Maia

By Richard Manichello

She was electrifying. She possessed astonishing charisma, charm, character, and poise. People would scream, and men withered in the heat of her unspeakable sex appeal as if she were some torrid female rock star. Eager fans threw flowers and gifts to her when she skated. They went absolutely ballistic.

Nearly two decades later, she still creates frenzy. She's an international icon now, a planetary celebrity, playing Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and like Cher and Madonna and Sting or Celine, she needs only one name, Maia, on the world's star roster. One in the audience tonight at Caesars tells Maia's story in more detail. He knows the story of her subjugation in the Soviet Sports Gulag, her suffering and callous abuse by KGB watchdogs, and her triumphant rise to fame as a wealthy American superstar. In the time of the Cold War, he and Maia chanced to dream of a shining life in the free world together. She got the life. He was left with the dream.

In fall of 1983, Soviet fighter jets have just shot down a commercial 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew over the Sea of Japan. Everyone has perished. KAL 007 is suddenly another international incident, and the US and the USSR are at it again.

Eddie Genell, a young sportswriter for Athlete, one of the top monthly magazines in the world, flies into the tense atmosphere of Cold War brinksmanship to get a feature story on the Soviet Union's first female-singles figure skater with a shot at an Olympic medal in the Winter Games. Maia Larisa Ulyanova is a phenom. The incredibly stunning young skater has captured the hearts of three hundred million Russians and holds the Soviet Union's first chance to make Olympic history. World press attention has been riveted also by her extraordinary beauty and drop-dead sex appeal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524528850

Richard Manichello

Author Richard Manichello is by no means a neophyte to the creative. His twenty-five-year career in the arts spans the gamut from being an actor and a director in the theater to an Emmy Award–winning television writer and producer and a novelist. Richard has written short drama (some produced) and short fiction (some published). His first short story, “I Sell Clouds,” won first prize in a Midwest literary competition. He’s written a short story collection entitled Aerial Views. His debut novel, The Couloir, is a story of renewal and rise from the scars of addiction set in Verbier, Switzerland, with a huge international cast. Manichello writes the classic European novel, at once literary and entertaining. In off-off Broadway productions, he directed at Ten-Ten Players, Synchronicity Space, Drama Project, T. Schreiber Studio, and the 2007 International Fringe Festival in New York. He directed for Terry Schreiber for several years and in Westchester County at the Herbert Mark Newman Theatre, the Schoolhouse, the Depot in Garrison, Brewster Theatre Co., Pound Ridge Theatre Company, Storm King Theatre, and Axial Theater in Pleasantville. In 2010, he shot the feature City of Gold for Bartek Rainski Films of Warsaw, filmed Radio Hate for Grissom Films, played a PI in Undercover Intern for Cinic Films, and was a conductor in the rehearsal for the Philadelphia Opera & Theatre Company. In 2011, he shot Pisces of an Unconscious Mind with the director Gleb Osatinski (selected in ten film festivals) and Breeze across the Green for Brantley Jones Films and played a cosmonaut in The House at the Edge of the Galaxy, a short film that has been featured in over two dozens of film festivals worldwide. In 2013, he directed Red, John Logan’s Tony-winner, in Dobbs Ferry. He’s a graduate of Temple University and a member of the Directors Guild since 1982.

Book preview

MAIA

a novel

RICHARD MANICHELLO

Copyright © 2016 by Richard Manichello.

Cover Design by Tracie Smit

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016911998

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-2887-4

                Softcover        978-1-5245-2886-7

                eBook             978-1-5245-2885-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood, © 2000 O.W. Toad Ltd, used by permission of the Author. Published by Doubleday/Random House in the United States; McClelland and Stewart/RHC in Canada, and Bloomsbury/Virago in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved.

Rev. date: 10/19/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

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Contents

BOOK ONE

Leningrad

One—Cold War Games

Two—Grigori, November 1983

Three—Yubileiny

Four—Desert Ice, March 2001

Five—Maia, October 1983

Six—Coraopolis Mon Amour

Seven—The Astoria Angleterre

Eight—The Pond

Nine—Yuri Gagarin

Ten—Legends

Eleven—Stasov

Twelve—Kirov

Thirteen—The Apartment

Fourteen—Lenny

Fifteen—Anichkov Most

Sixteen—Hermitage

Seventeen—Palace Square

Eighteen—Lake Placid

BOOK TWO

Moscow

Nineteen—West Side Storage

Twenty—Moscow

Twenty-One—Archangelskoye

Twenty-Two—The Train

Twenty-Three—The Dacha

Twenty-Four—Karina

Twenty-Five—Neva

Twenty-Six—Russian Gold

BOOK THREE

Sarajevo

Twenty-Seven—The Baritone

Twenty-Eight—Toronto

Twenty-Nine—Koševo Stad

Thirty—Jelena

Thirty-One—Dragan

Thirty-Two—Athletes’ Village

Thirty-Three—Zetra

Thirty-Four—The Partisans

Thirty-Five—Jure Franko

Thirty-Six—Kiss And Cry

Thirty-Seven—Venice

Thirty-Eight—Covo Di Lupo

Thirty-Nine—New York

Forty—Epilogue (2001)

For Danny and Nita

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Passion’s a precipice—

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Prologue

The crowd at Caesars hushed quickly when the lights dimmed. A respect for theater is a nice way to put it, but it’s nothing so courteous or noble or chivalrous. It’s the hush of expectation, the impatience that accompanies a possibility of disappointment. This better be good, sweetheart. I paid a fortune for these tickets. She’s a Russian, skating around backwards! I could be out at the Baccarat tables. The irritated, the restless, and the provoked. They arrive with little more than a belief, an assumption that someone will or should achieve something. The dilemma of being audience: unfulfilled, maybe jealous, or satisfied and cursory in their appreciation. She may do something—the one in the lights, in the shining costumes—that no one could imagine seeing in a hundred years. That’s why she’s in the blue follow spot and we’re in the dark. People scratch and cough, squirm, clean their glasses, pop a lozenge in, and wait. The activity of an ersatz Roman coliseum descends to perfect silence.

She glides in. More follow spots. Overheads are at center ice. She skates into them. Gentle applause swells to a clappy, modest opera-house level. Some shouts of her name from screechy females. The skating clack. They’ll stand in the doorways, in the exits to get a look. Maia. She needs only one name now. Just Maia. Hollywood A-list, recognized across a spectrum of worldwide stardom—Cher, Madonna, Leo, Beyoncé, Sting, Brad, Demi, Celine—now Maia, and the rest of the one-name pack.

A confluence of elements will silence even the most skeptical: her extraordinary beauty, powerful yet feminine physique, musculature, sensuality, the light, the dark, and the fluid movement across the mirrored surface of ice. A skater captivates like a high-wire act. The hush and silence is a reflex. The speed and jumps, the spins in air, the leaps, elevated and long. The line. Is there anything more beautiful than a figure skater? Why her? How does she possess such beauty and athletic talent? From that place, with those troublesome Communists. The USSR. Snot-nosed kid came from nothing, from a bombed-out city. White nights. She skated on a river. Soviets. Cold War bastards. How’d she get here? She’s American now. I watch them watching her. I’ve seen it all before. Salchows, camels, doubles, a triple, toe loops, layback, double axel, spiral. We’re helpless to remove ourselves from her experience. She does this well. Puts on a good show. Packs a house. Beauty can be fearsome. The people in the dark anticipate a fall, a mistake, a slip, the flaw in a perfectly beautiful creation, but it never comes. We can’t take our eyes off of the dancer in the light; we’re afraid to. Her blades flash. They are her high wire. Her sounds go through us. The act has complete control. The presentation, the skill, and the daring are beyond our imaginative limits. Beauty wins; it succeeds, it enthralls. Beauty holds sway in our culture, always has. It makes us want, enviously, a moment, a performance like the one she has rendered. Caesars crowd sighs, it breathes. The dancer’s face brightens; she smiles, spreads her arms. Her breasts heave fulsome and deep with exertion. She is living, breathing sexual desire. The follow spots and overheads are radiant, shimmering and all trained on her at center ice. The audience roars like a hundred thousand at a soccer match, maybe like two hundred thousand at Indy.

BOOK ONE

Leningrad

Ленинград

She awakens to the sounds of electric trams rhythmically clacking along the boulevard eight floors below. The screeching and scraping sounds pierce the predawn, pushing last night’s snowfall along the rails. Rusty pilots scream against the cold steel track each morning and suffice as a reliable alarm clock through the winter months. Wind rustles the powdery drifts outside on the balcony, swirling in dry dancing tornadoes around the tiny patio. The gale shakes the loose-fitting windows. Three or four short sentences of Russian, mostly epithets, she grumbles and slips from beneath the thick duvet. The apartment’s floors are cold, so she moves fast from bed, to hallway, to bathroom. Splash some water on the face—extreme courage for this—it’s icy from either tap. Hot is but a plumbing concept in these old Leningrad apartment buildings. A comb and a brush quickly run through the hair, then a vigorous scrub of the teeth with a dab of Russian toothpaste—a vanilla-white grout of mysterious origin and efficacy. A green mouthwash swished once or twice burns out the grout. That’s it. She’ll shower there, at Vrankina’s, not here. They’ll shower there, together.

The pantry is her makeshift walk-in closet behind a beaded-curtain door. Scarves and woolens, coats, sweatshirts, boots, gloves and hats of all kinds and colors, enough to protect an Arctic traveler, are folded and stacked neatly. Dresses, tight skirts, jeans, and pants pressed, starched, creased perfectly, clean and fresh and hung, floor to ceiling, on three sides.

She wraps and wraps herself in combinations of the garments, over her black tights, until she feels adequately bundled to brave the howling wind and the unimaginable cold awaiting her. The skate bag on the floor is full and always at the ready, routinely prepared the night before, she need only hoist it. She alternates shoulders with it every morning so that its weight strains her torso, corrupts her posture, evenly. Over the length of a career it will matter. This is what the ballerina told her. Nadia Vrankina, the ballerina who trains and loves her dearly, told her so, and Maia heeds the precaution seriously.

A red freckled apple, hard-boiled egg, and a big piece of chocolate are swiped from the top shelf of a four-foot-tall refrigerator that looks like a piece of dollhouse furniture. She stuffs the foods in the center of the skate bag, insulating them from the icy temperatures outside and from the hot radiators in Kirov’s rehearsal halls. No time for a cup of chai or a breakfast cake this morning; she’ll enjoy both with Nadia later, at Nadia’s place, after the long workout on the parquet.

The first inhalation of the frigid air, it takes her breath away. Deeply down, burning in the lungs, and she’ll need a moment to recover. It’s the same every morning, for every Leningrader. They brace, they buttress the neck and encircle the face with appropriate coverings, and they breathe through the thick fabrics of midwinter attire, and still the cold shock of the crisp breeze wins the first encounter. Maia’s used to it. Leningraders suffer it with a stoic pride, like Eskimos.

The blank, ugly high-rise apartment blocks are the Soviet Projects. Stinky, crumbling, filthy, dark, and untended, they encircle the Russian classicism that was Saint Petersburg. A city built by the artists of Europe hemmed in by the grotesque rectangles of the Khrushchev buildings—his legacy to the Soviet dream. She boards the narrow-nosed trolley on Sverdlovskaya Embankment, a short walk from her front door. Eleven stops, rocking and pitching along wide streets before familiar pink façades gently blooming in the glow of sunrise light. Leningraders nod and grunt a muffled "Dobriy utro" to each other on the tram, acknowledging their common plight and perseverance, some even recognize Maia now with a proud smile. Across the wide, frozen Neva, the fluid river is but a blue-black canal down the center, made by the icebreakers. Clackity-clack down Gliinky Street and she’ll hop off at Theatre Square facing the Mariinsky’s green-and-white front portico, then rush to the Kirov’s side entrance to find a scrum of gaunt dancers and choreographers huddled together against the stage doors, sipping hot chocolate and finishing a last cigarette before the work day begins.

Nadia waits for Maia inside, upstairs, down a long corridor, in a wooden room gleaming soft and worn with more than a century of human burnishing. The body oils, skin burns, pirouettes and jumps on boney feet, and perspiration—a lather of artistic passion—from countless thousands of dancers have polished the parquet chamber to a cozy gloss. As a premier dancer and choreographer for the world-famous company, much of Nadia Vrankina’s blood and sweat have seeped into these wooden rooms and stages. She is revered by the hoards of new waifs who come to learn and follow in her shadow. The running joke for Kirov’s dancers, and most Russian ballerinas, goes, What does a dancer get for her thirtieth birthday? Teaching position. Frightening but true, Nadia finds herself, at thirty-three, quite content with a stellar career behind her and a reputation that has secured her future as an important artist in a vast, cutthroat system of survival whose only genuine hard currency is youth and stamina.

Nadia holds a stretch pose in the center of the room. Maia leans over her, pressing Nadia’s bare shoulders against her breasts, wrapping her arms around, locking the ballerina’s hard-cut biceps inside hers, and tenderly kissing the delicate line of whaleback spina on the arch of her neck. Nadia enjoys the early morning intrusion; Maia’s cool lips and embrace. She’s suddenly comforted by her presence, and then the nimble dancer springs to her feet.

"We have a long practice, much work, Miusha. Schto, schto! Come, come, only three weeks until next competition. Worlds are coming up." She kisses Maia rapidly on both cheeks and begins unwrapping the thick winter garb covering the skater, tossing garments onto a bench in the corner of the room.

"Ya, ya, I know all about," Maia says sullenly.

Just some months and weeks and Olympics will be here before you know it, my beauty, Vrankina scolds good-naturedly.

So cold today, you can kick dog shit like stone, Maia says angrily. Going to live in Majorca someday. Nadia laughs. They embrace again mechanically, then prance to the center of the room to begin a warm-up routine.

Did I tell you Amerikanski journalist is coming to write story? Maia says casually.

No, I know nothing about. Nadia stops, hands on hips. Here, to Leningrad?

"Ja. Coaches tell me it’s good thing. Big Amerikanski sports magazine will do profile for the Olympics. Perhaps I can even be on cover."

"Da, da, da, this is very good. More people will know you, know what I already can see."

Maybe he can interview great Kirov choreographer, Nadia Vrankina, too.

"Ne, ne, I can stay behind scenes. You are star, devushka." Nadia combs Maia’s hair with her fingers, caresses her face tenderly, and kisses her three times: once softly on each cheek, then meeting Maia’s lips passionately. Hungrily, they enjoy each other’s mouths for an extended few moments. It’s exciting for both, and the kiss becomes a bit ravenous.

We must do work, Nadia, Maia says, breathlessly breaking away.

Yes, of course. Nadia straightens up, assumes a dance exercise pose. We will have time later for talking. Maia mirrors her position silently.

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They will put together elements of Maia’s long program, this day, and the labor will be intense and long. Until one of them raises a blister, or a wad of skin peels back in burning pain, or worse, until fatigue leads to the drawing of blood and puss from swollen feet, until then they will press on. Today, fortunately, they’ll finish before any physical calamity befalls them. They cool down with leg extensions and yogic stretches and meditative breathing, then dress themselves to withstand a quick five-block sprint to Nadia’s spacious apartment in the afternoon light and frosty winds of Leningrad’s short winter days.

Nadia has status, and some privileges, in this society after many years as a Kirov dancer and high-ranking choreographer, and a luxurious apartment in a classic old district of Leningrad is an important bonus. A car, a share in a country dacha, and a well-stocked refrigerator are some other perks for members of an elite group in Soviet Russia: athletes. Athletes and some other artists benefit from a special status, but Maia’s worth to the state and international notoriety is just beginning to affect her standing in the culture. These fineries and benefits will come to her in time.

Nadia fawns over Maia with solicitous bearing. Maia’s her star pupil at the moment, one of only a handful of figure skaters to ever merit the tutelage of a top Kirov choreographer. Nadia knew, the moment she saw Maia skate, there was some indefinable special quality present, a talent that needed only the slightest nurturing. She also knew, almost immediately, that she had come under Maia’s charismatic spell, and a longing in her to be close to someone, to share an intimacy with another, would begin then and there to find ripening.

Nadia’s apartment is warm. It’s a refuge for Maia, available to her when she wants to withdraw or needs Nadia’s protective care. Maia was sought after by scores of men, mostly the athletes and artists who made up those circles with which she came into direct contact. She dated occasionally, yearned for a man’s affections in a strong, deeply committed love, but it never happened. She was young and attractive. That’s what young and attractive Russian boys and girls did, dated, probably more out of a sense of duty than inclination. Unarguably, Maia is one of the most beautiful women in the USSR, perhaps on the continent. Her face suddenly adorned numerous Soviet television specials and European tabloids in the short time it took to get a glimpse of the new skating sensation and Olympic hopeful who looked like a high-fashion model. She was rock-star material, a hit at the top of the celebrity charts, and she became an overnight heartthrob throughout Europe, especially in the Eastern Bloc. That’s all it took. An unaccustomed recognition and fame were swiftly upon her, and so, too, a stampede of brutish men—Russians, swaggering Slavs, Czech hockey players, Bulgarian skiers, an Estonian speed skater, a Ukrainian futbol star—men whose idea of preeminent sexual entitlement seemed savagely similar to Neanderthal’s. Romance was, it seemed, very low on their priority list.

She tired of that scene, fast. So many of her contemporaries—the unfortunate, ungifted in sport or theater or dance—had turned to a Russian-styled prostitution as paid escorts, kept women on a short leash held by their male benefactors. Like sugar babies with pretend sugar daddies, they were not quite mistresses with lofty standing, or endowments of exquisite clothes and gaudy jewelry. A stack of rubles or, with a little luck, a crisp roll of US dollars or Swiss francs was compensation enough to suffer a Russian man’s company and abuse for a night or two. The trophy female, the physical convenience, came with a price on both ends of the agreement. Maia’s rapidly ascending fame as a potential Olympic treasure accounted for nothing in the most basic of human genera. She was still a Russian woman, akin to property in the impassive Soviet male-dominated hierarchy.

She stopped dating and dedicated herself completely to skating and the goal of an Olympic medal. And Nadia was there, with tenderness and compassion, with understanding, and with an appreciative sensitivity that enveloped their long-standing friendship. The friendship deepened as the work intensified. Raw emotions exposed a space of love wanting in the Platonic, and they soon formed a bridge to the missing romance, sensuality, and passion. The power of lust did the rest.

The desire for sexual connection in the two women was agreeably overwhelming, explosive, and instantly satisfying. Their bodies came alive with newfound excitement. Maia and Nadia indulged joyously in their innate physicality—a pas de deux of organic genesis.

Soaping each other’s firm breasts and buttocks in warm showers, lying naked, embracing in hot saunas, kissing wildly in celebratory passion, kneading each other’s taut, tired muscles in oily massage evolved naturally from their closeness. Sexual play, child’s play, spontaneous touching and caressing, arousing to sexual frenzy, and they’d readily found completion and solace in one another.

Sharing Nadia’s warm shower, they could wash away the sweat of their toil and the film of Soviet scum that Russian women collected like pollution in the haze of a pawing male-centric society. Neither woman would profess a total, connubial loyalty to the other. They craved liberation—they were Soviets—they loved and respected individual emotional freedom too much for any binding contract. Their intimacy, they’d decided, would be an emancipating zone of choice and self-determination. They drank willfully at the font of their common desire, leaving ample space for change and new desires. This was the state of their being. They’d found a small quiet corner in a dismally oppressive culture where their pleasure and experience could blossom and find expression.

In time, perhaps Maia would make new discoveries; perhaps in her travels for skating competitions she would meet people outside of the closed Soviet society. Maybe a man would come along, a different kind of man, and a hunger for deep male and female sexual attachment might arise again. For now, she was fulfilled. Every connection she wanted or needed was contained in this sympathetic coupling, and every burning passion, every furious desire Maia had, was both set aflame and sated in the heat of Vrankina’s love.

ONE—Cold War Games

Maia went into the 1983 skating season with impressive new choreography. The hard work she and Nadia Vrankina put into her programs paid high dividends. She medaled at the Worlds in Helsinki, but more importantly, she won top honors in several competitions within the Soviet Union, and it served to boost her growing fame in Russian society to nearly idol status. She was a rare jewel—a world-class singles skater in a country that had consistently produced superstars in pairs or dance teams, exclusively. The USSR was not used to individual celebrity of this magnitude. A cult of personality was suddenly sweeping across the land from Siberia to the Ukraine, and Maia’s name was on everyone’s lips. The Winter Games in Sarajevo were less than a year away, and her success was drawing worldwide attention to the impenetrably closed world of Soviet introversion and secrecy. More precious than ballet, ice hockey, or vodka, their impassive privacy and isolation were being compromised by a genuine sex symbol in skimpy skating outfits.

On September 1, 1983, in the nighttime skies over Russia’s eastern coast, six Soviet military jets shot down a Korean Air Line’s commercial 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew that had mistakenly veered off of its flight path and into Soviet airspace—more of their guarded concealment suddenly compromised.

The plane plummeted into the Sea of Japan near Sakhalin Island, killing everyone aboard. Many of the passengers were Americans, including a United States congressman. East and West, tempers flared. Globally, a general outrage polarized the Free World and the Communist bloc, and an airline boycott soon followed. Moscow lied and alibied, Washington accused and demanded incessantly for reparations and beat the drum for the Free World’s collective condemnation. The Soviets played the denial card, claiming the plane was on a spy mission over sensitive territory.

KAL flight 007 had turned the heat up under Cold War animosity once again, hastening the usual knee-jerk dash to confrontation and escalation. The political rift grew rapidly, and harsh words, throughout the autumn of ’83, volleyed between the capitals. At times, it was frightening to hear or read the news. Them and us: Soviets and Americans, at it again—and again to the Cold War breach.

There’s more.

Unknown to the outside world on September 26, a drama of cataclysmic proportions was unfolding in a bunker beneath the streets of suburban Moscow. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov (retired) watched with alarm as his computerized early warning systems indicated that missiles had been launched by the United States against the Soviet Union. In the event of such an attack, Soviet strategy—at the mercy of quick-response judgment by one Stanislav Petrov—was to launch an immediate all-out nuclear counterattack against the United States. Armageddon, reliant on some yellow blips in a video game military software program and, quite possibly, Colonel Petrov’s trigger finger. The colonel’s bunker computers, however, relayed that only one missile was heading towards the Soviet Union. Petrov reasoned that the United States would not launch an attack with just one missile; it would launch many simultaneously. He alone decided that the early warning systems information was in error and did not launch the missiles he was being prompted to send. Stanislav Petrov’s individual prudence is credited with preventing World War III and the devastation of much of the beautiful Blue Marble by nuclear weapons.

Mistakes, accidents, or overt provocation not withstanding, an overriding fact of the Cold War remained clear throughout—hundreds of millions of people on three continents stood to be wiped out in less than an hour’s nuclear exchange, untold numbers elsewhere. As the shoe-pounding Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, once warned, The survivors would envy the dead.

The threat of nuclear war hung like a sledgehammer over two generations. Every so often these posturing standoffs between the superpowers rose to worrisome levels of altercation. The hair-raising incident of KAL 007 was but one in a string of menacing Cold War crises to keep the citizenry, Russians and Americans, piqued for the inevitable showdown.

It was a U-2 spy plane in 1960, Berlin in ’61, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62. Incident or accident? What’s the difference in a world teetering on the edge of total destruction? In 1966, a midair collision between two US Air Force planes over the Mediterranean near Palomares, Spain, spread radiation from plutonium over a vast area of the quiet fishing village. One of the American planes, a B-52 bomber, was carrying four hydrogen bombs, three of which exploded upon impact. We could be a threat to ourselves—seven Americans died and scores of Air Force personnel charged with the cleanup were contaminated—and fields around Palomares, the fertile land of one of our allies, has been fenced off since the midair mishap. The United States had already boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, a minor us-and-them quandary on the surface, but the underlying reason for it was a key component to our special Cold War relationship. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The US response was to keep the American athletes home for the Moscow games. (Tag: you’re it!) The Soviets retaliated, on cue, with a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Tit for tat. Soviet occupation troops would remain mired in a fierce protracted war with Afghan separatist rebels for more than a decade after 1979. Maybe the American military could find a way to get involved in Afghanistan too? Stay tuned.

Each day’s headline news brought with it some diplomatic or military bone of contention between the United States and the USSR. Flashpoints could happen anywhere at anytime. We the people got used to it, tired of it occasionally. We even ignored the boisterous warnings at times. Propaganda was a two-way street, we soon learned, and common folk of both nations went on about their business. We were two for the Cold War seesaw—you had to stay on to keep the balance. Nevertheless, each day’s tendentiousness between Washington and Moscow held in the balance the same unnerving prospect of mankind’s nuclear grave.

Our parents’ generation had been severely scarred by the atrocities of two world wars only a few decades apart. This was understandable. Only twenty years after the ferocity and wholesale bloodshed of the Great War came Nazism, Fascism, death, destruction, ethnic cleansing, and systematic genocidal extermination on a scale that would slowly reveal a new untoward level of the inhumanity man could inflict upon fellow man in World War II. Oddly, the outrage by war’s end was somewhat muted in a world of political rift, war-torn economies, and megalomaniacal leaders.

And the resolution after official surrenders was swift—maybe too swift and too orderly. It was National Socialist Party order that got us into the mess of world war in the first place. The Third Reich’s insistence on order led political and social professionals down a road of immorality, persecution, and cold-blooded murder to conform the world’s mixed populations to the desired Aryan purity. Many of the most brutal and bold war criminals escaped to far-off lands. It would take years to bring a handful of them to justice, or to occasionally hear about their deaths from old age. The postwar Nuremberg Trials and military tribunals took almost five years to complete, and the prosecution of Nazi war crimes—offenses that would seem overwhelming on any court docket—gave the lawful appearance and impression that something resembling retribution was taking place. As in most fishing expeditions, some of the big ones got away. But the most conspicuous insouciance surrounded the two most cataclysmic events, events that would change the world, and all of its inhabitants, forever—the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A secret nuclear door had been opened and left ajar, and the world fell manifestly silent. Perhaps the shock was too monstrous, far-reaching, too much to bear, the magnitude too great, or too fearful. Seeing the filmed detonations of the A bomb left ordinary people and scientists alike awestruck and conceivably unable to comprehend and process the portents of the acts—a diabolical progression of technology and unchecked human ambition to an endtime (yes, a real end time).

At the first General Assembly of the United Nations in London in 1946, the alarm was sounded. The assembly’s goal was to eliminate the use of all nuclear weapons. The Soviets, clearly behind in development, proposed universal nuclear disarmament. The United States, not wanting to scrap its advantage in weapons technology, proposed continued development with international control and oversight. The division was sharp and clear: Soviet and American, Athens and Sparta, arms race, space race, ideological divide and conquer, NATO, Warsaw Pact, East-West, Communist-capitalist, develop digital science or destroy existing advances in computer sciences, create systems or clone systems.

Welcome to the Cold War. We’re all in it, and nobody wins it.

And that’s the way they left it: nothing done to sever the nuclear serpent’s head. The genie was out of the lamp was the popular cliché. The Allies parted ways after Yalta, each taking their slice, or slices, of the crumpled European pie, and then simply kicking the nuclear pebble down the road for the next twenty-five years. Nuclear buildup was not spoken of and weapons of mass destruction was not yet a popular term in post–World War II peacetime. Nuclear stockpiling was the game of choice for superpower militants, but it was carried on privately, out of worldview, trusting that the winners of World War II would exercise caution with the new gifts of fission and fusion.

Despite warnings from Sir Winston Churchill, and occasionally from wary Americans like Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, an arms race had commenced. It was unstoppable. The United States had demonstrated a clear advantage with the atom bombs dropped on Japan. The Soviets wasted no time and detonated their first nuclear bomb in 1949, shocking the world years ahead of predictions. The victors occasionally whispered the softer term proliferation, and, of course, so much could be secreted behind a word like proliferation. Reactors and centrifuges could be constructed—and they were—for all sorts of applications from medicine, to exploration, to clean energy. Missiles could be retrofitted—and they were—with nuclear payloads called warheads, and suddenly atomic energy had a new sidekick, the ICBM. Intercontinental was the operative word. We’d suddenly gone global, like it or not. The nuke could reach anywhere, and shelter was becoming increasingly obsolete, or meaningless. And wasn’t progress our most important product?

Great Britain and France joined the nuclear club with alacrity. China came online soon after to become the fifth club member. Their nuclear ambitions, all of them, were very hush-hush secret, meant to be inscrutable and threatening, but planet earth was just not big enough to hide the test explosions of even the most clandestine pursuits of atomic power. Whole islands and coral reefs would disappear. All surrounding island life would be exterminated, as was the case with Ivy Mike in 1952, a hydrogen bomb so big, it rose in a cloud one hundred miles wide and twenty-five miles high. The atmosphere would be contaminated for months or years, or would it? (Who knew?) Underground and under-ocean testing registered seismic reverberations thousands of miles away from test sites. The South Pacific became synonymous with nuclear clouds and infernal tests. Radiation effects were grossly underestimated, and thousands of innocent people were exposed for the sake of testing and the nuclear arms race. Scientific and medical knowledge had not yet caught up to a nuclear infestation by modern technologies. It was simply called acute radiation syndrome—radiation sickness—and from 1945 on, people around the world would fall victim to its effects in industrial mishaps, in military applications, or scientific testing of nuclear technology.

It would be 1970 before a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed by the developing nations. 1945 to 1970. You do the math. All that time to build warheads. Warheads became the new portmanteau word of the twentieth century. We became obsessed with counting them—by the thousands—as though size mattered to those of us unsuspecting pedestrians beneath the mushroom cap. The nuclear arsenals were truly frightening in their volume. Our leaders, our governing bodies talked over our heads, as if ionizing the air we breathe or frying the environment to a crisp was just some nasty detail of Cold War preparedness and the newly formed hazmat culture.

This is the world I was born into, the world in which a beautiful blue-eyed child from Leningrad would arrive. We would live each day with a serious and fearful premonition. We would know nothing else in our lives but to exist, go to school and learn, and take up football or skating—to laugh and love and live in the time of the Cold War.

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Television and film, music, an age of protest, an age of anxiety and the dread of doomsday, inherent in a Cold War state of mind—and all of the crises associated with Cold War conflict, hostility, or achievement—would shadow our lives from birth and childhood into our young adult and family-making years. And to our complete surprise, we would see almost all of it with our very own eyes on TV or on film. The irony and pathos of Cold War confrontations was not all spent on actual nuclear annihilation. The story of our obliteration was entertainment too. There was the fictional Cold War. For Hollywood, the us-and-them film genre of end-time scenarios was a bonanza.

In the fall of 1983, ABC Television—network of the 1984 Winter Games and Summer Olympics, no less—was in the final production stages of a made-for-television movie called The Day After. It was a cinematic what-if, depicting a world in the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration: the remaining human life forms struggling with a new reality one day after near-total destruction.

In premise, an unfortunate war has occurred in the not-too-distant future between (who else?) the United States and the Soviet Union, and the result is the onset of stark and barren nuclear winter. A cast of capable television actors, hidden underground in Kansas, dramatized the effort to reinhabit the desolate landscape following a thermonuclear event. The movie aired on November 20 of that year and achieved record-setting Nielsen ratings. Ultimately, an estimated one hundred million viewers saw it worldwide.

I was scheduled to fly Pan Am to Helsinki, then Aeroflot to Leningrad on November 21—the day after the movie’s premiere.

TWO—Grigori, November 1983

Pulkovo Air Terminus in Leningrad, and I’ve touched down in the USSR. Grigori Ivanovich Baranov is waiting for me, holding a sign with crude black marker lettering scrawled across it: At’ let Magatzin. He’s my liaison, my fixer and translator, provided by the State Television Organization, Gosteleradio, assigned from media headquarters in Moscow to meet me here. Any access, any arrangements I need to get my story on the female figure skater, he will make the contacts and schedule all of my requests with her coaches and trainers, and with the Figure Skating Committee of the Supreme Soviet Sports Ministry—the jock gulag.

Baranov is a balding, diminutive but squarely built, sternly professional man with direct deep-set eyes, unblinking behind Coke-bottle-thick glasses. An uncompromising, unchanging, bulldog grimace has riven crevasse-like lines in his rugged complexion. Dark stubble and an angularity to chin and cheeks give him a rough, defiant tenor. He waddles with an uneven gait, and I’ve been told he’ll lean to one side when forced to stand for extended periods—remnants of several years in one of Joe Stalin’s prison camps.

Nice sign, Mr. Baranov. I exaggerate a grin.

Sorry. He smiles broadly. It’s a wonderfully warm smile of shy, embarrassed, immeasurable candor and kindness. We shake hands tightly. I’m a phonetic creature, you see, I can speak English well but spelling it correctly… ? It’s a difficult language. Don’t you agree?

It’s the worst, Mr. Baranov. Yes, tricky. Maybe we should try Turkish?

I’d been detained for what seemed an interminable inspection in Soviet Customs and baggage claim—ceremonial Communist organisms renowned for their intimidation. I’m a journalist, here on business. The scrutiny is intensified for the nontourist, I’d been warned, especially someone who’s in the business of taking information out of a closed society and using it in an open one.

Baranov is dressed a bit better, a bit more stylishly than the average Soviet businessman. Fatherly and gracious, and a gentleman, he has command of several languages—his English is a British English with Russian zeal and irritability—and he possesses a keen talent for getting things done rather quickly in a place where bureaucratic indolence is the adopted and enforced modus operandae. Mike Corby has known Grigori Baranov for many years. He set up the arrangements with the Soviet Sports Committee, unbeknownst to me, on the condition that they guarantee Baranov for my assignment.

You and Baranov… it should be interesting, Mike said. It was the way he said interesting that comes to mind now.

Progress is always slow for Americans in the Soviet Union, especially slow since the Korean airliner incident. Grigori Baranov knows this. He knows the ways of Western journalists. He spent considerable time in the West, as a reporter for the Soviet News Agency, Tass, during World War II. He knows much about Western efficiency and impatience. A young war correspondent with worldliness and intelligence, he was rewarded with brutal enslavement, hard labor, and torture. He’d witnessed mass executions of his countrymen, Corby told me. There is mileage, history, and much pain in those noble old Grigori Baranov bones, Mike said.

It’s hard for me to grasp, that time, that level of inhumanity. The Soviet system, the direct derivation from the Bolshevik Revolution, is but a piece of abstract history to me now, an endless stream of network news reports, editorial rants, TV documentaries, and magazine articles with mushroom-cloud pictures and sensational headlines. But Grigori Baranov is indefatigable in his charm and clever sarcasm. He’s intelligent, warm and disarming from the first, relishing in a dry, droll wit and a beguiling sense of humor. All Russians possess a sort of puzzling, existential black humor, but too few use it. I’ll soon discover a good sense of the lighter side becomes an enormously valuable asset in Soviet Russia.

Customs check seemed like an eternity, my friend, he says with a sly smirk, as we bounce and bump along in a shockless, springless, strutless van—a Russian RAF Lativa—at what seems like aircraft speed, over potholes and ruts on a superhighway from Pulkovo Airport. "I could have read War and Peace."

Three hours, I tell him nonchalantly, hanging on to a broken strap that dangles ominously from the ceiling.

Your first time, Amerikansk. He trills the r in Amerikansk. Sounds neat. It’s not bad, thickened like that, I kind of like it. He’s pleased with it too. The facking militia, they only do this to Americans.

Figures, I mumble.

The USA-USSR bullshit, Amerikansk, he says angrily.

I admire the tone of his remark. I like this guy already. Maybe this will be interesting.

You call everybody Amerikansk? From… Amerikansk-i?

No. This is special for you. He waits for me to smile.

Oh, yeah? Special for me. How come?

On your papers, I saw all those facking names. This is crazy, I said.

You don’t like my names, Grigori? Which one didn’t you like? Aeneas, Edward, Bartholomew, Gianfranco . . .

How come so many names, Amerikansk?

Russians should complain about names, right? I’ve read Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev . . .

Yes, this is more puzzling that you are an American from this place of steel making.

I really don’t know, Grigori. My parents were having a contest, I think. Big Italian family, lots of men, lots of egos to please.

Must have given nickname at some time, yes? School chums, sisters, or brother? How are you called?

Numb Nuts, Meat, Snake, Hotspur, Bo-Bo . . .

No, Amerikansk. Seriously, what was nickname given by friends? He’s chuckling a bit, trying to keep a straight face.

Famous, I tell him, with dry resign.

This makes no facking sense at all. He starts laughing like a hyena. The van swerves. You Americans are all crazy. Hemingway. This name, I give to you. Like the great novelist. I will call you Hemingway and make you famous in Leningrad. Hemingway! I like this! He slams the steering wheel with a fist, and I give him a big smile and a rap on the shoulder.

Ernest doesn’t work for you?

No. Hemingway only. You see, Amerikansk, the insane kind of bullshit I must put up with? Crazy Americans like you, all the time, this is what they give to me.

Right on. How about this Double-O-Seven bullshit, Grigori?

Yes, liars all. They will take us to the brink of war, the facking superpowers. The ones in power are crazy. He rattles again angrily.

"Americans are pouring Russian vodka in the streets over this Korean airliner thing, you know that don’t