Corporation
of New York
Vol. 2/No. 2
Spring 2003
New Americans, Fresh Off the Presses
My Russia: One Reporter's View of Life After Communism
The Paradoxes of Russian Democracy
Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology
The Foundation Partnership to Strengthen African Universities
Also in this issue:
Carnegie Forum with New York City Schools Chancellor
The First Africa-Wide Journal About Higher Education is Launched
Past Issues:
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by Sophia Kishkovsky
Sophia Kishkovsky, a journalist based at the Moscow Bureau of The New York Times, has lived and worked in Russia since July 1991. Her grandparents were from Russia and fled soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. Kishkovsky was born in San Francisco and grew up in Sea Cliff, New York. She has witnessed—and reported on—Russia’s often remarkable, often frustrating struggle towards democracy and a free market and has been especially interested in its effect on the everyday lives of Russians. It is a story that is still being written. In this article, Kishkovsky writes about how the lives of several very different people from different walks of life, all of whom she has known since at least 1991, have changed since the fall of Communism.
Misha Slonim’s Victory
March
On August 22, 1991, I spotted my friend Misha Slonim, beaming as he moved with a euphoric crowd towards Red Square. They had just stood down a coup by hard-line Communists who had taken control of the Kremlin and put Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest. Misha helped carry a yards-long Russian tricolor flag, held high in proud, pointed contrast to the Soviet hammer and sickle.
When they reached Lenin’s Mausoleum, Misha and his friends did the unthinkable: they sat down and had a beer.
When the coup began on August 19, Russians awoke to television broadcasting an endless loop of Swan Lake and menacing pronouncements. Gorbachev’s liberalization policies, glasnost and perestroika, suddenly seemed like a dream; Moscow’s lone McDonald’s, a capitalist mirage.
The city’s creaky phone system was overloaded as the news spread. Tanks surrounded the Russian parliament building—the Bely Dom or White House. The weather turned bleak as did the mood, like a color film reel skipping to black and white.
A
looming black monument to secret police founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky—“Iron
Feliks”—in front of KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, where
“enemies of the people” had once been tortured and killed, no
longer seemed like a ghost receding into the past but a hint of things
to come.
When the coup began, I pictured my grandparents fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. My Russian friends and relatives are my window on the world of those who stayed behind. The changes in their lives and worldview since August 1991—since the fall of Communism—are just as dramatic and evocative of a society’s upheaval as the revolution that took place more than 80 years ago.
Thousands of Muscovites like Misha, many of them quite comfortably middle class by Soviet standards, rushed to defend the White House. Russian President Boris Yeltsin clambered atop a tank and rallied the crowd with a rousing anti-Communist speech, reinforcing the idea that they were defending their dreams for Russia’s future.
The anti-Soviet, anti-Communist crowd achieved a remarkably swift victory. By August 22, brilliant sunshine enveloped Moscow in a Technicolor glow as it bounced off gold cupolas and the red, white and blue tricolor Misha grasped. Two days later, Yeltsin asked forgiveness for the lives of the three young men killed in the coup attempt and proclaimed Russia resurrected into a new age of democracy and freedom. An Orthodox priest and a rabbi intoned hymns for the departed.
Angry
protestors tore “Iron Feliks” down on the night of the 22nd
and dumped him in a park. To many, at that moment, Russia seemed poised
for a determined break with the Soviet past that could lead only forward.
Misha and his wife Tamara hoped for as much when we set out for their traditional end-of-summer sing-along outside Moscow several days later. There was already a chill in the air as we rode along on a rickety train and hiked through the woods. Misha and Tamara had been meeting with the same group of friends for many years to brew mulled wine and sing lyrical verse about nature and love as well as mocking songs regarded as subversive commentaries on Soviet life. The group included college buddies, poets and a troubled Afghan war veteran. Most of them had stood at the White House with Misha. More than anything, the Slonims said, their friends and singing were dlia dushy—“for the soul”—not a political statement. Probably, few of the friends gathered in the woods that day—or many others, for that matter—could have imagined the breakneck speed at which the 70-year-old Soviet empire would collapse, and new hardships and opportunities arise.