1970s: Looking Back and Out

An excerpt from "The Age of Lucya: An Exercise in Personal History."

by E. V. Svetova

We lived in the center of the World. The East was Far. The West, Západ in Russian, was even farther – a dangerous place from where blew a steady wind of threat.   The very word harbored an implication of decay, death.   Západ was the place where the Sun set, where you could fall and perish – zapást' – without a chance of coming back. Conveniently compartmentalized Soviet mind created a more general name for the place, both to the East and to the West, where all the cool stuff came from: the multi-colored felt pens and chewing gum, coveted blue jeans and fashionable music – all the little things, desiring which was beneath a good Soviet child. That land of ever greener grass was the mysterious Zagranitsa – "Beyond-the-Borders" – the Abroad.   Everybody had an opinion about it, but very few had been there.

We had several foreign things in our home. Some innocuous, normal objects from brotherly socialist republics, like an occasional Czech glass dish, and a couple of items brought from really foreign, not-so-friendly countries, like my mother's vintage English jacket and my Japanese pencil holder.

Other objects masqueraded as normal. Some of the vinyl disks bearing a stamp of the Aprelevka music factory in Cyrillic type in reality contained the music by my favorite band, and those four were foreigners, I knew for sure. When they belted "Kin' Babe Lom!" they sang about love that's not for sale, and not "Throw the Crowbar to Grandma!", like some of my unsophisticated schoolmates insisted.

Considering that even a decade ago one could get in trouble for listening to jazz, the release of The Beatles music in the tightly censored USSR must have been a major ideological indulgence.   Miraculously, in the 70s the vinyl disks were officially sold in the music stores. To downplay rock-n-roll's foreign origins, the album covers never had the name of the band on them, but a ambiguous title in Russian: "A Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble, lyrics and music by Dzhon Lennon and Pol Makartni."   I may be getting it all wrong though, and the explanation for all the anonymity was not political, but the reluctance of the Soviet music industry to pay for the international copyright, but that seems like too simple of an explanation.

Some foreigners were ok. There was the French Chansonier Joe Dassin.   Besides having a velvety voice, being a son of a Communist sympathizer made him our kind of guy. There was the friend of the Soviet people, the American rebel Dean Reed, who introduced my generation to an eclectic mixture of popular foreign tunes, from The West Side Story's Maria to Quantana Mera. I loved singing along to the little vinyl 45 EP, making up the foreign words as my ears misheard them, the ghost of Lady Mondegreen proudly soaring over my little head.

Some officially sanctioned propaganda was printed for us by the West.   One I remember was a small and thick British literary quarterly called "Anglia," and the other a large-format, colorful "Amerika" magazine. Every once in a while my father would bring home one of these.

So, the same Americans who, as I was told at school, were bent on destroying us with the nuclear war, who threatened us from outside the protective Iron Curtain - those Americans were nice enough to print a magazine for us in Russian.   "Aren't Americans bad?" I remember asking, and I swear, I remember my father's "a whole nation cannot be good or bad" speech.   He did add pointedly that exactly because Americans are people just like us, I should not believe all the propaganda in their glossy magazine.

"Amerika" had been published since 1956 by the USIA specially for the Cold War Soviet Union. The sleek book was heavy with varnished paper, and smelled like real Zagranitsa - a whiff of another world. Each issue of this lavishly produced magazine presented another facet of American life. Inside were artful photographs of the ancients green sequoia forests, the red Grand Canyon, the blue Atlantic Ocean, and the silver skyscrapers of New York City. There were cowboys smiling on the backdrop of the long-horned cattle, beauty pageant finalists with their toothy pasted-on grins, cosmonauts (except in America they called them astronauts) beaming next to the model of the Lunar module; there were impossibly dark-skinned jazzmen with impossibly white teeth; there were politicians with babies of all colors, all baring their teeth (and gums) in the variety of unfamiliar fashions.

Each issue had a particular piece of Americana on the cover. I remember the one with a disheveled Raggedy Ann and Andy, whose bizarre tin-button stare gave me the creeps. The one that I loved the most was the cover with a carousel horse. I can see it right now. The horse is carved out of wood and painted in the most precise detail; its head is life-like, with moist shiny eyes and passionately blown nostrils; the head is contrasted by a fantastic mane, each wooden curl flowing like waves, and each wave a different color; the bridle encrusted with bright glass jewels and trimmed with polished copper nails. The horse's body is lithe and elegant, yet perfectly proportionate – not at all a toy. An elaborate saddle finishes the realistic effect. There are other figures in the blurred background of the photograph, deer and giraffes, and, I think, an occasional unicorn.

I knew there was a whole carousel somewhere. Across the ocean. Across the universe. A carousel I would never ride.

Another issue celebrated the American movie industry. There was a page of Disney cartoons, and an article on the animated Grinch. Almost half of the issue was devoted to a new sensation -   The Star Wars movie. The seduction was complete at first sight. The sky full of stars beckoned. The donut-haired princess and the bathrobe-clad knight looked like my long-lost friends. This world was so close, so palpably real on the glossy page, and yet light years away.

A six-year-old, sitting in my parent's single-room apartment in the 1970's Moscow, in the censored, deficit-ridden Soviet Union, I wished the Iron Curtain would lift just a little, and I could get just one ride on the jewel incrusted carousel horse, or take one glimpse at the Millennium Falcon.

Who could have known that a time would come when I would ride on the Carousel in Central Park, see Luke Skywalker on the big screen of the Siegfield, and there would be nothing I would desire more than to go back to being an oblivious child in the safety of my parents' home - if only for a moment.

***

I might have had a fascination with exotic foreign objects, but my heart belonged to my Motherland. I was a happy Soviet child.

We lived like everybody else, modestly. The rent and utilities were priced in single digits. Education and medicine were free. My mother's salary as senior engineer at the House of Optics was 150 roubles – a price of a month worth of groceries, or, a pair of imported German leather high-heel boots, if one is lucky enough to find one. My father's salary was maybe twice as much.   Only big industry bosses made over 400 roubles. A Government minister had a standard salary of 700 roubles. My grandmother's pension bought me treats, like little cheap toys and fruit.

Nothing was in all-year supply. Strawberries came in June, cherries in August, the best apples and pears in September. We ate tangerines only once a year, for New Year's Eve. Flowers also only came in season, except for the ubiquitous red carnation, the official Communist flower. I preferred the taller-than-me gladioli because it reminded me of the Roman swords. I especially liked the blood red ones, the ones young pioneers used to present to Comrade Brezhnev during televised Party celebrations.            

Yes, there were food lines. Mostly in winter. In Russia the agricultural season is twenty five days, that's comparing to twice as long in Eastern Europe, not to mention the tropics. In winter most local vegetables, except the onions and potatoes of the previous harvest, were in short supply. Imports were limited, so on rare occasions when exotic bananas went on sale, people would go wild. To me it didn't matter – lines or no lines, my grandmother always seemed to create a feast out of the available supplies. To her, waiting in a fifteen minute line to buy some veal was nothing like standing for two hours in the cold to redeem ration stamps during the war.

Some shortages were inexcusably trivial, like the notorious toilet paper lines.   I do remember asking about it. Indeed, doesn't it seem strange that in the country abundant with paper mills, the people, all as one, had to wipe with cut-up newspapers? Of all the deficits – why the toilet paper? My father, who always made a point of explaining the world to me in earnest, offered that our economy sometimes lacked resources, because we, the Soviet people, have to spend too much on the defense to cope with the arms race.  

As someone who started his engineering career in a highly secretive aviation firm, my father knew what he was talking about. So did my mother, whose right-out-of-college job was at the mysterious House of Optics, the leading Soviet research institution that specialized, among other scary things, in laser-guided warhead development. Come think about it, everybody in my peaceful world worked for war. Or, as they saw it, to prevent the war that all the enemies of the Soviet country couldn't wait to wage.

It's natural for a child to have fears, but some fears come hand in hand with shame. It is an insult to human dignity to grow up scared of being out of work, homeless, sick. It is humiliating to be afraid of poverty. It is shameful to have a fear of not being good enough, thin enough, fear of being rejected.   Soviet children didn't know that kind of fear.   Instead, our righteous horror was the nuclear war. I was afraid of war every day and every night.

Other than constant nightmares about nuclear Holocaust, life looked good to me at six. There was nobody to envy or pity. All my friends' parents were working, like my mom and dad. Almost all were engineers, just like them. All the homes I visited had the same plain furniture. Same bookshelves hosted the same leather bound tomes – a green collection of Chekhov, a red collection of Mayakovsky, yellow Tolstoy – not the Count Leo, but the other one, Alexei. I believe, the Count's collection was gray. There were the dark-olive volumes of the Masterpieces of World Literature, the ever continuing series of classical literary texts from all over the time and space, identical tomes distinguishable only by thickness, from the skinny "The Harrying Of Cualnge" to the fat and forbidden "The Twelve Caesars" with academic commentaries on every ancient depravity.

It seemed, everybody had both parents at home. Everybody's grandparents were around, grandma often living in the only bedroom, and the rest of the family – in the living room. Everybody's apartments were small. Everybody had purebred dogs in their small apartments. Few families had cars, but those who did had the same models. Few families had more than one kid. All my friends were only children.

For a child there was a comfort in this unobtrusive sameness, a sense of recognizeability, control. Goodness was guaranteed. Every radio station played the same harmonious tunes. The songs sung the beauty of Russia's golden rye fields and translucent birch tree forests; they told of first love and cherished joys of motherhood; they inspired one to live and work for the Motherland. All television channels (I believe in the 70s in Moscow there were only three or four) showed   the same movies about the life of the Soviet workers, the great sacrifice that the Soviet people paid for the victory over Fascism, or about the triumph of true love over materialism and prejudice. Radio and television constantly broadcasted theater performances of classics from Homer to Dickens, not counting endless operas. I preferred cartoons. Cartoons were funny. Yes, healthy humor was allowed. Self-deprecating (but always within the limits of tasteful! none of that bourgeois tackiness!) comedians exposed laziness, ignorance, selfishness, materialism – all the vestiges of the past that held the Soviet society back from entering into the Communist future. And the future was guaranteed to be shining, if only somewhat remote. I didn't care about what Communism was exactly, but it seemed to be something nice and definitely possible, even if not necessarily attainable any time soon.

In the anticipation of Communism, everybody did their part. My father designed computer systems so that planes could fly, my mother developed optics so that people could see, and my grandmother took care of me so I could grow up to be smart and healthy; ready to work for the good of my great Motherland. If we weren't great, they wouldn't want to destroy us, right? And, although my parents never taught me to be patriotic, I understood. What's not to understand?

I lived in a mighty country.

I loved and was loved.

I had a bright future.

And if there was something dark, unsightly, or unwanted that flowed below the taut shiny surface – well, my family was there to make sure it didn't touch me, and I let them, just like when our fox terrier Mitzi died of old age, they told me she went away to the forest to live with the wolves, and I believed them.

Since then I lost several dogs. Now I know that dogs die, while the wolves only grow bigger and badder, and, eventually, come out of the forest. As for me, forever a Soviet child, I mourn my own innocence, because knowing better hasn't made me a better person.