Thirty-seven years since I was last in Russia, the silhouettes of Stalin’s seven Ghostbuster Gothic skyscrapers still loom above Moscow, massive and unavoidable, Orwellian testaments to the omnipresent power of the state.
Only now, far below the crenelated, spired peak of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, homeless drunks and their pack of filthy dogs huddle for warmth atop a subway grating, something absolutely unthinkable in the mid-1970s when I was a student in the U.S.S.R. In those days, small white vans labeled Special Medical Help patrolled the streets, scooping up any fallen drunks and carrying them off to who knows where to dry out.
The vans were easy to spot back then: The vast 10-, 12- and 14-lane boulevards of Moscow, Leningrad and other major cities had no traffic at all. Now, so much money flows through Moscow that the streets are clogged and the sidewalks packed with haphazardly parked Bentleys, Porsches and Escalades, all covered with the frozen and refrozen grime of winter.
The down-and-out are gathered at one end of the Arbat, the short, iconic Moscow street that is now a pedestrian walkway. In the 1960s and 1970s, celebrated Soviet poet Bulat Okudzhava sang about his home street as “my religion . . . my homeland.” Once an inviolable testament to Moscow’s ancient past, the Arbat is now populated by McDonald’s, the Hard Rock Café, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. A 10-minute walk away there’s a Blackglama boutique. Many of the leggy and startlingly beautiful young women who seem to have migrated by the thousands to Moscow—and the lobbies of its many luxury hotels—appear to be among the furrier’s faithful.
Perhaps most surprising is the two-story Seven Continents grocery store, at the corner of the Arbat and the 14 lanes of Smolensky Street. It overflows with imported specialty foods, smoked fish and—in a capitalistic slap in the face at a market once utterly dominated by the Soviets—high-end vodka. Back in the 1970s, a highlight of our meals in the student cafeteria at Leningrad State University was the occasional island of cooked-to-death gristle floating in the center of a grease-rimmed atoll of borscht. Out on the street, wizened men and women pushed colorful wooden carts from block to block, selling tea, juice, kvass and beer, all dispensed into and consumed from the same unwashed communal glass hundreds of times a day.
Nowadays, outside the Seven Continents, chauffeur-driven S-class Mercedes cars idle, waiting for their owners. Inside, business is brisk.
Not so at Lenin’s tomb, where queues once rivaled the lines for Space Mountain on Memorial Day. Today one can pretty much walk right in. The only flowers left in tribute to the heroes of the October Revolution and the successive leaders of the U.S.S.R. are those placed in front of a bust of Stalin.
In 1977, I was one of 30 Americans studying at Leningrad State University. In those days, whatever the Soviets lacked in material comforts—heat, decent food, toilet paper (we used squares of yesterday’s Pravda and Ivzestia)—they made up for in surveillance.
On our second day, one student was already on his way home—for missing the midnight curfew. Over the next several months, my two Soviet roommates—Volodya No. 1 and Volodya No. 2—seemed to know where I was every moment of every day, no matter how hard I tried to hide my tracks by taking this metro or that, switching to the bus, and then going back into the metro. To check out his suspicions about just how closely we were being watched, another American in our group mailed himself a letter from a distant corner of the city, posting it with nothing on the envelope but his name. No stamp, no address. A few days later, it showed up at our dorm.
Later, when the warmth and long days of spring arrived, my American girlfriend and I, desperate for a few unsupervised moments, took a commuter train far out of town, way beyond our prescribed area of independent movement. As we got down to some serious necking on a pebble-strewn beach on the Gulf of Finland, Soviet marines appeared out of nowhere—in a Zodiac-like boat—and stormed ashore. Clearly, we were not alone.
Nearly 40 years later, while in Moscow to profile U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul, I returned unexpectedly to my hotel room and began to wonder how much had or hadn’t changed. As soon as I opened the door, my eyes were drawn to a piece of paper on the floor. It was a note I had left inside my passport, which I had left inside the safe, which was now open. A cold shudder rose through my spine. I pushed the power button on my laptop. It started, and then crashed. My entire life—every photo, every email, every financial record, every word I’ve written over the last 28 years—was on that computer. I felt ill.
What had I been thinking? McFaul was someone who had strongly and repeatedly criticized President Putin. How could I have been so stupid as to have brought my workaday laptop and not realize I would be watched? Already the ambassador, in his completely conspicuous, flag-flying Cadillac, had dropped me off late at night at the hotel’s front door.
“We considered all electronic devices brought into the country to be compromised for the life of the machine,” the regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy told me later that week—before adding that if anyone had accessed or installed anything on my computer, I would never know. The tracks they did leave—the open safe—were just to let me know, once again, that I wasn’t alone.
Being young, being conspicuous, being the tiniest of tiny players near the front lines of the Cold War during the dying days of détente—it was wonderfully thrilling to be an American in the U.S.S.R.
Back then, there was no Erotic Gallery Institute, as there is now near the Arbat, a store that sells “games for romantic encounters.” And there were no neon ads for Gap advising passersby to “Make Love.” The only place where my girlfriend and I imagined we might truly be alone was in the dormitory sushilka, the small room where we hung our clothes, often for days, waiting for them to dry.
Stealing away one night, we found that someone had left the series of small ventilation panels in the triple-paned windows open. Snow was swirling in and a drift had already formed, sweeping down from the sill to the floor. With our hands, we swept clear a small patch of the battered parquet floor and lay down in the cold. Above us, the jeans, underwear, socks and sweaters that had been left to dry were all frozen in wrinkled, tortured shapes. Dali never conjured and Nabokov never wrote a more surreal or romantic scene.
