RUSSIAREDUX
by
GWENDOLYN STEWART
PROLOGUE:
Imagine
wandering over the largest country on earth,
A Clyde's T-shirt.
In Red Square! I could not believe it. I had hauled myself all the way from
Washington, D.C., to New York, New York to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Moscow, and
who should be practically the first person I saw on the rainy cobblestones
outside the Kremlin but a young man wearing a familiar green-and-white T-shirt
marked "Clyde's" -- an eating-and-drinking establishment less than four short
blocks from my apartment in Georgetown. Thrilled to be finally in Red Square,
stretched out by the red-eye flight, barely making it to the center of
Moscow before the last light fled, I was unable to contain myself. I gushed
my excitement to the young man and his buddy, and then walked
on.
When the two of them crossed my path in the Square a second time, not long
thereafter, and seemed to want to continue, I was not sure what should come
next. I found myself repeating and elaborating on my earlier amazement at
seeing something from home. "A foreign friend gave it to me," said the young
man. Since he was not asking me for anything, nor saying all that much
himself -- but not leaving either -- it seemed to fall to me to do the
talking. Clyde's, I told him and his friend, was very
famous.
Suddenly, a militia officer came up and led the two of them away.
It was 1984.
I had studied Russian language and history, and Soviet politics and economics,
in college and graduate school, and I had already traveled to China and
Poland, in 1981. Now I wanted to see the motherland of communism for myself.
I was working as a photojournalist in Washington; I had carved out seven weeks
between my assignments photographing the Democratic Convention in San
Francisco in July and the IMF-World Bank Annual Meeting in Washington in
September. Seven weeks to sample all the major regions of that one-sixth
of the landmass of the planet: fifteen locations -- the Baltic, the Black
Sea, the Caucasus, Kiev and Moscow and Leningrad, the Volga-Don region and
Siberia -- with temperatures ranging from a high of 113 degrees Fahrenheit to a low of 40 degrees.
Officially, it was summer.
In seven weeks of wandering around on my own I was to be taken over and over again to be part
of the scenery, assumed to be a local photographer working the central city tourist spots, or just someone
useful to ask directions of. When I was heard to be not a native Russian speaker, the guesses as to my origin
ranged widely. One of my favorites was being taken to be a "sportsmen" from the GDR -- an athlete from
East Germany -- a tribute, I assumed, to my being almost six feet tall and strong. What seemed not to be
credible was that I could possibly be an American -- an American woman traveling alone over the face of the Soviet
Union. In 1984.
For 1984 was the last year of Ronald Reagan's first term, a time of a Cold
War newly heated up, before Nancy Reagan helped convince him that peace made a
more useful historical legacy. It was the summer of the Los Angeles Olympics
and the Soviet tit-for-tat retaliatory boycott of those Olympics (we had
devastated the Soviets by boycotting their 1980 Moscow Olympics after the
invasion of Afghanistan). It was the summer of Ronald Reagan's "joke" in the
warm-up to a Saturday radio address, a "joke" declaring "Russia" an
outlaw nation and announcing that the bombs would fly in five minutes.
The very next year Mikhail Gorbachev
had arrived to head the Kremlin; five years after that, in the summer of
1990, there was a sense that the Soviet Union was very much up for grabs,
if not down for the count. Four thousand, six hundred eighty-three delegates
to the Twenty-Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
were summoned to Moscow, to the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin, to
help decide its fate. Boris Yeltsin made his move.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN:
MOSCOW & the GULF WAR: Excerpt from Chapter
Three * * * * An exhibition of a quarter-century of the photography
of Gwendolyn Stewart entitled "HERE BE GIANTS" was held last year at
Harvard. Photographs from the show, including the one above, are
available for purchase. Please contact: GWENDOLYN STEWART * * * * GWENDOLYN STEWART is both a
photojournalist and a political scientist
specializing in political leadership in Russia, China, and the U.S.
A former Bunting/Radcliffe Fellow, she is an Associate (and former
Post-Doctoral Fellow) of the Davis Center for Russian Studies and Central
Eurasian Studies at Harvard, as well as an Associate in Research of the
Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. For the Fairbank
Center she co-founded and co-chairs the China Current Events Workshop, a
forum for examining pressing issues in Greater China. Her
Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (Sic Transit) dealt with the role
of the leaders of the republics, especially Boris Yeltsin, in the breakup
of the Soviet Union. She is currently writing RUSSIA REDUX,
the story of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: part political analysis, part
travel-memoir. COMMENTS &
INQUIRIES
WELCOMED: RussiaRedux@gwendolynstewart.com BORIS YELTSIN'S
MIDNIGHT DIARIES BILL & BORIS &
VLADIMIR & GEORGE & Strobe Talbott's THE RUSSIA HAND: AMERICA'S
RUSSIA POLICY
THOMAS P. O'NEILL, JR. (TIP O'NEILL)
THE BIG DIG & FREDERICK SALVUCCI
GAO XINGJIAN: CHINA'S FIRST NOBEL LAUREATE IN LITERATURE
© Copyright 2008 Gwendolyn Stewart. All rights reserved.