Buying the Night Flight (26 page)

One day in Moscow I was interviewing Ann Martinova, the crisp, dark-haired editor at
Literatumaya Gazeta,
and eventually I asked her about the "problem" of premarital sex relations. All of her carefully constructed manner of insouciance and sophistication dissolved immediately, and the blood rose in her pale white face, causing a distinct flush. Her lips became more set; then, "WE HAVE NO 'PROBLEM' OF PREMARITAL SEX RELATIONS," she snapped. "Our family life is very solid. This exists only in
your
country."

How very interesting, I thought. Another example of Russians facing reality head-on. For everywhere I went, young people told me exactly the opposite. Premarital and extramarital sex among the young (and old) was so widespread, so common and so casual that one could only come to the conclusion that most Russians take it, as the early Bolshevik and free love advocate, Madame Alexandra Kollontai, told Lenin, "like a drink of water." (And he, typically male, answered that he preferred "not to drink from a dirty glass.") And Russian men ... Russian men do not make "passes" (such a gingerly, Western, British word for what they do), they have home runs, or try to, the first moment they decide they want you. They do not approach, they lunge, they attack crudely. I very deliberately watched out for them. When I saw them drinking too much at a table where I was sitting, I often left, for nowhere in the world had I seen such aggressive, crude, and dangerous men as the Russian ones.

And when, as a woman, I tried to study the Russian women, I came up with some very interesting impressions. The image of Russian women outside is that they have arrived in some kind of nirvana of feminism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women, yes, are equal, but they are "equal" to work outside the home and bring money home, to do all the housework and shopping, to bear the children and then give them up to child care--in effect, to do everything. And the men do not "mind" it; isn't that marvelous of them!

I was curious to see this "Russian syndrome" occurring just a little later in the U.S. But in 1971 surveys showed that Russian wives had half the amount of leisure their husbands had and one hour's less sleep a night. A Professor Kobalevsky, writing in
Molodaya Gvardia
or
Young Guard,
tabulated that in industrial districts working women had three hours less free time on workdays and nine to eleven hours less free time on Sundays and holidays. In consequence, he determined, "the woman slowly neglects herself, loses her former attractiveness, and the onetime love dies out."

"I came to our school one morning early last week," a teacher in Kiev told me, "and another teacher was sitting there with her head in her hands sobbing and saying, 'I wish I were back in czarist days. At least then I'd just have one thing to do--be a woman at home and have men flatter me and do certain things for me. It's just too much.'" She paused. "Yet we don't want to stay home. We consider that a kind of grave."

The Russian women were, very simply, conflicted beyond belief. They were overworked. The "macho" Russian men refused to do anything -- anything -- around the house. They were often drunk. They still beat women. But we have to understand this, too, within their specific historical context.

Russian women have always worked. They toiled in the hardest type of manual labor and they fought in the wars beside the men. Actually, historians have traced three strands in Russian women's history: the subordination of women, equality in hardship, and also creative equality. That last, which in the past existed only for the aristocratic classes of women, is still out of reach for most women in Russia, and elsewhere, today.

But the Russian women at that time were getting even in a very special way--they were not having children. The birthrate of one child per couple that was, by the 1970s, the norm among European Russians was obviously not going to reproduce the population, which requires 2.2 children per family. Moreover the Asiatic Soviets were reproducing at such a high rate that by the year 2000 they will constitute a majority of the population, thus changing the country's entire racial makeup. I found that the state was utterly terrified of this -- it would mean that Great Russian control over the vast and scattered former "minorities" in the Soviet Union would be diluted and perhaps dead. My own feeling was that this fear had something to do with the invasion of Afghanistan -- like the ancient Roman Empire, they needed an outlet for their minorities; they needed to give their minorities spheres of their own. And who had done this? The Russian women had done it, simply by refusing to give birth. If it was not a direct revolution, it was certainly a direct geopolitical threat to the empire.

Yet I do not want to intimate that Russian women have not gained great deal, because, to be fair, they have. Attitudes, even in Central Asia, have changed dramatically. I remember one day, just outside of Tashkent, when we stopped in the Uzbek countryside on a little river. An outdoor teahouse, consisting of square piers which hung over the river, was filled with Uzbek men lounging and drinking tea and gossiping over a languid green river. Above were swaying willow trees, and an occasional oxcart trundled across an old bridge nearby.

Next to us on a nearby platform sat a group of seven Uzbek farmers from a nearby collective farm. In their traditional clothes they could have been out of a world of five hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago--when the emir still kept mistresses and each day threw the one he liked best an apple as she bathed in the pool. Before 1917 these Asian women went out only when completely veiled, and if a woman removed her veil, her husband had the right to bury her alive.

We sat down at one of the little piers and eventually the man who was the leader of the group next to us, a fifty-three-year-old farmer named Dadsmotov Hosneden, invited us to join them for pilaf, which we gratefully ate with our fingers.

"Do your wives work?" I asked him.

"Of course," he said. "If they have small children at home, they don't. But otherwise -- of course. They are equal to men."

When he asked me how old I was and I said "Thirty-two," he exclaimed, "And you're not married yet?"

"I travel all the time," I answered. "Maybe in another year."

"But you should marry while you can enjoy your youth."

"I'm enjoying it now," I answered.

What was so striking was that all the men accepted that it was quite right and natural for a woman to travel about the world alone.

"Yes, it's true," Hosneden said. "When you're eighty, you'll have things to tell your grandchildren about the whole world." Then he paused and asked, "Do women have equal rights in America, too?"

***

The Soviet state of Georgia is a ferocious land: it is exquisitely beautiful, with dashing Caucasus rivers that swirl and crash down from the wild mountains, with a capital city, Tbilisi, that is as weathered and beautiful as its most celebrated son, Joseph Stalin, was cruel and evil. The Great Russians call Georgia and its ways "Asiatic." It is certainly different from central Russia, although perhaps only in degree -- and what happened to me there is different only in degree from what happens to women everywhere and throughout history.

In Georgia I saw, firsthand, a less liberated side of male-female relations.

In my roamings and rummagings about the Soviet Union in 1971 I had planned to go to Mongolia as a "side trip" (to see the homeland of Genghis Khan), but at the last moment, not unexpectedly, the Russian authorities in their wisdom refused to let me go. I was heartbroken, for Outer Mongolia had a hauntingly romantic appeal for me. But what could I do? We included Georgia instead and I was pleased to have a few days rest in a fascinating and historic place.

The first afternoon in Tbilisi, just as I was beginning to relax after exhausting weeks of trying to work with the Soviet authorities, I went shopping on the main street. I felt at ease in "Russia" for a change, and there were lots of things to buy, Georgia being noted for its folklore and handwork. Tbilisi is also known for its arrogant, dark-haired, mustachioed men and I knew well enough to avoid and ignore them. Even in the hotel restaurants you could not sit down for two minutes at your table without the waiters bringing you note after note from men at surrounding tables, suggesting ... everything. It was Latin America but with a distinctly dark side and sinister cast.

Very quickly a young Georgian -- a broad-shouldered man with a handsome face and a witty manner -- started walking beside me. I shooed him away, refused to talk to him, insulted him. He started jogging next to me to keep up, I was walking so fast.

"You should get to know us," he said, panting theatrically. "We're nice. The Russians don't like us because we're rich and they're jealous. They say when a Georgian goes to Moscow and goes to the checkroom to get his coat he puts down a twenty-ruble note and says, 'Never mind the coat.'"

Despite myself I smiled at this. But I still refused even to look at him. As we approached the new modern hotel, he was suddenly hailed by some friends, who soon surrounded me, laughing and joking. "But we're okay," one said in American-type English. "We're all journalists." At this they took out their journalists' cards -- and they were indeed journalists. Finally they convinced me to stop in the hotel coffee shop, the most innocent of occupations in the Soviet Union, and we all had champagne and caviar. I was amused at the way they all joked about and jostled the young man I had first met on the street, whom I shall call Ivan. He was
the
television announcer on Georgian news.

"He's nice but too big," the other Georgian -- a small man with bright black eyes, a look of continuous surprise and a devilishly pointed chin -- said of Ivan. "You should see him on television -- he's all head. That's all you can get on the little tube."

Ivan seemed to be unusually fair-minded, even for a Georgian, who are known for their avid anti-Russianism. He talked very emotionally about the two Soviet astronauts who had just been killed and then said, "But I felt the same when your astronauts were killed. We are all human beings -- I do not feel any differently about our people or your people."

Another time he said about the Russians: "They are brutes. You hear them all the time making dirty jokes about their mothers. No Georgian would do this.

"I suppose I could go abroad now," he went on, "but I don't really want to, the way we have to go. You march around in a group and you sit in a bus and someone says, "There on the left ... and there on the right .... ' I'd rather stay here."

When we walked back the couple of blocks to my hotel, Ivan waved off the rest and insisted we have dinner. I said, "No. No, no and no." He called me later. Again I said no. The next day I said no again. I was beginning to sound like a multiple American negative, but later it became very important to me that I had been firm and unyielding about saying no to something really quite innocent. Had I not felt so confident about my behavior -- had there been even the slightest flirtation with him -- God knows what my typical, traditional female psyche would have dredged up to torment me.

Two days later my Georgian guide, a nubile young woman with dark, guarded eyes, by the name of Ia, and the chauffeur and I gathered in the lobby of the hotel about 10:00 a.m. We were traveling out to Cori, Stalin's birthplace, to spend the day there. And who should appear, out of nowhere and thoroughly uninvited, but Ivan.

"I'll go with you," he said, for lack of confidence was surely not one of his traits. "I know a lot of people out there, and I can help."

I still strongly demurred, but now it was Ia, the prissy little puritan, who took me aside. "He's very well known here as a television commentator," she assured me. "A fine fellow."

All right. I nodded my head. And the day turned out to be splendid indeed. We traveled, singing and laughing, over golden, close-cropped mountains and valleys, carved by meandering streams. The villages were picturesque, the orchards heavy with every kind of ripe and robust fruit. After two hours' driving we came to Gori, a large, industrial "new town." And in the midst of a pretentiously long parkway that stretched out at least half a mile, with low pine trees forming a parade line on both sides, stood the tiny wooden hovel that was Joseph Dzhugashvili's birthplace. The hovel was covered by a second roof held up with Greek columns -- quite extraordinary! When Stalin's wise old mother saw it, she
is
said to have uttered one vulgar but precise Georgian word and quickly returned to her simple home in Tbilisi.

We roamed around the strange monument. There were pictures of Stalin as a young man, when he was a seminary student, his natural fanaticism steeped in the passionate peasant religiosity of the Georgian Church. He was handsome, dark-eyed, terribly serious, this Joseph Dzhugashvili. It was later, during the revolution, that he abandoned his real name and took the name Stalin, which means in Russian "Man of Steel."

Knowing some Russian history, I could only look about me with total disbelief at the flagrant disregard for truth. Above one statue were engraved the words: "I have always been a student of Lenin's, and that is all I ever want to be."

But where in the museum -- or in the Soviet psyche -- was there any acknowledgment of Lenin's final "testament," written in 1923 before his death, in which he recommended Stalin be brought down as head of the party. "Stalin is too rude," he wrote, "and this fault, entirely supportable in relation to us Communists, becomes unsupportable in the office of general secretary of the party. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position."