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Moscow Snapshots
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16906 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
3,260 Words |
| Author
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Stanislav Levchenko
Stanislav Levchenko is a J.M. Olin Fellow of Boston
University's College of Communications. He is the author of
On the Wrong Side and other books and is a member of the
Jamestown Foundation, which helps defectors from communist
countries resettle in the West. |
KIFE
Nancy Traver
New York: St. Martin Press, 1989
252 pp., $19.95
It is difficult thing for a journalist to write a book on the Soviet Union. Things inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe are changing so fast that it is practically impossible to come up with a totally up-to-date report. Nancy Traver, who spent several exciting years in Moscow in the era of perestroika, had enough courage and determination to challenge this situation successfully, however. Traver spent hundreds of hours talking to ordinary, but mostly young, Soviet men and women about a great variety of topics. Her book Kife is useful both for lay people and specialists on the Soviet Union.
The title of her book is unusual. She explains:
“Most young people are focused on the pursuit of kife, a slang word that has slipped into vocabularies of Soviets all over the country. Kife means catching a buzz, or having it all. When a Soviet has achieved kife, he's got it made. Kife is the centerpiece of many Soviet jokes, but one well-known tale is particularly apt in its illustration of the word. In the joke, three young men are locked in conversation, trying to define kife. One of them says, '’Kife is when you wake up in the morning with a terrible hangover. You go to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and find a cold beer there waiting for you. That is kife.’ The second man says, ‘Kife is when you come home and find two hundred rubles on the kitchen table and a note from your wife that says, 'Gone on a business trip. See you in two weeks.' That is kife.’ The third man says, ‘Kife is when you hear the knock on the door in the middle of the night, your open it and a KGB agent says, 'Is this apartment 23?' And you have the pleasure of saying, 'No, this is apartment 25.' Now that, my friends, is kife.”
So, can the young Soviet generation achieve kife? What kind of life do they live? Does it give them a buzz?
To find an answer, Traver dissects Soviet society and looks at its problems, layer after layer. Her investigation shows that the society has serious problems:
“Generations of Soviets have learned that obedience in the face of authority reaps richer rewards than risk-taking…To change that, the government will have to reverse
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