Sunday, January 27, 2002
THE MERCURY NEWS

To do Russia justice requires an appreciation for paradox and deep-seated ambivalence, the kind I associate with my grandmother. As Bubbe Rose told it, she escaped from Russia in the back of a peasant’s hay wagon more than 100 years ago—and spent the rest of her life reminiscing (usually over a cup of lemon tea steeped in a glass mug) about the Volga.

Paradox spills across nearly every page in the latest spate of books on modern Russia. Despite rampant alcoholism, deprivation, pollution and economic ruin, the country remains oddly alluring. Its people are blessed with humor and a heroic tenacity that makes them survivors. Despite the calamities of everyday life, they are devoted to Mother Russia and her mysteries. These themes flow through the two memoirs: “Black Earth City: When Russia Ran Wild (And So Did We)” (Henry Holt, 211 pp., $23), by Charlotte Hobson, and the unfortunately titled “All the Clean Ones Are Married: And Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow” (Academy Chicago, 272 pp., $23.95) by Lori Cidylo.

Both begin, curiously, the same way: An adventurous 20-something woman leaves her comfortable home (in the first case England, in the second the United States), moves to Russia and goes native. The year is 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev has just been forced out of office. The Soviet Union has been declared a political nonentity.

Hobson, a student at Edinburgh University, is the recalcitrant type who refuses to heed advice (“Have you any idea what knuckleheaded louts live in the provinces?” a Russian emigre asks her incredulously) and heads for Voronezh, a city best known for having endured 200 days of front-line fighting in World War II.

Cidylo, a small-town journalist from upstate New York, horrifies her Ukrainian immigrant parents who can’t understand why their daughter would willingly travel to a place they’d prefer to forget, and moves to Moscow.

Cidylo isn’t the natural writer or storyteller that Hobson is, but her book resonates with personal experience, gathered from six years of daily struggle to survive in what may well be the most dysfunctional place on Earth.

When her refrigerator breaks down, she simply moves the food out on the snow-covered balcony (where it remains safely preserved for the next couple of months), then resumes her reading of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

But Cidylo has her priorities, devoting an entire chapter to the demands of laundry. Exhausted from washing her clothes and heavy sweaters in the bathtub each week, she considers a laundry service but decides against it when she learns that it refuses to accept anything with buttons or zippers. (Her neighbors cut off the buttons and resew them after each cleaning.)

Money ironing

She tracks down a washing machine on the black market, and taking along a male friend for protection, meets up with a shady character who ignores her Ralph Nader-like line of consumer questioning. In the end, she’s desperate enough to hand over the crisp $100 bill that she ironed specially for this purchase. (While Russians love U.S. dollars, they like them unwrinkled.)
The washing machine immediately goes on the blink and floods the kitchen floor after a single cycle. Not to worry! A Muscovite friend quickly diagnoses the problem: Soviet-made machines are like Soviet workers: “When they perform a task, they need to take a break.” Half an hour between cycles is recommended.

Cleanliness ranks clearly next to godliness on Cidylo’s priority list. The title says it all: “All the Clean Ones Are Married.” Read: Russian men smell. They don’t use deodorant or mouthwash, their hair is greasy and dripping with dandruff, and they share a common belief in the hazards of the daily bath. When one date shows up at her door wearing a sweater that smells like “a butcher’s garbage can,” Cidylo can barely bring herself to touch it.

Charlotte Hobson isn’t nearly so fastidious. She settles into a “verminous” student hostel that is “teeming with activity”— much of it sexual. After 70 years of Soviet repression, the youth of Russia are breaking out in wild, licentious behavior, and teenage girls who once professed an ambition to be Lenin's Little Helpers are now hell-bent, according to one poll, on becoming hard-currency prostitutes.

Hobson captures a maddening world of characters who could have come straight out of the novels of Gogol and Dostoevski. Of those, none is more telling than Edik Zelyony, a pretentious intellectual snob who, when we meet him, is delighting in his good fortune: He has just managed to finagle a government identity card declaring him a Grade 3 idiot.

A Grade 1 or 2 categorization would mean confinement in a mental hospital, but Grade 3 carries a host of advantages, including cheap transportation, food and medicine coupons, special housing and, best of all, military exemption. His doting mother celebrates the news with a little party of fried eggs for family and friends.

Hobson approaches life with a youthful verve that blends easily into a world where there’s little to lose. She walks the frozen streets at night with her Russian lover, Mitya, ducking into doorways to kiss, huddling for warmth under monolithic Soviet statues.

She joins a group of Russian friends on a nocturnal trek through a pitch-black forest, only to learn later that 700 corpses—the remains of victims killed by Stalin—were recently uncovered beneath its pine trees. Two weeks later, Hobson attends a memorial service in which skeletal remnants, belt buckles and shoes are buried in a mass memorial service.

“Black Earth City” offers a taste of young turbulent energy, but it ultimately gives you just a tiny piece of the vastness that’s Russia. There aren’t many old or even middle-aged people in this book. Indeed, its subtitle, “When Russia Ran Wild (And So Did We),” tells a lot about whom this book is really about. In comparison, Cidylo’s obsession with her laundry seems like the ranting of an old fogy.

Unleashed turmoil

A couple of recent coffee-table photography books also look at the turmoil that was unleashed with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Gerd Ludwig, a National Geographic photographer, has collected 126 color photographs from the magazine. “Broken Empire: After the Fall of the USSR” (National Geographic, 224 pp., $50) juxtaposes images of filth, homelessness and misery alongside one of diners at the first-class Cafe Pushkin in Moscow, where a bottle of wine can cost $2,800.

Shepard Sherbell, a documentary photographer, spent three years traveling throughout the dismantled Soviet Union, recording the faces of mothers, mine workers, prisoners, factory workers and children. The result, “Soviets: Pictures from the End of the USSR” (Yale University, 276 pp., $45) is a raw, unfiltered collection of grainy black-and-white photographs. The misery of the country lies naked across the faces of its citizens.

Like the world it portrays, it is a book full of pain.

Copyright 2002
San Jose Mercury News