Moscow Calling

The World Order Upended (Again)

By Steven Leigh Morris

Moscow Kremlin and river in morning, Russia

Yesterday, I received a text from Moscow.  “Stevka. Just to let you know what people think about the situation here. We hate this decision. We all think this is against the law. And people here are very scared what he [Putin] will do next. People here don’t support this at all.”

My stepdaughter, Katya (name changed for her protection), lives in Moscow. She is Russian, now in her late 30s. I’ve known her since she was eight. Her mother lives in the same building outside the city center. When we were married, I visited Moscow every winter for about a decade. I had produced the visit of what was then a Soviet theater company to California. They played in Chicago, and we got them on the bounce. In the summer of 1990, Moscow’s Theatre on Spartacus Square was the first-ever Soviet Theatre Company to visit California with a new Russian play — Dear Elena Sergievna. It came to Cal State, Dominguez Hills (where I still teach in the Theatre/Dance Department), in a project co-sponsored by the City of Carson. George Bush, Sr. was our president then, with Bill Clinton on the horizon. Gorbachev was theirs, presiding over the end of the Soviet Union, a conclusion egged on by their upcoming pro-Western president, Boris Yeltsin.

Can you imagine a pro-Western, Russian president? He didn’t last long.

I later married a company member of Theatre on Spartacus Square, and every winter, for about a decade, I would visit her family in Moscow. During my first visit, Gorbachev was still in power. He was calling for democratic reforms to the Soviet Union, but insufficiently Western for the Russian populace. Yeltsin was proposing a binge of “privatization” of State services, such as health care. A few years later, Bill Clinton came to Moscow and endorsed such privatization, to cheers from Muscovites, and I thought to myself, this is not going to end well. Back in 1991, there were crowds in the streets chanting “Yelt-sin! Yelt-sin! Yelt-sin!” Crowd control consisted of teenagers in military fatigues, unarmed and looking a bit dazed.

In those years, a pack of Marlboros could get you a cab ride anywhere. The grocery shop shelves were semi-bare — well, uh, not unlike those at our local Grocery store here in Idyllwild, California today. But I guess that’s a different story.

As an American, I was seen as an exotic pet – a kind of star in the firmament yet viewed with suspicion. Trying out my newly acquired Russian language skills, I asked a large, robust woman trudging across a snowbank where she got the sausage in her bag. At least, that’s what I thought I asked. Confusing the Russian verbs to obtain and to appear, I actually asked her how it came to be that she looked like a sausage. She burst out laughing, and couldn’t contain herself for about two minutes.

There’s an annual New Year’s ritual played out on Russian television with the president addressing the nation. One year it was Gorbachev. Then it was Yeltsin. For a stretch, it was Putin, until a guy named Medvedev served as a placeholder for Putin’s return. Without exception they praised the virtues of family, or hard work, and of national progress. Across the span of those years, however, upon my return to the United States, I couldn’t help but notice how certain domestic values in Russia and the United States were starting to fuse. Long before Trump’s candidacy and his even-then praise of Russian strategies, neighbors in my Hollywood condo were spying on and reporting other neighbors in a practice that was endorsed by the Homeowners’ Association. The bullies in the building were always aggrieved about something – often imagined and invented – a pretense for further aggression. It was a microcosmic preview of what would unfold in the 21^st century, in a very public way, for the first time since the McCarthy-era of the 1950s.

I became particularly fond of my father-in-law – an accomplished musician and jazz band leader working in Moscow. He spoke not a word of English, and conversations with him in the tiny back room of his apartment were mainly how my Russian language conversation rose from inept to almost competent. 

It was from him that I learned eternally useful phrases such as, “I’m not as stupid as I look,” and Svolochi ee Vori (bastards and thieves) — he was referring to Russian politicians and oligarchs. He spoke about how the Minister of Culture was pressuring him to make his band more “Russian” – code for, can you get rid of all those Jewish musicians. He held his ground, arguing that he would hire the best musicians he could find.

I was a journalist for LA Weekly at the time. “I would like to interview Medvedev,” I told him. Without missing a beat, he looked at me and replied cheerfully, deadpan, “Me too.”  

My peer from Claremont High School, John Freedman, had married a Russian actress and moved to live with her in Moscow. Deeply suspicious of governments everywhere, he wrote theater coverage for the American-owned Moscow Times. I remember him being unmoved by the pro-Western fashion of those early years. Even in the early 1990s, he anticipated a backlash, referring to “The Russian steamroller” as an inevitable part of of history. “Who do they think we are?” echoed Svetlana Vragova, who ran the Theatre on Spartacus Square. Hers was a mocking assertion, “Democracy is simply not in the Russian DNA.”

Whether or not it’s in the American DNA remains an open question, but Putin’s “aggrieved” invasion of Ukraine appears for the time-being to have returned us from partisan nihilism to a renewed if fragile sense of purpose in the world order.

Katya and her mom came to LA for various lengths of stay. Katya is an only child, who felt compelled not to abandon her grandparents — and particularly after her grandfather’s death, her grandma – in Russia. With the onset of her grandmother’s dementia, the visits of mother and daughter to the U.S. became less frequent. The Pacific Ocean is an immense divide. Our marriage became a kind of Arctic Straight.

This morning, I spoke with both of them by phone. Katya works (like a horse) for a Russian fashion boutique that imports clothes from Italy. She told me she’d stayed up the whole night sobbing that, in the very moment that saw the Ruble plummeting to all-time low, which portends exponential price increases for everything, international sanctions threatened to close her company. There have been street protests against the invasion, she said. “Almost immediately, they’re arrested and thrown in prison. In all my life, I’ve never seen such a crackdown on freedom of speech here.”

“Even during the Soviet Union, it was never like this,” her mom added. “Nobody consulted us about this war. I can tell you, everybody I know, and all of Katya’s friends, and all of mine, nobody here wants this.”

Three weeks ago, they both admitted, they were mocking the Western press and intelligence services that predicted (with almost pinpoint accuracy) Putin’s actions and contrived rationales for empire re-building.  How stupid are they in the west, they pondered, knowing that an invasion of Ukraine would devastate the Russian economy. It just didn’t make any sense. Putin was playing the West like a joker.

They’ve now arrived at the sobering realization that anything, everything, is possible.