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Tanya's Tears, Olya's Smile
| Article
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19914 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
3,588 Words |
| Author
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
Moscow, The sky is overcast, the light cloud cover sometimes lowering, swelling, and finally exploding with snow. It has a good effect on the city, softening the lines of what the Russians call "stone boxes," row after row of high-rise apartments. It does something magical to the fairytale couples that suddenly leap into view when you turn a dismal corner. Muscovites are like their city. They, too, can seem bleak and chunky, and then all of a sudden something enchanted and enchanting comes flying out of them--a word, a gesture, a song.
But snow is not only an aesthetic matter, it is a municipal problem. Streets and sidewalks have to be cleared. And some are, but not many. In the old days, every building had its janitor, who was as conscientious about reporting to the secret police as he was about shoveling the sidewalks. Stalin wanted both and, needless to say, got both. Now, the clearing of snow seems, like everything else, part of a random pattern that can neither be understood nor predicted. But how else could things be in a society going through meltdown?
When speaking of Russia, we have to be very careful with our tenses. Soviet communism has not yet collapsed. It is still collapsing. It is true that the USSR has been officially dissolved and Russia is once again a separate county--now, for the first time, with a freely elected president. That does not mean in the slightest that communism, as legacy and consequence, has disappeared. Nearly everything that is happening in the former USSR is either a result of communism or of its demise. Though there are signs of the new society that is being born in Russia, it is premature to judge its nature, especially as it may never reach maturity--the Russians have been given the unenviable task of constructing a new building on the very spot where the old one is still imploding.
Empires galore have fallen, but none other was so vast, had nuclear weapons, or was consciously trying to turn itself into something new. Sometimes that's hard to remember, though, just after the sun has set on the city and the snow acquires a sickly radiance. Scurrying figures appear as a multitude of brown fur caps against a field of slush and cement. Here any color helps as the ruby red of communism, the banners, the posters, have pretty much faded from Moscow.
Emerging Signs
Though scattered, there are signs, literally and figuratively, of a newly emerging society. The road leading out to the
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