Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union - David Satter

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he might soon cease to be a resident of the local chairman’s area, which would mean that he could be exiled from Moscow. If a foreigner were to inquire about the conversation, however, a Soviet official would describe the talk as a friendly conversation with no implicit threat.

      The Soviet penchant for advertising what is meaningless and concealing what is important can deepen the psychological distance between westerners and Soviet citizens by depriving words of their meaning. This is reflected in a wide variety of situations from Soviet claims to have been “invited” into Afghanistan to the behaviour of the women who manage the cafe next door to my office. They shut the doors when they feel like gossiping and hang up a sign reading “closed for technical reasons.”

      The successful creation of a false facade for foreigners and the irresponsibility with words in the Soviet Union both stem from the basic Soviet attempt to convince people that the truth is what they are shown or told and never what they learn independently.

      The emphasis is on manipulating what they can see because it is assumed that foreigners have no access to independent impressions. With Soviet citizens, the goal is to get them to ignore what they see and believe what they are told.

      One night a friend of mine named Volodya came home after an alcoholic binge to find his wife and mother waiting up for him and, in his words “ready to strangle me.” He had been out with his friend, Petya. In a distinctly Soviet attempt to save himself, he told his wife, “Petya is Dead.”

      Volodya’s wife, who was fond of Petya, burst into tears, helped her husband into bed, and brought him a cup of tea. When she left, Volodya picked up the phone and called Petya. He told Petya to stay out of sight for a few days because he had told his wife that he was dead. Petya, who had also been drinking, agreed, and went back to sleep.

      The next day, Petya having forgotten the incident, saw Volodya’s wife on the down escalator at the local Metro station as he was riding up. He waved at her and then, realizing his mistake when he saw her look of absolute horror, began shouting, “no, no, I’m dead, I’m dead.”

      Only in the Soviet Union would a man in Petya’s position have felt there was a chance to convince her.

      Light and shade in Shadrinsk

      View from Middle Russia

      The morning sunlight in Shadrinsk revealed an old Russian merchant town where leaning log houses, warped from centuries of rain and snow, lurched over dusty streets and five-storey housing blocks stood in the background with iron balconies and laundry hanging out to dry.

      It had taken 39 hours to reach the Ural mountains town of Shadrinsk, in the Trans-Siberian Express and on the way, we passed timeless wooden villages where peasant women bent over dirt plots in the heat of the sun.

      As we approached the outskirts of the town, trucks loaded with chopped wood waited at a crossing and the grassy Russian plain was broken by a pine grove which gave way to a scene of peaceful decrepitude where unused railway sidings were dotted with marigolds and grain elevators rusted in the sun.

      We had been prompted to make the trip by the massive Soviet propaganda campaign following the invasion of Afghanistan. In Moscow, educated people are sceptical of their Government but I thought this was probably less true in the towns and villages flung out over thousands of miles of provincial Russia, the “deaf places” where most Soviet citizens live.

      During the train journey to Shadrinsk, a factory town of 80,000 in the centre of the USSR, which was picked at random, a colleague and I got some idea of what lay ahead. There were many soldiers on the train, en route to new postings, as well as a reasonable cross section of the travellers one would meet in any second-class compartment on the busy Trans-Siberian Express.

      Almost to a man, people we spoke to condemned the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics and said that they supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

      “We gave the Afghans help, just as the Americans gave us help in the Second World War,” said a retired schoolteacher from Kurgan. “They published the appeal for help in our newspapers.” I asked him if he ever considered the possibility that what he read in the Soviet newspapers might not be true. “How could it not be true?” he replied.

      In Shadrinsk, I unpacked my things at the Hotel Ural and walked through the shadeless central square, stopping to talk to some young girls who were sitting on a bench near the war memorial. Across the road at the Motherland Cinema a new film was playing called, “From Your Loved One, Don’t Be Parted.”

      In the next three days, I spoke to people in cafes, in the barren farmers’ market, in the restaurant of our hotel, and in the lush, mosquito-ridden city gardens. The overwhelming impression I took away was that there was little realism in the idea of President Jimmy Carter that an Olympic boycott would inform the Soviet people about Western anger over Afghanistan, In remote cities like Shadrinsk which are cut off from outside information, the conditions for informing people do not exist. Soviet propaganda is the reality.

      One night in the hotel restaurant, we sat down at a table with some amateur musicians who worked at the Shadrinsk Auto Parts factory, and began talking with them about world events. They said they were disgusted by the Olympic boycott and, echoing the phrase constantly repeated in the Soviet newspapers, said it was wrong to mix, politics with sport. “We all know about Afghanistan,” said Volodya, one of the men, “but I put a fence around this question. Sport is one thing, politics is something else.”

      At a table cluttered with empty vodka bottles and half-eaten meat and potato salad, Igor, another of the men, explained the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as an example of “typical Russian generosity.”

      The lack of access to uncontrolled information about the world situation in Shadrinsk was complemented by a shortage of decent books. The only bookshop was full of technical books and bound volumes of Lenin’s works. There were only two counters where genuine literature was being offered, a counter where the works of Chekhov were displayed as a prize in a lottery and an exchange desk where a few works of modern literature were being offered in return for specific other books listed in a file of index cards.

      One night at Shadrinsk’s floodlit dancing ring in the city gardens we chatted with a pretty 19-year-old shop girl. My colleague asked her if the fact that she wore Western jeans and liked Western music meant she didn’t like the Soviet Union. “No,” she said emphatically, “I love the Soviet Union.”

      During our stay, we had several meetings with local officials but the result of the meetings was to give the impression that political discussion is frowned on in Shadrinsk when it departs from the verbatim repetition of official propaganda. With political issues and anything that bears on them eliminated from the conversation, our talks with local officials were taken up with their odd recitals of meaningless facts.

      In a 90-minute meeting with leaders of the Komsomol, the Young Communists’ Organisation, we learned that Shadrinsk has four cinemas, 18 secondary schools, six hospitals, 75 retail establishments, 4,000 private cars, 8,000 motorcycles and every year, no fewer than 800 weddings. This information was not apparently prepared in order to waste our time but simply defined the area of independent intellectual competence permitted to local officials.

      The impression of faith in the picture of the outside world given by Soviet propaganda and the Soviet Press would have been all but total in Shadrinsk, had it not been for one fleeting, discordant incident which took place while I was out for a quiet stroll.

      I turned off on a side street and came upon the site of an old church which was surrounded by broken, weathered scaffolding except for the red bell tower and the golden cupola and cross. In a yard beside the church, an old man was filling pails with sand and I asked him if restoration work was continuing. He laughed disinterestedly without looking at me and said, “the State has more important objectives than restoring churches.”

      The man continued his work, apparently unperturbed by being approached by a foreigner.

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