“There was a different feeling in the air,” said Nina. “Students started coming to the USSR from Africa and the Arab states, and people felt more free to talk openly.” But even with this thaw, old habits of fear and secrecy remained. Although Nina’s parents both professed belief in God, they were afraid to go to the Russian Orthodox church in Tallinn. Even so, Nina went occasionally with her grandmother. “She used to say, ‘Let them shoot me, but I will have icons in my house,’” said Nina, who now had a row of icons in her own home.
One day in 1961, when Nina was in her ninth-grade math class, the teacher was called out of the room. When she returned, her eyes were bright with excitement. “Children!” she announced with pride, “Man is in space!” Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth in the first-ever manned space flight.
“I was so proud,” Nina recalled. “I was the kind of child who cried whenever Soviet athletes won international awards and our flag was raised. I loved my country so much! So when the first man in space was a Soviet man, it made the achievement that much better.”
Yet the idealistic young Komsomolka got a dose of cynicism when she went to her first open Communist Party meeting. “I was so nervous. I thought it would be this monumental gathering, where people discussed ideas and really did the work of the Party. But when I got there, nobody was paying attention; people were milling about, reading, playing chess. It was farcical.
“I knew from that time that there was nothing to strive for in the Communist system,” she concluded. “If that was what Party meetings were about, there was no reason to want to belong.”
As Nina grew older, her cynicism deepened. When applying for admittance to the Leningrad Medical Institute, she wrote as her essay a scathing indictment of Soviet slogans. Thanks to her childhood experiences in Estonia, she viewed them as mindless and hypocritical.
Those slogans made me sick! “Long live friendship between nations!” “Long live the Soviet brotherhood!”
So I wrote a critique. When my aunt found out about it, she said, “The black raven is going to come for you,” meaning the black Volga sedans that came for people who were to be arrested.
But nothing bad resulted from that essay. In fact, I got the highest marks.
While studying at the medical institute, Nina met Gennady Shalyopa. The couple married in 1969, and within a few years they had two sons, Boris and Andrey. Life in the 1970s, during Brezhnev’s “period of stagnation,” was for the most part uneventful. “There were no long lines in the 1970s, no terrible shortages,” remembered Nina. “Not in Moscow and Leningrad, anyway. Other parts of Russia had more difficulties as far as getting food products, but things here were fine. We lived modestly, but well.”
This was, perhaps, the calmest period of the Soviet century. Yet Russians in the 1970s were still careful not to say the wrong things to the wrong people.
We didn’t tell anecdotes on the trams, where someone might hear. Things weren’t nearly so paranoid as in the Stalin years, but all the same, people weren’t free to say whatever they wanted.
Once I went to my uncle’s house to visit. He had a friend over, and we all sat around drinking wine. I told a political joke—nothing terrible, just poking a little fun. My uncle laughed, but his friend looked at me and said very seriously, “That’s not funny. They put people in jail for jokes like that. And rightly so.”
The seventies were a time when Soviets passed around mimeographed copies of banned writings and shared cassette tapes with fuzzy recordings of Western bands. “Of course I read banned literature whenever I could,” said Nina. “But I wouldn’t say it was something I was obsessed with. There was a lot of good literature that could be had legally.”
In 1979, when Nina was offered a position as the head of a city medical department, she was invited to join the Communist Party. She declined. “Part of the reason I turned them down,” she told me, “is because I didn’t want that job. In those days, it was impossible to take a job like that without joining the Party… Who knows what I would have done if I had really wanted it? Even I don’t know.
“The idea of Communism itself is not bad,” she said. “But the fulfillment of it in this country was very, very bad. Once I realized that, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I remained very apolitical.”
In the early 1980s, the quick, successive deaths of aged apparatchiks Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko paved the way for new leadership in the Soviet Union. U.S. president Ronald Reagan began to escalate Cold War rhetoric, and Russia’s future looked uncertain. But no one realized just how uncertain until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and started shaking up the government.
“Gorbachev spoke without notes; he just talked. That was the amazing thing,” said Nina’s son Boris, who was 15 when Gorbachev came to power. “He was young and dynamic, not like Brezhnev, who could barely speak. We had a sense that he would fight against the things that we didn’t like about the Soviet Union, and everybody began to be interested in politics.”
The twin policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) became part of the world lexicon, and things began changing quickly in the creaking behemoth of the USSR. For young people like Boris, the transformation was exhilarating. “When Gorbachev initiated perestroika, I thought, It’s about time!” he told me.
But that enthusiasm turned to disillusionment in the late eighties, years that saw terrible food shortages all over Russia. When Gorbachev declared limits on alcohol production, sugar disappeared from store shelves, snatched up as a vital ingredient in homemade liquor. There were also chronic shortages of butter, flour, tea, and other essentials.
“In the end,” said Boris, a handsome, bearded man with a passing resemblance to Billy Crystal, “Gorbachev himself became a barrier to the reforms he started. He was afraid to do more. He lost control of the situation.” By the early 1990s, Gorbachev had lost control altogether, and in 1991 he resigned his presidency and dissolved the Soviet Union.
For Boris, the fall of the Soviet Union was no tragedy. “The USSR was an artificially created entity; Kazakhs, Azeris, and other nationalities that were brought into the Soviet Union are completely unrelated to Russians,” he said. “They should have their own countries.” During the putsch attempt of 1993, when members of the Russian parliament attempted to overthrow President Yeltsin, Boris went to St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Square, where hundreds of people gathered to listen for news from Moscow. After initial anxiety, he decided everything would be fine after noticing “how calm everyone was on the square. Nobody was yelling, or panicking. The whole place was quiet.”
Now, Boris said, “Things are better than they were five years ago. The ghost of hunger has disappeared from Russia. If you work, you can earn money, and now you can buy everything here. Yes, there are some pensioners who are suffering, but Russia is enduring growing pains now. It’s all part of the historical process. Some will suffer, some will die, but the process itself is unstoppable.”
Six-year-old Vanya was born in 1989, as the Soviet Union was wheezing toward its final collapse. When I met him in 1995, his father Dima worked as a distributor of wholesale eyeglasses and his mother, Zhenya, sold Mary Kay cosmetics. His parents planned for Vanya, then in kindergarten, to go to a special school the following year, where students took intensive courses in English—the “language of the twenty-first century,” as they called it.
Gary snapped photos as Vanya’s great-great-grandmother, Maria Mikhailovna, stretched out her gnarled old hands to pull him close. “Come here,” she said, taking his small, smooth hand in hers. “He’s a good boy, a smart boy,” she said of the child 92 years her junior. “Who knows what the future will be like for this country? But he will do well.”