Hedrick Smith's Books

> The Russians

The Russians: Intro

The thought flashed through his mind that this might be a tail, but he dismissed it as a foolish fantasy. Still, when he left the subway, the man went with him like a shadow. When he would stop to look in a store window, the shadow would also stop and look. When he crossed the street, the shadow crossed the street. When he walked slowly or speeded up, the shadow kept pace. Finally, though it was a cold winter day, Kalb went up to one of those ice-cream vendors that operate on Red Square oblivious to the seasons. He bought two eskimo sticks and without even turning around, extended an arm backward offering an eskimo. The shadow took it without a word. They continued that way all day, in tandem, never speaking.

His story was like a page from a bad spy novel exept that it actually happened. It was the kind of eerie episode that sticks in your mind if you are headed for Moscow. And it posed an implicit challenge to me as a journalist setting out for Russia with the objective of getting through to the Russians to try to see them as they see themselves.

Very quickly, however, I had an experience which made me think that getting through to the Russians would not be so much of a problem after all. One evening, after a concert by Duke Ellington, courtesy of the Soviet-American cultural exchange, my wife Ann and I were driving home in the office car, a large black Chevrolet Impala that seemed indecently ostentatious next to the spartan little compacts that Russians chugged around in. Although it was about 11 p.m., downtown Moscow was practically deserted, the sidewalks bathed in the iridescent bluish glare of Soviet street lights. Here and there, people were waving down cabs or hitching rides from passing motorists. To my surprise, one knot of young couples gaily hailed us despite what I had presumed were the risks of unauthorized contact with foreigners. So we picked them up. They had just come from a wedding party in a restaurant and were in no mood to quit partying. As we drove toward their part of town, they impulsively invited us in for a drink.

It was a very Russian encounter. All of them, men and women, were doctors or graduate students in medicine, married and in their mid-twenties. Misha, a slender, pale-faced, thoughtful young man who turned out to be our host, spoke quite passable English. The others said they read it but spoke little and we jabbered in a mixture of tongues. They insisted on sitting all together, and somehow seven of them crammed into our back seat. All were fascinated by the American car, its power, its size, its comfort, its speed, its gadgets, and they were enthusiastic at the chance to talk with Americans. We parked kitty-corner from their apartment building rather than right out front. Misha cautioned us not to speak English as we entered the building and slipped past the dezhurnaya, the old woman robed in baggy sweaters, sitting by the elevator, watching the building’s comings and goings.

Misha’s apartment, the first Russian home we had seen, was small and sparsely furnished but comfortable for two - one bedroom-living room, a tiny kitchen, a hall, a washroom, and a toilet. Nine of us sat in a tight little group on and around the bed, which did double-duty as a couch. The talk, awkward at first, was about the Ellington concert (none of them had gone because tickets were impossible for ordinary Russians to buy), about Western music and fashions, about our family, my job, about life in the West and only a bit about Russia. Misha and his almond-eyed wife, Lena, newly wed, had little to offer except what Russians consider most necessary: a couple of bottles of vodka carried off from the restaurant under someone’s coat, two large pickled cucumbers still wet with brine, and a heel of brown bread. A motley assortment of jiggers, juice glasses, and cups materialized for the vodka which, according to Russian custom, we drank neat - tossing back the head to knock down a shotful in one quick gulp.

This was our initiation to this essential ritual of Russian life and the others were amused by our timidity. They quickly gave us a short course on how to endure the lethal punch of the vodka: exhale before you gulp; instantly chase with food. The girls, grimacing terribly after each drink, would hurriedly take a bite out of one of the pickles which passed continuously around the circle. Others gnawed at the bread. Misha explained that during the war, when bread was short, the hardy drinkers passed the crust around the circle and simply took a whiff, not a bite. For them, the whiff was enough to counteract the vodka. He demonstrated, and then handled me the bread and a shotglass. I downed the vodka, took a sniff of bread, and came up coughing. The room dissolved in laughter. Misha urged me to try again. I shook my head. No, he meant only the bread, and this time insisted I breathe deeply. So I inhaled that moist, rich, sweet-sour earthiness of Russian brown bread. And I nodded to him without understanding how this whiff, no matter how nourishing to the nostrils, would cool the fire that was still in my throat.

So it went, very innocently, until the vodka ran out - at about three in the morning. Before we parted, we all exchanged phone numbers and heart-warming expressions of friendship. Once again, Misha whispered a warning not to speak English and ferried us past the sleepy-eyed grandmother by the elevator. We bade farewell outside, but not before Misha and Lena urged us to keep in touch. “We must get together again,” Misha insisted.

Ann and I drove home, amazed at the ease of communication, the friendliness of the young people and their unquenchable curiosity about America. We had learned little about Russia beyond how to drink vodka, but we had passed through that seemingly impassable barrier to human contact. As we pulled away from the curb, I had a moment’s pang of uncertainty when headlights flashed in the rearview mirror. They did not follow us, though they may have stopped at Misha’s building. Still, we congratulated ourselves for having gotten through to some young Russians so quickly.

The next day, as a gesture of thanks to Misha and Lena, I wangled two tickets for them to an Ellington concert and telephoned their apartment to let them know. I kept getting no answer or wrong numbers. Other reporters had already warned me about the unreliability of the Moscow phone system, so I doggedly persisted. But after pestering one woman twice in a row, I decided something was amiss besides the circuits. That evening, Ann and I delivered the tickets in person.

The dezhurnaya was gone and the elevator was not working. We walked up the eight stories. Lena was at home, surprised but happy to see us again so soon and delighted with the tickets. I mentioned the trouble with the phone and we double-checked the number. It was absolutely correct except for the last digit. Instead of 6, Misha had written 7. It was not a question of legible handwriting. The figures were neat and clear.

We corrected the number and went off, conveying greetings to Misha and accepting Lena’s promise to get together after the concert. Over the next few weeks, I phoned several times. Misha was always out - at work, away on a trip, visiting his parents. But Lena always sounded happy to talk. Once we even discussed where we might meet when Misha was free. One evening when I called, Lena told me I could catch him at his parents’ apartment and make the arrangements. She gave me the number. When I called, Misha answered. But when I gave my name, he hung up. I tried again. The phone was busy. I called Lena back and told her that obviously Misha did not want to see us again, and I apologized for bothering them. “I’m so sorry, she said. “You understand?”

I hung up, discouraged but wiser. Although I had not been so blatantly tailed as Marvin Kalb in my first days in Moscow and had made a quick contact, it was now plain that getting to know Russians and making real friends among them was going to be a much more formidable task than it had first seemed. I ran into other Westerners who had also made “one-time Russian friends” and had been unable to pursue those contacts. Some weeks later, talking with an experienced American diplomat who had served in Moscow in different times - under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, I mentioned our experience with Misha and Lena.

“Oh,” he said, “so you have discovered that the Iron Curtain is not barbed wire on the border of Austria and Czechoslovakia but it is right here in Moscow at the end of your fingertips. You can reach out, you can live right here among them and not really know how they live. The controls are so tight they shut you out. One night, one evening you can talk and drink with them - especially if they can explain it away later as an accidental encounter. But the next morning, they think it over and decide it’s too risky to go on.”

Sadly, the diplomat seemed to be right. Yet surely he had caught only part of the truth. For I sensed in Misha’s conflicting emotions a hint of a society more complex than I had first assumed and a people with more sharply contradictory drives than I had imagined. Clearly there had been a conflict between Misha and Lena over whether to continue seeing us and later I met other Russians who felt similar ambivalence about friendships with foreigners. In an almost childish way, Misha had exulted in the experience of riding in an American car, admiring its chrome and its horsepower. Yet he was knowing enough to warn me in advance to park kitty-corner from his apartment house and not to talk English as we passed the elevator lady. Even more unsettling to me, his society had so conditioned his political reflexes than even while we were holding vodka glasses and toasting our friendship, part of his brain was concentrating on changing that last digit of his telephone number. There was in Misha, then, not one Russia but two - the official Russia, the Russia of police controls and Pravdaand retreating from unauthorized foreign friendships, and poised against this the other Russia, more human, impulsive, emotional, and unpredictable.

The problem, it seemed to me as I began to pull together the threads of what I was seeing, was that established images of the Russians did not capture this complexity, this ambivalence. The model of the totalitarian state entirely omits the fascinating eccentricities of life beneath the surface, the readiness of people like Lena to disobey the unwritten rules of the system. The opposite, comfortable assumption of most Westerners that Russians are not much different from the rest of us misses the important conditioning that the Soviet system had built into Misha. At almost every turn, the improbability of the down-to-earth realities of Russian life constantly forced me to correct my own preconceptions. The painstaking dissections of Western Kremlinologists, for example, had exposed the fiction of the Communist Monolith but did not quite prepare me to hear a dissident’s wife disclose that she was a Party member or to spend an evening listening to a Party apparatchiktell me cynical jokes about Lenin and Brezhnev.

The longer I stayed in Moscow, the more I began to wonder whether anomalies weren’t the rule. I found that in spite of the climate of aggressive state atheism, there are twice as many church adherents as card-carrying Communists; that in a society that has enshrined state ownership of property, more than half of the living space is privately owned; that in a system of rigorously collectivized agriculture, nearly 30 percent of farm output is grown on private plots and much of it sold through sanctioned free enterprise markets; that six decades after the czars were overthrown, there is a surge of interest in Russia’s czarist past and its artifacts; that in spite of the rigid ideological conformity imposed from above, large numbers of people are politically indifferent and privately mock the inflated claims of Communist propaganda; that in the land of the proletariat, people are far more rank-, class- and status-conscious than in the West.

Before going to Russia I had set aside the myth of the classless society but I was still taken aback the first time I heard Russians talking about rich Communists - millionaires, even. Initially, when two writers calmly referred to someone’s being “rich as Mikhalkov,” I presumed that Mikhalkov was some merchant prince of old who had built a fortune from furs or salt mines in czarist times. But I was informed that this Mikhalkov - Sergei Vladimirovich - was a Communist, an immensely successful children’s writer, a literary watchdog and bigwig in the Writers’ Union, who later became the first person publicly to call for exiling Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and who issued other literary pronouncements. The writers told me, and mentally toted up the figures out loud, that along with Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quite Flows the Don) and perhaps another writer or two, Mikhalkov had legally earned a million rubles or close to it, from the multiple editions and collections of his books and from lucrative prizes awarded for loyal service. They said he had two country mansions, a chauffeured car, a fancy in-town apartment, and the life-style as well as the bank account of a capitalist. Moreover, this seemed to run in the family. For he had two sons making their way in the literary world and a son-in-law, Yulian Semenov, who specialized in spy novels and television serials that glorified the KGB (secret police) and earned 100,000 rubles^*at a whack.

The Mikhalkovs notwithstanding, I had to learn that money is a poor yardstick in Russia. Earnestly, I asked Intourist guides, queried my Russian office interpreters, went to factories or engaged people in conversation in restaurants, inquiring how much they

earned, how much they spent on food or rent, how much it cost to buy a car, trying to compare living standards. I busily went on making computations until Russian friends tipped me off that it was not money that really mattered but access orblat(the influence or connections to gain the access you need) - access to cities like Moscow where the stores have food, clothing and consumer goods in quantities and qualities unavailable elsewhere; access to the best schools and to good vacation spots or government cars, or to that most prized of privileges, the opportunity to travel abroad and mingle legally with foreigners; or access to a system of special stores for the elite where a new Soviet-made Fiat-125 Compact costs not the usual 7,500 rubles ($10,000) but only 1,370 rubles ($1,825) and the waiting time for delivery is a couple of days instead of the normal two or three years.

I also had to unlearn the notion that Russia had become a modern industrial state on a par with the advanced West, for that concept obscures as much as it reveals. Behind the mask of modernism, of missiles, jets and industrial technology, is concealed the imprint of centuries of Russian history on the structure of Soviet society and the habits and character of the Russian people. For it remains an intensely Russian land in ways that newcomers, especially Americans with our penchant for instant understanding, our impatience with history, our fixation with Communism, are slow to comprehend. Here and there, the traveler glimpses signs of a very traditional country - women patiently sweeping city streets with long-handled twig brooms, peasants bent over the fields hoeing by hand, store clerks adding up bills, click-clack, on ancient wooden abacuses. But it was months before I began to appreciate the weight of the Russian past on the Soviet present.

Behind the majestic stage-setting of the five-year-plan, I also came to understand, there is an erratic, helter-skelter scramble of production which plays such havoc with quality that Soviet consumers know to check the date of products (much as American housewives check for fresh eggs) to avoid the undependable goods made in the frantic, catch-up final ten days of every month. Instead of one economy, it turned out, Russia has five - defense industry, heavy industry, consumer industry, agriculture, and an illegal counter-economy - each with its own standards. The first and last seemed to give the best performance. The rest were mostly muddling through. The propaganda vision of shockworkers tirelessly building socialism was quickly dispelled for me by the undisguised goldbricking of waitresses, repairmen or builders. “This is the workers’ paradise - the greatest place in the world for workers to goof off,” a young Russian linguist chirped to me. “They can’t fire us.”

It was this latent anarchy in Russian life that surprised me the most - the irrepressive unruliness of human beings in a system of rules. I knew something beforehand about corruption in Soviet society, but I had not grasped how expert Russians were at finagling ways to beat the system and how much it affected the fundamentals of everyday living until I came across Klara, a Moscow State University coed. Klara’s family lived in a dingy little provincial town. She was desperate to avoid being sent there or to Siberia on government assignment as a teacher after graduation. She found it impossible to get a job in Moscow because she could not get registered for Moscow housing. (The passport controls are designed to put a ceiling of 8 million on the city’s population.) But Klara hit upon the scheme of marrying a Moscow lad to qualify for city housing as his wife. One of her close friends told me that Klara paid 1,500 rubles

($2,000 - a year’s pay in her first job) for a bogus marriage to the brother of another friend, never planning to spend a single night with him. In fact, the groom ducked out quickly after the wedding ceremony. All Klara wanted was to use the marriage certification in her passport and six months of “married life” to obtain her Moscow propiska, her resident’s permit. A scientist later told me of a couple living in a provincial city who went to even greater lengths for the privilege of living in Moscow. They divorced and each married a Muscovite to obtain a propiska. Then they divorced their Moscow spouses and remarried. When I eyed him skeptically, the scientist insisted it had truly happened that way. Other Russians told me that literally thousands of people resorted to “marriages of convenience,” as Russians call them, to live in big cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and to escape what they regard as exile in the provinces.

It fascinated me that there were such cunning devices for foiling the authorities and that Russians, of all people, supposedly being a nation of sheep, would resort to such expedients. For the notion of the totalitarian state, perhaps useful for political scientists as a bird’s eye view of Soviet society, misses the human quotient. It conjures up the picture of robots living a regimented existence. Most of the time, it is true, the vast majority of Russians go through the motions of publicly observing the rules. But privately, they are often exerting enormous efforts and practicing uncommon ingenuity to bend or slip through those rules for their own personal ends. “Slipping through is our national pastime,” a woman lawyer smilingly commented to me.

Russians, I was also comforted to see, have not lost any of the madcap improbability of Dostoyevsky’s characters. I was prepared to hear dissidents curse their KGB interrogators, as many did, but not prepared to hear others say their interrogators were polite or to learn that over the years the chasers and the chased sometimes develop personal ties. It came as a surprise, for example, when Joseph Brodsky, the poet who later emigrated, told me that his KGB interlocutor fancied himself a writer, too, and whenever they met, he would show Brodsky his prose and ask for suggestions and criticism.

Such a relationship is hardly typical since dealings with political police in any country are fundamentally unequal and intimidating. I knew of cases of sadism and vindictive meanness. Yet I also knew Soviets, especially those who had been through labor camps and were not easily intimidated, who jokingly referred to security agents rather possessively as “my KBG man.” A Jewish family, embittered at having been kept under tight house arrest during President Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1974 to prevent their demonstrating or issuing statements, told me how their police guards had gone to buy groceries for them. And they laughingly remembered how later on they had seen “our man” in some food store and nodded in recognition across the sacks of sugar.

One reason why Soviet life is so deceptive is that Russians are masters at the art of lying low, of adopting the protective coloration of conformity in order to get by with something or to pursue some special interest that would be crushed if discovered. Important elements of Russian culture and intellectual life have survived this way. During the scientific ban on genetics under Stalin and Khrushchev, for example, some biologists managed to find refuge in institutes of chemistry and physics. They secretly kept their science alive by covering up their real work with phony experiments in other fields or by doing experiments at home in their kitchens, as one scientist told me. Cybernetics had a similar sub-rosaexistence when it was in the doghouse as a “bourgeois science.”

Again, while Western rock and jazz were being publicly condemned by the stody guardians of Communist morality in the Soviet press, a few Soviet musicians quietly organized rock groups and played “forbidden music.” Somehow, a futuristic electronic music studio has been operating in the heart of Moscow, developing far-out combinations of the most modern Western rock or cosmic-sounding electronic music accompanied by expressive modern dance, and pulsing to strobe lights and laser-like beams. The whole scene, an offshoot and strange beneficiary of the high priority attached to radio electronics by the Soviets, is far beyond the bounds of official tolerance. Yes, I was told, some authorities know about it and are prepared to pretend that it does not exist so long as it does not attract attention, does not ‘raise a scandal,” as Russians put it.

The electronics expert and music lover who took me to the studio and arranged a mind-blowing performance of its sight-sound-dance compositions asked me not to write a newspaper story about it at that time because publicity just then might jeopardize the studio’s precarious semiofficial sponsorship. Similar precautions were urged upon me when I was taken to a private concert of very hard rock. “Until this sort of thing gets official acceptance of some kind,” a jazz musician advised me, “our survival depends on people not knowing about us. That is the way our life is. The most interesting things are going on in private where you can’t see them. Not only you as a foreigner but other people, Russians, as well. To you that sounds crazy, I know, but to us it is normal.”

The odds against foreigners finding out about such things are formidable. For Soviet authorities raise many obstacles to normal, easy open contacts between Russians and foreigners. Those who travel to Russia for brief visits are usually escorted about in delegations and tour groups to official meetings or tourist sites and are kept occupied with group activities by guides and interpreters who shepherd them from morning to night. (Although I went to Russia skeptical of such tales, one Intourist guide informed me that guides are required to report to the secret police on those foreigners who stray from the group, speak Russian, or have Russian friends or relatives whom they try to contact. He even showed me the room off the lobby of the Intourist Hotel and described the back room on the top floor of the Metropole where KGB officers received their reports. “Some guides are conscientious about this, and some don’t bother much,” he said, “but everyone is supposed to do it. If you don’t, they call you in after a while to ask why not.”)

Those who go to Russia as residents live a cloistered existence. On the final approach of our first flight into Moscow, I remember Ann’s fleeting notions of freedom. As she peered out of the window of the Austrian airliner flying low over the Western outskirts of the city, she exclaimed: “Look, there are houses! Maybe we can live in a house out of town instead of a foreigners’ apartment.” But the choice was not ours. The houses she saw were the little bungalows, the izbas, of the peasants or the country cottages and dachas of the Soviet elite. Like nearly all other diplomats, businessmen, and journalists who work in Moscow, we were simply assigned to an apartment building, one of half a dozen foreign ghettos around the city provided by Soviet authorities for foreign residents. We did not even have the choice of apartment. Living where we wanted - out among the Russians - was completely out of the question.

Around our foreign community was stretched a cordon sanitaire. The courtyard of our eight-story apartment building at Sadovo Samatechnaya 12/24 was crudely closed off from the adjacent apartment houses of Russians by a ten-foot high cement wall constructed so close to our building that it was awkward driving in cars to park. The only way to enter our building was through a single archway past uniformed guards who manned a sentry box 24 hours a day. They wore the uniforms of ordinary policemen but actually worked for the KGB.

Soviet authorities tried to maintain the transparent fiction that the guards were there for our protection but it broke down on numerous occasions. Once, a 12-year old Russian school friend of our daughter Laurie telephoned from her home in fright, saying that the guard had stopped and interrogated her closely as she tried to visit us. He had sent her home and she was afraid to come back unless Laurie came out and got her (and she was unique, for other school friends did not dare to come at all except as a group for birthday parties). When I protested to the guards for interfering with the children, one lamely replied that they were only trying to protect us from “hooligans.” On another occasion, Aleksandr Gleizer, an art collector, rather foolishly tried to bluff his way past the guards to my office which was in the same building, by speaking a few words of English. They seized him, and for more than an hour held him in the sentry box - I could see his terrified face through the window - while I argued with the guards to let him go. Only after a group of other correspondents gathered and the guards evidently feared a lot of unfavorable publicity over such a minor incident, did they release him. Once again, the excuse was that they were trying to protect me from an impostor, though I knew him well and had told them so.

It would never have dawned on most Russians even to venture near our contaminated zone. There was a group of specially screened translators, maids, chauffeurs, janitors, repairmen, and clerks supplied by UPDK, a Soviet government agency, to foreigners and embassies, whose faces were known to the guards and who could enter unhindered. Official and other prominent Russians could pass the guard-barrier for diplomatic receptions and other special occasions by showing written invitations to the guards. But ordinary Russians were challenged and interrogated. In more than three years in Moscow, I found practically none prepared to risk that ordeal. It was possible for us to go out in the car, pick up Russian friends, and drive them into the compound past the guards, but when we did that on two occasions, the guards ran up close to us either to try to identify our guests or to scare them. Other people, even world famous writers or poets, refused invitations to dinner, mostly without explanation. I remember one writer, with a shiver, saying, “I can’t stand being in that atmosphere.”

In another Russian couple we knew, the wife - who came from a Communist Party family and who prided herself on her independence - maintained that it was not fear that deterred her but the embarrassment of having to answer the guard’s questions about her identity and her foreign friends. Her husband disagreed violently. “How can you say that? How can you pretend you are not afraid?” he gasped and he turned to me and said in a quiet voice, “Maybe she is not afraid, but I am afraid.”

Such fears gave a lopsided tilt to our Soviet friendships: we went to their homes, but they never came to ours. Life was hampered by other controls, like tapped telephones, special white-on-black license plates for foreigners to make their cars recognizable to all in an instant (our code was K-04: K for correspondent, 04 for American), and the ban on travel more than 25 miles from the Kremlin without special permission (a cumbersome procedure that took a week at a minimum and frequently ended failure). Once the tap on our office phone was so clumsily installed that the wires got crossed with the police headquarters. I was away but my colleague, Chris Wren, kept getting calls for pult, the switchboard. It took several calls before he tumbled to whichswitchboard and to the fact that it was police officers and others calling in complaints. When we reported the problem, we got the swiftest, most solicitous attention on any repair job during my time in Moscow.

Yet, in all honesty, it was not merely controls that inhibited foreign contact with ordinary Russians. Because of the obvious obstacles very few foreigners make a serious and sustained effort to meet and get to know Russians, other than their few designated official contacts. A rather comfortable paternalism envelops the foreign community. The lack of choice in housing may be an affront to a Westerner’s sense of freedom but it spares him from house-hunting and simultaneously insulates him from that kind of humdrum encounter with ordinary Russians. The same is true with shopping. Soviet authorities provide special hard currency food shops which, though they periodically run out of ordinary things like tomatoes, tuna fish, orange juice, or strawberry jam, are far better stocked and cheaper than ordinary state stores. The result is that few foreign women even bother to go to Russian stores or experience what shopping is like for Russian women. Similarly, most foreigners travel by car and miss a chance to mingle with Russians who almost all have to ride the bus, tram or subway. The ghetto existence is reinforced by foreign schools - a French School, a German school, an Anglo-American school for the children of foreigners, run by Western embassies. UPDK, the government agency that supplies maids and translators, also provides special ballet classes, language tutoring, exercise groups, and occasional tours to occupy the diplomatic wives.

Each major embassy has its own country house for rural outings, picnics, and parties. About 100 miles northwest of Moscow, at Zavidovo, there are some government lodges on the Volga River which foreigners can rent for a taste of rustic Russia. (A Russian friend who had a boat that he operated on the river said he was sternly warned by guards to stay away from the area used by foreigners.) West of Moscow, beyond a lovely pine forest, there is a “diplomatic beach” on the Moscow River. But the foreigner who tries to edge further down the riverbank where Russians swim and fish may be stopped by militia men who jot down license plate numbers and shoo the wayward foreigners back to their own section. Stopping on the road that passes through the dacha-land of the elite is also forbidden.

The consequence of this privileged segregation is that most foreigners - even East Europeans - stick to the beaten path. They pass their Moscow tours entertaining each other and going occasionally to museums and tourist haunts. Except for official functions with Russians, life soon comes to resemble a long cruise on a luxury liner with the same old bridge partners every evening.

Yet surprisingly, all these mechanics of segregated living do not make it impossible for a curious, purposeful Russian-speaking foreigner to meet and get to know Russians. What the restrictions do insure, however, is that by and large those with whom foreigners tend to mix are special people, almost all unusual in some way. And this obviously affects and colors an outsider’s view of Russia.

An entire veneer of people, running into the thousands, has been created by the Soviet system for dealing with foreigners. We used to call them “official Russians” but we did not mean merely government officials. For the veneer extends to high-level journalists specializing in foreign affairs, to Intourist guides, translators, specialists at the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada or the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, executives in foreign trade organizations, Party scientists and administrators. Practically every Soviet institution from the Red Army to the Writers’ Union or the Russian Orthodox Church has its foreign department set up to deal with outsiders. So fixed is the circuit for foreigners that I found on a trip to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk in Siberia, I was taken to the very same specialists whom Ted Shabad, another Timesreporter, had met ten years before.

These “official Russians” who have a license, in effect, to deal with foreigners have the task of projecting Pravda’sRussia, the Russia of scientific successes, socialist workers’ democracy, and the modern welfare state. Although I had working relationships with about 30 such people, it was very hard - though not impossible - to find out what they thought about life and to get to know them personally. Mine was far from a unique experience. I knew a Scandinavian Ambassador who had served several years in Moscow and who complained that he had never been invited home by his opposite number in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Even when the Russian official’s mother died, the Ambassador said, he was held at arm’s length. He called the Foreign Ministry to obtain the official’s home address to send condolences and flowers, but the Ministry refused to give it out. He was instructed to send his flowers to the Ministry. Other foreigners have been treated differently, but the results are often the same. Sargent Shriver, the international lawyer and presidential aspirant, told me that he had not only gotten the official red carpet treatment in Moscow but that he had also been invited home by several foreign trade officials and executives. The hospitality was cordial, he said, but the talk was dry. “I’ve had what they call in diplomacy an exchange of views,” Shriver said, “but I’ve never had with any Russians what you and I would call a conversation.”

It is hard for someone sitting in the comfort of a Western living room, accustomed to the give-and-take of an open society, to grasp what an obstacle this uncommunicative facade poses. I have often been asked by people in the West whether censorship is a problem for reporters in Russia. Not literally. Censorship on outgoing dispatches was ended by Khrushchev in 1961 and most newsmen now send out their stories direct by telex or cable (though photos have to go through censorship). The Russians have other ways of dealing with reporters who poke into things they prefer left uncovered. The most common is constantly to hound, scold, reprimand them for their dispatches, usually in private but sometimes publicly in the press. Occasionally, tires are punctured or reporters are beaten up by police goons to deter them from making unauthorized contacts. Once during my tour, two Western newsmen were interrogated by the KGB in investigations of criminal cases against dissidents, which put a chill on everyone. More frequently, the Soviet Foreign Ministry simply refuses to let reporters travel outside of Moscow or to get official interviews if the Party takes offense at their writing. It happened to me several times. Once, as punishment, I was excluded from a group interview that Brezhnev held with American correspondents on the eve of a summit meeting. And finally, correspondents are expelled or forced to withdraw as were at least four correspondents during my stay in Moscow.

Yet, these harassments in fact represent less of a problem that censorship. Not the censorship which most Westerners immediately call to mind but the self-censorship of most Russians that inhibits them from speaking candidly with outsiders about their society. For most people, this is a habit born of fear and loyalty. But ultimately it springs from a national mania for dressing up reality at all costs and covering up the secret vices or virtues of Russian life or the awkward truths that do not square with Communist propaganda. Nearly everyone is coopted to some degree into not revealing that Soviet life does not measure up to the Party’s pretensions - whether the artless fiction that Soviet writers do not have to submit to censorship, the counterfeit claim that more than 100 Soviet nationalities live in happy harmony, or merely the petty pretension that under socialism, waitresses do not need or want tips.

Plenty of Western officials and politicians, of course, squirm mightily to avoid admitting inconvenient facts, but rarely do they resort to the blatant and often baffling extremes of Soviet posturing and prevarication. Soviet officials will blandly deny to an American legal delegation that the Soviet Union imposes the death penalty (though the Soviet press occasionally reports executions); contend to Congressmen that emigration by Jews and others is completely free; insist that Soviet labor camps have an excellent medical system (after the death of a well-known political prisoner operated on for an ulcer by another prisoner because no professional medical care was available); and make other claims that immediately cause a foreigner to raise a skeptical eyebrow.

What makes the Soviet false fronts so much more misleading than those of other countries is the lack of public controversy and independent information to provide a corrective context. The visitor can peer in vain at power stations, truck factories or private cars for an understanding of Soviet Russia. It is not a monolith but it can wear a pretty monolithic facade and the outsider can miss entirely the intangibles and the invisible mechanisms that set it and its people apart from America, the West, and even Eastern Europe.

Another problem is that individual Soviets will sometimes quite consciously shut out the foreigner even when he thinks he is enjoying a moment of personal confidence. I remember a Jewish scientist telling me how, on a trip to America, he had been asked by a Midwestern scholar whether there was academic discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union. The two were alone and yet this Soviet scholar told me that he lied to the American and told her there was no discrimination even though he had been personally very upset by repeated cases in his own department. He had been afraid, he said, that if he told her the truth, somehow the word would get back to Moscow and he would be denied further trips abroad. He said he was confessing this to me only after having decided to emigrate to Israel and having broken his ties with the Soviet system.

Societies, of course, play down their problems, put their best foot forward and try to make a good impression on visitors, but Soviet society, with the special vanity of its utopian ideology, takes this tendency to extremes. No more dramatic example of staging a show to impress foreigners took place during my stay in Russia than the face-lifting given Moscow just before President Nixon’s visit in the summer of 1972. Entire blocks of old buildings were burned down and carted away. Hundreds of people were moved out. Streets were widened and repaved, buildings repainted, trees and lawns planted, fringed with fresh flowerbeds put in practically on the eve of his arrival. Even our building, far from the Kremlin, was spruced up a bit on the odd chance that Nixon might show up. Under the czars this was called “Potemkinizing,” after the prince who erected fake villages along the highway used by Catherine the Great to impress her with the wealth of his region. Nowadays, Russians call it pokazukha, for show.

Pokazukhacan cover anything from the hard currency shops, the fancy imported goods in the windows of G.U.M. department store (goods which usually cannotbe bought inside) to the model farms and factories where foreigners are taken, down to a little thing like elaborate menus in tourist hotels. Printed on glossy paper, Russian menus can run for pages, spinning out an impressive list of selections in four languages. Only when it comes to ordering does the visitor confront the reality that only about one-third of the plates listed are actually available. So common is this phenomenon that a colleague of Sol Hurok, the impresario, told me that whenever Russian waiters used to present Mr. Hurok with a menu and ask what he wanted, he would reply, ‘Never mind the menu and the ‘What do you want, Mr. Hurok?’ Just tell me what you’ve got.”

I was myself once accidentally caught up in a pokazukha-in-the-making. On one trip to Baku, I was staying in a hotel by the Caspian Sea when word came down that a delegation of foreign ambassadors was about to make an official visit. Like the provincial bureaucrats of Gogol’s rich satire The Inspector General, the staff scurried about in a frenzy to make the hotel more presentable. The corridor lady collected all the room keys so the workmen could paint new numbers in gold lettering. A cross-eyed electrician began replacing burnt out light bulbs. Maids went to work washing windows and dusting. The front door and the railings on the promenade along the seashore were given a fresh coat of paint. The regular glass ashtrays disappeared from the dining room tables and new, more decorative ashtrays appeared. Large white carnations were placed on each table, along with fancier, shinier, and higher priced menus for the Ambassadors. Not only was this done at the hotel, one Ambassador told me, but at other installations which they visited.

At times pulling the wool over foreigners’ eyes approaches a national sport. “We do it naturally,” a bright young government consultant on foreign policy admitted to me one evening in the privacy of his apartment. “It is to our advantage. Deceit is a compensation for weakness, for a feeling of inferiority before foreigners. As a nation, we cannot deal with others equally. Either we are more powerful or they are. And if they are, and we feel it, we compensate by deceiving them. It is a very important feature of our national character.” When I observed that his own comments were some disproof of what he was saying, he smilingly responded that he was the exception proving the rule.

Fortunately, he was not unique, for I found a fair number of other exceptions as well. Like Sargent Shriver and many others, I have spent untold hours in uncommunicative dialogues across green felt-topped tables that are a fixture in practically every Soviet institution. But in other settings, out of earshot of others and either to show their own sophistication or because they were tired of the false front, some official Russians opened up. Politics might be taboo (though not always), but like other peoples, Russians like to talk about their personal lives and in the process reveal much about their society. They are usually flattered when foreigners speak their tongue and they are so generously tolerant of the linguistic mistakes of foreigners that I quickly found I greatly enjoyed talking with them in Russian and they, too, felt more relaxed.

On a lengthy car trip through the Caucasus, for example, I had one escort-interpreter (helping me but also keeping me insulated from too much exposure to Soviet life) who slipped into a sad discussion of her problems as a working woman and the hard life of Soviet women generally. At a trade fair, ignored by others and perhaps eager to share a common parental problem, a Communist Party man fell into talking to me about the difficulty of bringing up his sons to be good Communists when all they were interested in was Western rock. In his office, a Soviet intelligence man whose job was to oversee travel and interviews for foreign correspondents, told me of his amazement at the openness of American life and showed off one of the nicely tailored suits and bright wide ties he had brought back from an American trip. There are many other examples I cannot cite for fear of exposing friends to reprisals. The point is that characteristically, taken out of the official setting, Russians begin to reveal something of that other human Russia beneath the official facade. Their instincts, like Misha’s, are friendly. Perhaps that is why the controls are tight and official Russians almost always meet foreigners in groups.

There are other types of people who have less sanction than official Russians to mix with foreigners but often have more personal incentive and show less restraint in doing so - establishment intellectuals, young people, underground artists, dissidents; emigrating Jews. Some establishment intellectuals are interested in little more than maintaining a liberal reputation in the West, wangling an invitation to America, or drinking embassy gin and whisky and keeping a safe distance. Some young people want no more than to buy the jeans off your legs or the latest Western records, the artists to sell their paintings, and the Jews and dissidents to publicize their protests. But in all these groups, I found individuals who were genuinely interesting and revealing, people who were capable of seeing their own society critically though not disloyally, eager for outside contact, and anxious to share ideas and experiences. Some of them became very warm friends.

Being Moscow Bureau Chief the The New York Timeswas an advantage. It gave me more entree than most other foreign newsmen to senior Soviet journalists at Pravda, Izvestia, and elsewhere. Those who had traveled abroad tended to be less obviously dogmatic than government officials who were ill at ease with Western newsmen and generally inaccessible anyway. These newsmen had their professional self-respect to maintain among their Western competitors. Among ordinary Russians being from the Timeswas a help, too, because the Soviet press so frequently quotes the Timesto try to gain credibility and it is well known to Russians. I made it a practice to inform people who I was. A few were immediately wary. But others, even those who said suspiciously, “Oh, a journalist,” were intrigued. Some even seemed to make a point of making petty disclosures or complaints, evidently feeling that if they remained anonymous to me, it was safer to tell their thoughts to a foreigner than to another Russian.

At one period, I was pestered by phone by an elderly lady with a quavering voice who insisted on meeting me. Reluctantly, I went. She described how she and her invalid husband and his invalid father were squeezed into a one-room apartment in violation of all housing norms and how officials refused to give them better housing. She was unbelievably plucky for not only had she protested to the Communist Party Central Committee but she thought that if I wrote about her plight, the Soviet authorities would have to solve the problem. (My reaction was the opposite - that a story using her name would get her into serious trouble.) More common was the case of the man who somehow got my home phone and called on enight, speaking with a Baltic accent, to tell me how he had been mistreated by the Soviet guards when he approached the American Embassy - and the line went dead before he finished.

The most surprising to me, however, were the chance encounters with people all over the country. Ann and I found that the farther we went from Moscow, the less inhibited and less strictly indoctrinated people seemed to be. In minority republics like Georgia, Lithuania, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Moldavia, even the Ukraine, people were usually more candid than politically sensitive Muscovites, and a fair number of them were critical of the Soviet system because of their outspokenly anti-Russian feelings. The problem always was to find the time and the setting, whether in a restaurant, a theater, on a train, or in an airport, for an opportunity to talk.

Westerners, especially Americans, are always in a hurry when they travel. In Russia, we almost always went by train because we found Russian trains comfortable and because it was a good way to get to know people. I have sat in a dining car with a wiry little state farm director for a couple of hours spooning up borscht and drinking sour, watery beer while he explained how he got one-up on socialism by raising his own private herd of sheep. I have been accosted by a Latvian engineer with thick glasses who read somewhere that the Americans had invented eye-glasses that correct color blindness and would I please help him get a pair, and wound up talking about the foibles of Soviet construction. I have swayed in the aisle of a Baku-Tbilisi overnight local churning through the Caucasus mountains, while a construction worker unfolded to me the mysteries of getting a job abroad, going through a labyrinth of security clearances and indoctrination, and finally enjoying the benefits of overseas pay bonuses. I have played backgammon with two Soviet fighter pilots for several hours while one of them chug-a-lugged vodka and whiskey, hugged my wife because her name was the same as his sister’s and kept slapping me on the back and saying, “So you’re a real American,” because the only other Americans he had ever seen were the American pilots of reconnaissance planes against whom he flew wing-tip to wing-tip in a Cold War game of chicken over the White Sea.

In some ways, when we were away from Moscow, life in Russia became a picturesque experience, as we caromed off one individual onto another. Hard as it was to adjust to this fleeting contact, Ann and I came to cherish some of our one-time friends as much as our closer, longer-term Russian friends in Moscow - whether the Armenians who impulsively invited us to attend their church wedding and their long family celebration afterward because they had an uncle in San Francisco, or the nervous Lithuanian artist from whom we bought a couple of modernistic graphic etchings. There was something about the setting, the difficulty of breaking through the barriers of mistrust and fear, and finding the sudden human warmth that made these encounters precious occasions. I remember once in Leningrad an accidental acquaintance that Ann, who is a teacher, struck up with a Russian teacher to whom she turned for help in a store. The woman spoke some English. Before we knew it, we were invited home. Strange as it may sound, we formed a sudden fast friendship with this Russian woman and her husband. For hours on end, they devoured what we had to say about life and culture in the West and we devoured what they told us about their own lives and emotions. We ate plain cheese sandwiches and soup, and lingered long into the night while they showed us slides of their camping trip in the Caucasus Mountains and we told them about our family camping in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains of Virginia and Tennessee. Through other Americans who later met this couple bearing notes from us, we have heard they had been terribly afraid about having made contact with us after my name was mentioned on Voice of America broadcasts. And yet they got over it and sent these same intermediaries back to us with notes and gifts of remembrance.

The tragedy is not that communication is impossible but that so much effort is expended to prevent it, for these are often precisely the unplanned, uncontrolled contacts the Soviet authorities seem determined to obstruct - not the friendship and emotion, but the revelations that go with them. During my time in Moscow, several reporters were beaten up and temporarily detained for contacting dissidents and Jews. Most of us were tailed at times. In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, I remember looking for an American-born Armenian schoolteacher who had once talked with other American reporters. It was morning and I was trying to find his school. I kept stopping to ask school children the way. I happened to look back and 30 paces behind me, a man in a dark suit would stop and question each school child with whom I talked. I found the teacher at school before classes started and asked him when it would be best for us to meet and, evidently having paid painfully for his last talk with American reporters, he replied, “It would be best for us not to meet at all.” In Riga with Mike McGuire of the Chicago Tribune, the team of surveillance agents that followed us for three days was so obvious that we developed nicknames for them - Chief, Shorty, the Veteran, and so on - and watched them change shifts. In Moscow, I would sometimes spot cars tailing mine, once so openly that Ann and the children watched him follow us from our apartment to the hard currency food store, hanging out the car window to keep an eye on us. I also remember the wan smile of a young Army officer who had been caught talking with us in our train compartment and was hauled off for interrogation by the military police. We had only been sharing impressions of Leningrad with him.

Sometimes foreigners get overly paranoid about being under surveillance or the dangers of sexual provocations by the KGB. Diplomats loved to swap old stories about Soviet femmes fatalesand this made most men hyper-alert. I recall a dinner in a skimpy little hotel restaurant in Siberia when I had to share the only empty table for a late dinner with three local women just deserted by some Russian boyfriends. All had been drinking and found it a lark to have an American at their table. They were quite forward. As we talked, the flowsy-haired brunette nearest to me tried holding hands, rubbed my knee and urged me to go with them for some late night fun. I began to wonder whether this was the start of a frame-up. Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around to find a husky Army officer looming over me. He motioned me to the hallway. Is this the way it happens?I wondered. Figuring the safest place to be was right in that restaurant with a crowd watching, I refused to budge. He insisted I come with him. I refused again, but he kept insisting. The girls tried to get rid of him, but he wouldn’t leave. I looked closer and senses that he, too, had been drinking, though not much. And I was anxious to quiet down the fuss being made over me, so I agreed to go out in the hall. When we were alone, he turned and shook my hand, apologized profusely for my misfortune in having fallen in with local whores and urged me to leave the table. He only wanted to help me. I had to laugh at my own fears for he was the furthest possible person from an agent trying to entrap me. Nor do I believe that the actual tailing of correspondents was continuous and systematic. It did not have to be. The simplest method of keeping track of us was to surround us most of the time with Soviet translators, guides and chauffeurs in Moscow and with escorts from the Foreign Ministry, Intourist or Novosti Press Agency when we traveled elsewhere.

Even then, in my experience, the system of insulating foreigners from Russians was afflicted with the same bureaucratic muddle and inefficiency that plagues other elements of the Soviet system, and we had a lot of time to ourselves. Sometimes, too, the most elaborate precautions of Soviet security officials would backfire.

Michael Parks of the Baltimore Suntold me of a trip he took to the provincial city of Ufa, 900 miles east of Moscow, to cover a traveling American exhibition and to see what provincial life was like. He was given only an overnight visa but when he was ready to come back to Moscow on Saturday evening. Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, had no seat for him. This produced great consternation because Aeroflot flights are notoriously overbooked and such an obvious security infraction as allowing him to stay on until the next flight on Monday was impermissible. The solution of the airport security officials was to haul nine Russian passengers off one flight to Moscow to make room for Parks. Why nine? For security reasons. Parks was placed in the middle seat of one row of three seats. Both seats on either side of him were emptied and so were the complete rows in front and behind him. For a few minutes he sat there is splendid isolation while the security men disappeared and a volcanic argument exploded among the unhappy Russians who had been kept off the plane. One of the stewardesses, oblivious to the security problem, appeared and demanded to know why Parks was sitting all alone. Parks said he didn’t know and the stewardess, more concerned with appeasing the roiling mob outside, filled all the seats around him. On one side sat an Army colonel’s wife, and on the other the wife of a petroleum engineer. Both talked to him steadily all the way to Moscow, the engineer’s wife complaining about how little there was to buy in the sops in Ufa and the colonel’s wife telling him how happy she was that her husband was in the armor and final out of paratroops because so many paratroopers were breaking their limbs and having accidents. They had heard about the American exhibition but had been unable to get there and they wanted Parks to tell them all about the American cars and consumer goods.

I had similar experiences - precisely the kind of contacts the KGB wanted to prevent.