The scene at the Yerevan (Armenia) airport was of hundreds trying to get out of the country. We were trying to get on a commercial flight to Moscow, Russia. They told us we may have to wait twelve hours, but somehow “Uncle Joseph” — the name I gave to our in-country host who looked like a clone of Joseph Stalin — worked a deal and we were suddenly whisked out of the building onto the tarmac and into an Aeroflot jet.
Aeroflot, the old Soviet carrier, has been condemned by the international aviation community and I had no doubt why. Beyond unseen mechanical horrors, the aisle carpet was so tattered that half the aisle was just bare aluminum, it was so cold people were putting on their coats, and the food was worse than Air India. We made an intermediate stop at some city that probably wasn't on the map and were almost arrested for snapping a few pictures.
* * *
I had heard the stories of Moscow — grey, bleak, cold. But, coming from where we'd been, Moscow looked comfortably cosmopolitan.
I had arranged for the three of us to meet with Steve, a former subordinate who had made it big and was living in Moscow. Little did I know that Steve had worked his maids and cooks all day to prepare a virtual banquet for us in his silk draped, Persian carpeted and wine-decantered dining room. It was a downtown Moscow flat he had renovated at, I'm sure, an obscene cost. It was pure, unabashed capitalism, a clone of a Central Park pied-à-terre . . . and we walked in in lycra and Levi's having just had our first shower in more than a week.
After a late night dinner, Steve drove us the few blocks to Red Square. As I walked onto Red Square I was every bit as visually stunned as the time I caught my first glimpse of the nighttime golden glow of the Eiffel Tower. Red Square is one of the few places in the world that, because of the power of its history, brought a lump to my throat. Westminster Abbey, practically a shrine to the British Empire and Western civilization, is one of those places. Gettysburg is another. I was wiping away tears at Normandy.
Entering Red Square was like returning to a place I'd never been. The brightly lit onion domes of St. Basil's, the red star capped towers of the Kremlin and the austere tomb of Lenin were like scenes from old home movies because they were the primary images of the Cold War. Laurie and I stood in the middle of the dark square, raising our shoulders to our ears against the cold Moscow wind, just absorbing Russia. My first thought was that no one could witness Red Square, even without knowing its history, and not think that Russia was one of the world's great nations.
A good part of my memory was tied up in the place. It made me remember having to practice ducking under my sixth grade desk and covering my eyes in the event of a nuclear blast, and it brought to mind the red booklet all of us twelve-year-olds received, entitled Communism: The Nature of Your Enemy. I remembered sleeping out under the stars with my buddies, convincing ourselves that we'd be the first to be fried by the atom bomb because Denver was so close to NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain. I remembered my father pointing out the model of Sputnik to me at the U.N., the flickering images of Nikita Khrushchev on TV, and the silver and blue book jacket of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
Around 1987, a few of us were invited to the Soviet Embassy which stood across a few blocks north of the White House on 16th street and ironically backed up to the offices of TheWashington Post. The embassy was in the old Pullman (train cars) mansion. After passing through security I entered the main foyer and started up the grand staircase. At the top of the staircase was a fifteen-foot-tall painting of Lenin that, I'm sure, raised the hair on the back of my neck. We watched some propaganda movie, asked questions, then were escorted into a ballroom full of Soviets, Russian vodka, caviar and hors d'oeuvres. The First Secretary was a caricature of an old Russian operative - - heavy, jovial, with giant bushy eyebrows — a spitting image of the actor playing opposite Michael Caine in a Cold War movie from the 60a called "Funeral In Berlin." He asked me if my boss was a member of the COS (Conservative Opportunity Society), one of Newt Gingrich's early workings.
I ended up talking at length with a guy who looked like Omar Sharif from his Zhivago days. In his impeccable English he suggested we should have lunch. In spite of wanting to be able to tell my grandchildren that I'd lunched with the KGB, I never called him. About a year later, there was a big article in the Washington Post about the Soviet Union's spy activity in the United States. It featured a man whose face was circled in an accompanying photo taken at a Congressional hearing. Sure enough, it was my friend, Dr. Zhivago. His real name is Mikhail. . . I still have his business card.
* * *
Steve had arranged for our own private, all-day guide to show us the sights of Moscow. She was about my age and confided to me that she was bitter that, for most of her life, she had been taught, and had believed that Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were perfect men, nearly gods. Since the collapse of "The State" she had learned that her whole system of beliefs was mistaken. Throughout the day, through her comments, it was obvious she was a person a little off-balance, still dealing with having had the rug pulled out from under her.
We had no sooner left the Kremlin gate when we heard some commotion in a small park adjacent to the Kremlin wall. When we looked in that direction, we saw a black sedan come to a screeching halt. Three men in dark suits jumped out, grabbed a young man and literally threw him into the back seat of the car. Then they jumped into the car, slammed the doors, and sped off. Suddenly the park was quiet and people pretended they hadn't seen a thing. When I asked our guide about it, she just shrugged her shoulders. It made the Cold War fabled Lubyanka Prison seem all the more menacing. Chris, who had visited Moscow before the fall, had pointed it out to me.
* * *
[Lady Caroline Cox of the British House of Lords was the leader of our trip]
To our amazement, Caroline announced that Yelena Bonner had agreed to meet with us. We arrived before Caroline, and the young man who was friend and interpreter to Bonner took us up the six or seven stories to her flat in the old-fashioned, iron-caged elevator. Thinking her friend had brought her some reporters, Bonner flew into one of her famous cigarette-smoking rages until she learned differently, then she led us into the study to await Lady Cox.
I remember sitting there thinking "so these are his books." I believe it was his very study. I later read from David Remnick's book Lenin's Tomb:
"Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study."
" . . .When Bonner [later] went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him on the floor, dead."
". . .They strapped the body to a stretcher and carried him down seven flights of stairs to the car. Then Bonner had to deal with the reporters out on the stairs. She stuck her head out the door and lost it: 'You all worked hard to see that Andrei died sooner by calling us from morning till night, and never leaving us to our life and work. Be human beings! Leave us alone!'"
"Bonner did have a terrifying temper, but she, too, had to be admired deeply. She was indispensable to Sakharov, his lion at the gate. She protected him, inspired him, and he loved her ferocity. In their human rights work, Sakharov and Bonner were a team. They suffered, physically and psychologically, as equals. The KGB harassed the Sakharovs every way they could, even mailing them "Christmas cards" with grotesque images of mutilated bodies and monkeys with electrodes stuck in their skulls."
Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist and human-rights advocate, first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1975), banished to the city of Gorky in 1980, won worldwide praise for becoming the moral conscience of the Soviet Union.
"On a winter's night in 1986," Remnick wrote, "the phone rang. A woman's voice said, 'Mikhail Sergeyevich will speak to you.' Now Gorbachev was on the line, telling Sakharov that he and Bonner could return home to Moscow. 'You have an apartment there,' Gorbachev said without a word of apology or regret. 'Go back to your patriotic work!'
Reading the account of Sakharov's funeral is to understand his influence on Russian life. Remnick continued:
"It was not until we reached Luzhniki that I could see how many people had come to say farewell to Sakharov. No fewer than fifty thousand people had packed into a vast parking lot."
". . . Sakharov's casket was hoisted up in front of the flatbed truck where the speakers stood, and Bonner, wearing Sakharov's gray fur hat, stood near the microphone smoking cigarettes. She stepped up to speak only once, asking everyone to make room so that the ceremony would be peaceful and safe. Only a non-Soviet would have missed the reference: in the days after Stalin's death, the crowd outside the Hall of Columns was so dense and emotional that hundreds of people were crushed to death."
Yelena Bonner, of Armenian ancestry herself: lectured on the war in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh; wrote an article for The Washington Post openly appealing to all nations to create a network of international observers for referenda in Russia; and continued her ongoing human rights work through the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. It was like getting a seat at Center Court, Wimbledon.
Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner
* * *
The Commonwealth of Independent States had made the claim that all CIS visas would be recognized throughout the union, but as we were preparing to leave the country, Caroline reported, "Now they're telling us your Armenian visas may not be valid to exit Russia." Whatever the confusion, or the bureaucracy, the U. S. embassy told us that airport authorities were extorting money from foreigners on the "invalid visa" ruse.
At the Moscow Airport, I approached the passport clearance desk with trepidation. It was a scene from 1942 Germany when the worst nightmare was realized with the words, "Your papers do not seem to be in order!" Sure enough, the officer firmly stated that my Armenian visa was not valid in Russia and that it would cost several hundred dollars to remedy the situation. Armed with the information I'd received, I just as firmly stated, "Yes, it is. The American Embassy has confirmed that it is. Thank you very much, goodbye." I snatched my passport, and walked through the gate praying I wouldn't hear shouts or whistles.
* * *
When I think of Russia, everything is on a huge scale. Not only because the country itself is so vast, but because the national character of old Russia, and particularly the former Soviet Union was so forbidding and so austere. Beyond Red Square, the one all-encompassing image I have of the Soviet Union actually comes from one night in Hungary.
The Budapest train station looks like it belongs in an old Ingrid Bergman movie, with trains rolling in from all parts of Europe to pull up alongside the concrete platforms under the high roofed, hanger-like station. That night the trains all looked the same until, from out of the rainy darkness, a great old Russian train slowly emerged, crushing the railroad ties with its weight. The rail cars were bigger, the pain was darker, and its character so heavy I almost expected to see a giant iron hammer and sickle mounted on the engine and red flags masted above each car.
Yes, Russia is the country of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and the Bolshoi Ballet. The Soviets beat the Nazis at Stalingrad, the Americans into space, and for seventy years they terrified the Brits, the Germans, the Americans, and the rest of the Western world. But as Churchill said, she is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." In the end, the whole Soviet empire, from Russia to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, and from East Germany to Siberia, had drowned in the lies and the absurdities of life in the U.S.S.R. No one knew that better than Andrei Sakharov. When Sakharov was a boy, his aunt Zhenya received news of her husband's death in the camps when one of her letters was returned "Addressee relocated to the cemetery." Later one of Sakharov's friends died in the gulag, the authorities announced, owing to a "chilling of the epidermal integument.”
If you weren't born under a 48-star flag you probably can't appreciate the anxiety of the Cold War years. This Victory Day clip in Moscow's Red Square might help:
