Hedrick Smith's Books

> The New Russians

Introduction

Having lived since 1971 under the oppressive orthodoxy of Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, and having endured numerous personal scrapes with the chill and arrogance of Soviet officialdom, I had come to see authoritarian rule as something firmly imbedded in Russian society, and ingrained in the Russian psyche. A solid wall separated the rulers and the ruled. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev had eased the raw despotism of Stalin, but he had left intact that granite citadel of power, the self-perpetuating hierarchy of the Communist Party.

Five long centuries of absolutism - from Ivan the Terrible to the Soviet seventies - had left the Russian masses submissive. In their personal lives, I found them ingenious in beating the numbing inefficiency of the state economy. Their black market was so vast that it operated as a counter-economy, even to the extent of producing underground millionaires. But in the sphere of political action, grass roots initiative was moribund.

In Russian history, tiny shoots of democracy had sprung up briefly from time to time, but they had not taken root. Except for a handful of dissidents, most of the intellectuals I encountered in the seventies were politically passive: Fear had taught them to save cynical jokes for private company. Ordinary people might grumble about shortages or injustices, but they never took action. As I was told time and time again, Russians would choose stability over chaos, order over freedom.

The Chinese are known as a nation of traders and businessmen, but I learned first-hand that the Russians had little entrepreneurial know-how. Underground centers of illicit private enterprise were in the non-Russian republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan, or in the more western-oriented Baltic regions of Latvia or Lithuania. In places like Moscow or Leningrad, Jews or transplanted Georgians or Armenians showed more of a knack for commerce than most Russians did. The vast majority of Soviet people expected the state to take care of them - especially of their of their economic needs, however poorly - and to tell them what to do. For despite its revolutionary conceits, the Soviet Union was a profoundly conservative society. Most Russians were not driven by Western appetites for the new and trendy; they were held back by the dual weights of inertia and dogma.

I did know some intellectuals who were desperate for a bit of fresh air, some room to breathe, for a modest "Thaw" such as the one initiated by Khrushchev in the late 1950s. But it had seemed to me that even a modest reform would be long in coming. Like others who had lived among the Russians, sent children to their schools, studied their history and their institutions, come to know their ways and their mentality, I had left Russia 16 years ago thinking that fundamental change was impossible. And I wrote that in my book, The Russians.

The decline and stagnation that sank into place for the next decade, into the mid-eighties, seemed to confirm this judgment. Soviet politics seemed as frozen as the Siberian tundra.

As it turned out, of course, I was wrong.

Never had I imagined that the Soviet Union would undergo the kind of seismic transformation that became apparent a couple of years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March, 1985.

In the name of reforms that would modernize, humanize and ultimately save Soviet socialism, Gorbachev cracked open the wall between the rulers and the ruled and let loose massive popular discontent; he shook the very foundations of the system that Stalin had imposed from above. He provoked the Soviet people to begin taking their destinies in their own hands. He summoned a democratic spirit that aroused the slumbering giant of Russia and then swept across Eastern Europe, toppling Communist governments like a row of helpless toy soldiers - governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. When these puppet governments looked to the Kremlin for protection, they got none. Gorbachev let the tidal wave roll on, until it swept over the Berlin Wall and carried the Iron Curtain out to sea.

He called this vast undertaking perestroika. But like any shrewd political leader who is improvising strategy as he goes along, Gorbachev has kept manipulating the definition of perestroikato suit his purposes. In his hands, it is a slogan for the general urge for reform, and also a label for whatever measures he chooses to implement. Sometimes, when Gorbachev is on the offensive, his slogan perestroika rings with what he loves to call "revolutionary" change; it harbors gossamer promises of democracy, of disguised private enterprise - and it smacks of heresy to the Soviet power establishment. At other times, when Gorbachev is on the defensive, the term has more limited, cautious connotations - of modernization, of re-adapting Soviet socialism, without dismantling the system founded by Lenin. Then, Gorbachev uses the term perestroikain ways that include protection of the establishment.

In talking with Gorbachev's colleagues and following his course closely, I have come to see Gorbachev not as a theorist with a pure vision of the future, but as a pragmatist who pursues what works and is ready to junk what does not. Perestroikais a process, not a fixed and finite objective. Literally, it means "the reconstruction" or "the restructuring." But its deeper meaning is The Reformation. Think of Gorbachev, then, as a kind of Martin Luther, setting out to cleanse, purify and renew a corrupt and failing Socialist Church, but ending up forever changing its nature and its destiny.

Because in fact, perestroika, in its essence, represents a sweeping and profound change, far more extensive than a specific program of reforms. It is the catalyst for a wholesale societal transformation, analogous to the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1854, or Bismarck's forging of the modern German state in the 19th Century. It has parallels with Kemal Ataturk's disciplined drive to modernize the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, to thrust Turkey into the 20th Century, and with Mahatma Gandhi's sounding the death knell of British colonialism with his non-violent campaign to free India from Imperial England. These were not passing trends that flashed brightly for a few years and then disappeared. They were major bend-points in the path of history. So, too, is Gorbachev's perestroika.

Initially, of course, many in the West were skeptical. For several years, people wondered: Was Gorbachev a Communist charlatan, a masterful media politician whose changes were cosmetic, but not cosmic, not real; whose "new thinking" was transitory, not fundamental? At first, President Bush was cautious, and careful not to embrace Gorbachev too hastily. But with the stunning collapse of Communist power in Eastern Europe in the latter half of 1989, it became clear to almost everyone that the long, painful period of the Cold War was ending, and that the world was crossing an important historical divide.

Overnight, it seemed, the world order was transformed and our global agenda reshaped. The old structure based on East-West confrontation became obsolete. German reunification replaced the Cold War as the number one concern of the major powers. Subtly at first, but then very dramatically, the world was shifting from an era in which international affairs were driven by the arms race and the threat of a nuclear apocolpse, to a new epoch in which the principal driving force of global affairs is economic competition.

In the American psyche, the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles was replaced anxiety over the economic challenge from Japan and the fear that the United States cannot compete well enough in the global marketplace. Gorbachev's perestroika did not create these trends, but it accelerated them. It vaulted us all into a new era.

What was so striking about Gorbachev's approach, when I finally had a chance to see it up close, was that he was daring to trust the people; and he was daring to disassemble the pyramid of power in the Soviet Union. His strategy represented a reversal of much of 20th Century history, for this has been the century of totalitarian governments, epitomized by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Dictators, parties, ideological movements have single-mindedly set about accumulating power, concentrating power - total power - in their own hands. Yet now, near the century's end, both Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiao-Peng in China have tried to head in the opposite direction. Each has attempted the controlled dispersal of power, but when those attempts got out of control, as they were bound to, Deng pulled back quickly; Gorbachev let the process go much further.

Once Gorbachev lifted the threat that Soviet tanks would roll out to suppress the democratic spirit in Eastern Europe, the pent-up rage of masses of people who took to the streets shattered dictatorships and converted The Berlin Wall from the world's ugliest barricade into a bandstand for the celebration of freedom.

In a less visible way, Gorbachev is responding to popular pressures at home. The sullen discontent and stubborn lethargy of millions of Soviet workers and a cynical, disenchanted Soviet intelligentsia had forced Gorbachev to embark on reform - to try to energize his people and revitalize his country. At each stage, when he has hesitated, popular pressures have impelled him forward. In his fifth year, for example, he was provoked to do what Khrushchev could not or would not do, and what he himself had hesitated to do - attack the Communist Party hierarchy's lock on power.

In December, 1989, he admonished the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov for demanding a multi-party system, but two months later, after political uprisings in Lithuania and Azerbaijan that showed the party's loss of authority, Gorbachev reversed his course. He summoned the party bosses early last February and told them that the party would have to change or perish; that it would have to give up its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power and prove itself in the competition of a multi-party system. On the eve of that party session, nearly 200,000 people massed outside the Kremlin, in the largest spontaneous gathering in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution, to demand that the party apparatchiki yield to popular will. Perestroikahad come full circle. Gorbachev was being propelled forward by the very forces he had unleashed.

My personal introduction to this new world, the world of the new Russians, so different from the world I had known in the early 1970s, came at one of the high tides of perestroika, in May of 1988, when I went to Moscow for President Reagan's summit meeting with Gorbachev.

For Americans, Reagan's venture to the Kremlin was big news. His strolls on Red Square with Gorbachev, his luncheon for Moscow dissidents, his speech to university students all made great television soap opera: The old Cold Warrior playing in the heart of "the evil empire."

But the Russians I talked with then were blasé about the summit. They saw Reagan's visit as a sideshow; the much more compelling battle was the one within their own country, over internal change. Its outcome, that May, was most uncertain. The Russians knew that Reagan's coming was important for Soviet-American relations, but it stirred no real excitement. They were glad for his courtesy call, especially after all the harsh things he had said about them, and they were polite to the President for a few days. But they could hardly wait for him to get out of town, so they could back to their own unfolding political brawl, a struggle over their national destiny.

That trip to Russia in 1988 was my first visit to Moscow in nearly 14 years, and the ferment and electricity astonished me. It began an adventure of discovery and rediscovery that would take me to the USSR seven times in the next two years, to do the reporting for this book, and also to film a series of documentary programs for American public television, Inside Gorbachev's USSR.

On the way into Moscow from Sheremyetovo Airport on that first trip, I remember looking for immediate evidence of Gorbachev's supposed earthquake, but at first I couldn't see any. On the main highway into Moscow, I saw the same massive, naked apartment buildings that I had remembered from the Seventies, huge, impersonal, 13 and 20-story tenement blocks that looked like a vast construction site, a sprawling, gargantuan Levittown, balconies aflutter with the wash, buildings crying out for paint, for trees, for shrubbery, for any tiny bit of decoration. These apartment-behemoths had been designed with one object in mind: To pack in as many people as possible, with little thought for individual convenience, human scale or diversity. Along Gorky Street, in the city proper, were the same old concrete block constructions of the Khrushchev era, the same impersonal signs that I knew so well: Myaco(Meat), Apteka(Drug Store), Khlyeb(Bread). I searched in vain for signs of individuality - "Vanya's Bakery" or "Gorky Street Grocery" - something that would convey a new spirit of entrepreneurship; but there was none.

Later, with producer Martin Smith and writer Paul Taylor from WGBH-TV in Boston, I went up to the Old Arbat, a long strolling mall, hunting some more for evidence of material change. But in one state store after another, we found only a paltry selection of staples - potatoes, cabbages, cucumbers, a few carrots and some sad-looking green oranges; in the meat store, one brand of fatty salami, one brand of fatty bologna, each at over $5 a pound. Otherwise, the meat counter was empty. Chances were that the state-store butchers were sneaking the better cuts of meat under the counter to sell for private profit, and, of course, for very steep prices, peasants were selling meat and produce at the farmers' market. Nevertheless, the food situation in the heart of Moscow looked no better than it had 14 years earlier.

I was eager to talk with old friends and so I phoned Zinovy Yuryev, a science-fiction writer and for a long time deputy editor of Krokodil, the Soviet humor magazine. During the Seventies, I had often visited Zinovy and his wife, Yelena Kornyevskaya. Now, following my old precautions, I did not call Zinovy from my hotel, where the lines might be bugged. Instead, I went to a pay phone on the street. Yelena was away, but Zinovy was eager to meet for dinner. He asked a question that caught me by surprise: "What restaurant shall we choose?"

I had never met with Zinovy and Yelena in public; always we had talked at their apartment, and often when I went there, I had taken precautions: I had used the metro or I had driven my car part way there, then parked some distance from their home and had taken a taxi or a metro the rest of the way. In the 1970s we foreign correspondents sometimes saw unmarked cars tailing us; one American reporter found a radio device under his car that sent out a signal, letting the KGB secret police know where his car was at all times. We had assumed such devices were planted somewhere on all our cars, and so we did not drive directly to the homes of Soviet friends, unless they had official reasons for meeting us. Zinovy, as a Jew with a high-level press job, subject to Communist Party oversight, had had to be careful about private contacts with foreigners.

So his willingness now to meet in a public place signaled a change in the political climate. Moreover, he suggested Kropotkinskaya 36, a new cooperative (privately owned) restaurant, a treat for me because I had not eaten yet at a Moscow cooperative, and because the service and food turned out to be unusually good, the atmosphere quiet and intimate - unknown in the Moscow of my day - even if the prices rivaled those in Manhattan.

"Two years ago, I would not have been here and seen you in public like this," Zinovy told me after we greeted each other with warm Russian hugs and kisses.

Zinovy is a short, intense man in his early 60s, with thick graying hair and the energy of someone much younger. His English is excellent, his accent sharp and choppy. With me, he has never minced words. He is a satirical writer, ironic and sophisticated in conversation, but never indirect. He speaks in staccato bursts, either with great passion or with acid cynicism, and during the Brezhnev era, he found ample cause to be cynical. He believed in nothing, trusted virtually no one, had little good to say about the leadership or the system. But now he was brimming with enthusiasm. He told me that he had left Krokodiland was trying his hand at writing movie scenarios as well as books.

"The Director of Gorky Studio phones me and says, 'Zinovy, I'd like to see you. Come over,' " Zinovy reported. "To you, it's nothing. But to me it is as if Buddha were calling me - these bureaucrats never call anyone. So I go to see him and he says to me, 'I've looked at your script and it seems to me that it can be a good movie and it will make money.' To you, that's nothing. It's a natural idea. But to me, it's astonishing to think that this will be the standard - to make money. These idiots have produced so much rubbish over the years, never worrying a damn about wasting billions of rubles. Now suddenly, they want to make money. If they really stick to this, it's a revolution." -- Zinovy Yuryev, conversation with the author, May 27, 1988.

But Zinovy had an even more surprising story to tell, about the revolution going on in his country. It involved his son Misha.

I remembered Misha as a boy of eleven, with large brown eyes and a mind that matched the intelligence of his parents. So brilliant was he, in fact, that he had graduated from Moscow State University biology faculty at 19, headed for a career as a geneticist - until he found himself in serious political trouble.

I knew from my earlier experience that many free-thinking Soviet intellectuals like Zinovy had faced a dilemma in raising their bright adolescent children. They could hide their honest beliefs and opinions from their children, for fear that under the political pressures for conformity, their children might be induced to expose the parents as hidden dissenters. They could simply keep silent, sparing their children from having to grow up living double lives - speaking their minds in the privacy of their families, and toeing the Party line in public. Or they could do what Zinovy did, be honest and open with his two sons, Yura and Misha. He had talked candidly with them and let them dip into his extensive personal library of contraband literature - modern American and British fiction and non-fiction as well as dissident Soviet writers like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and others.

So it was only natural that Misha, as a young biologist in his early 20s, had borrowed his father's copy of Tom Clancy's novel, The Hunt for Red October, and had taken it to his office at a prestigious scientific institute. Of course, as the story of a Soviet submarine captain defecting to the West, Red Octoberis not a book on which Party watchdogs or security officers looked kindly. Unfortunately for Misha, he lent it to a friend, and either the friend or somebody else reported Misha to the KGB for possessing and disseminating anti-Soviet literature. The incident occurred in Gorbachev's early period, when his emphasis was not so much on reform as on work discipline and the drive against alcoholism and corruption. So the investigation blossomed and eventually led the KGB to Zinovy's private library of forbidden books.

One morning a KGB major and several workmen arrived in a truck to do an obysk- a search of Zinovy's apartment. When the KGB do an obysk, as Zinovy explained, they do it methodically, top to bottom, meticulously listing all the materials they confiscate for an investigation. This morning, they went through Zinovy's entire collection, not only his books but his Western video tapes and cassettes. They took everything, cataloguing every single item, and they expanded their original investigation of Misha to include Zinovy as well.

Investigations such as this one have a way of dragging on, with all the various complications and interrogations. The family used what connections it had with Communist Party higher-ups to get the matter dismissed, but the situation looked steadily worse for both father and son. Although formal charges had not been filed, Misha appeared headed for Siberia, and Zinovy appeared likely to lose his job and perhaps worse.

Then suddenly, on Dec. 17, 1986, Gorbachev called Andrei Sakharov at his enforced exile in the city of Gorky and invited the famous dissident to come back to Moscow, to help enlist the intelligentsia for Gorbachev's reforms. That phone call was a dramatic harbinger of cultural liberalization to come, as Zinovy was soon to find out.

Within a few weeks, the KGB investigator in Zinovy's family's case telephoned Misha and said, "Why don't you write us a letter asking us to drop your case." Misha, who had steadfastly refused to write or sign any paper for the KGB, balked at first, but eventually Zinovy persuaded him to go ahead and do it.

More weeks went by and then a phone call came from the KGB telling Zinovy and Misha to be at their apartment on a certain morning. Once again, the KGB major appeared with the workmen in a gray truck - but this time they began to unload Zinovy's books and tapes, and systematically put them back on the shelves. When they had finished, Zinovy noticed prudishly the KGB had kept two of his videotapes.

"One was Pretty Baby, which they considered porno," Zinovy recalled with a chuckle, "too dangerous, they evidently thought, for an old guy like me. And the other wasAliens, which they considered too violent."

All the books were returned, but one. "They said that was a mistake," Zinovy reported, "and they apologized!"

Zinovy sat there, shaking his head in wonder and disbelief at this weird new KGB politesse. And at the somersault in his own family's fortunes.

"Imagine it, Rick," he said. "The KGB apologizedto an ordinary citizen! Now you see why Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader I have believed in."

It seemed a fantastic story, worthy of Zinovy's satirical fiction, but this time, it was true. And it conveyed a wider message about the mechanism of state terror and the climate of fear that had ruled Russia for seven decades of Communist power, and for centuries of Russian absolutism before that. For if the KGB were truly to be held in some check, and Gorbachev was really going to lift the threat of arbitrary arrest for the mere possession of liberal writings, then gradually ordinary people might gain the nerve to speak their minds in public.

My colleagues from WGBH and I decided to try to talk to some ordinary Russians, on the day that President Reagan arrived for his summit meeting with Gorbachev. We went out to the Great Stone Bridge which crosses the Moscow River on the southern approach to the Kremlin, to mingle with the crowds along Reagan's motorcade route. As executive producer of our documentary series, Marty Smith had a mini-camera and wanted to try out some man-in-the-street interviews on camera. I wanted to see whether the Russian people would talk to us openly.

I was recalling my arrival in Moscow in 1971 when, during my first week, Nikita Khrushchev died, an anonymous pensioner, and Western reporters had been tipped off within hours by friends of the Khrushchev family. Nothing appeared in the Soviet press for two days; obviously, Khrushchev's successors could not decide what to say about him, so they did not print even the news that he had died. Of course, The New York Timeshad the story and wanted me to get reactions from ordinary Russians.

So, fresh from Russian language tutoring, I went out to find out firsthand what the people had to say about old Nikita, the bumptious upstart peasant who had dared denounce Stalin, had put missiles into Cuba, and had banged his shoe on his desk at the United Nations.

No one would talk.

People scurried away when I mentioned Khrushchev's name. I had luring people into a conversation by asking for telephone change, but when they got my drift, they fled with vague mumblings of, "I'm not from around here," or "I don't know what you're talking about." Then I tried cornering vegetable vendors at stands in the farmers' market, but they, too, were full of evasions. "Poor old man," said one grandmother. A middle-aged man parried, "Where was he all this time?" But more typical was a ticket-seller in a movie house. Like everyone else, she had seen no official news of Khrushchev's death and she was mistrustful. Eyeing me suspiciously, she demanded, "How do you know he died?" I understood that people were so wary that it was ridiculous to put together a story.

So with that memory still in mind in 1988, I headed out to the Great Stone Bridge, skeptical at our prospects for a genuine give-and-take with the Russian man-in-the-street. I figured the camera would be an extra handicap, more likely to attract police interference than talkative Muscovites.

But my experience from the Seventies was a poor guide. As soon as I explained, in Russian, to people on the bridge that we were American public television reporters here for Reagan's visit and eager to sample public opinion, they wanted to talk. The sight of the camera drew a crowd. Moscow suddenly seemed like New York or Los Angeles.

At first, their comments were safe and obvious, sentiments about wishing Reagan well. People said they were glad he was in Moscow, they hoped his visit would strengthen peace. It was far better, they said, to have our leaders talking than preparing for war. When I edged toward more controversial territory, such as questions about their personal lives, there was a moment's hesitation; then a wiry little man in a straw hat, with the almond-shaped eyes and oriental face of a Tatar, started delivering a rapid-fire speech from the back of the crowd.

"We ought not to be talking about this - this is not what's No. 1 on our minds," he declared. "What's No. 1 is that our economy is in terrible shape. These people are Moskvichy, Muscovites - they're well taken care of compared to the rest of us. I come from near Kazan on the Volga River [800 miles east of Moscow], and our situation is a nightmare. We can't find sugar or tea in our shops. Coffee is hard to get. Housing is terrible...."

And he went on. I kept expecting someone to object, or to put a hand in front of Marty's camera. That's what would have happened in the 1970s. Some Soviet patriot or some militia officer would have grabbed this little Tatar by the scruff of the neck, pulled him out of the crowd and lectured him about not washing dirty linen in front of foreigners. But instead, his tirade touched off a kvetching session. Others chimed in with pet peeves - the lack of meat, the shortage of baby clothes. One serious young man began to preach that there was too much materialism, that more people should turn to religion, now that Gorbachev was letting churches reopen. Suddenly, we were in the midst of a mini-Hyde Park. People were pushing and shoving to get to the camera to give America a piece of their minds.

Then a sturdy, middle-aged matron with black hair tied back severely in a bun pushed aggressively through the crowd and demanded to speak. She had the authoritarian aura of a school principal. Her iron back and steely eyes reminded me of a type I had encountered all too often in years gone by: the ideological vigilantes, self-appointed keepers of order. Her advance to the front rank signaled a moment of reckoning. There will be no more self-indulgent whimpering, I thought to myself; this woman will cuff the ears of any who would sully the honor of the Motherland.

I was trying to figure out how to finesse her. "I don't think we need this one," I said to Marty Smith. "Let's just take a little bit," he replied; and so I asked her to state her problem, and her script began as I imagined.

All the others had spoken anonymously. But with the abrupt efficiency of a military officer giving name, rank and serial number, this woman self-confidently reeled off her name, address, and occupation: "Tretyakova, Olga; Stavropol Region; teacher, retired." For special effect, she emphasized she came from the home province of Mikhail Sergeyevich, using Gorbachev's first name and patronymic, the normal Russian way. Obviously, not a lady to be trifled with.

Then, with stentorian oratory, she commenced to deliver a pitiful indictment of the Soviet health system. To my astonishment, she was speaking out not to defend the system but to drive a nail into its coffin. "Eleven years ago my only son died in a hospital," she began, "a victim of corruption." She was outraged not only at faulty diagnosis and bad treatment but also at the arrogance of one doctor who had demanded a bribe for treatment which was supposed to be free of charge under Soviet socialism. When she took her case to a public prosecutor, she said, he, too, demanded a hefty bribe of 1600 rubles (practically a year's pay for her) and then he disappeared with the money.

"Later, he was arrested and convicted," apparently for other crimes, she said. But the doctor, whom she condemned as "a killer in a white coat," was still unpunished because of a "cover-up" in the Stavropol prosecutor's office.

Initially, Olga Tretyakova's riveting story and commanding presence kept the others silent. Now, people began to grumble. Several uniformed militia men at the fringe of our group pressed in closer to listen, just as Mrs. Tretyakova was emphasizing that this scandal had taken place practically under Gorbachev's nose, in his home province.

"I have written the Communist Party Central Committee," she complained, "but they just pass the buck."

One onlooker cautioned her to be careful or she might get in trouble.

"Let them arrest me!" she blurted out. I fully expected a militia officer's gray-uniformed arm to reach over the crowd and lead her away, but the police made no move. Eventually, she became frustrated that we, the Americans, would not promise to right the wrong and investigate the doctor; she reluctantly relinquished her hold on the camera and the crowd, and made her way out along the street - still a free woman, for as far as I could see.

In the end, it was we, not the Russians, who ended the dialogue.

For me, the episode was a revelation. In the 1970s, I had heard Russians gripe, with good reason, about terrible living conditions, but they had been wary of expressing individual criticism too freely in front of strangers, especially other Soviets. Indeed, as we strolled away that afternoon, a young blond workman in rumpled clothes tagged along after us. When the militia were out of sight, he approached me with a story of being fired from his job and blacklisted because his bosses condemned his complaints as a political protest. He was having trouble getting work; he wanted us to help him emigrate. His furtive contact was typical of my encounters in the 1970s, a symptom of a system of repression, some of the effects of which obviously still lingered on.

But the openness of the others, their willingness to voice their criticisms in public, on camera - all of was a striking change. In three and a half years of roaming the country in the 1970s, I had heard many candid and sordid stories from Soviet citizens, but if they had a negative message to deliver, they were usually careful to check that no one was eavesdropping and to protect themselves with anonymity. In a crowd, Big Brother was always assumed to be present. Fear had been palpable.

As we returned to our hotel that afternoon, I had to admit that even if the food selection was still grim and even if other material conditions had not improved three years after Gorbachev's ascent, people's psychology had changed. I found it remarkable that Russians, who have almost no tradition of tolerance for differing opinion, would let each other speak, without shouting each other down, and without some Communist Party busybody stepping in to set the record straight or to call a halt. The notion of public dialogue had obviously gained some legitimacy, but what impressed me most of all was that these people had lost much of their old fear. If Gorbachev had done nothing else, he had created a whole new world, merely by lifting people's fear.

It is tempting for us in the West, especially Americans, to witness such sea-changes in events and in people's psychology and then to interpret them through the prism of our own values, our own political framework. We assume we understand what is really going on inside the Soviet Union; we assume that as soon as Soviet people are given freedom, they will behave as we do. Our framework is capitalism and multi-party democracy; our way of life seems so natural, so right to us, that we take for granted that once dictatorship is removed, Russians deep-down will reflect and assert our same values.

When Gorbachev talks about democratization and greater freedoms, we mishear his rhetoric because few of us understand that Russian history has given those words different meanings for him and his people. We expect that people who have been politically inert for decades will immediately know how to operate democratic institutions, how to take charge of their destinies. We imagine that only an entrenched Old Guard is blocking them; that once a few "bad guys" at the top are removed, the world of the average Russian will look like ours. To us, Gorbachev's perestroika, or casting off the old Stalinist dictatorship, makes so much sense that we cannot fathom how deeply imbedded is the resistance to change among the vast majority of people, even those dissatisfied with the past.

The swiftness of political change in Eastern Europe only compounds our misperceptions of what is happening inside the Soviet Union. The governments of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania fell with such electrifying speed in the fall of 1989 that it fostered the illusion that tyranny can be replaced by democracy overnight. A banner I remember seeing on television being waved aloft by exuberant street crowds in Rumania on their most fateful day captured the lightning tempo with which the old world was being turned upside down. It read: "Poland - ten years. East Germany - ten weeks. Czechoslovakia - ten days. Rumania - ?"

On our television screens, we see the same massive street marches in Lithuania, Azerbaijan, or in Russian cities that we saw in Prague, Leipzig or Bucharest, and we are tempted to assume the Soviets will transform their country swiftly, as East Europeans have.

But as the past six years have shown, the Soviet Union, and at its heart Mother Russia, is different from its neighbors. As a society and a people, Russia is more difficult to change. Even the largest street demonstrations in Moscow have been nowhere near as large or as universal as the demonstrating masses in the smaller capitals of Eastern Europe - a sign that Muscovites, that most Russians, are not as swept up by the magnetic attraction of a new way of life as are Poles, Germans or Czechoslovaks.

Eastern Europe faces a torturous process to move from socialism to capitalism, and to revive working democracies; but at least in Eastern Europe, there was a relatively recent tradition of democracy, within the memories of people now alive. As World War II began, governments in Eastern Europe included the institutions of democracy. But Russia has been ruled by czars and Communist dictators for five centuries, with only brief interludes of democratic reform.

What is more, the dictatorial brand of Soviet socialism had its roots in Russia. It was not imposed by an alien army, as the Soviet Army imposed Communist dictatorships on Eastern Europe. It was fired and hardened in the crucible of war, famine, terror, and hard sacrifice, and it has its committed legions. What is more, the Russians are a people who have historically needed a belief system, an ideology to live by, whether Communism or Russian Orthodoxy. Many are uneasy with a political system in which the guiding principles of public life are concerned with means, not ends.

When I have described our political ethic to Russians, many of them have said that they felt something was missing; they have been uncomfortable with our notion that while the wider society establishes process, the institutions of government, its legislatures, division of powers, and free press, the individual himself is left to develop philosophy, faith and the meaning of life. That is not the Russian tradition. Most Russians look to the state and the ruler to provide an ideology and a purpose as well as law and order.

So the collapse of the wall - both the Berlin Wall and the wall within the Soviet Union between the rulers and the ruled - is not the whole story; it is just the beginning. The story now is what happens after the first massive political tremors; what happens after the wall comes down. That is the story which has fascinated me most, the human story, the story of personal transformations: how people cope with reform, some promoting it, others resisting it, or mouthing its slogans but secretly sabotaging it; or floating in uncertainty, voicing hope for change but unwilling to take risks to make it happen.

In pursuit of that story, I have spent nearly nine months in the Soviet Union over the past two years, traveling more than 40,000 miles, visiting 25 major cities and nine republics. I have ranged from Siberia to the Baltic republics, from Central Russia to Uzbekistan, from Armenia and Azerbaijan to the Ukraine. I have tried to probe the innards of Gorbachev's U.S.S.R., talking to coal-miners, farmers, high school students, listening to city officials and industrial bosses, reformers and hard-liners, questioning taxi drivers and members of the Politburo. My own reactions to what was happening have passed through several stages of deepening awareness. My opinions of Gorbachev have changed several times.

What follows in this book are the stories of what it is like in the Soviet Union today; what it is like for individuals to live through a cultural convulsion, a wholesale change in their society and environment.

There is the story, for example, of a local Communist Party leader who for the first time stands for election in a genuine contest; and he loses. There is the story of an industrial manager who is suddenly told, "Run your own business and make a profit" - but first he must struggle to extricate himself from the web of a state-run economy. There is the story of high school teachers who dutifully preached the dogma of the past, but who are suddenly told the old textbook is full of lies, and that they must invent a new version, using disclosures in the daily newspapers.

I write about students who have heard one orthodoxy from early childhood, taught by both teachers and parents, only to discover that actually, their teachers believed one thing, their parents another. What is it like for a television producer to be given license by Gorbachev to tackle any topic, but then to discover she is being held back by the taboos of her own bosses? How do older people, who once worshipped Stalin and made sacrifices in his name, react when their idol is discredited - when their own lives are discredited? To whom does a democratic-minded mine worker turn if after five years, there is still little food on the shelves? Or a farmer who would like to till his own land but cannot be sure that state will not snatch it back from him the day after tomorrow?

From afar, there's a tendency to see things either in utopian or apocalyptic terms: success or failure, stability or collapse, dictatorship or chaos, black or white. We don't necessarily see the shades and the fluctuating currents that swirl around ordinary people. The epic story of Russians today has been personalized around Gorbachev: Is he winning or losing? Will he survive or not?

But in truth, the struggle in the Soviet Union, and within individual Soviets, has become far more complex than that; change is operating on so many levels and in so many directions simultaneously. There is no single hero, no single plot-line to the story. All too much of the time, our single focus has been on Gorbachev and whether he will "make it," but the most important questions reach beyond Gorbachev personally.

In fact, one of the most important things this book will show is that whether Gorbachev "makes it" or not, the process of change has taken root in the Soviet Union. It may be halting and embattled, its course unsteady and sometimes thrown temporarily into reverse, even by Gorbachev himself; but whether or not he survives, reform there has acquired roots, and it will flower whether under Gorbachev or somebody else.

The transformation of a society as large as the Soviet Union, and as enmeshed in the habits and traditions of authoritarian rule, will inevitably take so long to run its course that no single leader, such as Gorbachev, can hope to see the process to the end. The old dictatorial order of Soviet Communism has been irrevocably altered, and the process of forging a new social and political order will be painful, turbulent and prolonged. The battle will ebb and flow over two or three decades, perhaps more, for it is impossible to crack an entrenched dictatorship without peril and bloodshed. Some Old Guard leaders, frightened by the powerful forces that Gorbachev has unleashed, have been trying to check and reverse the process. As 1991 began, Gorbachev himself was trying to retrench in the name of "law and order;" but I believe that others such as Boris Yeltsin and democratically elected leaders in various republics, now learning the skills of democracy, will emerge later on to carry reform forward, further than Gorbachev either intended or was capable of moving.

In time, we are likely to see Gorbachev as a transitional figure, who uncorked the process and set the yeast of change to work in the Soviet body politic. In fact, as we shall see, fundamental change had been gestating within Soviet society for years before Gorbachev appeared. He fostered its birth, and now finally, reform has taken on a life and a dynamism of its own.

That fact comes through most clearly in the personal experiences of the people you will meet in this book.

Even from afar, the transformation now under way in the Soviet Union today holds a special fascination for all of us, not only because its success or failure affects our destiny, our survival, even the changing nature of our own society. But what is happening there now rivets our interest for a deeper reason. It is a modern enactment of one of the archetypal stories of human existence, the story of how people and societies transform themselves, grow and change. It's a story of the struggle from darkness to light, from poverty toward prosperity, from dictatorship toward democracy. It represents an affirmation of the relentless human struggle to break free from the bonds of hierarchy and dogma, to strive for a better life, for stronger, richer values. Beyond the specific outcome of events, what is happening now to people in the Soviet Union has universal meaning. It is an affirmation of the human capacity for change, growth, renewal.

This book is about how that story of change began and what it is like to live through it today. And, it is about what this change means for the new Russians, and for the rest of the world, in the 1990s and beyond.