CIE grant assists professor with research in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia

Cathy Frierson, professor of history, recently traveled to Russia with the assistance of a 2004-05 Center for International Education Faculty International Travel Grants funded by the vice president for academic affairs. The grant supported travel to conduct research on three projects. Below is her report.

Frierson in Moscow on Victory Day, May 9, 2005, the 60th Anniversary of the Defeat of Nazi Germany, with a Veteran of World War II.

Life in Moscow and St. Petersburg during spring 2005 seemed increasingly “normal.” A “normal life” for Soviet citizens was one of M. S. Gorbachev’s goals in the mid-1980s, and Russian citizens certainly longed for it during the economic collapse of the 1990s. My trip this spring was on the 20th anniversary of my first research stay in the Soviet Union in 1984-1985. From the perspective of that trip and the ones since then, I found that, after years of grinding away in the ruts of the Soviet era, the populations of the two capitals have broken out and are speeding forward toward a material existence very close to that of their European neighbors. Bathrooms in restaurants were modern and clean, and no one had stolen the toilet seats for their apartments. Owners left the windshield wipers on their European cars parked on every street (and sidewalk) overnight, with no apparent concern that someone would steal them. At the thoroughly up-to-date Planet Fitness sports clubs, women left their shoes and boots outside their lockers, again with no apparent fear that anyone would steal them. Widespread petty theft of public and private property, so common from 1985 to 2000, had evidently declined as more urban residents could buy toilet seats, windshield wipers, and boots at Maxidom or Lenta, the Russian equivalents of Walmart.

Other evidence of modernization and expanding distribution of wealth abounded. In updated private and public bathrooms, the tile work fit together in direct alignment; abacuses had disappeared from shops, where cashiers swept bar codes across computer strips just as they would in Boston; drug store chains displayed their nonpharmaceutical products (Russian, U.S., and all other international lines, including extensive homeopathic oils and supplements) on open shelves; and boys gathered after school in internet cafes to play EverQuest, Halo, and other interactive computer games with players from around the world.

Moscow and St. Petersburg throbbed with public sociability. Body language was relaxed, especially so in St. Petersburg, where couples and friends strolled down the street, talking and laughing animatedly. Groups gathered for long conversations in charming cafes and teahouses, where offerings of fine teas, coffees, and pastries were excellent, and university students served as pleasant and efficient wait staff.

A mere five years ago, these daily realities now taken for granted were simply unimaginable; as recently as two years ago, such phenomena were only spottily present, like the odd patch of black-eyed Susans or field daisies in a rocky, clear-cut lot in northern New England. But during March, April, and May of 2005, I found walking Moscow and St. Petersburg streets en route to my research sites to be akin to traveling the Yellow Brick Road through a lush field of poppies that intoxicated and beckoned me to explore current developments rather than go indoors to focus on Russia’s past.

I resisted that temptation and pursued three research projects. For an annotated translation of letters and prose works by Russia’s first professional woman poet (Anna Bunina, 1774-1829) commissioned by the University of Chicago Press, I gathered unpublished letters and rare published prose works in archives and manuscript divisions in libraries. This project is part of University of Chicago Press’s series on forgotten women writers. Bunina certainly fits the profile; not a single one of my highly educated Russian friends had ever heard of her. I suspect that this may be because she was at the heart of conservative circles, who proclaimed an ideology of “family values,” monarchism and Russian nationalism during the reigns of Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855), and thus were invisible in Soviet historiography and literary criticism.

My second project focused on letters as attributes in Russian painting, 1750-1850, which was part of a larger project on epistolary culture among the Russian nobility. This research led me to art museums for consultations with curators and scholars. In St. Petersburg, I spent an afternoon in the storage rooms in the attic of the State Russian Museum, guided by the chief curator who showed me every minor and major work there that included a letter. She also could not resist pulling out some of her personal favorites among the little-known works. I repeated this experience in Moscow, where the director of nineteenth-century paintings took me into the locked vaults of the State Tretyakov Gallery. Visits to the Hermitage, Peterhof, Pavlovsk, the State Museum of Fine Arts, and the Menshikov Palace confirmed that I had a good grasp of the genre. These visits also confirmed that the professionals who worked at these institutions consider it a normal activity to host international scholars and to facilitate their work, making no exceptional demands beyond those characteristic for similar institutions in the United States and Europe.

My most exciting research involved launching a project on orphans of Soviet repression and terror, so-called “children of the Gulag.” I consulted with the founder and director of the nongovernment society “The Return” -- an archival, publishing, and advocacy center for Gulag survivors and their children. I also met with key persons at the Moscow and St. Petersburg branches of “Memorial,” the more extensive nongovernmental organization founded in the late 1980s to memorialize the victims of Soviet repression and now a dynamic network of museums, research centers, and advocacy groups for human rights. And, of course, I read materials in libraries. But most thrilling were my oral history interviews with persons who lost their parents to Stalinist repression. These included (among others) the daughter of a major NKVD (later KGB) officer who had helped run the terror before he fell victim to it, a man whose father was shot because he had drafted a constitution for a future Jewish state, children of the Trotyskyite opposition, and children whose parents were arrested as a birthday present for Stalin on his seventieth birthday in 1949. Among my interviewees were the Minister of Health during the Yeltsin years; the current director of the Russian Chess Federation and editor of their journal; and one of Russia’s most famous and beloved actors, who was a slave laborer after being accused of spying for the United States, and went on to act in a series of films in the late 1990s that presented KGB officers in a sympathetic light.

The interview with the actor took place on my penultimate day in Moscow. This man, who is closing in on his 91st birthday, welcomed me into his modest apartment with a twinkle in his eye and the question, “Whiskey, vodka, or cognac?” It was 3 in the afternoon; I had just set the table in my own apartment for a farewell dinner with friends later than evening, including the requisite bottles of red wine, white wine, beer, vodka, Scotch, and cognac. I inwardly groaned. But I had learned through my previous interviews that building trust in the interviewees’ home was the essential first step in a successful interview (thank heavens all the others had offered me tea!). So, we opened a large bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label from his stash of 90th-birthday presents and took off on a three-hour journey (with his still-beautiful, actress wife and a mutual friend) into his years in the Gulag, his memoirs, and a documentary film on his life in the camps. Whenever he sensed that I fully understood what he was sharing, he would stand up from the couch, raise his glass to me and indicate that I was to stand; his wife and friend stood as well. We would clink our glasses as we looked silently into each other’s eyes, then sit down to continue the interview. It was one of the most nearly perfect afternoons of my life. And the miracle is that every moment is as crystalline in my memory as the goblets we were constantly raising.