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The Russia Suite

A little more than six years after the Marcos dictatorship fell at Edsa due to what has since been called "People Power," six months before parts of the world followed suit and the Berlin Wall tumbled, and within the decade when the Czechs mounted their Velvet Revolution and the dictatorship of the Russian Soviet crumbled, Mike Bigornia and I were witnessing perhaps the last hiccups of empire (now called hegemony) during a 13-day tour of three Russian capitals and obliged friendships (but fine nevertheless) with our guides. We had visited Kiev and Leningrad (now back to St. Petersburg) and our tour was ending. It didn't feel like a writer's tour because we met few writers (the more famous ones were on vacation, it was late summer), and we read poetry on just one occasion. It was a tourist's tour, but sprinkled with a little more culture and museums. From Leningrad we trained back to Moscow on the Overnight Express and saw lots of countryside—what looked to me like Victorian villages amid magnificent stands of pine and birch, or simply endless evergreens in the chill of late summer stretching far into the horizon. Here are my penultimate "diary entries" written a couple of years after. 

Moscow: Scenes from Memory

1. EPILOGUE, 1990

 

 

Since I saw Moscow, it’s been more

Than half a year. Or half a lifetime

Even, I do not know, for half the world

Had changed--by terror or by temblor,

By the heaving of hearts or continents,

By the machinations of meretricious

Circumstance. Like dominoes, dictators

And dictatorships had fallen one by one,

From the Warsaw Pact to the American

Isthmus, relinquished by the powers

That sustained them—the native

Or the foreign hand. (Ours, long a client

Of one, had vanished at last, after

Lingering in banishment, leaving wounds

In our souls that wouldn’t heal.)

At the Eastern Bloc the Berlin Wall

Was crumbling into souvenirs

(Gorbachev’s face had been carved

Into the pages ofTime), a playwright 

Sits at the head of the Czech Parliament,

The Poles have voted their favorite

Union man president. And the people, long

At the throes of their sordid heritage,

Are plunged into the Free World’s

Shoreless seduction: What economics

Or ideologies could save them now?

SkyscraperBW.jpg

2. ON THE OVERNIGHT EXPRESS FROM LENINGRAD

 

 

Pine, fir, birch, in permanent expanse,

Escorted us across the dawn

Into the rotting outskirts of Moscow.

Leningrad left us sated and mortified

With the opulence of art at the Hermitage,

Loot and heritage of tsars and commissars

From world tours and world wars.

On the overnight express its memory

Had become a residual flatulence

Relieved by the quaintness of samovar

Dispensing the train attendant’s morning tea.

In the golden gray light Moscow awoke

With its frayed elegance of tenements

And factory smoke, as its million intent

Faces preened and slid into streetcars

And the smooth bowels of the Metro.

(Half in jest our guide observed: Here

People seldom smile, in this center

Of State the ambitious of Russia thrive...)

From afar, above the signs of Comecon,

Tungsram, Abloy, Cubafrutas, we glimpsed

Stalin’s spires transfixing the sky

With their sun-gilt five-pointed stars.

 

1991

The Soviet 'skyscraper', typical of the Stalinist "Empire" style or Socialist Classicism.

Below: Lenin's Tomb (Mausuleum). Maxim Popykin

13. RED SQUARE

 

 

That morning in Moscow I will never

Forget: As far as the dappled birches

Bowing in the sun by the Kremlin Wall,

Over asphalt and cobblestone,

Into the great patio under the cupolas

Of St. Basil’s that presided like 

Turbaned caliphs over Red Square,

And under the lone spire of Spassky Gate

That kept watch with its stern

Military stare, the lines of devotees

Stretched from the doorstep of Lenin’s

Mausoleum, from the sunlight into

A crypt of red marble. At a signal from

The guards (‘Fix your ties, button up, please,’

Said the public address), a hush fell

Upon the crowd, the soul preened

Before crossing the threshold.

There lay what was left of a man

Who shone one October, heir to the yoke

Of peasant and serf crushed under

The wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

What vision he saw he seems to have

Taken with him under the glass

That shields him now from the world’s

Contagion, as he rests embalmed,

Preserved in the taxidermist’s perfection.

In this shrine of the Other Orthodoxy,

We, pilgrims from other conformities  

Pay homage to him who did not conform. 

 

1991

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LeninTomb.jpg
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