Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
I spent six years in the Soviet Union, from 1976–82. During this period, I sensed the uniqueness of the situation and began collecting the personal stories of Soviet citizens with the intent of preserving them for posterity. I was banned from the Soviet Union after 1982, allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that the security organs regarded my presence as “undesirable.”
During these years, I observed four different Russias which managed to differ radically from each other while remaining essentially the same. From 1976 to 1982, I witnessed the Soviet Union at the height of its world power and a people in a state of ideological stupefaction. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the unreal world of the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with a genuine set of universal moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.
Finally, the unreal world of the Soviet ideology took its revenge in September, 1999 with the bombing of four Russian apartment buildings that made possible Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the resurrection in Russia of the Soviet Union in a different guise.
The imaginary world of Marxist-Leninist ideology never really went away because the issue was never its validity but rather its political effectiveness. Mentally subjugated individuals can be treated as raw material for the purposes of the state which is why an ideology is so useful. By the time I was expelled from Russia in 2013, the re-propagandizing of Russia had been long accomplished and Russia is in a state of ideological control without an ideology to this day.
As Russia evolved, the conditions of work for a journalist also changed. During the Brezhnev period, all official information was organized to confirm the truth of the imaginary world. Real information was available but it was unofficial and getting it entailed taking a risk. This accounted for the unique role of the Soviet dissidents. They took it upon themselves—and often paid for their efforts with terms in Soviet labor camps—to provide truthful information about historical events and the conditions in the country to diplomats and journalists. The best informed foreign journalists were those with the closest ties to dissidents.
During the perestroika period, the regime itself began to release information that, had it been published months earlier by a dissident would have led to the latter’s arrest. Gorbachev wanted to use limited freedom to, as he put it, “unleash the potential of socialism”. This was only possible, however, by lifting the dead hand of the ideology which meant free information. For journalists, this situation was nearly incomprehensible. The regime seemed to be organizing its own demise. But journalists were not the only ones who were confused. Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet Union by undermining the credibility of its ideology led inevitably to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, journalists faced a country that, while no longer communist, was taken over by criminals and so was not truly free. If the Soviet Union was justified by the myths of communism, Yeltsin’s Russia was justified by the myth of democratic, anti-communist reform. Foreign journalists could travel and write freely (although Russian journalists were frequently killed) but they had to struggle to distinguish appearance from reality. The endurance of the belief that the Yeltsin period was the flowering of Russian democracy is a tribute to the fact that very few journalists passed that test.
In September, 1999, Western journalists in Russia faced their greatest challenge as apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night and evidence mounted that the perpetrators were agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The bombings were used to justify a new invasion of Chechnya which helped Putin to become Russia’s new president. Putin restored the institutions of the Soviet Union—false propaganda, militarism and hostility to the West. But as Putin’s grip on power tightened and the apartment bombings were followed by assassinations and new provocations, journalists largely restricted themselves to the official version of events, leaving the reality of Putin’s Russia concealed by ever more elaborate lies.
The articles in this collection are a chronicle of Russia almost from the day I arrived in the Soviet Union as a young correspondent in 1976 until the present. Depicted here are the things I saw, the people I met and the events I witnessed as reported by me to my readers in the West. In the broad sense, this is a record of one person’s attempt to penetrate the false reality of a country which was not like other countries but always sought to depict itself as something it is not.
Emigres from the former Soviet Union often despair of their inability to convey the truth of their experiences to the West. Arthur Koestler, a former communist and the author of Darkness at Noon, the classic novel about the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, told a colleague that it was always the same with the comfortable and insular West. “You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies,” he said. “But when all is said, we ex-communists are the only people … who know what it’s all about.”
In fact, it is not necessary to be an ex-communist to understand what it is all about. But penetrating the veil of Russian mystification requires effort and the ability to understand that seeing is not always believing. The Russians have created an entire false world for our benefit. The articles in this collection reflect my 40 year attempt to see them as they are.
ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN
Never Speak to Strangers
By David Satter
February, 1977
A bleak, overcast day in Riga had given way to a night that was clear and bitter cold. The red lights on the last car of the Riga to Tallinn overnight train glowed in the frigid air as the train backed into the station. I gathered my things and walked to the seventh car where I handed in my ticket and boarded the train. I entered my compartment and was surprised to see a young woman seated on one of the bunks. She had black hair, which was freshly set, a heart shaped face, pale complexion, and lovely dark eyes. I guessed she was about 28 years old.
I took off my coat, put my suitcase under the bunk and sat down opposite her. Two other persons soon joined us. The first was a tall, sandy haired man with broad shoulders who was wearing a heavy coat and a double-breasted jacket. He said that he was a boxing instructor from the Ukraine. The second was another woman in her 20’s, who entered the compartment carrying several packages. She was thin and bird like with a petulant expression. She had red hair and wore bright red lipstick. She said her name was Masha Ivanova.
As the train began moving, the attendant gave us back our tickets and brought us glasses of tea. Rivers and the skeletons of bridges passed by in the moonlight. The pale lights of occasional villages appeared and disappeared on the horizon and the train was soon rolling rhythmically through a landscape of pine forests and snow blanketed fields.
It occurred to me that it might be more than just a coincidence that a man and two attractive women my own age were riding in the same compartment with me but I decided that this compartment on a train between two Baltic capitals, on a quiet Saturday night—which the KGB was undoubtedly taking off anyway—was a sanctuary. I felt relaxed and, in any case, believed that members of my generation had something in common wherever we happened to be.
I decided to travel to the Baltics at the suggestion of Kestutis Jokubynas, a former Lithuanian political prisoner who I had met in Moscow. Kestutis and I agreed to meet in Vilnius and he promised to give me the names of contacts in Riga and Tallinn. But, being new to the Soviet Union, I also asked the Soviet news agency, Novosti, for help in setting up official interviews.
I arrived in Vilnius by train on February 15, 1977 shortly after dawn and met Jokubynas at my hotel. We took a bus to Kestutis’s apartment. Kestutis lived in a single room in a housing block in a new area of the city. A solitary window let in the gray light of an overcast day and the walls were bare except for a rectangle of barbed wire over the fold out bed, a reminder of 17 years that Kestutis had spent in the camps. Kestutis poured me a cup of tea. He said he had little hope that he would live to see an independent Lithuania. He then mentioned, almost