I never did get it, what this trip was all about. I stood at the rail of the cruise ship Alexander Pushkin staring out at the vast rolling shore of the Volga. Here or there was a patch of grain, not high enough even in late July to conceal the line of furrows plowed straight downhill in the most erosion-producing way possible. And here or there was a skinny cow in an untidy hectare of pasture. But most of the land looked empty, unsown, ungrazed, uncultivated. And all around me were minds just as fallow.
I was on something called the Volga Peace Cruise, a sixteen-day trip to the USSR featuring a nine-day boat ride from Rostov north up the Don, through the Don-Volga canal, and on up the Volga River to Kazan. The 160 passengers were all Americans. Most were antinuke activists and peace-group organizers with sixties leftover looks. Others were products of the Old Left. The peaceniks talked about peace, mostly in terms of atomic holocaust. The leftists talked about peace, mostly in terms of Soviet-American relations. The entire program of the “peace cruise” consisted in the bunch of us talking about peace. And the Soviet government had provided five Russian “peace experts” to talk about peace too.
I asked some of my fellow passengers what the point was.
“Atomic holocaust is the most important issue facing mankind,” said the peaceniks.
“Atomic holocaust and Soviet-American relations,” said the leftists.
What about dissident Russian peace activists? Was anyone interested in talking to them?
“There is no need for dissident peace organizations in the Soviet Union,” said the leftists. “The Soviet Union already has the largest peace organizations in the world. In America dissident peace organizations are important because American foreign policy is prowar. But the Soviet Union is propeace because twenty million Soviets died in World War II.”
“Well, if we see any …” said the peaceniks.
Did anyone expect the Soviet “experts” to say anything everyone hadn’t heard Soviet experts say already?
“Soviet-American relations are very important,” said the leftists.
Were we going to convince those experts that their government ought to pull its troops out of Afghanistan?
“Huh?” said everyone.
Or maybe the leftists would convince the peace activists to take a more political view of things?
“What leftists?” said the leftists.
I was attracted to the Volga Peace Cruise by a half-page advertisement in the February 27, 1982, issue of The Nation magazine. It read, in part, “Find out for yourself what’s going on in the Soviet Union capital and heartland as you join The Nation this summer on an exciting, affordable Soviet excursion.”
I have a sneaking love for the old-time left and that compendium of their snits and quarrels The Nation. Mind you, I’m a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business except to make a buck. Still, Wobblies, Spanish Civil War veterans, the Hollywood Ten touch the heart somehow.
But, to tell the truth, I’d never met any Old Leftists. I expected them to be admirable and nasty, like Lillian Hellman, or brilliant, mysterious, denying everything, like Alger Hiss, or—best of all—hard-bitten and cynical but still willing to battle oppression, like Rick in Casablanca. I did not expect them to be the pack of thirty fussing geriatrics I met at Kennedy Airport, misplacing their hand luggage, losing their way to the ladies’ room, barking at the airline personnel, and asking two hundred times which gate we’d have to be at in three and a half hours.
They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet Union was: pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidies of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.
The ad had promised excitement, and surely entering the Soviet Union would be exciting. The Russians are famous for making border crossing an exciting event. But we just stood in line for four hours. “You can understand the delay,” said a lady who had complained all night about everything on the flight to Moscow. “So many reactionary forces are trying to destroy the Soviet Union.” If reactionary forces are vulnerable to understaffing and inept baggage handling, they don’t stand a chance at the Moscow airport.
There was only one faint thrill when we handed in our passports to the officer in the little glass passport-control booth. He was maybe seventeen with a tunic too large around the neck and a hat too big by half. He made an awful face and shouted, “Num? Fuss num? Plas oaf burf? Dat oaf burf?”
One of my tour group members had been born in Kiev. She said her “plas oaf burf” was Russia.
“Dat oaf burf?”
“1915,” she said.
“When leaf?” hollered the passport officer.
“1920.”
“Reason leaf?” he yelled.
I swear she sounded embarrassed. “I don’t know. My parents did it.”
Then we got on a smoky, gear-stripped bus and rode past blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings, through the smoggy Moscow twilight, through half-deserted streets. No neon lights, no billboards, no commotion, not much traffic, everything dusty-looking and slightly askew, and everything the same for an hour and a half.
“Some people,” said a leftist lady with orange hair and earrings the size of soup tureens, “say the Soviet Union’s depressing. I don’t know how they can say that.”
We pulled up in front of an immense glass-curtain-walled modern hotel, a perfect Grand Hyatt knockoff, and I headed for the bar. It was pretty much like any bar in a Grand Hyatt. There was a big drunk man there, red-faced and bloated. He seemed to speak English. At least he was yelling at the bartender in it. “A glass of schnapps,” he said. He got vodka.
“How long you been here?” I said.
“Hahahahahahaha,” he said. “I’m from Frankfurt!”
“Scotch,” I said to the bartender. “Where’ve you been?” I asked the drunk. The bartender gave me vodka.
“Fucking Afghanistan!” said the drunk. Afghanistan? Here was some excitement.
“Afghanistan?” I said, but he fell off his stool.
My tour group of leftists met with another three or four groups in the Moscow hotel. The others were mostly peaceniks. I don’t know how my group got involved in the peace cruise or how I got put in with them. They certainly weren’t from The Nation. “The Nation prints too much anti-Soviet propaganda,” said a potbellied man smoking a pipe with a stupid bend in the stem.
In fact, there was no one from The Nation on the cruise except one assistant editor in the book-review department. The excursion ad had run, I found out later, in large part because The Nation received a commission for each passenger it signed up. The ad had listed a number of other sponsors: Fellowship of Reconciliation, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Promoting Enduring Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Fellowship League. A few passengers in the other tour groups were from those organizations, but most seemed to be representing tiny peace organizations of their own. And if you didn’t stick socks in their mouths right away, they’d tell you all about it.
First, however, a visit to Lenin’s tomb. It’s real dark and chilly in there, and you march around three sides of the glass case, and it’s like a visit to the nocturnal-predators section at the Reptile House with your grade-school class—no talking!
“He has the face of a poet,” said our beautiful Intourist guide, Marya. He certainly does, a nasty, crazed, bigoted face just like Ezra Pound’s.
None of the leftists so much as sniffled. This offended me. I can get quite misty at the Lincoln Memorial. And I had to explain who John Reed was when we walked along the Kremlin wall. “Oh, that’s right,” said the orange-haired lady, “Warren Beatty in Reds.” Today she wore earrings that looked like table lamps. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, presenting Red Square as if she’d just knitted it. “No crowds!” The square was cordoned off by soldiers.
Back to the hotel for another big drink.
We spent the rest of the day on a Soviet version of a Gray Line tour, visiting at least thirty places of no interest. For the uninitiated, all Russian buildings look either like Grand Army of the Republic memorials or like low-income federal housing projects without graffiti. There are a few exceptions left over from the czars, but they need to have their lawns mowed. Every fifteen feet there’s a monument—monuments to this, monuments to that, monuments to the Standing Committee of the Second National Congress of Gypsum and Chalk Workers, monuments to the Mothers of the Mothers of War Martyrs, monuments to the Inventor of Flexible Belt Drive. “In the foreground is a monument to the monument in the background,” Marya narrated.
During a brief monument lacuna, Marya said, “Do any of you have questions that you would like to ask about the Soviet Union?”
“Where can I get a—” But the leftists beat me to it.
“What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?” asked one.
“What is the retirement age in the Soviet Union?” asked another.
“What pension do retired Soviet workers receive as a percentage of their highest annual work-life salary?”
“Is higher education free in the Soviet Union?”
“What about unemployment?”
Marya answered, pointed out a few more monuments, and asked, “Do any of you have other questions you would like to ask about the Soviet Union?”
Exactly the same person who’d asked the first question asked exactly the same question again. I thought I was hearing things. “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”
And that flipped the switch.
“What is the retirement age in the Soviet Union?”
“What pension do retired Soviet workers receive as a percentage of their highest annual work-life salary?”
“Is higher education free in the Soviet Union?”
Marya answered the questions again. The third time it happened she began to lose her composure. I could hear her filling up empty places in the sightseeing landscape. “Look, there’s a building! And there’s another! And over there are several buildings together! And here [sigh of relief] are many monuments.”
All the time we were in Russia, at every opportunity, the questions began again, identical questions with identical wording. I’m proud to say I don’t remember a single one of the answers. Except the one about unemployment: “There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union. The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job.” A pretty scary idea, I’d say.
Later in the trip, when I’d fled the bus tours and was wandering on my own, the lumpier kind of Russian would come up and ask me questions—not the “You are foreign?” sort of questions but rapid, involved questions in Russian. Perhaps because my hair was combed and I wore a necktie (two Soviet rarities) they thought I had special access to the comb-and-necktie store and must therefore be a privileged party official who knew what was what. I’ve wondered since if they were asking me, “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”
One of the bus questioners stood next to me as we waited to board our flight to Rostov. She looked out at the various Aeroflot planes standing on the tarmac and managed a statement that was at once naive, gratuitous, patronizing, and filled with progressive ardor. “Airplanes!” she said. “The Soviet Union has thousands and thousands of airplanes!”
I never did find out what this lady looked like. She was only about four foot eleven, and all I ever saw was a skull top of hennaed hair with a blur of fast-moving jaw beneath it. She had that wonderful ability some older people have of letting her mind run right out her mouth.
“Well,” she’d say, “here I am with my seat belt buckled up just sitting right here in the airplane seat and folding my hands in my lap and I’ll move my feet over a little so they’re on top of my flight bag and pull my coat up over my shoulders, whoops, I’m sitting right on it but I’ll just wiggle around a little like this and pull it over my shoulders …” For hours, all the way to Rostov.
The peaceniks, especially the older peaceniks, were more visually interesting than the leftists. Somebody ought to tell a sixty-year-old man what he looks like in plastic sandals, running shorts, and a mint-green T-shirt with a Kenneth Patchen plagiarism silkscreened on the front.
The peaceniks were sillier acting than the leftists too. There was a pair of Quaker ministers with us, man and wife. But they were not Quakers as one usually pictures them. They had “gone Hollywood.” Imagine a Quaker who came up to you in the LA airport and tried to get a donation for a William Penn button. Not that they did that, but it always looked to me as though they were about to. Anyway, this couple bore different last names. When we got aboard the ship in Rostov, a passenger went to return a book to the husband.
“I’m sorry,” said the wife at their cabin door. “He’s not here.”
“But can’t I give the book to you?” asked the passenger. “It belongs to your husband.”
“We’re not the same persons,” said the wife.
My cabin mate was no leftist. “I’m not pro-Soviet,” he said as he watched me unpack a necktie with little duck hunters all over it. “I’m a retired peace activist. I mean I’m not retired from peace activism—you know what I mean.” He had spilled a bottle of Campho-Phenique in his luggage and had gastrointestinal trouble from the food and wouldn’t use the air-conditioning because it might give him a cold, so all the way to Kazan our cabin smelled like the bathroom at a Vicks factory. Three bus tours after we met he told me, “This country is just like a big club. Did you know there’s no unemployment? The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job!”
Fortunately there were other people to talk to. Actually, you couldn’t talk to most of them because they were Russians and didn’t speak English—what you might call a silent majority. On the plane to Rostov I’d sat next to a fellow named Ivor. He spoke only a bit of English but was a good mime. He got it across that he was an engineer. I got it across that I was an American. He seemed very pleased at that. I should come and stay with his family. I explained about the cruise boat, showing him a picture of it on the brochure. I did a charade to the effect that I’d better stick close to the boat. He gave me an engineering trade magazine (in Russian, no illustrations), and I gave him some picture postcards of New York. We parted in a profusion of handshakes at the Rostov airport.
The boat stayed at the dock in Rostov until midnight Tuesday. They have plenty of monuments in Rostov, too, and tour buses were lined up on the quay. I could hear someone asking inside one of them, “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”
I was just being herded into that bus when someone grabbed my arm. It was Ivor. “Come on,” he gestured. I escaped down the embankment. We got on a boat packed to the scuppers with Russians and went for a two-hour excursion on the Don. Ivor bought a bottle of champagne and began a labored explanation punctuated with hand wavings and flurries of picture drawing in my reporter’s notebook.
His father had been on the front lines when the armies of the East and West had met in Germany in 1945. Apparently the Americans had liberated every bottle of alcoholic beverage between Omaha Beach and the Oder-Neisse Line and really made the welkin ring for their Red comrades in arms. “Anglish—poo,” said Ivor. “Francis—poo,” but the Americans, they were fine fellows, plenty of schnapps, plenty of cognac, plenty of vino for all. And they could drink, those American fine fellows. So Ivor’s “vada” had made him promise (point to self, hand on heart) if (finger in air) Ivor ever met American (handshake, point to me) he must buy him much to drink. Da? (Toast, handshake, toast again, another handshake.)
Standing behind Ivor was a giant man well into his sixties, a sort of combination Khrushchev and old Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was staring hard at me, cocking an ear to my foreign language. He wore an undershirt and a suit coat with a line of medals out across the breast pocket, “Deutsch?” he asked me sternly.
“Nyet deutsch,” I said. “American.”
He beamed, I mean just beamed. “Ally!” he said. It was his only English word. He pulled out a wallet with what I guess were commendations and an honorable discharge. “Amerikanskii ally!” he said and slapped my shoulder. Eight-ounce glasses of brandy must be bought for Ivor and me.
I toasted him with my only Russian word—“Tovarishch!” He brought forth a tiny grandson and had him shake hands with me.
“Now the little one can say he met an American,” Ivor more or less explained. I toasted the big guy again. He pledged a long toast in return, and, as I understood Ivor’s translation, we’d drunk to the hope that America and Russia would be allies again in a war against China.
I bought more cognac. Ivor bought beer. The big fellow bought even more cognac.
When the boat docked Ivor and I went to a beer hall, a basement where they lined up half-liter mugs and squirted them full with a rubber hose from four feet away. Everyone grabbed half a dozen mugs at a time and drank one after the other while standing at long wooden tables. There was no communication problem now. We discussed women (“Ah, beautiful. Oh, much trouble”), international politics (“Iraq—poo. Iran—poo”), the relative merits of socialism versus a free-market system (“Socialism—enough responsible, nyet fun. Captialism—nyet enough responsible, plenty fun”), and, I think, literature (“And Quiet Flows the Don—poo, too long”). Then we went to another bar on top of a Russian tourist hotel and had even more to drink. I didn’t want to let my side down. And there were Ivor’s father’s feelings to be considered.
Ivor and I embraced, and I staggered back to my stinking cabin to pass out. The woman with her brains between her teeth was standing at the top of the gangplank. “I hope you’re not one of those people who’s going to see the Soviet Union through the bottom of a vodka glass,” she said.
Of course, we had plenty of Russians aboard the boat too. There were five of the advertised experts. I’ll change their names in case some reconstructed quote or poetic exaggeration of mine is misconstrued to mean that one of these Soviets might be “turned” by the CIA. No one deserves to be pestered by surreptitious Yalies who couldn’t get into law school.
Two of the experts were really journalists. Natalia was a pleasant blond woman of about forty. She didn’t have much to say. Nikolai was a sturdy guy in his midthirties, completely Western in dress and manner. He had lived as a foreign correspondent in Switzerland and Austria for seven years, wore a bush jacket like any other foreign correspondent, and was as bluff and hard-drinking as any newspaperman. I gathered this wasn’t much of an assignment. Nikolai took no notes at the peace confabs, and Natalia took only a few.
A third expert, Orlonsky, was a sinister-looking type with a half-Russian, half-Tartar face and slitlike eyes. He turned out to be a bored economist from the Soviet Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies who was along to brush up on his English in preparation for some academic conference he was going to in San Francisco. The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America’s rural areas. But Orlonsky seemed to be a look-alive fellow. He wanted to talk about America’s marvelous demand-side goods-distribution system and did our Reagan administration economic institutes have screws loose or what? Also, where did our automobile industry go? But the Americans wanted to talk about peace and Soviet-American relations.
Two more official-expert types were Dr. Bullshovich from the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economy and International Relations and Professor Guvov from the department of philosophy and sociology at Moscow U. Dr. Bullshovich was a lean, dry character with a Jesuitical wit that was lost on his audience. Between formal peace activities he hid somewhere. Guvov was a doctrinaire buffoon who looked like a Hereford cow and was a big favorite with the leftists. “He is not a professor,” one of the crew members told me later. “He is, you would call it, instructor. He should be teaching military schools.”
Besides the experts there were thirty or more officers, sailors, waitresses, stewards, and cruise personnel. Some of the higher-ranking crew members spoke English but usually didn’t let on. They preferred to stare blankly when the Americans began to complain. And the Americans did complain, the leftists worst of all. Between praise of the Soviet Union it was “It’s too noisy, too rough, too breezy. The chair cushions are too hard. And what’s that smell? This food is awful. Too greasy. Can’t I order something else? I did order something else. Didn’t someone say I could order something else? I’m sure I can order something else if I want to, and, young lady, the laundry lost one of my husband’s socks. They’re expensive socks and one of them is lost.”
Translating the complaints, or pretending to, were a half dozen Intourist guides. They began to have a haunted look before we were two days out of port.
When I came to, after the Ivor expedition, I stumbled into the ship’s bar. We’d cast off while I was asleep, and motion of the boat combined with motion of my gullet. I couldn’t have looked well. Nikolai was sitting on a stool next to one of the Intourist guides, a dark, serious type named Sonya. I gripped the bar with both hands and tried to decide which of the impossible Russian soft drinks would be easiest to vomit. “You need vodka,” said Nikolai, motioning to the barmaid. I drank the awful thing. “Now,” said Nikolai, “how did you get that President Reagan?”
“I voted for him,” I said. “How did you get Brezhnev?”
Nikolai began to laugh. “I do not have this great responsibility.”
“How are you liking the Soviet Union?” asked Sonya.
“I’m not,” I said.
She was worried. “No? What is the matter?”
“Too many Americans.”
Sonya kept a look of strict neutrality.
“I have not met many Americans,” said Nikolai. “They are all like this, no?” He made a gesture that encompassed the boat, winked, and ordered me another vodka.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Perhaps they are just old, a bit,” said Sonya with the air of someone making an obviously fallacious argument. “But,” she brightened, “they are for peace.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “They are progressive. They are highly progressive. They are such great progressives I think I have almost all of them talked into defecting.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” said Nikolai.
We docked on a scruffy island somewhere up near Volgodonsk. One of the U.S. peace experts, a pacifist from the American Friends Service Committee, got up a volleyball game against the crew. “Now let’s play and let’s play hard,” he told the American team. “But don’t forget we’re playing for fun.” The Russians trounced them.
That night the Russians took me out onto the darkened fantail, where they had dozens of bottles of beer, cheese, bread, and a huge salted fish.
Sonya was concerned about my Republicanism. “You are not for peace?” she asked.
“I during Vietnam War struggle for peace very much [talk with the Russians for a while and you fall into it too], rioting for peace, fighting police for peace, tear gassed for peace,” I said. “I am tired of peace. Too dangerous.”
Orlonsky began to laugh and then shook his head. “Vietnam—too bad.”
“Land war in Asia,” I said, “very bad. And some countries do not learn from an example.” All of them laughed.
“And in Middle East,” said Sonya, mirthfully pointing a finger at me, “some people’s allies do not learn also.”
“War is very bad,” said Nikolai. “Maybe U.S. and Soviet Union go to war over Lebanon—ha, ha!” This seemed to be a hilarious idea. The Russians all but fell out of their chairs.
“With all of Middle East how do you pick only ally without oil?” said Orlonsky.
I said, “With all of Europe how do you pick Poland?”
“You wish to make trade?” said Nikolai.
“Also, in deal, you can have South Africa,” I said.
“We will tell Reagan you are a progressive,” said Orlonsky.
“P. Cheh. [P.J.] was making faces at the Pravda news today. I do not think he is a progressive,” said Sonya.
“Oh, he is a progressive,” said Nikolai. “You remember, Sonya, he has almost all Americans on ship ready to defect.”
Marya made a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Sonya turned very sober. “Progressives,” she sighed. “Everything must be made perfect for them.”
Our first scheduled conference took place while we sailed through the remarkably scum-filled Tsimlyansk Reservoir. The conference coordinator was a short, broad, overvigorous American woman in her sixties. Let’s call her Mrs. Pigeon, so she won’t sue, and also because too much truth doesn’t go with travel writing. Mrs. Pigeon was an authority on the education of children, and, in fact, had the personality of a teacher—the sort of teacher who inspires any feeling child to sneak back in school at night and spray-paint the halls with descriptions of the human love act.
Mrs. Pigeon introduced the Soviet experts and their two American counterparts, Reverend Bumphead (not his real name) and the volleyball coach, Nick Smarm (not his real name). Nick was a politician, but the sort who would run for city council in Youngstown on an antidevelopment, pro-ecology ticket. He smiled too much. The Reverend Bumphead was a young man of Ichabod Crane lank. I never caught his denomination. My guess is Zen Methodist. He was either growing a beard or didn’t know how to shave.
Mrs. Pigeon opened the proceedings in a patronizing tone that propelled me back through twenty-five years to the vile confines of the fourth grade. It was a beautiful afternoon, hot sun, clear sky, and just the right crisp breeze. The conference was being held on top of the cruise boat, but the 120 or so participants had jammed themselves in under the shade deck, where they were surrounded by superstructure on three sides and the air was stifling.
The peaceniks took notes. I had a vision of newsletters, reams and reams of mis-stapled copier paper Xeroxed when the boss wasn’t looking, vomiting forth from the tepid organizations these people represented. “My Interesting Peace Voyage Through the Soviet Union”; “An Interesting and Enjoyable Visit to the USSR with Peace in Mind”; “Not War and Peace but Peace and Peace” (one of the clever ones); “Peace in the Soviet Union and an Interesting Trip There Too.” Maybe America could be bored into nuclear disarmament.
Nick Smarm began to speak. It was the standard fare. He laid the greater part of the blame for a potential international nuke dukeout on the American doorstep. What he was saying wasn’t wrong, at least not in the factual citations he made. But suddenly and quite against my will I was angry. To stand in front of strangers and run your country, my country, down—I didn’t care if what Nick said was generally true, I didn’t care if what he said was wholly, specifically, and exactly true in every detail. I haven’t been that mad in years. I had to leave, go below. I was ashamed of the man. And it occurred to me that I would have been ashamed if he were Russian and we were on the Mississippi. That big fellow with the medals down his suit coat, my ally, he wouldn’t have done such a thing on the Delta Queen.
I had a drink and went back. Reverend Bumphead from the Princeton Coalition for Disarmament was speaking now. He said exactly the same thing.
“Now it’s time for all of us to ask Nick Smarm and Reverend Bumphead some interesting questions,” said Mrs. Pigeon.
“Mr. Smarm,” said a fat man, “now this is just a hypothetical question, but the way you were describing how the arms race is mostly the fault of the United States, couldn’t I, if I were a red-baiter type, say that—just hypothetically now—you were a paid Soviet agent?” And he hastily added, “Please don’t anybody take my question literally!” They took his question literally. The fat man was smothered in literalism. Squeals of indignation wafted toward the banks of the Don.
“What a terrible thing to say!” shrieked one of the leftist ladies. I’ll bet she was pissed—all those friends of hers acting as Soviet agents for years, and no one ever offered to pay them.
I was about to put in a word for Pudgy, but it was too late. He was already overapologizing to Nick.
“What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?” asked a leftist. Reverend Bumphead didn’t know the answer to that, so Mrs. Pigeon answered the rest of the questions.
I tried to explain my patriotic seizure to Nikolai. “Wouldn’t you feel the same?” But I didn’t seem to be getting through.
I gave up. We had more drinks. About twenty minutes later Nikolai said to me, “I did not think Nick’s speech was so interesting.” He pulled a deadpan face. “I can read Pravda.”
Ashore in Volgograd we were taken to Mamayev Hill, where umpteen million people died defending the place when it was still named after Stalin. One of the leftists chaffed me for wearing a suit and tie again. I mean, we were going to visit a mass grave.
The leftists had their wreath, but watching them present it in their bowling shirts was more than I could bear. Besides, there was a fifty-two-meter-high statue of “Mother Russia” on top of the hill, and it’s pretty interesting if you’ve never seen a reinforced-concrete nipple four feet across.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after four days on the boat, that I discovered there were real Americans aboard. Some ordinary tourists had stumbled into this morass of the painfully caring and hopelessly committed. By price or by accident they had picked this tour, and they were about as happy as if they’d signed up for a lemming migration.
When I came back from Mamayev Hill, I saw a normal-looking, unagitated person stretched out on the sundeck in a T-shirt from Air America, the old CIA-run Southeast Asia airline. “What got you on this tour?” he asked, when I stared at the logo.
“I guess masochism,” I said and looked again at the T-shirt.
He puffed out his chest. “This ought to shake the bastards up.”
He was one of a dozen New Mexicans, all friends, traveling together on a private tour. Until now they’d had a wonderful time in the USSR. They said it was a fine place as long as you could drink like a Russian and leave like an American. But they’d taken this cruise without any idea of the peace that lay in store for them, and since they’d come on board they’d barricaded themselves in the promenade deck lounge and had kept the leftists out with loud Western accents and the peaceniks away by smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.
The New Mexicans had become special pets of the barmaid. They were allowed to take glasses, ice, bottles, and china forward to the lounge. She wouldn’t take tips from them, but Billy, a Santa Fe architect, had gone to the market in Rostov and brought the girl an armload of flowers. She blushed to the clavicle.
The New Mexicans were amazed at their fellow passengers, not in the matter of politics, but because the passengers were so rude to the crew. “And to each other,” said Sue Ann, a real estate developer. “I’ve never heard husbands and wives carp at each other like that in my life.”
When it came to politics, Tom, a former AID officer with the State Department in Vietnam, said, “After all, there hasn’t been a great big war since the A-bomb was invented.”
“I live in Alamogordo,” said Sue Ann. “I’ll bet that shakes the bastards up.” Indeed, that did bother some of the peaceniks, though the Air America T-shirt didn’t—not one knew what it was.
That evening at dinnertime, seven or eight young Russians from the local Soviet-American friendship club were ushered on board by Mrs. Pigeon. I noticed they gobbled the meat. Their president was a stiff young fellow, a future first secretary of the Committee for Lies About Grain Production if ever there was one. He had a guitar about two times bigger than normal and a watchful mien. But the others were okay. I sat between Alexei, a construction foreman who looked to be twelve, and Boris, an engineer (practically everyone in Russia is an engineer, just like our sanitation engineers are).
Alexei wanted to talk about rock and roll. His English was no worse than the average Rolling Stone reviewer’s. “Abba—too nothing. Hard rock! Yay! Led Zeppelin! Yay! And Kiss!! I most like—hard, hard rock! You know of Time Machine?” He was very excited that an American recognized the name of the top Russian rock group. “Good like Beatles. But is best hard rock America, yay! Is only too bad always rock stars so many dying of too much liquor and …”—he shot a glance at the president—“and of other things.”
Boris wanted to talk about cars. In his opinion Russia needed much, much faster cars. “I want fast car,” he said.
The Americans wanted to talk about peace and Soviet-American relations.
We went to the boat-deck music room after dinner with about ten Americans, mostly leftists, and Marya to help translate. There was one lady among the leftists I had not noticed before, though she was markedly ugly. It was not the kind of ugliness that’s an accident of birth but the kind that is the result of years of ill temper, pique, and petty malice. These had given a rattish, shrewish, leaf-nosed-bat quality to her face.
The president said, “We are thankfully welcomed of being here. English ours is not so well. But is practicing now you with more.” Then each of the Russian kids introduced himself and said his profession as best he could.
The ugly woman took aim at Alexei and said with great acerbity, “How many women construction workers are there in the Soviet Union?”
Alexei tried to answer. “Is construction worker training in mostly male, men I am meaning, but is also some girls if …” He got no further.
“Girls?!” shrieked the old bitch. “Girls?! We don’t call women girls! That’s an insult!” The Russian kids stared at her, mystified. The hag turned on Marya. “You explain to them that calling women girls is a demeaning thing to do.”
Marya said something placating in Russian. The president tried a halting apology, but the ugly woman interrupted. “One thing I’d like to know.” She glared at Alexei’s denim trousers. “Why do young people all over Europe, even in the socialist countries, pick up that awful American popular music and those sloppy blue jeans?”
Marya made what sounded like a pained verbatim translation. All the Russian faces in the room froze into the great Russian public face—serious but expressionless, part poker face and part the face the troops made on You’ll Never Get Rich when Phil Silvers asked for volunteers.
It isn’t easy to get a sober Russian to do anything on impulse, but I took Marya by the cuff and convinced her we’d better get some beer from the bar. The room was still silent when we returned. The president wouldn’t take a drink, but the rest of the Russians seemed glad enough to bury their faces in beer. The ugly woman sat smugly, still waiting for a reply. The other Americans were getting embarrassed. Finally, the woman’s husband spoke up. He was wearing his running shorts and Kenneth Patchen T-shirt again. “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a …”
Something had to be done. I stood up. “I think it’s very unfair for us to monopolize the comradeship and international goodwill of these Soviet young people,” I said. “There is another group of Americans in the lounge who are eager to discuss Soviet-American relations with our guests, and—”
“Oh, yes!” said Marya, and she began to point to the hallway and chatter in Russian. The New Mexicans were a little surprised to see us, but their hospitality didn’t falter.
“We are thankfully welcomed of being here,” said the president. “English ours is not so—”
“The hell with that,” said Tom. “Play us a song on that thing.” And it was a pretty good song, and Sue Ann even got him to have a drink when he finished.
There was another peace conference under the shade deck, and this time it was the Russians’ turn to speak. I was slightly late, due to sheer reluctance. Mrs. Pigeon was opening the session. “It is better to get these answers from Soviet experts than from our press,” she was saying as I walked in. I walked back out again and had a beer. Actually, I had three.
When I returned, Guvov, the buffoon, had wound up his speech and was answering a question about whether Solzhenitsyn was just a bad writer or a spy too. He was wearing a hilarious pair of ersatz Levi’s with TEXAS JEAN printed on a salad-plate-sized plastic patch on the ass. “Solzhenitsyn painted the Soviet Union only in dark colors,” he said. The leftists clapped vigorously. “Criticism,” said Guvov, “leads to the problems of democracy.”
Time for more beer.
It seemed to be dawning on a few of the peaceniks that something was askew. When I returned from the bar the second time, one of them was addressing Guvov. “A lot of the Americans on this trip have admitted the errors of American foreign policy. How come none of the Soviets have admitted any Soviet errors?”
“We don’t criticize the foreign policy of our government,” said Guvov, “because we hundred-percent agree with it and approve of it.” The questioner gasped. But the leftists all clapped, and so did quite a few of the peaceniks.
That was it for me and peace. I apologize, but this reporter did not attend any more peace functions of any kind.
The leftists and peaceniks spent most of every day talking. They were not arguing. They were not analyzing. They were not making observations. What they were doing was agreeing with each other—in feverish spasms of accordance, mad confabs of apposition, blathers of consonance. On Reagan, on the weapons freeze, on the badness of Israel, on the dangers of war, on the need for peace, they agreed.
I decided these people were crazy.
I watched my cabin mate write a letter to his wife. It was a political exhortation. “We Americans must repudiate the Reagan administration …” This to his wife of thirty years.
Crazy. And stupid too.
One, who was from the deep Midwest and looked like Millicent Fenwick, told me, “You know, if the people who put Reagan in office prevail, they’re going to take the vote from women.”
As we were going through the locks of the Don-Volga canal the woman with the direct connection between her cerebral cortex and her mouth came nattering up beside me at the rail. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said, staring at a gigantic blank wall of concrete. “They’re such wonderful engineers in the Soviet Union.” I agreed it was an impressive piece of work. “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, marvelous,” she said. She peeked over the side. “And where do they get all the water?”
The Intourist guides were at wits’ end, the Soviet experts were becoming testy, and the crew was clearly disgusted and getting into the grog ration earlier each day.
The ship’s doctor, a blowsy, mottle-eyed, disbarred-looking fellow, had taken to experimenting on the diarrhea symptoms half the Americans were suffering. Marya gave an elaborate burlesque of accompanying him as the translator on his rounds. The Russians would not explain the joke, but I know one peacenik had gone to him with the malady and received a laxative and a glass of 200-proof neutral grain spirits. I did not see that person again for thirty-six hours.
Sunday I was drunk.
What Was Going On in the Soviet Capital and Heartland as We Joined The Nation This Summer on an Exciting and Affordable Soviet Excursion?
I know I’ll never understand what the Americans thought they were doing in Russia, but I’m almost as confused about what the Russians thought they were letting them do.
Obviously the Volga Peace Cruise was approved. Unapproved things unhappen in the USSR. But though the Soviets had approved it, they didn’t seem very interested. In one of the cities where we docked, a local reporter came aboard and talked to Nick Smarm. When Nick finished excoriating the U.S. and began pointing out that the Soviet Union was also engaged in the arms race, the reporter simply stopped writing. This was the total media attention given us.
I suppose we were under surveillance. I noticed that Sonya took complete notes during the conferences, but it seemed to me she was paying most attention to what her countrymen said. Some peaceniks suspected their rooms had been searched. One woman had found her bags a little too neatly closed and zipped. Another woman’s copy of Peter the Great disappeared.
“Do not bother to look for it,” said one of the Intourist guides, when the woman made a stink. “It has doubtless slipped behind the folding bunk when the steward lady has been making the bed. It is most difficult to look under there so steward lady will do it for you during dinner.” This sounded suspicious. But the book did not mysteriously reappear after dinner, not even with certain pages torn out, so maybe it was just lost.
Neither I nor the outspokenly pro-American New Mexicans were bothered. One day Nikolai and Sonya took me on a nice but pointless speedboat ride up the Volga, and I assumed this was when my cabin was to be searched. But I’d used the old Ian Fleming trick of fastening a human hair with spit across my locker door and it was still there when I got back.
If anything was happening to the leftists, they weren’t talking. But one of them, the woman who was embarrassed to have left the Soviet Union as a child, had relatives in Moscow, whom I know she visited. When we went through customs at the end of the tour, she was searched completely and questioned so long that the plane had to be held for her. Our tour leader claimed it was because she’d lost one of her currency exchange receipts.
Whatever the official Soviet attitude toward us may have been, the private Russian attitude was manifestly clear. The Russians, when they’d had a few drinks, would repeatedly make declarations starting, “I am not an anti-Semite, but …” And, at least to judge by last names, many of our tour members were Jewish.
One of the crew, in the most confidence-imparting stage of drunkenness, told me, “You know Brezhnev is married to a Jew. Many members of the Presidium are married to Jews. This is why we cannot be so firm with the Israelis.”
But the peaceniks and the leftists were blind to this, or passed it off as anti-Zionism only. Their only serious concern was with the CIA. They were convinced there must be a CIA agent aboard. I suggested the fat man, surely an agent provocateur. But they’d decided he was okay, since he’d apologized to Nick. Someone said the leftists suspected me—that coat and tie. I asked Nikolai who he thought it was. “All of them,” he laughed.
I think the Russians had decided, both privately and officially, that these Volga peace cruisers were inconsequential people, unable to influence American policy in any important way.
When we docked in Togliatti, the leftists were very eager to see the Lada automobile plant there, one of the most modern factories in the Soviet Union. They were swooning to meet genuine “workers.” But it wasn’t on the schedule. Our Intourist guides made a halfhearted attempt to convince the local Intourist office to allow a tour, but it was too big a group, too many officials would have to be contacted, it would take too long to arrange, and so on. The leftists were pretty sore, and went so far as to make no excuses for the Soviet system this time.
But meanwhile Nikolai had somehow got in touch with the Lada plant management and informed them that I worked for Car and Driver magazine. I’m only a contributing editor there, and even if I were editor in chief I wouldn’t have much sway over the FTC, DOT, and Reagan administration executive orders that keep the Russians from exporting cars to us. But I was a representative of the real world nonetheless. And that afternoon there was a big chauffeured car waiting at dockside to take me, the only admitted Republican on board, for a personal tour of the Lada plant.
By Tuesday the twenty-seventh I’d come to the end of the tour, at least as a sentient being. There were still two days left to the cruise and six days left in Russia, but I was gone.
The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made of concrete. I saw buildings with the facades falling off that were still under construction. And everything that’s well built turns out to be built by somebody else. Moscow Airport was built by West Germans, the Grand Hyatt knockoff by the French, the Lada plant by Italians, and the very boat was made in Austria.
The air pollution in the cities is grotesque. No machine seems to run well. And the whole of commerce visible on the Volga consisted of carting sand and phone poles from one port to the next.
The New Mexicans had a contest: a bottle of champagne to be won by the first person who saw a crane with an operator in it. No one won. Every building site we saw was three-fourths deserted. I asked Orlonsky where the workers were, but he turned sly on me. “Perhaps they are at lunch.” It was 10:30 in the morning.
What little of the old and charming architecture is left is rotting, sitting neglected, waiting to be torn down for its lack of modernism. Russia stinks of dirty bodies and evil Balkan tobacco and a disinfectant they must distribute by the tank car daily, some chemical with a moldy turned-earth stench as though vandals had been at it in the graveyard or mice had gotten into the mushroom cellar.
In the end, every little detail starts to get to you—the overwhelming oppressiveness of the place, the plain godawfulness of it.
We put in at Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin. Not an easy city to find your way around in. Take Lenin Avenue to Lenin Street; go straight to Lenin Square, then left along Lenin Boulevard to Lenin Place and Lenin Lane. Don’t miss the monument to Lenin’s sister’s dog.
And there’s no reason to find your way around. There’s nothing there. We were shitfaced drunk in the bar by noon. The New Mexicans and I were crazed now with the desire for a cheeseburger, mad for the sound of a pedal steel guitar, would have killed for a six-pack of Budweiser and a ride down the interstate at 100 miles an hour in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. But there was nothing to be done, nothing to do but drink. So we drank and told jokes: old jokes, bad jokes, dirty jokes.
We were interrupting the progressives’ dinner now. The leftists and the peaceniks were mad. But only Mrs. Pigeon had the courage to approach. What were we laughing about?
“Sex,” said Sue Ann.
“Now, what’s so funny about sex?” said Mrs. Pigeon.
“Well, if you don’t remember, honey …” And Mrs. Pigeon retreated. We began to sing. We sang “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and “Danny Boy” and
My mother sells rubbers to sailors,
My dad pokes the heads with a pin,
My sister performs the abortions,
My God how the money rolls in.
The progressives could not get the Russians to stop us. Instead, the Russians came back from the fantail and began to sing too, loud Russian songs with stamping and pounding of glasses. Then some of the peaceniks came up and then a few more, and they began to sing along. They sang “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” and every verse to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a most cacophonous sound. We danced, and the ship’s band tried to play jitterbug. And the Russians gave toasts, and we gave toasts.
To the American Eagle,
The higher she goes, the louder she screams,
And who fucks with the eagle best learn how to fly!
And the Russians said:
To Mother Russia,
Who comes here with the sword
Dies by the sword!
And someone said, “From one bunch of sons of a bitches to another.” And we drank everything that came to hand, the doctor’s neutral grain spirits included, and sang and danced and drank some more until we passed out on top of the tables in a triumph of peace and Soviet-American relations.
There’s nothing at all to the rest of the trip except a huge gray-and-green hangover with a glimpse of the White Kremlin making my head ache in Kazan and the band piping us ashore in the morning with, most appropriately to my mind, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Then a flight to Moscow, rough weather all the way, and back to that Grand Hyatt hotel.
There was a Russian disco band in the lounge, balalaika music played on electric guitars and set to a Donna Summer beat. The New Mexicans went on to Leningrad, and I was left sitting alone in the bar waiting for my plane home a day and a half hence. An English tourist sat down next to me. “Been here long, have you?” he said. “Been all around the country?”
“I’ve been to the fucking back of the moon!” I said. “Scotch,” I said to the bartender. He gave me vodka.