Buying the Night Flight (23 page)

In that evening I spent with Hoffer and friends, it came through to me even more dramatically than in his books how much he believed that America was not only the quintessential, but the only country of the common man. Hoffer distrusted the intellectuals -- they were too theoretical for him. He saw them as the true oppressors because when they came to power they demanded not only physical submission but mental submission as well. I could not have arranged a better briefing for my trip to Russia -- where before the Marxist revolution the czar could own men's bodies but only God could own their souls.

Once during the evening Hoffer shouted -- that is the only verb to use, for his voice was so resonant -- "I will never leave America." How like Saul Alinsky, whose friend he had been!

Over a groaning dinner with roast pork, huge scoops of ice cream with walnuts, and glass after glass of red wine, he discussed the recent Berkeley riots, which was exactly the sort of event to disgust him. He saw this kind of student in the same light as the intellectual -- wanting to tell the workingman, who after all produced all the wealth, what to do, wanting to make him respond like a Pavlovian dog.

"When I saw those riots," he said with an impish look, aimed particularly at me, the Latin Americanist, "I wrote down in my little book, 'The working men of the world are becoming Americanized, and the American intellectuals are becoming Latinized.'" As to the black firebrands then looting cities, he declared without equivocation: "They are not revolutionaries. Revolution is not stealing and burning." Stokely Carmichael was someone who "wants to be given power as if it comes in a can. The Negro needs pride in himself. He can't be given things." During this he continuously called intellectuals "scribes."

But he listened, too. I was able to tell him several things that backed up everything he had written -- among them the fact that in Latin America "anti-Americanism" was the preserve of the intellectuals and the middle class and that, on the contrary, the workingmen are very pro-American. I told him that his ideas about the dependence of the weak upon the strong and the resentment it caused were particularly apt in Latin America where the weak (the Latins) resented the strong (the United States) not so much because of injustice but because of their own feelings of inadequacy.

Hoffer replied: "I knew it..." He cried out, then: "The workingmen of the world will all look to America. They will all understand America."

I remember the evening as though it were yesterday: the sheer human zest and passion, the wonderful talk, the belief in a future for mankind -- but a
realistic
one.

***

Only days later, Henry and I stood on the deck of the Japanese ship as it approached through the gray mist the empty, dimly out lined coast of the eastern Soviet Union. Low, hilly, bleak. I was filled with a deep emotion, as though a long-held dream were about to be realized.

Soon it was all spreading out in front of my eyes, so close and yet, always, always, always so far. There, in Khabarovsk, where the men fought tigers with their bare hands. There in Bratsk, far north in the Siberian wilderness, one of the "new towns" where people went to escape. There in Samarkand and Bokhara, between the Red and the Black Sands in Central Asia, in the great blue and gold cities of Tamerlane. It was all within my grasp--and always and ever eluding my grasp.

Our days everywhere were similar. We were always housed in some utilitarian but acceptable (finicky male Henry didn't agree with that last word) hotel where nothing ran efficiently or smoothly, but instead with the utmost of bureaucracy, which is what the Russians substitute for efficiency. In each city we could contact the Novosti man and he would have arranged appointments. The appointments were always formal and utterly similar, as though we were dealing with well-informed and well-planned puppets. Every moment we were challenged; we were "the imperialists" -- why were all capitalists so ugly, so inhuman? Facts, statistics, history: nothing moved them. Every night we came back to the hotel exhausted with that special exhaustion that no one can know who has not known Russia. We would stagger to the dining room, sometimes struggling for hours to catch the waiter's or waitress's eye. Deliberately, insouciantly, scornfully, sarcastically, they would ignore us. Sometimes it took three hours to get the simplest and always the most banal of dinners. Since in the Soviet Union any service occupation is looked down upon, they excuse themselves from serving other people by scorning them. It was enraging. Often we got around it by ordering caviar and champagne in our rooms. Eric Hoffer would have enjoyed the sight of us, here in the "workers' paradise," surviving by eating caviar and champagne!

How was I going to write about this shrouded land, this cloaked people with their souls hidden deep inside them? Where was I to go to discover their real selves? Were there even "real selves"? Was it all in the propaganda and in the harsh statements that the officials so avidly fed me? Was I wrong always to grope underneath the psyches presented me? What were the clues--and how would I even recognize them when I found them? Every night I went to bed with the same heavy and dull exhaustion that seemed to permeate all of Mother Russia.

Then I began -- just began -- to get clues, to have this strange secret world open up. As in so much of journalism you could not push it; you had to just be around, to hang around, and then suddenly people would reveal themselves, like actors waiting for their -- never your -- cue.

Once on a ship in the Black Sea, for instance, my guide and I were standing against the railing quietly watching the dramatic seacoast where Jason sought the Golden Fleece when suddenly he said, "The government explains it all by saying we can't leave because they need the work force." I didn't answer. The words had come out of nowhere and hung there like spiders spinning their own web. No Russian would admit that the government forbade them from leaving, you see; but suddenly, when you least expected it, it came out.

Then there was a night in Kiev, when I was talking with a charming young woman I shall call "Natasha." The conversation in the hotel dining room had started with the typical chauvinistic Russian remark that Russians could not create anywhere except in Russia. We moved on to Stalin and I mentioned, "Look at all the people killed. The top members of the party, the politburo .... "

"You know more than we," she said, now defensive but also sad. (How many times was I, for whom "knowing" was so important, to hear that from young Russians!)

"And they were the top members of the party," I went on, because I had a relentless intention then of
making
them see or at least hear the truth. "It's the Communists who should hate him."

"Maybe this is why the ordinary people do not hate him," she suggested tentatively. "You ask people today if they hate Stalin and you'll be surprised...." Then her mood suddenly changed. She became very upset and tears rolled generously down her cheeks. And then she made the most extraordinary revelation for a Russian.

"After the death of Stalin," she started, "I was terribly upset." By now we were sitting on the darkened steps of the hotel, and perhaps that gave her a feeling of safety -- that plus the wine. "It was a great disillusionment for me to hear about his crimes -- I can't tell you how deep it was. I couldn't even go to the institute to study for two years. I lost all interest in everything. It wasn't until my marriage, when my husband began to explain things to me, that I began to feel again." By now she was crying very gently.

"Now..." Her voice suddenly became fierce. "Now I don't want to know things."

When I suggested to her that to be fully human you had to "know" things, she shook her head fiercely.

"Why?" she demanded. "I don't think it's at all necessary. So what if Stalin killed a million people, as you say? There are still two hundred million of us left!"

***

I was not in Russia during the "thaw" of Nikita Khrushchev, for that was largely over by the mid-sixties. But some of it lingered on. Stalin was long dead--and the society would not return to that mailed fist, to that "man of steel" and epoch of steel and blood. The United States was getting over the sickening death of John F. Kennedy and was full-blown in the war in Vietnam. Latin America, with such hope during the Kennedy period, now was pulling back; the democratic solutions offered in the early sixties were dying by the wayside, and Central America again was slipping toward the all-out civil war and guerrilla "solution" that later came back to haunt us in unspeakable nightmares. Africa still was freeing itself from colonial rule, and China remained in the Maoist grip.

But, Russia? What
was
Russia, this "world" that had been set up by history as our nemesis, our antagonist, our enemy? How could we deal with something we knew so little about? How could we reach it -- and reach into it?

Gradually, as Russia unfolded before me, little insights and events piled up upon little insights and events and began to show me "how." One night in Irkutsk, a charming old Siberian city where the political exiles built churches and forts in challenge to the czar, I went over to talk to the Komsomol youth in the university. As Komsomolski they were or should have been the most totally indoctrinated of the lot; and they were. At one point the young woman leader and I were arguing about the U.S. Finally I pointed to a poster emblazoning the wall marked, "Kill the Yanqui gorillas in Latin America," the "gorillas" being the American-backed military.

"I don't think
that
is so friendly," I said with a distinctly miffed air.

I fully expected her to argue with me. Instead she went over to the offending poster, looked at it for a moment pensively, then took it down. Underneath it was one reading, "Release political prisoners in Greece!"

"There," she said soothingly, "we can all agree on that!"

In this and other situations I tried to watch for signs -- of anxiety, of sudden interest, of whatever--that would show me what people really were wanting and thinking. In Novosibirsk at the Institute of Electrical Engineering, for instance, I sat all afternoon with fifty high school students. The usual questions were repeated hostilely and by rote: "How could you respect Steinbeck anymore when he came out in favor of the Vietnam War?" "Why did we go into Hungary? -- Hungary fought against us in the great war.... " Etc., etc., etc.

Then suddenly the conversation shifted -- and I could sense it shifting to the things that really interested them. Finally one boy stood up and said wearily, "That's enough of politics." Then they all began asking with great eagerness, "What do American students do at night? Where do they go? Do they worry about their futures? How do they get jobs?"

This curiosity for the "personal" later was reinforced and interpreted by Dr. Vladimir Lisovsky, the USSR's preeminent youth sociologist. I looked him up at the University of Leningrad and got to know him -- and like him -- as well as anyone I met. In his studies on youth, for instance, he found that they wanted, in this order: to get an interesting job, to receive a higher education, to visit foreign countries, to be well off, to have good housing conditions, to improve one's qualification (for work), to find loyal friends, to bring up children to be worthy people, to find one's true love, to build a family, to buy a car, to receive secondary education, and to move to a housing project under construction.

One afternoon I had Lisovsky, a totally genial man, and my two guides up to my room at the old Astoria Hotel in Leningrad for champagne and caviar, when another telling event occurred. Suddenly Lisovsky, such a charming and rational man, was sputtering at me inexplicably.

"You Americans ... are always criticizing us," he was saying. "No hot water. No amenities. No..." By now all three sets of deep Russian forest eyes were glaring at me. Friendly only a moment before, the looks now were shrouded and angry.

"Now wait," I interjected as calmly but firmly as I could. "Think a minute. I've never criticized anything here. Nothing at all."

They all looked at me in utter astonishment. What I had said was true. But to their minds my very
being
there was a kind of built-in, implicit criticism.

That same afternoon, when we sat for hours eating and drinking, Lisovsky at one point asked me, "Now, tell me please, what do you not like about the Soviet Union?"

"Let me tell you first what I like," I said. And I outlined several areas -- the egalitarianism, the respect for work, the quest for cultural values. "But there is one thing I could not abide, living here. That
is
the fact that your entire society is built upon dishonesty. You all live it every minute, you speak it, and sometimes even you yourselves don't know where honesty ends and dishonesty begins."

To my surprise these words were greeted with total silence. Lisovsky looked down at the table, stared at it. The two women looked away from me. No one would meet my eye.

***

It was also telling to talk (on those rare occasions when you could) with the officials, with the Soviet
"apparatchik,"
and to see the subtleties and complexities of their minds and utterances. One day in Moscow it was arranged for me to visit Ivan Tikhonovich Komov, a member of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and a powerful force. Unblinking, gray, he received me sternly in his office.

"Perhaps this is not interesting to you," he started, "but we have a new program. We are trying to bring up a new generation in the experience of the former generation."