Moscow, Russia: Field Notes on Site Visit, 1991
Daniel J. Elazar
Wednesday, July 24
We flew to Moscow directly from Tel Aviv on an El Al non-stop
flight on Wednesday evening, July 24th. El Al now flies two
flights a week to Moscow and return. Officially they are charter
flights, but they are numbered, leave on a regular schedule, and
are announced as regular flights in the Moscow Airport. The
plane was full with a very interesting mix of people. About a
quarter were ultra-Orthodox in full dress. Later I discovered
that Chabad was having a conference of shlichim in Moscow and
they were flying up for that. Many were Soviet Jews now settled
in Israel returning to the USSR to visit family. Still others
were businessmen and academics going to pursue their respective
interests in the Soviet Union. There may have been some
government officials on board as well but I could not tell.
Direct flights bring Moscow closer to Tel Aviv than Los Angeles
is to New York. Indeed, it took my colleagues from Novosibersk
the same four hours to fly to Moscow non-stop.
Our experience at the Moscow Airport was a foretaste of our
overall Soviet experience. The International Airport is
relatively new and the plane did pull up to a jetway but once I
was wheeled off of the plane in my wheelchair we confronted two
steep flights of steps down to customs with no elevator and no
facilities for getting handicapped people down the steps. We had
to find two airport workers who were willing to carry me down in
my wheelchair. They had obviously had no experience with such
things in the past and, in addition, were heavily under the
influence of vodka, but they did the job and felt amply rewarded
with a couple of packs of cigarettes.
I took a wheelchair with me after discussing the problems of
travel in the USSR with Dr. Seymour Epstein of the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in charge of their Soviet
operations, at headquarters in Jerusalem. Epstein encouraged me
to take the trip but in the course of his conversation indicated
to me how hard it would be. He indicated that he had never seen
a wheelchair in the Moscow Airport and even suggested flying a
JDC wheelchair from Vilnius to Moscow to meet me since it was the
only free wheelchair he knew of in the Soviet Union. I indicated
that I would rent my own and take it with me, which I did. It
was absolutely indispensible. There would have been no way for
me even to get out of the airport had I not done so.
Customs and immigration continued to indicate what we were
facing. There were no customs declaration forms in English. They
had run out. We had to use a form in French. They were also
available in German and Russian. There were red and green lines
for passing through customs, but anyone bringing in foreign
currency had to go through the red line. Thus there were long
lines of people by each of the red lines and no one by the green
line except that periodically people who looked questionable
passed through it. It took us well over an hour to pass through
the red line although they now have electronic scanners so they
do not open every suitcase and obviously are not as strict as
they were until a few years ago.
We were met by Leonid Polishchuk, senior economist of the
Institute for Economics and Environmental Technology with a van
from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to take us and our baggage to
our hotel, Uskoye, the deluxe hotel of the Academy of Sciences
located in the southwestern suburbs of Moscow. The hotel would
probably receive a minus one star rating from Mobil guide. Quite
spartan. Of course it had six steps leading up to it so I had to
be carried up in my wheelchair. It looked like a large barn or
youth hostel but was otherwise reasonably comfortable. Its
biggest drawback was that there were no screens or netting on the
windows, this in an area with heavy mosquito infestation. (Moscow
is north. It has heavy summer mosquitos as in Minnesota or
northern Canada.) Apparently Russians do not open their windows
summer or winter but it was stifling in the rooms as a result.
After two days we had to open the windows during daylight, close
them at twilight, and then kill mosquitos in the evening. As the
week went on, the number of mosquitos who got in and settled in,
increased, so that by the end we could not sleep.
On the other hand, the rooms were each equipped with color
television sets which picked up the range of Moscow channels plus
CNN so that we were able to keep in touch with the world. Indeed,
early the next week we watched the Bush-Gorbachev summit on CNN
where Gorbachev essentially surrendered to Bush as it was
happening in Moscow.
Russian hotel rooms, even deluxe ones, are spartan, to say the
least, but adequate for all that. Another peculiarity is that
the hot water pipes in the bathroom are exposed so that they
exude heat. This must be very helpful in the winter, but in the
summer when the temperature is in the 70s or 80s it is
problematic.
The food in this deluxe hotel is best described as unspeakable.
We indicated that we were vegetarians so the two meals we ate in
the restaurant the first day when we were hosted by our hosts
both consisted of sunnyside-up eggs plus potatoes and beans. No
thought to prepare the eggs in a different way for the second
meal, just exactly the same as before. At first I thought it was
because we were presenting them with problems but then I saw our
hosts had been given identical meals at lunch and at dinner. The
taste of the foot was greasy and bad. Even the bread had been
made with rancid cooking oil so it tasted strange. Our Russian
hosts received the same thing that we did except unappetizing
pieces of meat instead of the eggs. This for the director of one
of the institutes in the Academy of Sciences with the rank of
academician and a senior member of the Russian Supreme Soviet. As
for drinks, they served Pepsi Cola in pitchers, sweeter than the
kind we know but still it was something to drink. The water was
poor. Our hosts suggested that I try Russian champaign. I did.
It was simply dreadful and undrinkable. The vodka was good. I
am not a vodka drinker by preference but one can tell good vodka
as one can tell good anything and this was good. They also drink
a highly alkaline soda water that tastes like what they used to
kill people and livestock with in Death Valley days.
The hotel was essentially barn-like. There was no place to get a
newspaper. Yet it had a foreign currency shop where one could
purchase preserved foods and various electronic appliances for
hard currency. There was not much for sale, though we did use it
to buy soft drinks and some preserved foods imported from Western
Europe.
There is a small theater in the hotel where performances were
held several nights a week while we were there or perhaps always.
There was a Soviet folk orchestra playing the folk music of the
various ethnic groups. We found out about it by accident after
Harriet heard the music coming from the hall. Although their
performances are open free to hotel guests, there were no notices
posted so that is the only way we could have found out. Once we
found out, people were very gracious to us and made sure that we
knew when the next performance was so that we could come on time
rather than have to walk in at the very end as we had done with
the performance we discovered, but had we not discovered the
existence of this performance, nobody would have told us.
Russian secretiveness again.
The one thing that could be said about the hotel was that for
possessors of hard currency it was cheap. While my hosts paid
for me, I was told in advance that I would have to pay for
Harriet and Gidon and that since it was a ruble hotel I would
have to pay in rubles. Their stay for the full week came to $17
and change at the official exchange rate. We broke a glass dish
in the room (which came equipped with a refrigerator). The
concierge on the floor insisted that we pay for it, which of
course we did. It cost us the equivalent of 3 cents. Fortunately
the room did have three decent chairs so that we could sit. Very
plain but sturdy and not uncomfortable.
Thursday, July 25
At 10, Leonid Polishchuk appeared as planned and we had a meeting
lasting several hours until 1:15 during which time he described
the Institute at Novosibersk, its work in regional science, its
connections with the International Regional Science Association,
and Walter Isard's group at the University of Pennsylvania, a
group at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Rehovot Rural and
Urban Study Center in Israel, among others, and how they were
trying to turn their attention to federalism. It turns out that
the Institute is headquartered in Novosibersk but has branches
around Siberia where it undertakes various kinds of economics and
environmental studies. It does a lot of work on the theory and
practice of regional planning and development. While its total
staff is numbered in the hundreds, its academic staff numbers in
the tens. In other words, it has a complete support system of
janitors, cooks and bottle washers, drivers, translators and what
have you, probably with a lot of featherbedding.
They do not have the foggiest idea of what to do with regard to
federalism. They know the difference between federation and
confederation and that is about it. There is no literature on
the subject. As Polishchuk and others were to tell me, all they
have are the slogans that were said to them during the Communist
regime. Apparently a few of them read English and even fewer
speak, so that without having a literature in Russian they have
no access to information and there is no literature in Russian. I
was struck throughout the trip by the fact that they did not know
what to ask and, being secretive, could not bring themselves to
ask me to tell them what they should ask. I had to wing it with
regard to what information I should impart to them that would be
useful and the communication problems were generally such that I
could not know if I was on the right track.
Polishchuk was by far the most polished, cosmopolitan, and
connected with the West of all of them. Not surprisingly, he is
Jewish, born in Berdichev. His father was a professional army
officer and he was raised in Georgia where his father spent most
of his military career. He has lived in Novosibersk for ten
years. His wife is non-Jewish but they are contemplating a
possible move to Israel. His comment to my wife in private was
that he loves Russia and, if he leaves, needs to go someplace
where he will feel that he has a motherland and that can only be
Israel. His wife does not object. They contemplated sending
their son to the Jewish camp at Novosibersk this summer but in
the end did not. Even in our conversation it was clear that he
saw himself as Jewish in the way that all Soviets know their
nationality. He will be spending the coming academic year at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver as a visiting
lecturer.
It seems that most or all of the autonomous republics inside the
Russian Federation have proclaimed themselves the equal of the
Union republics and are demanding that the Russian Federation
itself become more of a true federation. This matter concerns
the Novosibersk Institute as much as the new confederation that
will be the Soviet Union of the future, indeed, maybe even more,
since they see Russia more or less going it alone in having to
put its own federal house in order. It will require a
restructuring of its own. There is also a movement in that part
of Siberia which is simply part of Russia (i.e., not within the
boundaries of any of the autonomous republics) to somehow form
its own entity. I was unable to find out just how serious that
was but just that it exists and that Novosibersk is apparently
the center of it.
Novosibersk is also the center of the intellectual members of
Pamyat with many scientists attached to the scientific institutes
there, members of or sympathetic to that organization. Thus
there is some growing anti-Semitism. I should note that just
outside Novosibersk there is an academic city where the Academy
of Sciences has many different scientific institutes. It is
apparently considerably nicer than Novosibersk itself which
everybody says is one of the ugliest cities in the world --
extraordinarily ugly architecture of the socialist realistic
style and heavily polluted.
At 3 we met with Dr. Viacheslav Selivestrov, deputy director of
the Institute, obviously Granberg's right hand man. He was my
first contact with the Institute since he attended Murray
Forsythe's conference at the University of Leicester in September
1990 and initated the contact, indicating then that the Institute
wanted to join the International Association. At that time he
did not speak English. He visited the Institute at Queens
University during the year and Ron Watts and Doug Brown told me
that in the three months he was there his English improved
considerably but he still would not speak English with me and
insisted on speaking Russian through the interpreter, Mischa, who
was a member of the Institute's staff and who was assigned to us
for the duration of the trip.
We had lunch in the hotel restaurant and he wanted to talk about
the Institute's membership in IACFS almost exclusively. His own
field is regional science and they are in close contact with the
Center for the Study of Urban and Rural Settlement in Rehovot
which is a very active member in the International Association
and which has received Soviet visitors over the last few years.
Indeed, they are supposed to have a joint conference with that
Center in October and Granberg is supposed to attend. Before I
left, Granberg had decided that he could not go and that
Selivestrov would represent him.
Selivestrov does not really understand the differences between
federalism and the hierarchical approach of regional science but
he does seem to appreciate that there is a difference and that
they have to learn something about it. As I said above, he was
most interested in discussing the details of how they would be
accepted to membership and what kind of signing ceremony there
would be to accept them. Either Granberg or he will plan to come
to Jerusalem in October where we will have the signing ceremony.
They also want to hold an international conference jointly with
the International Association in Novosibersk. They have the
funds to cover ground expenses and internal travel. When I
indicated to them that the schedule of regular IACFS conferences
is committed until the mid-1990s they indicated that they would
like to hold a special conference in 1992 or 1993 and I indicated
that we could probably accommodate that.
We were together for two hours and then, after a 2 1/2 hour
break, Alexander Granberg, the Institute director, arrived, and
the four of us went down for dinner at the hotel restaurant where
we sat together until 11. Granberg apparently knows only a few
words of English and does not really understand an English
conversation, unlike Selivestrov, who can listen to English and
only answer in Russian. Thus the entire conversation was
conducted through an interpreter. It was very difficult to get
any information from him. His answers tended to be vague and,
while very friendly, not particularly forthcoming.
Granberg was in Moscow working out the details of the
Russian-Lithuanian treaty which Yeltsin and Landsbergis were to
sign the following Monday and, indeed, had postponed his leaving
for a Swedish vacation by a day because of that. I indicated
that I would be very interested in attending the treaty signing
on Monday. He responded that I could watch it on television. It
seems that this is part of his responsibility as Chairman of the
Committee on Inter-republic Relations, but more than that, that
he was an academic politician skilled in such matters, leaving
most of the truly academic work to others even in his institute.
His high position in politics was apparently very good for the
Institute but had removed him more or less totally from academic
work.
He essentially repeated what I had learned from Polishchuk and
Selivestrov, adding that as chairman of his committee he was
interested in maintaining the status quo in the Russian
Federation. He raised the example of Birobidjan, obviously
thinking that as a Jew I would be interested in what happened to
the Jewish Autonomous Region. Apparently Birobidjan is
represented in the Russian Soviet by two Jews, the senior one
named Kaufman, even though the population of Birobidjan is
overwhelmingly non-Jewish. He indicated that the Jews were
elected out of courtesy to the fact that Birobidjan was formally
a Jewish Autonomous Region. Somebody, perhaps they, had asked
that Birobidjan be raised to the status of an Autonomous
Republic. He was not prepared to go along with that, in part
because of a general desire to let sleeping dogs lie. If every
ethnic group asked for Autonomous Republic status, he said, there
would be no end to it. Partly because of the special situation
of Birobidjan where the Jewish population is in such a small
minority. It was clear to me that whatever transformations
Russia wanted in the Soviet Union, it was not prepared for nearly
as much within Russia proper, hardly surprising at that.
We agreed on my schedule for Friday and he formally invited me to
appear before his committee. Again, formality seems to be quite
important.
Friday, July 26
In the morning I made calls to various contacts around the city.
I was unable to reach Jack Matlock who was involved in
preparations for the Bush summit, but left word at the American
Embassy where we were. We did the same with the Israel Consulate.
I spoke to the president of the synagogue and arranged to meet
him. I tried to reach the privately-sponsored Center for the
Study of Federalism in Moscow but did not succeed in doing so. I
did not succeed throughout my trip. There was never any answer
at their phone number.
9:30 to 12 we were taken on a tour of Moscow - the university,
central Moscow, and the Kremlin-Red Square area. From 12 to 2 I
met with Granberg's committee in their offices in the building of
the Russian Supreme Soviet. This is the famous "White House"
which was to become world famous a few weeks later during the
coup where Yeltsin made his stand. It is a massive building,
very ugly and disproportionately large.
I spoke to them about federalism in general and Soviet and
Russian federalism in particular. Only one of them spoke or
understood English, thus the meeting was also conducted through
an interpreter. Again, it was clear that these people did not
know what to ask and could not ask me to tell them. I spoke to
them in general terms about the spread of federalism in the world
but had no idea whether it was the most relevant thing that I
could have said to them. There was like a curtain between us
and, though they seemed appreciative, it was hard to say what I
had accomplished other than to bring them in contact with the
larger world and to indicate that there was a world out there
with experts on federalism, with federal systems that worked and
that had accumulated experience that might be beneficial and a
literature that might help. Since most of those present were
politicians, the latter part interested them less. One was a
labor union leader and the one who spoke English was an
academician, an economist who had some better idea that there was
a world out there.
After we finished the meeting Selivestrov took me to lunch in the
restaurant of the Russian Supreme Soviet. Its restaurant was a
touch better than that of the hotel but considering this was the
restaurant of a parliament and legislators usually know how to
eat well, it was quite poor. We had to look at a wall menu as we
entered, decide what we wanted, and buy chits for it in advance.
My colleagues had herring for an appetizer, which I politely
declined. When their three slices of herring came covered with
luminous skin, it reminded me of John Taylor of Caroline's famous
insult directed at a colleague in the U.S. Senate. "There he
sits, shinning and stinking like a dead mackerel in the
moonlight." Of course they had one of the meat dishes which did
not look in the least bit appetizing. In the end I had plain
spaghetti with a little cheese on it, also of poor quality and
poorly done. Either these people do not know what decent food is
or they just do not have any.
Moscow is not a beautiful city but it is not as ugly as it was
pictured to me before I came. It is true that it is dominated by
blocks and blocks of huge public housing apartment buildings that
have all the architectural elegance that one has come to expect
from public housing throughout the world, but since Moscow is
essentially built on a plain with some low rolling hills, they
are not nearly as ugly as the similar housing in Stockholm which
ruins a beautiful natural setting. The city itself has 8 million
people and by now is quite spread out. The housing blocks in the
outskirts are more massive but also somewhat more attractive. The
architecture has improved a bit.
The most interestingly attractive buildings are of course in the
Old City, but Moscow does not have much of an Old City. It has a
few buildings that go back to the fifteenth century but most of
its Old City is sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and, from the looks of things, Russian architecture was not so
great then either other than the churches. Late eighteenth
century Moscow is probably the most attractive. Nineteenth
century Moscow is typically European nineteenth century
buildings, not ugly but not distinguished. The railroad stations
are mostly from that pre-revolutionary period and are a little
ginger-bready and thus cute but not in any way distinguished.
The drastic change in architecture after the revolution is
apparent. Even the monumental architecture of the Soviet regime
is gross. For example, the city center is spotted with those
kind of rococco "skyscrapers" build mostly as government
buildings in the 1930s, of which Moscow University is perhaps the
best known example. They look simply monsterous and silly,
separating form and function as completely as possible. Moscow
University spreads out over a substantial campus on the bluffs
overlooking the Moscow River at what is probably the most
beautiful site in the city. The promenade overlooking the river
gives a vast perspective of the city with the parklike setting of
the University behind it.
The University campus is fairly well-maintained. The boulevards
and parkways otherwise look rather scruffy. Nevertheless, Moscow
does give the impression of being an imperial city, the same kind
of feeling one gets in New York, London, Paris, Beijing, New
Delhi and other capitals of present or past empires or in Vienna
where the past is clearly past. It does have broad boulevards,
now becoming more congested with traffic although still far short
of what a city of 8 million would have in the West, though more
polluted in a primitive way. When one drives on the street one
comes back filthy dirty from the dust and the fumes. Vehicles
are not maintained and, except for the official cars of the
official leadership, do not ever seem to be washed either. The
city is a city of imperial vistas. The river flowing through the
city gives it its best feature. Most of its banks are in park or
landscape except where the riverboats dock and it is a moderately
interesting river. There is considerable traffic of tourist
boats on it and also commercial shipping.
The Kremlin is much more attractive and less massive than I
expected. This is not to say it is little. It is quite big, but
perhaps because it is in a much older architecture it has a
certain manageable scale and the buildings within it an
attractiveness long since disappeared even before the revolution.
The churches are its most attractive feature with their beet bulb
domes painted so many different colors. The whole of the Kremlin
is surrounded by a park where the moat used to be, which adds
much to its attractiveness.
Red Square is not that impressive or dominant. Again, it is more
human-scale than I anticipated, not unattractive. The buildings
adjacent to the Kremlin where the museums and many government
offices are located are mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and thus fairly attractive, much more so than the newer
construction further out for the same purposes.
Many buildings are surrounded by scaffolding indicating repairs
that never seem to end. The National Library is one example. It
is presumably being restored but apparently the scaffolding has
been up for years and nothing has been done. The State
Historical Museum is surrounded by scaffolding and has been
closed for two years, because, I was reliably told, they do not
know what history to present or how to present it so they are
just keeping closed. The KGB building with the statue of the
founder of the CHEKA in front of it (torn down three weeks later
after the coup) is right there as in all the spy novels. Harriet
and Gidon went to the Pushkin Museum, Moscow's great art museum.
It has neither drinking fountains nor lavatories. Some hotels
are being restored and new hotels built, all requiring hard
currency and at least $300 a night for a room. Most of the
city's downtown looks like an ordinary European city center.
We had Shabbat dinner at the hotel. With one pot, an electric
fork for boiling water, and the foods we brought from Israel we
had a far better meal than anything we could have had in the
hotel restaurant. In general, we eat our meals in our room,
making instant soups, vegetable couscous from the package, and
opening canned goods, food much better than we would get anywhere
else. Harriet and Gidon have discovered the Pizza Hut which
turns out to be the one culinery highlight of our visit. It is
built so that ordinary Russians can buy Pizza with rubles by
queuing up on the outside, going past a little window and buying
a slice or two which they then have to eat on the street, while
those with hard currency and entitled to have it go into the
restaurant itself which is a typical American Pizza Hut,
including salad bar, although the salad bar is limited to
vegetables available in Russia, i.e., cabbage, not lettuce.
Prices are 50 percent higher than in the States but, all things
considered, it is a reasonable replica. Apparently Pizza Hut is
in the Soviet Union because it is owned by Pepsi Cola which has
the soft drink franchise. Almost all the ingredients for the
pizzas are imported from Western Europe. There is always a line
by the Pizza Hut window, but it is nothing compared to the line
for McDonald's which varies between three and four blocks in
length any day of the week and seemingly any time of the day,
though it is especially long on the weekends.
Saturday, July 27
We spend the day at the hotel. Our driver and interpreter, being
non-Jewish, take Harriet and Gidon to the Main Synagogue which is
quite far away. (I do not go because of the many steps into the
synagogue.) There they encounter the usual picture of Soviet
Jewry. The synagogue has perhaps two minyanim of men, almost all
older men or tourists. The woman's gallery has about the same.
The acoustics in the main synagogue are terrible. The men break
up into groups for the Torah reading and the women come down to
stand by and listen. There is also a Sephardi minyan in one of
the side rooms which had slightly fewer participants. The rabbi,
who was officially Chief Rabbi of Moscow, was trained at the
Jewish Theological Seminary in Hungary, having been sent by the
Soviet government in the days when the regime held tighter
control over such matters. He is now something of an
unfortunate, rather isolated, not particularly respected (one
gathers) by the representatives of the new Orthodox presence in
the USSR, certainly not by Chabad or other Hassidic groups.
Chabad keeps challenging him for control in his own synagogue
apparently, although they have their own congregation in the
Marinskaya Synagogue elsewhere in town.
On one hand, he and his president believe that the synagogue
should be the center of Jewish life. On the other hand, they
have been passed by by the Vaad and the various outside groups
that have come in. Still, the synagogue remains a great meeting
place and Harriet and Gidon are approached by many people during
and after the synagogue, many of whom stand out in front rather
than come in. There are people who want to send mail to
relatives in Israel or the United States and who would like
telephone messages to be delivered. There are refuseniks who are
not allowed for security reasons to apply to leave as yet, most
of whom have dates in the future when they will be able to do so,
and who are seeking to go either to Israel or to the United
States.
The synagogue itself is an early nineteenth century building on a
tree-lined street. It was impossible for me to get into it
because of the steep steps, but it was not unattractive, just
poorly maintained. Moscow has quite a few tree-lined streets
which do much to relieve the architectural ugliness of the city.
We went by the synagogue two other times. There was always some
activity going on.
In the afternoon Harriet and Gidon walked out to a nearby
shopping area just to look at the stores and see what they have
and how people go about their lives on a Saturday afternoon. They
came back very depressed.
Unfortunately, because the hotel was so far away and we needed to
arrange transportation in advance, though the Academy provided it
when we asked for it, we did not get out and about as much as we
might have liked, especially at nights, when apparently it is
more of a problem to arrange for a car and driver. Therefore,
our visit was somewhat restricted with regard to night activities
in Moscow. In the evening we watched Soviet television, which
has quite a few variety shows, and CNN.
Sunday, July 28
We have asked to be taken outside Moscow to see some of the
surrounding countryside so our car and driver and interpreter
take us up to Zagorsk, a small city some 40 miles away, the seat
of the Russian Orthodox Vatican. We ride mostly on a four-lane
divided highway. It is not unpleasant. The countryside looks
something like the more boring parts of Minnesota. The dachas we
see are old or poorly constructed and crowded together. There
are occasional lakes and it is clear that the area was forested
and partially cleared, probably long ago.
Zagorsk itself is an historic city, quite attractive because it
has many old buildings, including the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth century buildings of the Church. The "Vatican" itself
is a Kremlin surrounded by a wall with many churches inside,
quite large, not quite on the scale of the Forbidden City but not
too much smaller. Inside, the Russian Orthodox Church is
functioning fully with services restored and many people coming
to participate in one way or another. Indeed, we see many people
on the streets of Moscow, particularly young people, wearing
crosses around their necks. It is clear that there is a
religious revival going on.
We go back to Moscow and have lunch in Pizza Hut which is air
conditioned and very pleasant. Our interpreter comes in with us,
something he cannot normally do. Not only does he not have the
money but there is a guard at the door, so that even if he
somehow got hard currency he would not be allowed in since he is
not entitled to any. It is clear that he is enjoying a unique
treat and relishing it. He is also getting more to eat than he
normally has. The waiters and waitresses are young Russians,
apparently teenagers, who know basic English and are trained to
wait in the Pizza Hut manner. After lunch we go over to the
synagogue and find that there is a Beit Din in session. The
Soviet Union does not have enough indigenous rabbis to man a Beit
Din so there is one from Brooklyn who has come for the summer to
serve on it so that they have the necessary court of three. We
have a conversation with him and he describes the rather routine
but very necessary work of the Beit Din.
At 4:30 the president of the synagogue, Federovsky and his wife
come to visit us at our invitation. They do not eat or drink. We
discover that Russians drink before they go visiting and do not
drink during visits. He tells me about the synagogue and the
community and about the struggle between the synagogue and the
Vaad for control. He insists that the synagogue should be the
dominant body in Jewish life in the USSR but he rejects the
Reform and half rejects Chabad. So on one hand they want to be
exclusivist in the contemporary Orthodox manner and on the other
hand they want to be an umbrella body. Clearly it does not work
in Moscow any more than anywhere else and the synagogue must give
way to the keter malkhut -- in this case, the Vaad, which is the
only place where all Jews can sit together. Chabad apparently
runs the synagogue school since they are the only ones who have
the manpower to do it. In general, Chabad is intertwined with
the community in various ways as much as it is separate, since it
is the major source of Jewish religious energy in the Soviet
Union.
The Federovskys clearly plan to stay in the USSR. His position
there as synagogue president by now is his full-time position,
since he has retired from his previous job. He has no particular
Jewish background but became involved in the synagogue by
accident and slowly allowed it to take over his life. He now is
learning what we might call synagogue skills and he would like to
learn Hebrew but, alas, he has no time. He speaks only Russian
but his wife is an English teacher and speaks a good English.
She interprets for us. They are in Moscow for the duration.
At 7 we go to the folk music concert in the hotel. It is very
pleasant. The orchestra plays typical Soviet folk instruments,
most fairly primitive. They are dressed in costume and have a
nice little act. Afterwards we see them walking out of the hotel
in their street clothes looking like typically harrassed Soviet
citizens.
Monday, July 29
Monday morning I visit the headquarters of the Vaad and the
Shalom Theatre which is adjacent. Actually the Vaad has only a
small two-room office so I meet people in the Shalom Theater, a
fairly shabby looking place but active. As always, there are
steps. I had to be carried up steps into the Russian White
House. I had to be carried down steps into the theater.
I meet with Mikhail Chlenov whom I had called earlier. He fills
me in on current developments. Chlenov, who is co-chairman of
the Vaad and clearly senior co-chairman, is reasonably fluent in
both Hebrew and English, so communicating with him is no problem.
He also introduces me to his co-chairman who does not speak
either language, who is younger and who obviously plays a Mr.
Inside role as against Chlenov's Mr. Outside.
Chlenov tells me that there are presently over 300 organizations
affiliated with the Vaad from across the USSR and that the larger
communities are already forming kehillot. He mentions Leningrad,
Kiev, Minsk. I believe he mentioned Odessa but I am not
positive. He is more or less in touch with all the various
groups from outside of the Soviet Union who are working in the
country which includes Chabad, which he sees good-naturedly as
something of a problem because of their exclusivism; the various
groups of young people from Israel and the United States who have
come to organize summer camps (of which more below); and the
delegations from "major Jewish organizations" that come to be
photographed and seen and get publicity for being involved in the
USSR but who really deliver nothing substantial. He seems to
take all of this in good humor, understanding that the Jewish
people are like that. Organizations proliferate, people seek
headlines rather than substantive work, there are jealousies and
competitions, even where such are unnecessary, but he knows the
Vaad is in the saddle, that it is the comprehensive organization
to which everyone seeks to belong and which has become the
representative of the community.
The day I am there is the first meeting of the Soviet
Confederation of Jewish Women's Organizations with Jewish women
in attendance representing organizations from 20-30 communities.
I am asked to deliver greetings. Chlenov gives me a very nice
introduction and I do so in English with simultaneous
translation. Many of the women come up to me afterwards to tell
me that they have children already in Israel and that they are
planning to leave. Many even mention dates on which they are
going to depart. Once again, it seems that there is an initial
generation of leadership that is about to leave the Soviet Union,
requiring this work to be done all over again.
I hear the greetings of the chairman and the other women
presiding who talk about womens' role in an uncannily prefeminist
manner, the way women used to talk at Sisterhoods and Hadassah
groups in the United States 25 years ago, how women have
responsibility for the home, how they support the men in their
efforts, things like that.
I suggest to Chlenov a number of ways in which the Jerusalem
Center might be able to help out and how we would like to
document the revival of Jewish communal life in the USSR. We are
prepared to hire people to do so. (By my figuring it should cost
us maybe $10-20 a month per person so if we can find the people
it should be possible.) He plans to be in Israel towards the end
of September or in October and will visit us them, at which point
he should have some names for us. We also talked about
translating the Jerusalem Letter into Russian and circulating it
in the USSR. Altogether it was a pleasant and useful visit.
There is a tremendous amount of Jewish activity going on in the
USSR this summer. I have already mentioned Chabad which is
working just about everywhere. It even brought its shlichim to
the country for a meeting. Bnai Akiva and Ezra and the Jewish
Agency are in the Soviet Union from Israel, organizing summer
camps and youth programs. Yeshiva University has organized a
program whereby college-age young people from the United States
and Canada come to the Soviet Union, organize 10-day summer camps
in various parts of the country. Harriet and Gidon ran into them
at the synagogue.
We have lunch again at Pizza Hut then return to the hotel. In
the evening Selivestrov comes for a wrap-up conversation and we
go over preliminary details of his visit to Israel and the
admission of his Institute to the IACFS.
Tuesday, July 30
Harriet and Gidon tour sites to which I cannot get while I stay
in the hotel and work. In the evening Granberg calls me for a
final long conversation about future plans. Meanwhile the
Bush-Gorbachev summit is going on and I watch it on CNN. Bush is
gracious but he is clearly accepting the surrender of the Soviet
Union, gently or not so gently lecturing everyone on the virtues
of capitalism and the market economy and democracy.
I had hoped to see some more Soviet Jews or Jews working in the
Soviet Union but they are all out of the country. The JDC staff
is meeting in Jerusalem, others are visiting Israel or the United
States for busines and personal reasons so I miss most everyone.
Wednesday, July 31
We spend the morning touring Red Square and other parts of
Moscow. The city is by now taking on form in my eyes. We go to
the synagogue on Archipova Street twice to talk with people.
There are classes and programs going on. We return to the hotel
at 4:30, work and pack.
The time comes to leave for the airport and the van comes from
the Academy of Sciences. It is a new vehicle with a different
driver than we have had, but like the other van, I can only sit
in the front seat. He refuses on the grounds that it is against
the law for security reasons, locks the doors, and absolutely
refuses to let me in. We argue with him to no avail. In the
end, Mischa, our translator, and Gidon take the wheelchair and
the luggage in the van to the airport while Harriet and I go by
taxi. The manager of the hotel who is very nice and sympathetic
orders us a taxi, but of course we have to pay for it very
heavily, since the fellow has us over a barrel. He earns at
least a month's wages, perhaps two, by virtue of this trip.
While we are waiting we discover that there are other Israelis in
the hotel. First of all, we ran into a Russian Jew who lived in
Haifa for 13 years, married an Israeli woman and then went to the
United States where he is now living in New York. Then we met
two Israelis from kibbutzim who do some kind of work on lasers
and who are in the Soviet Union in connection with their work.
They are very secretive about what they are doing and clearly do
not want to talk about it. Finally, I run into Zevi Dinstein,
head of the Israel Petroleum Institute, who is also in the Soviet
Union in some kind of official capacity. He is staying in the
hotel overnight before going to the oil fields in Baku the next
day. We have a nice friendly talk.
Arriving at the airport we find that getting out is somewhat
easier than getting in but not by much. Again, it is good that I
have my wheelchair with me as it was every step of the way,
especially since gates are posted and then changed and there are
no announcements. One simply has to go by rumor or word of mouth
to find out how one gets on and there are no provisions for early
boarding or anything like that. The flight is announced just
like a regular flight and appears on the departures board in a
regular manner with no indication that it is officially a
charter. It is called over the loudspeaker like any other flight
and it is a pleasure to see El Al Tel Aviv up there along with
flights to Kabul, the far eastern communist countries, as well as
more conventional destinations.
The waiting area is one big duty free shop. Obviously they are
trying to get their last slice of foreign currency before people
leave. On the departure side there is an elevator so getting up
and down is not a problem.
Thursday, August 1
The flight back is uneventful. I run into an acquaintance of
mine, a journalist for Erev Shabbat who had been in the Soviet
Union for Agudat Israel's Ezra youth movement. He was in charge
of setting up a summer camp in Byelorussia near the Lithuanian
border. He describes how it was successfully done including an
interesting story of how they were provisioned. Unlike others
who come to set up camps, Ezra did not send food, figuring that
they could be provisioned locally, especially since most of the
period was during the nine days when no meat could be eaten
anyhow. When he went to the store to get provisions the store
was empty and they would not sell him even what they had. He was
then advised by his local sponsors to call a certain Jewish owner
of the bakery which supplied the store, which he did and was told
to go back in an hour. When he did, obviously calls had been
made because he was ushered to the back of the store where there
was plenty of everything and he was easily and fully provisioned,
and continued to be during the ten days.
He was very proud of how the campers took to things Jewish. He
gave as his example the fact that even though none had ever heard
of Tesha B'Av before the camp, all of them fasted.
Summary and Conclusions
Altogether this was a difficult but fascinating trip. It was
difficult because there are absolutely no facilities for
handicapped. Had we not brought a wheelchair with us we would
have been stuck at the end of the jetway on arrival, but for that
matter there was hardly a building that we visited that I could
get into on my own steam. My hosts, who had probably never
thought about the issue before, were suitably embarrassed. They
even built a permanent ramp at the hotel but it is too steep and
not properly done.
Everybody was as helpful as they could be with the exception of
the van driver the last night and we have no complaints about the
human quality of our reception, but the country is simply
extremely primitive. There are no two ways about it. Whatever
they do with rockets and nuclear weapons, they live in a very
primitive fashion. Everything is rationed and limited. Mischa,
our interpreter, and others gave us plenty of information over
the week about how this is so, about how in order to get an
apartment one has to be married. If not, one lives at home.
After marriage the couple goes to live with one set of parents or
the other because only then can the couple sign up for an
apartment, which is five to ten years coming. Of course the
apartments are owned by the state with a nominal rental, perhaps
10 rubles a month. A couple gets a two-room apartment and cannot
get a larger apartment unless they have two children of different
sexes. Moreover, the shortage is such that they are now talking
about the fact that people may be made to give up their three
rooms when the children move out and go back to two room
apartments.
While apartments are assigned, one can refuse an assigned
apartment and wait even longer until one is available in a
desired neighborhood, usually based on what is closer to work.
There is also something of a "market" in apartments with regard
to neighborhood. That is to say, there are brokers who arrange
exchanges of apartments among families.
Food is rationed, not readily available, and sold only according
to plan. Thus, for example, a family of three receives a ration
of six kilos of meat a month: 2 kilos a week for three weeks and
then none. One must buy the meat during the prescribed period or
lose the ration. Thus there is no way to decide to hold off for 4
kilo one week unless one can make a swap informally or has space
in the small refrigerators that are available. The only thing
that is not rationed is bread. There are dairy products which
are, like everything else, bought in special stores, but the milk
sours rapidly. Apparently the delay from the time it is
extracted from the cow until it reaches market is such that it is
already at the end of its life.
Fruit is available in stores but mostly through farmers markets.
Farmers are allowed to come in to sell their produce directly.
Otherwise it cannot be sold except through regular channels. The
fruit is limited and tasteless. Even the rasperries we had were
sour, although Mischa who brought them to us was very proud of
his find.
Everyone waits in line for everything and is very accepting of
it, apathetic is more like the right word. More than that,
people do not question. When told on several occasions that Red
Square was closed for whatever reason, Mischa never asked when it
would be open. He just accepted the guard's word and when the
guard said come back later and see, he said we would come back
later and see.
Arbat Street which is supposed to be the semi-legal free market
is essentially a sad place because there is almost nothing to
sell except Gorby dolls, political versions of the old babushka
dolls of one grandmother inside another. Now they have dolls
with Gorbachev on the outside and various communist leaders of
the past inside. They are in irregular supply. For example, one
day Harriet saw keychains with Gorby figures dangling from them
which I thought that I would purchase as souvenirs for the JCPA
and CSF staffs when I got back. We went the next day to buy
them; they were no longer available and no new ones were around.
Conversion of all of this to a market economy would be terribly
difficult because the ruble economy, based as it is on subsidies
and controlled prices, is manageable on the ruble equivalent of
$5-20 a month, which is what Russian salaries are worth. (The
average Russian earns the dollar equivalent of $10 a month.) A
rapid shift would impoverish everyone.
There was much discussion of the new Union Treaty while I was
there and I had discussions with my hosts throughout the visit.
The Treaty was being kept secret but details were leaking or were
being reported in the media as agreements were reached. When I
arrived the major sticking point was over who would levy taxes.
The republics wanted to keep the full taxation power and only
commit themselves constitutionally to provide a certain
percentage of taxes they collected to the Union government, while
the Union wanted to maintain its own taxing power. The very last
day of my visit Mischa told us that he heard a report on Russian
radio that Gorbachev had given in and all taxation would belong
to the republics.
All I heard about the Union Treaty before the coup was that it
would indeed establish a confederation in place of the nominal
federation that existed before and that most powers would be in
the hands of the republics. The real problem was that foreign
affairs, defense, and state security would remain in the hands of
the Union government which of course would pose a threat to
republican independence. Most of that seems to have disappeared
as a result of the coup and the response to it.
Basically speaking, it was already clear that the republics did
not want to simply reform the existing Union but wanted to build
a new one from the bottom up so that they would each claim their
sovereignty and independence and then agree to confederate. It
was expected that there would be two circles -- an inner circle
of perhaps ten of the fifteen republics which would be full
partners of the confederation; an outer circle of the five
seceding republics (the three Baltic states, Moldova and Georgia)
which would be linked for economic purposes only in a kind of a
common market. The Russian-Lithuanian Treaty which I mentioned
above was part of the movement in that direction. Russia was
taking the lead in all of this and was already clearly the
dominant actor.
Of course, none of this would be brought before the people. It
would simply be decided upon by representatives of the Union and
the republics in negotiations with each other and then presented
to the people as a fait accompli. While the date had been set
for signing the Union Treaty (the Tuesday of the coup), it was
not at all clear that it would be published for people to see
before the signing.
On the other hand, it was clear that people felt generally free.
I was told that the KGB organization still functioned. In other
words, people still evesdropped, listened in, bugged, wrote
reports and the like on a routine basis, but that nobody looked
at them. Even so, there are increasing numbers of ex-KGB agents
looking for work. Chlenov told me that some are even teaching
Hebrew, that is to say, people who were taught Hebrew as KGB
agents from within the KGB had been let go because there was no
need to teach more KGB agents and were being hired by the Jewish
communities because they knew Hebrew and could teach it.
One thing was clear. Part of the Soviet commitment to democracy
is a commitment to federalism, mostly in the form of
confederation but also federation within the bigger republics. If
Soviet democracy succeeds in sinking roots, it will be federal
democracy.
