Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing a Changing Russia

By Naomi F. Collins and Strobe Talbott

This memoir of an American woman’s life in Moscow traces the social and cultural evolution of Russia from the era of Krushchev to the era of Putin.

In the mid-1960s, Naomi Collins was a graduate student at Moscow State University. As the 21st century began, she was the wife of the American Ambassador to Russia. In this insightful memoir, she shares her reflections and impressions of life as an American woman living in the Russian capital over the course of four decades.

Rather than retracing the economic and political events of the period, Collins focuses her narrative on daily as it changed over the years. She offers fascinating anecdotal snapshots that reveal rare insight into the evolving state of the nation.

“This book is like a script for a documentary spanning four decades when an especially astute and literate observer watched Russia emerge from stagnation and enter a period of dramatic economic, social, and political change and, on many fronts, upheaval.” —Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780984583263

Book preview

Illustrations

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All photographs are from the author’s collection.

Acknowledgments

Without my husband Jim Collins, who generously supported my writing and who impelled my unexpected lifetime of journeys to and from the former Soviet Union, then Russia, I would not have had the opportunity to witness and report four decades of static and dramatic life in that compelling nation.

And because of the encouragement of several friends, including Anne Garside, Janet Rabinowitch and Regina Foster, whose professional judgments I value deeply, my diaries and letters have become the basis of this book. Other friends and colleagues know who they are, and I am deeply grateful to them for championing this endeavor.

Sensitive editing by Josephine Woll, and support from my publisher, Anna Lawton (New Academia Publishing), have helped polish the prose and realize the publication. Of course the book’s content and views are solely my own. Some names in the text have been changed to avoid intruding on the privacy of friends and colleagues.

Foreword by Strobe Talbott

Russia has come a long way from the Soviet era, but it is still a country as perplexing as it is important. In the decades I have spent visiting Russia as a journalist, diplomat, and policy analyst, I have come to appreciate books that provide useful insight into what has changed—and what hasn’t—in that giant country that straddles Europe and Asia, spanning eleven time zones. This book so qualifies. Through Dark Days and White Nights goes beyond an engaging memoir of life in Russia during an important period, from the 1960’s through the turn of the 21st century: it captures a sense of Russia as a work-in-progress. Rather than a musty snapshot of an earlier era, or an account of a short stay, the book is more like a script for a documentary spanning four decades when an especially astute and literate observer watched Russia emerge from stagnation and enter a period of dramatic economic, social, and political change and, on many fronts, upheaval.

Because of the scope of Naomi Collins’ experience with Russia, she is able to provide a sense of continuity in the development of a country whose daily life advanced from static to dramatic, yet retained enduring features that the author also discerns and describes with great skill and clarity. She recognizes how much of Russia’s past lives in its present, how long and dark a shadow the Soviet system casts over what we can now safely (if apprehensively) call the Putin era. She also has an acute eye and ear for Russian daily life; she understands and conveys how a talented but often beleaguered people have learned to buoy their spirits— including during periods of stagnation and upheaval—through an appreciation of the richness of their culture, the intensity of friendships, the natural beauty of their country, the rotation of the seasons, and the respite of holidays. The policies emanating from the Kremlin play their part in her story, but so do the pleasures of a weekend in the countryside and an Easter celebration. Her book is further enlivened by her self-awareness: she acknowledges how her own perspective has shifted and her reflections matured as her own life has progressed during a period of transformation in Russia’s.

That perspective began when she and her husband, Jim Collins, lived in a dormitory at Moscow State University in Lenin Hills in the mid-1960s; she returned with their two- and five-year-old sons a decade later, and again in the 1990s, when Jim—one of my closest friends and colleagues in the State Department—served as ambassador, resident in Spaso House, the splendid Italianate mansion in downtown Moscow.

A trained historian with a natural sense of how to tell a good and important story, Naomi has drawn from diaries, journals, letters, and travel notes written over the years to produce a remarkable book that appears at a time when Russia should be much more at the forefront of American’s attention than is now the case. It deserves an influential and respectful readership.

Introduction by Ambassador James F. Collins

For much of its history, the land and people of Russia have seemed an intriguing, closed and shrouded mystery. Glimpses by travelers beyond barriers created by Russian princes, tsars, and communist general secretaries have been avidly consumed by Western publics wanting to fathom what lay beyond the reaches of most western experience. In turn, there has almost always been something that prompts the traveler into Russia to want to explain and describe: explain what the place is about; how it works; what it looks like; how it behaves. For centuries this urge has impelled visitors to write, paint, photograph, record; to speak, argue, analyze, and describe; to attempt to convey the essence of a land poorly known or understood by outsiders and the feel and spirit of a place that has seemed usually different, often enigmatic, and sometimes forbidding.

Through Dark Days and White Nights makes a rich and unique addition to this long and worthwhile tradition. Combining observation, impression and insight about Russian life over four decades, this is the work of an inquisitive writer who had the opportunity to see Russia over a period of great change and transformation. The result is not the usual history or political analysis of Russian events and developments, or of its leaders and their political maneuvering. It is rather a highly readable and informative work of description that illuminates the daily life, personalities, and scenes that have characterized Russia as it evolved from a self-isolated communist empire to an emerging new nation opened to the world community.

The book itself was prompted by encouragement from the author’s family and friends to use the notes, diaries, and correspondence she had shared with some of them over nearly four decades to add missing color and texture to the usual media and academic treatment of Russia. The result is a volume recounting a rich and varied journey in space and time to two very different Russias and through events that dramatically divided one from the other. It provides an image of these Russias from very different perspectives, beginning through the eyes of a student living a student’s life and ending with thoughts and impressions of an American ambassador’s wife in the capital of a new Russia.

The book begins with Russia and Russian life in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the decade from the mid 1960s until the mid 1970s. This period encompassed the height of Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies, even as it brought a countervailing trend toward more stable relations with the West. Russians’ daily life took place in a society isolated with determined efficiency from the outside world. Nearly impenetrable barriers prevented significant or sustained contact between the Russian people and the outside, yet somehow also enhanced interest in that other world to the point of giving it almost mythical status. But this period also concludes with the first steps toward détente and the historic signing of the Helsinki Final Act, a step that was to expose the Soviet system to new pressures against the totalitarian model and provide new avenues for the outside to get in.

The narrative begins in the fall of 1965 when my wife and I set out to spend an academic year at Moscow State University. I had been chosen along with a small group of colleagues (about a dozen and a half total) to participate in the U.S.-USSR exchange of graduate students and young faculty and to spend a year in the USSR conducting research and study. I had convinced a reluctant Naomi, whose academic interests and energies lay outside Russia, nevertheless to accompany me and share what for both of us would be not only a first trip beyond the United States but also a unique chance to live in a country that few had had the chance to see.

For the next academic year we shared dormitory and student life in 1965 Moscow. It was an immersion in Soviet life at the personal level few Americans ever had the chance to experience, what it meant to shop, eat, live, travel, study, enjoy and, survive the vicissitudes of daily life as a regular (though foreign and privileged) graduate student in mid-sixties Moscow.

We returned to Moscow in 1973, a much-changed family entering the USSR in a very different capacity. On this occasion Naomi accompanied me as mother of two young boys and wife of a junior diplomat posted to the American Embassy in Moscow. We arrived at a time of improved U.S.-Russia relations one year after President Nixon’s visit to Moscow had ushered in the era of détente. New programs of cooperation in areas ranging from space to health were the order of the day, and not long after I arrived, the 1973 Yom Kippur War ushered in a time of intense diplomacy involving US-Russian efforts to halt the fighting in the Middle East and work toward Arab-Israeli peace. As my responsibilities at the Embassy were concentrated on the Soviet Union’s activities in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, this meant close involvement with much of the diplomacy that dominated the headlines of the day.

Naomi had, in the interim, earned her Ph.D. in history, and the return to our student environs again prompted her to write. Through correspondence with family and friends she rapidly acquired a supportive audience hungry for information beyond the routine fare provided in the print and electronic media. This stay brought new impressions as she recounted the challenges of daily life for a diplomat’s wife in the Soviet capital and for Russians. She also kept readers abreast of the life and experiences of our two young sons and their encounters with Russia, and the vagaries of her own work in the cultural section of the American Embassy.

The new life also offered opportunities to know people from a broader variety of Russian communities. Russian artists, officials, dissidents, party members, and a community of foreign diplomats frequented our Moscow world, and we came to understand the life of the Soviet elite through immersion in its world. On the American side we made new and lasting friendships among a small (the total was probably never more than 300-400 people) American community of diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. And as members of Congress, the Secretary of State and other cabinet members, two Presidents, and countless other visitors came to the Soviet Union we also came to know a widening circle of American political and governmental figures, colleagues and friends whose shared Soviet experience kept us in touch over the following years.

We left the USSR in the summer of 1975, and I did not return to Moscow for nearly fifteen years. In the fall of 1990, after two years on the staff of the Secretary of State, I took up the position as the Ambassador’s deputy (Deputy Chief of Mission in State Department parlance) at an Embassy I knew well, but in a country that was strangely unfamiliar. Although I had traveled with Secretary of State James Baker to Moscow occasionally in the late 1980s and had seen elements of the changes that were transforming the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev’s dual programs of perestroika and glasnost, I was not prepared for the scope of change that was to come. This time, with one son in college and the other just graduated from college, and Naomi well established in a career in Washington, she commuted between Washington and Moscow. Her frequent visits gave her unique insights into the changes occurring all around us that were often missed or overlooked by those who lived with them day in and day out.

The failure by hard-line communists to oust President Gorbachev and seize power in Moscow in August 1991 brought on events that were made for the eyes, ears and mind of an historian. The abortive coup unleashed forces that were to transform both the former Soviet Union and the relations between the Russian people and the West. It marked the end of communist control over the Soviet Union, the beginning of the death throes of the Union itself, and the emergence of a little known Russian leader who would lead a new Russia following the end of the Soviet Union on Christmas day in 1991.

For the next two years Russia’s upheaval and revolution transformed the shape of European and Eurasian politics. Rapid and astonishing change uprooted an old order and re-opened Russia to the rest of the world as the country and people sought new self- definition among the democracies and capitalist economies from which it had isolated itself for nearly three quarters of a century. It was a period of great trial and turmoil for Russia’s people as they coped with a world turned upside down.

My time as Ambassador’s deputy and chargé d’ affaires came to an end in late 1993, and I returned to join the Clinton administration’s Russia-Eurasia team at the State Department where I would serve as Ambassador at Large for the New Independent States until my return to Moscow as Ambassador in 1997. I took up the new position as Moscow was celebrating its 850th anniversary and Russia, with Boris Yeltsin reelected for a second term, was firmly on a course away from its communist past. Once again Naomi commuted frequently from Washington, and this time employed the newly emerging technologies of email, Internet, and mobile phone to augment traditional letters and notes to keep friends and family aware of our lives. And both sons along with other family members and friends who remained Naomi’s loyal readership visited the Ambassador’s residence during the next four years, at last able to share some of the experience that Naomi had described over three decades.

And there was much to share. Russia’s revolutions continued to unfold with drama and unpredictability. The economic boomlet of the mid-1990s came to a crashing end in 1998 with an economic collapse that reverberated throughout global markets and traumatized a society that was barely recovered from the shocks of Soviet collapse. U.S.-Russia relations meanwhile grew more difficult with the emergence of differences over the Balkans, the expansion of NATO eastward, and tensions over Russian links to Iranian nuclear and missile programs. Then as the millennium came to a close Boris Yeltsin, who had come to personify new Russia, confounded his supporters and critics by turning the reigns of state over to a little known Kremlin insider Vladimir Putin, providing more uncertainties and questions at home and outside about where Russia was headed.

The end of the Cold War and disappearance of the Soviet Union put paid to the bi-polar world and ideological confrontation that defined the Russia and international environment Naomi and I had known in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless as I concluded my time as Ambassador, Russia remained in the headlines and in the minds of Americans who hoped a new century would mean a better relationship between Russians and Americans. By the time we departed Moscow just after the July 4 holiday in 2001, we left a country very different in many ways from what we had first seen in September 1965. Yet many of the qualities that defined Russian life and Russia itself endured. Aspects of life such as the seasons, climate, geography, historical experience, relations among family members and friends, and shared need to master a great and difficult land are at the core of Russia. For those who hope to understand and have a feeling for these dimensions of the Russia we live with today, Through Dark Days and White Nights opens the reader’s eyes to things often overlooked and unseen.

Through Dark Days and White Nights

Prologue

On August 19, 1991, I stood at the edge of our small rose garden in Moscow. Over the low brick wall I watched a convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and missile launchers roll down our street. With their low rumble and deliberate pace, chewing up the pavement they covered, they seemed like a column of unyielding prehistoric beasts.

Now, at 6:00 in the evening, I stood at the top of our townhouse steps. Greeting a row of guests, trustees of the Gannett Foundation’s Freedom Forum and their Russian and American friends, in the middle of this coup, I tried to imagine an ordinary cocktail party on an ordinary day. The hot mini-pizzas bubbling on the dining room table just inside the door sent out waves of pungent oregano so familiar I could be entering a shopping mall Food Court. But I couldn’t block out the rhythmic chants of a churning crowd, thousands of synchronized voices, rising and falling, the words muffled in the large open plaza just beyond the wall of our garden.

The Moscow evening was heavy with a low ceiling of fat dark clouds, signaling fall. Thunder, lightning, and gale winds had subsided. From a place outside myself, I saw myself standing at the doorway, smiling, shaking a hand, swiveling to the next in line… smile, shake, swivel… as if dropped unexpectedly into a scene in a play. But it was not a play or movie, although it struck me then that a movie imitating this scene would have seemed far more real than this reality imitating a movie. And there was no script. I floated through an unfolding bad dream, burdened by an ominous sense that it would not turn out well. Realizing that the future of hundreds of millions of people turned on this dramatic takeover, I felt guilty indulging my own fear of what might happen to us personally—to my husband Jim, our son Jonathan, and me; and what it would mean to our son Robert back in the States. Was it possible we wouldn’t survive this? Was there something we should be doing to help our chances of getting through this?

Trapped by growing anxiety, I stepped outside the scene asking the useless question that springs to mind at times like these: What am I doing here? The granddaughter of Jewish émigrés…And not just now, but repeatedly over four decades of my life. ("What were you thinking, Naomi? the fruitless voice now whines irritably in my head.) But I knew it was for the same reason I was standing here now, on automatic pilot, trying to register a succession of faces, hearing I’m glad to meet you; how nice of you to have us. And hearing my own voice responding, We’re so glad you could come."

The trustees of the Gannett Foundation’s Freedom Forum had come to work with their Russian and American colleagues to tell Soviet journalists about running a free press. It was the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the era of restructuring and opening the Soviet Union. What timing! Just the previous night, they had hosted a dinner at the elegant Savoy Hotel downtown at which everyone was sky high on the idea of uncensored print and media journalism. Toasting open societies and free press, the Soviet and American guests were bursting with hope and good cheer.

This evening, we were official hosts in return. Jim had devoted his life to serving in Russia, in a career in the State Department’s Foreign Service. And I was, in official State Department documents, Dependent Wife—"dep/wife" on the old rubber stamp now replaced with a computer macro. My other lives now faded. At this charged moment, Jim was in charge of the American Embassy, Moscow, and responsible for the lives of all Americans in the disintegrating Soviet Union.

I dared not follow this thought further. I realized I was numb, afraid of uncorking the roiling fear that threatened to swell and flood the tended decorum of the evening. Looking down at my feet in familiar beige pumps, as if their planting on the doorstep might confirm the reality of the moment, I looked up to see Jim returning from his office. After a cheerful hi and embrace, he joined me on the receiving line. As comforted as I was seeing him, I really   wanted to corner him and learn what he could tell me of what was going on, what might happen next, what wasn’t too secret to tell. Will we be targeted, surrounded, and used as hostages, trapped in the Embassy compound? Will we be evacuated quickly in the night? But those questions would have to wait. Instead, he and I walked into the living room, as always, to circulate separately with the guests.

Some guests were leaning out the windows, straining to see the crowds and hear their chants. A few people—mostly Russian women—were crying. They were scared, fearing the return of a closed, restricted life. They thought the KGB, military and hard- line Communist forces might win. These forces of the past would consolidate their control of the city and kill hopes for a promising future. Pessimism, edginess, and despair in the room were only partially masked by social graces. People pressed Jim to say what he thought would happen; he was non-committal. I suddenly pictured Molotov cocktails, named for a Soviet Foreign Minister, and pulled Jim aside to remind him how easily a bottle filled with gasoline and a rag could be torched and hurled into our open windows. Jim looked both calm and alert, but essentially unreadable. I felt the Soviet Union’s future pivoting on this turning point in time, and wished desperately to flip to the last page in a history book to see how it would turn out. Then I reluctantly conceded that I was not feeling half as courageous as I wished I could be.

1. Encounters with a Closed Society

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L. P. Hartley

The guests returned to their hotel rooms after the reception the night of the coup attempt, August 19, 1991. While I stood in the kitchen wrapping leftover mini-pizzas in Saran wrap, my mind flashed back to the days living under Soviet rule, an atmosphere that could be returning, from the look of things. I saw, like an old black-and-white movie, our earliest days in Moscow in 1965-1966, living in the student dormitories of Moscow State University. The gloom of a long, dark winter; the isolation and fear, grimness and monotony. Feeling discouraged and powerless, I eased into bed.

This is where we came in, I mumbled to Jim as he dozed off. Unable to sleep even in our comfortable king-sized bed, I pictured our old dorm room at Moscow State University only eight miles away. I saw myself twenty-five years earlier lying on the narrow steel-frame cot, tugging on my small rough woolen blanket, green, with a white snow flake pattern, trying to keep my shoulders warm while preventing my toes from popping out at the other end and wondering what anyone over 5’4" would do. Looking at the 12-foot ceiling looming overhead, a ceiling higher than the width of the room, I felt as if a giant had dropped me into a deep box.

Our last night in the dormitories, Wednesday, April 20, 1966, I had also lain sleepless. Fear had sharpened my sense of the room, revealing things I had not noticed before: the embossed flower pattern in the beige walls, the linseed oil and beeswax smell of the parquet wood floor, the dimness of the ceiling light we had left on as an amulet. A cockroach lurking in the shadow of the radiator had watched us. The tilted chair we had wedged between the door handle and floor to barricade ourselves in, as we had seen done in movies, had given the room an unsettling look.

Two feet away from me that night, Jim had lain on the identical cot, with the same controlled breathing. We had almost convinced ourselves that this barricade and our careful breathing could protect us from arrest and imprisonment by the KGB, the State Security Force commonly known as Secret Police. We were absolutely silent, knowing that our room was bugged, and that any inkling the KGB had of our unexpected departure could foil our plan. Although the long hallways outside the room were empty, I imagined I heard footsteps approaching, and flattened myself out still further on the bed, trying to become invisible. Like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, I felt we had been framed. Unlike Joseph K., we had some idea of what the accusation would be, but knew our innocence would make no difference. We, too, would be incarcerated, captive to the capricious will of arbitrary forces. Escape was all I could think of.

Jim and I had first arrived in Moscow on September 13, 1965, at 10:15 in the morning at the Belorussian Railway Station. I was 23; he, 26. We had been married for two years.

After ten days at sea and three more on trains, we were relieved to be greeted by professionally chipper Russian students equipped with a van, and a one-ton open-back truck with a canvas tarp, to collect us with our baggage for our trip to the dormitory. Our footlocker contained stuff for the academic year: clothes, pillows, Melmac plastic plates and cheap forks and knives, an electric frying pan, toiletries, sanitary napkins, deodorant, aspirins, toilet paper, Band-Aids… Our greeters, with English far more fluent than our Russian, had been hand picked—and gender-matched to us—by the Office for Foreign Students (Inostranny Otdel) to be friends to each of us for the year.

How was your trip? Nina asked me earnestly.

We hope everything goes well, Ivan told Jim.

We piled our footlockers into the truck and ourselves into the van that headed for the Old University—the historic downtown campus of Moscow State University dating back more than 200 years. Right across from the Kremlin, these crumbling painted stucco and light brick buildings still held active classrooms, and housed libraries and offices for professors and administrators. We entered a decaying administration building. Stepping up over a two-inch threshold, the men ducking to avoid hitting the lintel overhead, we descended two unevenly worn stone steps, and walked along a concrete corridor to the office of student stipends. There an official counted out 200 rubles in cash to Jim, equivalent at that time to $240. Accustomed to the distancing of money transfers through checks, I was taken with the nakedness of a raw cash transaction, pay-for-study. But at that moment, I had no idea that cash was the only option: there was no credit card or checking system in Russia then, nor would there be for more than a quarter of a century.

We were fortunate, rich by our own standards. The 200-ruble stipend was generous, about four times what Russian students received. (Levels were set by official government agreements.) The money went far. Unlike Russian students, we had no need to buy clothing or household goods, and had no children or parents to feed or support. We could use our rubles for food, laundry, souvenirs, books, occasional travel and restaurants. The currency was not convertible to dollars, so there was no point saving any of it. The ruble stipend was supplemented by a few hundred dollars of hard currency for the year, dollars we hoarded for our planned year abroad to follow.

With the cash in our pockets, we climbed back into the van to head for what was then called Lenin Hills. After driving along miles of mustard and tan stucco and brick buildings, we saw in the distance the newer Moscow State University. One of seven Stalinesque wedding cake buildings that dot Moscow, this massive white castle sits imposingly on a hill rising along a graceful bend in the Moscow River. How foolish, I soon learned, to try to get your bearings on any of these buildings, since they all look alike. The dormitory with its 17,000 students (we were told) covered well more than one city block on the ground, soared over 20 stories at its highest, and sat at the epicenter of radiating symmetrical structured gardens with tree-lined walks and formal plantings. Protected by giant fences, gates and guardhouses, the structure had controlled admission through a student pass long before U.S. institutions required any IDs or security measures. No one could enter the building without a pass, a propusk, but the only place to obtain a pass was inside the building. This experience made Catch-22 easy reading later that year.

Despite its size, the building was well heated, freshly painted and cleaned. The four wings of the building were identical. Very few in the bank of elevators functioned. Most stairways were locked for reasons we never learned, but assumed it was either to control the building population, or to prevent the need for cleaning. We were grateful to be no higher than the sixth floor. But I marveled at the architectural irony of the structure: dedicated not to emperors but to the common man in a socialist state, its heroic proportions were so monumental and overpowering in scale as to dwarf mere human beings.

Designed to showcase Soviet life, to model the look of the future, the university building contained not only bedrooms, but also classrooms, libraries, bookshops, cafeterias, food stands, and well-furnished lounges on each floor. These common rooms, resplendent in Victorian potted palms, Oriental carpets, wood wainscoting, and stuffed chairs, hardly fit our picture of what Socialism or The Future looked like. But it didn’t much matter, because the doors were tightly locked, except for three holidays a year, the November 7, January 1, and May 1 Soviet holidays. It also didn’t take long to see that the bookstands carried a limited range of ideologically acceptable books, those surviving censorship; and the cafeterias and food stands stocked only limited