Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

I met a lot of interesting people, like Russian and American cosmonauts, and I learned huge amounts from my contacts with diplomats, businessmen and administrators from the mayor’s office. Sometimes I was called upon to work as a translator for politicians (they asked me to attend a meeting between the security personnel of Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, but somehow, despite the fact that neither side spoke the other’s language, they managed to communicate perfectly happily after several shots of whiskey – I just sat idle with my American counterpart in the corner of the room) and visiting scientists (my success or otherwise here was entirely dependent on the extent to which I could understand the theories the figure in question was propounding – I had trained in rocket science, yet a lot of the more advanced equations zipped right over my head). But for me, New York was just a place; it was an office, never a home.

Sometimes it seemed as if we were in a kind of exile; though only 4,000 miles separated us from home, we might as well have been on Mars. We could not phone our families and had to rely instead on infrequent letters from them, which always arrived months after they had been posted. The people we loved back in the Soviet Union exercised incredible caution when contacting us; they knew we had little chance of being able to visit our homes, except in the case of an emergency, so they were wary of sending us anything that they thought might hit us hard emotionally. It was two months before Natalia discovered that her father had died.

Russian papers only arrived weeks after they were first published. So eager were we to receive information from our country that we swallowed any scraps we could get, like starving men scrabbling over a crust of bread. Depending on what we read or heard, we swung wildly between puzzlement, fascination, and, more rarely, exultation. What made the situation more complex was that American newspapers such as the New York Times presented a picture of almost complete ruin and chaos. It sometimes appeared as if they had swallowed Rupert Murdoch’s thesis – that the best news is bad news – whole. Every time I opened the pages of the American press I was left terrified for the safety of my parents and sister.

But then if we spoke to Soviet diplomats who had just stepped off the plane from Moscow we were told how the turmoil was accompanied by profound enthusiasm. That there were meetings taking place across the length and breadth of the country attended not by dissidents but rather by positive people seeking new lives, seeking new possibilities. We learned about the impact of dramatic legislation, like the 1988 Law on Cooperatives, which marked the first time in six decades that enterprises could be set up independent of the state, and saw how the new freedoms that were extended to the population encouraged a new spirit of openness and optimism. Suddenly, politicians were speaking without reference to Lenin, ordinary people could air opinions in public that just months before they would have been afraid of whispering to even their closest friends, and the state’s entire administrative apparatus had been convulsed by a series of electric shocks.

However, the virtuous attempt at de-centralisation resulted in a crisis of authority, as people who had previously been frightened into obedience began to exploit the new freedoms they had been extended, a process exacerbated by an abrupt, but devastating, economic crisis.

In time, we got used to reading in the US press what, in our eyes at least, amounted to propaganda. It was strange to be told by Americans that St Petersburg had become a militarised zone guarded by roaming gangs of cadets, or that out-of-control demonstrations were tearing the country apart. More often than not, one could laugh, but there was nothing funny about the atmosphere that still reigned even two years after Ronald Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech’. I returned to our apartment the following day to find my eldest son – who played baseball and collected Star Wars figures; how different was he really to the American kids living all around him? – bewildered to think that people might hate him simply because he was Russian.

I remember too, how when a friend of mine tried to invite my kids to visit his own children’s school at Red Bank in New Jersey, I had to tell him that I was terribly sorry, but that Soviet diplomats were prohibited from entering the borough because it was considered to be too close to a number of sensitive government installations, and that the prohibition extended to their families too. He looked at me with a mixture of scepticism and surprise. ‘Your propaganda has left you silly; they are kids, of course they can come!’ I had to tell him that they had the same diplomatic status as myself, and that I really did not think they would be given permission for this trip. ‘Don’t worry, I’m friends with two senators,’ he said, ‘I’ll get this fixed.’ Two weeks later I saw him again, he looked diffident, almost ashamed, as he turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Vladimir, I never thought that in the United States the authorities could behave like that about two boys who just happen to be the sons of a Soviet diplomat.’

But our friendship survived this, and we remain close to this day. The force of his country’s aggressive official position towards the Soviet Union paled in comparison to the warmth shown to us every day by men and women on the street. They showed that they were above ideology and dogma, and that what mattered to them was forging friendly relations with other humans, no matter who they were, or where they were from. We never saw any signs of hatred from the country’s ordinary citizens. On the day that I found my son so upset by the knowledge that he was a member of a so-called Evil Empire, I came to understand how deeply shocked he really was. So I rushed to the women of the UN’s hospitality committee, who assured me that they were horrified by their president’s words, and immediately arranged for my son to get tickets for the Christmas party at Macy’s department store. For us, this felt as prestigious and exciting as the New Year’s Eve party for children that was held every year at the Kremlin. We were met at the door by the women from the hospitality committee, who immediately involved my son in every game going. They were so unbelievably warm and kind that for the first time since we had moved to New York he started to speak in English.

On another occasion, on a trip to a remote lake to take my sons fishing, I accidentally locked my keys in my car. We were in the middle of nowhere, and to this day I still have no idea what I would have done if a police car had not drawn up beside us. The officers got out of their vehicle and asked whether we needed any help. ‘Yes,’ I said, explaining the situation. ‘It seems I do.’

They presented me with two options. The first involved using their guns to shoot the door open. It would have undeniably been effective, but the car was a brand-new Buick and I did not fancy explaining to the Soviet Mission what had happened to their new investment. OK, they said, here’s the second option: there’s an individual who has just been released from one of our cells who is something of an expert at getting into locked cars, we can probably persuade him to lend a hand.

So we went back to the station where they immediately ordered an enormous pizza to keep the boys happy. I was feeling somewhat discombobulated – it is a strange experience for a senior Russian diplomat to spend any time in an American police station, whatever the reason – but those guys treated me as if they had known me all their lives. After forty minutes, they came to me and said, ‘Mr Yakunin, you can go to your car now,’ and there it was, the door open, the keys exactly where I had left them. There was no sense that they saw us as members of the Evil Empire, no sense at all that they saw us as anything other than a regular family who needed help.