.  

When I thought about my stepmother’s statement, I had to admit that Grace was everywhere in her home.  My father and two brothers talked about Grace a lot; and when we weren’t talking about her, the omission was sometimes glaringly obvious.   After all, Grace was the unifying theme of our shared past—a collective experience, a familiar ghost, and a sometimes all-consuming memory.   In fact, after twenty-five years, Grace had become something bigger than a dead loved one:  in many ways, her name had become a mythological symbol for childhood itself, with all its myriad joys, sorrows, adventures, and tragedies.  

For me at least, the memory of Grace now represented the best and worst parts of life, and her spiritual presence seemed to permeate my every interaction with my parents and their home.  The past is always present, and this certainly is part of the message of Montefiore’s novel about the Russian heroine, Sashenka.  Montefiore, who wrote a brilliantly researched book about Catherine the Great’s favorite, Potemkin, as well as two of the best recent biographies of Joseph Stalin—The Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin, clearly believed that any twentieth century Russian novel must inevitably lead to a dialogue between Russia’s tragic past and uncertain present.  

Sashenka, who grows up in a rich, Jewish St. Petersburg family, throws herself into the revolutionary struggle against the Tsar.  Thus, in the first part of the book, Montefiore takes us back and forth between tsarist excess (Sashenka’s mother is one of Rasputin’s dissolute admirers) and puritanical revolutionary responses.   We come to understand why Russians had become exhausted by economic inequality, bourgeois decadence, autocratic stupidity, military catastrophe, and capitalist exploitation.  Yet we are also introduced to a Marxist-Leninist conspiracy, and its dangerous moral and ideological assumptions about class warfare.   Although we know why Sashenka is attracted to change, we also understand that this attraction is darkened by the Bolsheviks’ antidemocratic and violent approach to politics. 

Montefiore skips over the Civil War, Collectivism, and the Great Terror proper, and introduces us to fully formed Stalinism.  As World War II approaches, Sashenka and her  bigwig NKVD husband have become the model Soviet citizens.  Their attitude toward Stalin and Stalinism are no doubt typical of the time.  In awe of the Great Leader, they somehow managed to both love and fear the man and his political regime.  They understand that many of their close friends and colleagues had disappeared during the past two years, but they hoped against hope that these disappearances were justified according to some greater Party imperative or logic of history.  When they themselves wind up in Stalin’s cross hairs, they perish, victims of the same deadly and often arbitrary game that Sashenka’s NKVD husband had been playing for so long to prop up the Bolshevik regime.  Montefiore’s larger story, however, is about historical memory.  

In the final part of the book, Montefiore shows that Sachenka’s torture and savage death did not erase her memory, or the significance of the millions of other innocent Russians who died at the hands of Stalin and his criminal colleagues.  Indeed, Sashenka’s children and grandchildren miraculously uncover the tragic story of their ancestor’s past.  And somehow Sashenka emerges again, irrepressible, insistent, and all-consuming.  History, and especially Russian history, always demonstrates the simple fact that death doesn’t really end anything.  The living have an urgent need to make contact with the dead, and the level of this urgency is related in some morbid way to the abruptness and unjustness of the death.  And perhaps the dead—like Hamlet’s father who famously said:  oh, horrible tale!--also have an urgent need to make contact with the living.

The Triumph of Atheism

One of the Revolution’s crowing achievements was atheism.  After centuries of cruel economic and ideological exploitation by the Orthodox clergy and its political allies, Russians finally liberated themselves from an outmoded belief in God.  This liberation was at the heart of the Revolution’s appeal to the liberal-minded, urban intelligentsia.  How free must men and women have felt to be able to escape centuries of magical thinking and religious mumbo-jumbo in one spontaneous moment of rational action?  How joyous an epoch:  to overthrown a god as well as a tsar in one tumultuous year?  Rasputin, the tangible link between God and tsar in the last days of the old regime, was the living embodiment of everything that had been eating away at Russia for so many centuries.  For many educated Russians, Rasputin’s mysticism and magical thinking were inextricably tied up with his depravity and amorality, which, in turn, were firmly linked to the charismatic but bizarre man’s autocratic, reactionary politics.  Religious Russia meant Grigory Rasputin, or worse. 

I remember the moment in time when I first realized there was no God.  Strangely, my religious education occurred in public school during my freshman year of high school.  Assigned two essays about the existence of God—one theist, the other atheist—I was immediately and totally convinced of the truth of the atheist document.   I was shocked and upset by my conversion to godlessness.  Until that time, I had been a believer from a relatively liberal Protestant sect, Methodism.   Looking back, it’s clear that the collapse of my faith had very little to do with the essayist’s arguments, and everything to do with my mother’s recent death.  Reading the essay, I was left with that simple question everyone must ask himself in the wake of a personal tragedy:  if there is a God, how could he have taken away my mother?  My answer was as simple as the question:  there cannot be a God. 

Looking back, I am struck by the oddness of losing one’s religion as a response to death.  For religion is nothing if not an elaborate attempt to give people solace in the face of death, or mortality in general.  Yet my mother’s death opened up a curtain on existence and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was no longer a factor in my mortal life.  The irony perhaps is that my mother went into the final weeks of her life as a Christian, even calling for a minster to visit her sickbed to sing Christian songs with her.  That’s my memory anyhow--forgive the distortions that have accumulated over the course of twenty-five years.

One doesn’t really lose one’s faith in a single instance.  There are no “road to Damascus” experiences, as it were.  When I learned from my grandmother than my mother had died, I went to seek solace from my father, asking whether it was true that Mom was actually much better off being in heaven.  My father’s look, filled with pity and a certain incredulity at my naivete, said something different than his hesitant words:  “Yes, Derek.  She must be in heaven.  Yes, she must be better off.”  He probably never meant to deliver such a condescending message.  He may not even have meant anything at all.   Although he was a half-hearted believer at best, attending Church for his wife’s sake, his answer couldn’t have really turned my mind away from  the depressing fact of my growing distrust of the Christian response to tragedy.  The truth was this:  I didn’t really trust in God’s existence.  The bible picture book Mom kept downstairs seemed as relevant to my life as my book of Greek mythology or any Dungeons and Dragons book. 

Being freed from religion was an awesome responsibility, and one I couldn’t handle for many years.  At first, I wondered whether I even needed to bother about morality and ethics if God wasn’t around to punish or reward me.  Of course,  leaving religion had its upside:  I had a confident, independent, open-minded, and even creative approach to my surroundings and toward men and women from other religious traditions .  I also eventually started to think more deeply about right and wrong:  since the bible wasn’t inherently right or wrong, one had to think very deeply about what separated the good from the bad.  And of course I soon realized that Christians, and religious folks in general, were often capable of doing very bad things at the behest of their god.  As Kurt Vonnegut said, and I can only paraphrase him:  sooner or later gods have got to be held accountable for the actions of their followers.

In Russia, state-sponsored atheism led to ideological coercion, anticlerical cruelty, and anti-religions brutality on a scale not even the pogrom-tolerant autocracy could have imagined.  Godless Russia, it turned out, was even worse than Godly Russia.  In my own life, atheism didn’t make things better.  In some ways, atheism merely became the mirror image of my earlier Christianity:  I became as intolerant of different religious viewpoints as Christians generally seemed to be.  To me, Christianity itself—a religion I was born to—seemed as strange as the cult of Santaclaus, if people had continued to believe in Santa after entering adulthood.  At times, I barely understood how people ever maintained their faith in the supernatural in the face of overwhelming scientific and physical evidence.  

Just recently, an erudite Catholic friend came to visit and attested that there simply was no evidence that Jesus had NOT risen from the dead, or even evidence that he or his disciples had intended to perpetuate some kind of hoax that he had done so.  The absurdity of this line of reasoning even now overwhelms me.  If this friend, one of the smartest people I know, is able to frame a problem in such an illogical way, how much less thought do other Christians use when thinking about the existence of God?

Notwithstanding my occasional incredulity, over time I have mellowed.  I’ve come to think that atheism and theism are two sides of the same coin;  and that the quest for ultimate, metaphysical truth, must necessarily involve both a belief in transcendent reality and some kind of paradoxical belief in the physical sameness (and therefore anti-religious structure) of the universe.  Little by little I’ve made room in my life for a little religion.  I’ve lit a votive candle or two, spoken to my dead mother from time to time, and fallen for the Hindu god, Ganesha, whose small statue stands on my bookshelf as a reminder of how little I know or will be able to know about life and the cosmos.  Somehow an elephant-headed God, rather than an historical man-god, seems like a better indicator of the inner truth of religious sentiment. 

I guess I’ve come to understand that atheism will not make him a happier person.  It didn’t transform Russia into a utopia, nor did it lead me to inner bliss.  To the extent that I remain an atheist, I do so because atheism is a true doctrine and not because it leads to paradise on earth.   Where my son is concerned, I hope to teach him something that is neither theist nor atheist, or is perhaps both.  This is a complicated task.  I guess if I have my way my son will be something akin to the characters in an Isabel Allende novel, rational people who believe in ghosts and spirits and operate in a world of magical reality.  

Reading a book by Abram Tertz on Russian folklore, I see the kind of person I’d like my son to become.  Tertz was a deeply analytical man who applied the tools of anthropology and literary criticism to collect and objectively assess the religious traditions of the Russian folk,  a people who believed in all manner of major and minor religious, mythological, and spiritual activity.  Tertz did not merely respect the Russian peasants’ ability to incorporate the sacred into his daily life.  Rather, he crossed that threshold on occasion and saw life through their pantheistic gaze.  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James said that men and women were either religious or irreligious;  that is, they either lived in an enchanted world or they lived in a rational one, but never both.  But Tertz showed that it’s possible to live in both worlds at the same time, which is all that anyone should hope for.  

David Remnick's Russia

"Under Brezhnev, everyone thought that life would stay the same for a thousand years.  They couldn't imagine it being different."  Vladimir Voinovich.

"People cannot quite fathom why, in order to reach democracy, people must be killed in the streets." Aleksander Terekhov.

"We passed herds of goats, bell-clanging oxen, a pack of wild dogs.  We passed a holy man kicking a cat."  David Remnick.

I don't recall much about David Remnick's celebrated book about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb, but the strength of his book about Yeltsin's Russia, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia, makes me wonder if it isn't time to re-read that first book.  Remnick's rich and subtle description of the New Russia reminds one that Russia's story in any era--past, present, or future--is, or will be, endlessly fascinating.  Remnick's book demonstrates the bewildering complexity of Russia's transformation.  In the wake of 1991, Russians were left with no clear identity.  Millions of ethnic Russians lived outside of its national borders, and unprecedented numbers of those who remained were trying to flee abroad each year.  Russians had little to unite them;  the basic milestones of their past, from October 1917 to December 1991, were still being bitterly contested.  The capital and countryside seemed to have almost nothing in common.   Russian intellectual culture was being overwhelmed by vulgar popular culture.  Russians grappled with the meaning of capitalism, the legitimacy of popular culture, their place in the world, and the value of democracy.  Russians were hooked on television--but what that censored television was teaching them about how to live was difficult to say.  They were also deeply affected by the war in Chechnya, though the state-controlled press did its best to minimize the coverage most people saw.  It was an incredibly confusing time for everyone.  

The Aftermath

One cannot truly understand the depth of Soviet immorality without examining its aftermath.  With all due respect to the millions of decent Russian citizens caught up in the chaos of the last two decades of "freedom," modern Russia is a moral vacuum filled with one hundred varieties of evil.  When Russia shed its command economy and one-party political system, David Satter argues in Darkness at Dawn that Russians adopted something nearly as bad:  capitalism in a lawless society.  In the absence of socialist ethics, as barren as these ethics had become by the early 1980s, Russians experienced unprecedented insecurity, moral relativism, governmental corruption, radical income inequality, chronic alcoholism, rampant emigration, and runaway crime.  According to Satter, Russian demographic problems are not merely the result of bad economic decision-making and so-called Shock Therapy;  rather, they are the symptom of deep moral apathy on the part of much of the Russian populace.

The apathy is understandable.  There are times and placed when there simply are no good actors.  It's possible to work in such a place, where one leader is as bad as the next, where narcissism and venality are the norm.  In such an environment, it's almost impossible to tell which decisions will lead to which moral outcomes.  Satter says Russian business is like that today.  In a country where almost all businessmen are forced to align themselves with former KGB officers or gang leaders, and where every business success depends on a combination of physical threat and outlandish bribery, what does it mean for a Russian citizen to act in an ethical way?  Ten years ago, and perhaps this is true even today, Russians had to choose between varieties of criminality.  In many ways, the choice was an aesthetic one as much as anything else.  What kind of evil does one prefer?  Does one want to work on behalf of petty thieves, governmental sharks, sophisticated business swindlers, or out-and-out thugs?

One can answer the question based on strategic considerations or aesthetic ones, but not necessarily on the basis of any rational moral analysis.  The irony of course is that anyone who is brave enough to directly challenge the status quo in Russia is most likely to be branded a criminal and thrown into jail on charges of corruption.  The citizen who challenges evil isn't merely going to loose the battle;  rather, he's likely to be made infamous as the living embodiment of the evil he or she set out to contest.  Slatter's Russia is a place of almost total lack of regard for ordinary human life.  The extreme example of this callousness is the government's willingness to kill its own citizens by planting bombs in crowded buildings and then blaming these bombs on Chechnyan terrorists, although the evidence for this remains circumstantial.

But the more banal forms of indifference to human life are everywhere manifest.  In the 1990s, people were regularly victimized by business leaders, gangsters, bureaucrats, and police officers.  You could die on the operating table if the town's electricity were shut off to pay for mafia energy middlemen; you could fall into scalding power if a construction company cut corners and ignored basic safety guidelines; you could be rubbed out for falling behind on your protection money to a local mobster;  and you could die of starvation or disease if state actors decided to invest local tax revenue in lucrative investments rather than pay basic wages for many months at a time.  There are times and places where morality is luxury.

Manufacturing Heroes

Although the Bolshevik Revolution was laced with heroism, the longevity of the Soviet experiment in corrupt, coercive government is a tribute to humankind's endless capacity for cowardice.  For decades, most Soviet citizens chose not to risk their jobs in defense of liberty, religious freedom, or any other abstract civil or human conceit.  In fact, most Soviet citizens even failed to protest when their neighbors, colleagues, or even family members were unfairly harassed or persecuted.  Famously, Molotov seems not to have uttered a word of defiance when his boss, Stalin, permitted Molotov's wife to be thrown into prison, even though Molotov remained one of Stalin's most important collaborators.

This is not to judge the Russian people:  the Soviet regime could brutally oppress its opponents even in its softer, more humane, twilight years; and even people in the West act in cravenly ways now and again.  As it turns out, even the relative security of democratic states fails to elicit bravery when it comes to speaking up in favor of the basic human dignity associated with reproductive rights, marriage equality, or the right to receive a reasonable standard of medical care even if one happens to be out of work.  In my own life, I'm amazed at how often I've failed to do the right thing, even when a dash of courage would have helped me in the long run.

Two days ago I got back from my first trip back to Montreal since I graduated from McGill University in the mid 1990s.  Strolling around the campus, I popped into the history department and recalled how torturous my time in Montreal had really been.  On the one hand, I was thrilled to be living in one of North America's greatest cities, and utterly enjoyed the city's storied diversity.  With its street festivals, bilingual identity, strident cosmopolitanism, original architecture, lively gay quarter, and scenic natural backdrop, I couldn't have been happier with my surroundings.  On the other hand, I knew deep down inside that, notwithstanding my academic program, I had no interest in becoming a professor of history.   How then did I find myself attending history lectures?  In a word, my own cowardice was at fault;  rather than remain true to my interest in international relations, or risk trying something entirely new, I fell back on the one thing I knew best--school, and history, my best subject in school, in particular.

Over time, my subconscious apparently rebelled at my decision to make the study of history a a full-time occupation.  I began having trouble writing my thesis,  started reading broadly in fields that had nothing to do with my chosen subject matter, got a little depressed, and eventually left graduate school altogether.  But the decision to leave graduate school took an appallingly long time, approximately four years.  I ascribe the delay now to cowardice, a failure to face up to the simple fact that I had made a mistake, and a similar failure to court uncertainty by starting over in a brand new venture rather than doubling down on a bad investment and applying to a doctoral program in Urbana, Illinois.

Living a life of cowardice is anything but easy.  You avoid short-run pain but only in order to experience a double dose of long-run pain.  Courage isn't my forte.  As readers might expect, I attribute my cowardice to my mother's abrupt departure from this world when I was a teenager.  I suspect that I was so overwhelmed by my mother's illness and death that I made the subconscious decision to go out of my way to avoid any other form of pain in the future, and that included even the short-run pain associated with brave decisions.
No doubt you, the reader, are skeptical.  How is it possible to blame the author's every flaw and blemish on a dead woman?  If the woman faced cancer bravely, why should the son be paralyzed by fear for decades afterward?  I submit that obsession, and especially the obsession of an aspiring artistic, needs no explanation.  It is what it is.  It's impervious to logic, impervious to scrutiny.

How did courage operate in the Soviet Union?  I call the reader's attention to one of the Soviet Union's most courageous citizens, Abram Tertz, who ignored the Party's official aesthetic ideology, socialist realism.  Abram Tertz was insanely brave.  He wrote brave  novels, defended his decision to do so when put on trial by the monstrous Soviet state, and went to jail for doing so.  The Soviet Union was a machine for manufacturing both cowards and heroes like Tertz.  While most Soviet citizens were given ample opportunity to grovel at the feet of bureaucrats and Party leaders, others were constantly being forced to consider a career in heroism.  In the Soviet Union, one either surrendered all moral autonomy, or choose to avoid all moral compromise.  Most folded, but Abram Tertz and others choose bravery.

In Putin's Russia, cowardice continues to thrive.  For instance, the press is almost wholly silenced.  Oligarchs compromise with Putin to avoid the fate of Khordorkovsky.  Politicians vote the way they are asked to vote.  On the other hand, Valery Panyushkin's new book of biographical sketches, entitled 12 Who Didn't Agree, shows that at least a handful of Russians prefer ostracism, business seizures, jail, police surveillance, exile, physical beatings, unemployment, and indeed the threat of extermination, to cowardice. Panyushkin's well-told tales--more literary than most modern literature--show that people get to courage in a variety of different ways:  some are innately obstreperous, some draw strength from friends and family, some experience a sense of invulnerability born of celebrity, and some turn dissident out of moral outrage or near-death experiences.  In the end, Panyushkins' book holds out the hope that everybody, no matter how intimidated by circumstance or personal history, can at least become conscious of an alternative between a life of cowardice and a life of courage.  Perhaps this is what led so many ordinary Russians to take to the streets in recent months.

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Me

In the summer of 1991 the Soviet Union began to fall apart. Russia established its sovereignty that summer, and a hardliner coup was overturned by Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and his democratic allies. By December of that year, Boris Yeltsin pulled the plug on Lenin's political experiment by joining with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to establish the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation of sovereign entities that looked almost nothing like the monolithic superpower that preceded it. The final act in the drama took place on Christmas Day of that year when Gorbachev announced on CNN that he was ceasing his activities as president.

It's impossible to overstate the signifance of this bathetic conclusion to seventy years of Bolshevism. After little more than half a decade of glasnost and perestroika, Soviet leaders and ordinary Soviet citizens walked away from superpower status, Marxist theory, and Communist idealism. But what was I doing while the nuclear briefcase passed from the urbane but anachronistic Gorbachev to the alcoholic but immensely popular Boris Yeltsin? In the summer of 1991 I was graduating from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. As a student of international relations, I should have had a keen sense of the historical import of the moment. As I've mentioned previously, I had only recently completed three different courses on Russian history and statecraft. And yet, like most Americans, and some professional Kremlinologists, I remained oblivious to history. In fact, like most folks, I was, in the words of Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, "busy tryin' to do for me."

 That summer I sustained a series of minor personal setbacks, which seemed impossibly depressing to me at the time. In the first place, I failed the hyper-competitive Foreign Service oral examinations, something I hadn't really anticipated doing when I got accepted to a hyper-competitive international relations academic program. I remember this first Foreign Service failure vividly, even though I went on to fail the exam three more times before finally passing the exam a decade later. At one point, the examiners gave us a mock inbox of directives, written queries, and other forms of correspondence that demanded our attention. Without any previous work experience outside of Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Baker's Square, I smugly assumed that my decisions could scarcely be gainsaid. And yet, upon being told that day that I had failed the exam, the female examiner felt it necessary to add that the she and her colleagues had been "quite shocked" by my refusal to meet with a secretary who had, according to the mock organizational chart, wanted to criticize her supervisor, my fictitious chief of staff. During the exam, I reasoned that "real life" bosses would never stoop to undermining high level officers in the organization by meeting with their subordinates. To this day, I'm not quite sure that I was wrong about my assumptions about business life, but certainly it didn't do me any good to profess such cynicism at such a young age.

I want to tell my readers that things go better from here but they didn't. I moved to California, in pursuit of a woman who would one day do me wrong. In California, I took up a job for nine dollars an hour, right across from a strip club on Sunset Boulevard. In an attempt to escape my fate--which I wrongly concluded I had done nothing to forge-I took the Foreign Service exam a second time. This time, as they say in Godfather, "things got rough, Boss." Yes, I failed the exam a second time. The tragedy this time is that the examiners actually praised me, saying that I had done so well on the exam that it would have been "statistically impossible" for me to do any better than I had done, without actually passing the exam. The "good news" of the near miss devastated me. What happened next was par for the course. Walking outside, I noticed that it had recently rained but failed to notice that this rain had flooded a large area that blocked my way. The flood at pushed up a mass of floating wood chips that I now attempted to step on. Sinking about five inches deep into the flooded zone, I felt ridiculous. I only had one suit and this dunking seemed to be nature's way of telling me that buying a new suit was no guarantee of worldly success.

I remember thinking how I might have been able to accept the loss of a childhood dream like becoming a major league baseball player or astronaut; but why was the dream of becoming a government bureaucrat so unattainable? I took the Foreign Service test two more times before finally passing it. On the fourth time out, I was so desperate to pass and escape graduate school that I began to experience what must have been something akin to a panic attack. Making my way to the bathroom I peered into the mirror to try to get a hold of myself. The vision in the mirror horrified me. Having shaved a little too zealously that morning in preparation for the exam, I had nicked myself, leaving a few small drops of blood. In my heightened state of nervousness, I saw something quite different, something akin to a bloody, severed head. I blinked but could only see a dress shirt drenched in oceans of crimson blood. Surely this embarrassing sight would be the end of my quest to enter government service! And indeed this, or at least my exaggerated anxiety over the test, did lead to a fourth failure.

My quest to work in the field of international relations seems a bit comical now, or tragic, depending on how much sympathy one has for the follies of youth. It's ironic, to say the least, that my struggle to secure a place in the State Department should have distracted me so thoroughly from the events in Eastern Europe that were reshaping the world. History is like that. We think, to paraphrase Althusser, that "the future lasts forever." But it never works out that way. Nothing is permanent. The Soviet Union and the Cold War melted away and I hardly noticed they were gone. The Russians themselves weren't that concerned either apparently. Nightline and CNN provided the world with more coverage of Gorbachev's exit from the stage of history than any news outlet in Russia, and not merely because of Yeltsin's distaste for the man. Apparently Russians knew that Communism had died years if not decades early, and that Glasnost and Perestroika were just morbid attempts to animate a corpse.

And in case you were more interested in global history than you are in personal history, please see Conor O'Clery's thrilling book, Moscow, December 25 1991:  The Last Day of the Soviet Union.  Conor's book juxtaposes that final day with the year leading up to it.  Although the role of the American press gets far too much attention, the book goes a long way toward helping readers to see understand and assess the best and worst qualities of two great men, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.