Here and There – Russia
When people write about their parents, they often relate key events during their upbringing, describing the outstanding moments, some great and others ghastly, that occurred. I might write about such things one day. However, right now I want to mention my mother and her account of travelling to Russia. To be precise, my mother offering a long and laudatory speech about the Hermitage. I’m not certain she actually said this, but she might have remarked, “You should go there.” Well, whether or not she did, I did. Not yet married (we married a year later), I went with my partner on a long overseas trip (a sort of pre-honeymoon honeymoon), and we decided to visit Russia after a few days in Finland (where I had a project to complete). This was a side trip, and we had two nights, three days for our visit.
I had wanted to go by train. Years before I had been to the main Helsinki trailway station and seen the glorious old-fashioned but luxurious coaches, drawn by a steam engine, ready to take you there. It was redolent of Dr Zhivago, Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, and all that! Sadly, time was against us, and we had to fly. So, Trish and I flew from Helsinki to Leningrad in 1989, (it was still called Leningrad then), with Finnair. We had been warned against flying with Aeroflot, as the Ilyushin aircraft they used were considered quite unsafe. As we were descending and about to land at the airport, the flight attendant gave out bags containing big blocks of milk chocolate (Cadbury’s, as I recall). I almost refused, as I don’t like milk chocolate, but the attendant was quite determined: “You will need these”, we were told.
On landing, I made my first mistake. Concerned about cash, I changed some US dollars for rubles, in fact what turned out to be a very large number of rubles! I should have stuck to using my US dollars, as the street exchange value for American money was much greater than the official rate, but I didn’t know. We took a taxi to the Pribaltiyskaya hotel, a massive building which looked more like a prison than a place to stay. We checked in and went up to our room. Reaching the floor, we saw a lady at a desk, who kept an eye on our every movement. Later I discovered there were floor monitors for every level of the hotel.
I learnt exchanging money had been my second mistake. The first was made some time before. To put it simply, I was focussed on going to Leningrad to visit the Hermitage and hadn’t devoted sufficient time to keeping in touch with what was going on in Russia. What was going on was considerable! The country was in turmoil. Mikhail Gorbachev had been elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, the only candidate for the role, pushed by Andrei Gromyko, the man behind the scenes through much of the turbulent 1980s. Recognising the dire state of the Russian economy, Gorbachev was trying to bring about reforms, to save the central planned economy of the country while learning from the practices of the capitalist economies of Europe, the UK, and the USA.
You may recall central to this were two philosophies. The first was ‘Perestroika’, a complex series of reforms intended to restructure society and the economy. In a conference in the summer of 1985 Gorbachev said: “Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism”. Gorbachev’s perestroika also included an attempt to move away from technocratic management of the economy by increasingly involving the labor force in industrial production, believing once freed from the strong control of central planners, state-owned enterprises would act as ‘market agents’. Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders did not anticipate opposition to the perestroika reforms. According to their interpretation of Marxism, they believed that in a socialist society like the Soviet Union there would not be any ‘antagonistic contradictions’. However, the broader public came to believe many bureaucrats were paying lip service to the reforms while trying to undermine them.
In the second year of his leadership, Gorbachev began speaking of ‘glasnost’ or ‘openness’, which meant “greater openness and candour in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debates, in the press, and in Soviet culture”. Gorbachev saw glasnost as a necessary measure to ensure perestroika was effective by alerting everyone to the details of the country’s problems, in the belief that this would lead them to support his efforts to fix the challenges the country faced. The approach was popular among the Soviet intelligentsia, who became key Gorbachev supporters and boosted his domestic popularity, but it alarmed many Communist Party hardliners. Finally, for many Soviet citizens, this newfound level of freedom of speech and press – and its accompanying revelations about the country’s past – was proving uncomfortable.
Some in the party thought Gorbachev was not going far enough in his reforms. A prominent liberal critic was Yeltsin, who called for more far-reaching reforms than Gorbachev was initiating and criticized the party leadership. Although he did not mention Gorbachev directly, he claimed that a new cult of personality was forming. Hello, sounds like the PRC in 2022! Things got hot, Yeltsin resigned both as Moscow party secretary and as a member of the Politburo, and the tensions between the two men developed into a mutual hatred.
On top of this, the Chernobyl reactor disaster in April 1986 had initially been covered up, as officials fed Gorbachev incorrect information to downplay the incident. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, 336,000 people were evacuated from the area around Chernobyl. It marked ‘a turning point’ for Gorbachev and the Soviet regime. He cited the disaster as evidence for what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, including shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia. Gorbachev was later to describe the incident as one which made him appreciate the scale of incompetence and vast number of cover-ups in the Soviet Union. From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became increasingly open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population.
Coming closer to our planned time to visit, various issues, debates and criticisms continued. In June 1988 at the 19thParty Congress Gorbachev sought to gain additional support for his reforms, which included shifting power away from the Politburo, and instead proposing to elect a USSR Supreme Soviet to be the key legislative body. His ideas were discussed at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, a conference that brought together 5,000 delegates and featured arguments between hardliners and liberalisers. The proceedings were televised, and for the first time since the 1920s, voting was not unanimous.
Ill-informed about all this, we arrived as hopeful tourists, in a country where most Russians were preoccupied, following the debates while little else was going on in the country. We had no idea how tough life was, nor the impact Gorbachev was having. We quickly learnt. On the evening of our first night, we went down to the bar to get a drink. There was no-one there to serve us (and no other guests in sight). Eventually, I found three staff hiding around the corner watching television, or to be more precise, glued to a live broadcast from the Duma. Now we can look back knowing towards the end of the year the iron curtain would fall; back then, everything was up in the air. The next day travelling down to the centre of town, we saw no-one working, but heard hammering in one of the shipyards. It seemed appropriate, as we had seen a man scything the grass alongside the runway when we landed, and now we had evidence of a hammer to join the scythe, (or sickle)!
Outside the hotel, life was tough for the locals. We went into GUM, the huge department store, which was almost empty of goods. We went into a grocery store, where most of the shelves were empty. Few people seemed to be working. A street market had poor vegetables for sale, in a state we would have considered unfit for human consumption. In the hotel, breakfast comprised slices of black bread, tomatoes, cheese, and tea. Standing in the queue on the first morning, I heard an American behind me complaining about the “appalling food, appalling service”. It was one of the few times I lost my cool. I turned around and told him he was lucky to get anything, that people were starving in the streets, and he was getting more than almost anyone else could in this city. He shut up, but I suspect it was more from amazement than anything else. At last, we understood about the chocolate. It wasn’t for us. It was to give to people like the housekeeping staff, even to the guardian on our hotel floor.
We had been told that the restaurant to go to, on Nevsky Prospect, was the Café des Artistes. We were determined to have one excellent meal. We entered what looked like a rather down-market café. A few tables, and an uninspiring menu. I asked if they served caviar for dinner (there was nothing like that on the list we were given). “Ah, you wish to dine?” We were taken to the back of the room, through to a lavish and quite beautiful restaurant. Here there was superb food – at a manageable price – and entertainment, a singer (a rather large lady with a great soprano voice) with violin and piano accompaniment. A stunning evening, the one time during our time in Leningrad we experienced the city my mother had seen.
We did go to museums and galleries. We queued to visit the Hermitage, and when we were seen waiting, we were marched to the front, only to have two soldiers placed in front of us. The man behind me said nothing when we were put in front of him, but got very indignant about the soldiers, and waved a medal at them. It was a turbulent time. When we went back to the airport, we got our boarding passes for our flight back, it was to discover – as we walked across the tarmac – it was a code share with Aeroflot. The Russian Tupolev aircraft appeared to be held together with thick coats of paint, and the stewardess was still trying to encourage (bludgeon?) the passengers into buying souvenirs as we were landing.
Had I realised that critical history was being made? No. However, it was only a few months later, in November, that the East German government allowed its citizens to cross the Berlin Wall. At the time neither Gorbachev nor Thatcher nor Mitterrand wanted a swift reunification of Germany, aware that it was likely to emerge as the dominant European power of the future. Gorbachev wanted a gradual process of German integration, but Kohl began calling for rapid change. By the time of Germany’s formal reunification in 1990, the Cold War over. Perhaps this is one occasion when I can add ‘the rest is history’!!
Did we feel uncomfortable during that brief visit? Not about our situation, but we were concerned at the poverty we saw. To be truthful, we were ignored. There was too much happening for any of the locals to pay much attention to a few ignorant visitors. It might sound unlikely, but there was even a shortage of souvenir shops open (perhaps there were more, but the staff were too busy watching events in Moscow). Outside The Hermitage we bought a beautifully painted wooden egg, and an equally stunning small babushka doll from a lone vendor working the queue. It was a preoccupied city at a momentous time.
In a strange way, what was happening in Leningrad had an eerie if only marginal connection to what had been taking place in the southern states of the USA twenty years earlier. Back then, Martin Luther King Jr had been involved in marches and civil disobedience trying to focus attention on the racist exploitation of African Americans. In his powerful Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Martin Luther King explained how, over time, tensions can no longer be tolerated: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” Step by step, increasing tension eventually reaches the point where a break is unavoidable. In the same way, as the tension in Russia continued to grow, many believed change was inevitable.
Sadly, there is another way in which Russia at the end of the 1980s, and the US twenty years before were similar. In both places, while that increased tension did result in some changes over the following years (and again in both places), conservative forces gradually won back control and change was slowed, even reversed. Russia has seen a change of the individuals at the top, but it’s still a country run by oligarchs, the new set of rich cronies of the government. It’s the same in the US. Decades of reforms are slowly being wound back by the Republican Party. The lives of working- and middle-class people in both countries are certainly much better than they had been, but control and access to resources remain as skewed as ever. The rich and powerful remain rich and powerful: it’s the same old story with new actors.
What can Australia learn from these events? White Australia is not quite the same as the US and Russia. Often described as a classless society, which it is not, its structure might be described as comprising four groups: working class, self-employed working/lower middle class, middle class, and affluent. The gradations for the first three groups are fuzzy, and most people have a reasonable lifestyle, at least up until recently. Incomes slowly rise. Mobility is limited, but most people don’t seem perturbed. Of course, that leaves on one side the indigenous Australians, almost all of whom are extremely poor and living on the margins, both financially and socially, and a small but real group of indigent poor. For the last 40 years, there has been an absence of sufficient tension to precipitate major social change.
Is that the bread and circuses problem? Keep everyone entertained, focussed on the spectacle, and they won’t notice how little is different from the way it was forty years ago. It was Melbourne Cup time in Australia recently, fashionable days at the races, to be followed by relaxing at the beach, late night parties in the warm weather. Parliament will go into recess, and there are new television shows, movies and pop concerts to keep us entertained. Students are looking forward to the summer break, and heady discussions about the future of the world can be set aside for … ‘booze, beaches and birds’ (no, not the feathered kind).
I remain an optimist. The level of tension may be dropping again. COVID is no longer the threat it was for the past two years. Despite this, the pressure for change hasn’t disappeared. We are very likely to see further environmental change battering the Australian lifestyle, with more floods, fires and storms. We have just entered a third year of La Niña, with continuing flooding along the east coast. Slowly, more and more of the population realise we have to react, responding to and addressing the issues. Life in Australia has always been a matter of clinging on to the edges of an unforgiving island. Today it’s even more unforgiving.
Adversity required resourcefulness when the Europeans arrived in Australia. Adversity propelled change in Russia. Adversity might unite us in tackling today’s huge challenges. We can act to create a better life for everyone, and I believe we will. Yes, I’m an optimist.
