The other day, when it looked more than likely that we were going to be taken off the train in Belarus on our way to Kiev, I rang Ira to tell her that we were running behind. ‘Hello, Ira,’ I said. ‘This is Masha, Sveta’s mother.’ (Sveta and Masha are the informal, everyday versions of Svetlana and Maria.) Of all the possible slip-ups, of all the ridiculous things I could have said to her the first time we spoke in over two decades, this was telling. ‘Forgive me, Ira. I am someone’s mother and someone’s daughter, only I got the two confused.’ Was I, am I, really confused? What would Freud say?
It has taken me unforgivably long to allow Mum to step down from the pedestal I created for her, to free her from my image of her as a superior being radiating (at an even temperature all year round) wisdom, benevolence and hard-edged optimism. Only in the last few years have I been able to let my mother assume her full separateness as a person, someone who can be seen differently by different people, who in fact can be different with different people. And here, almost in the flesh, is Ira – the person whose closeness with my mum, even if it was over four decades ago, means that she knew her in a way that I could never know her, that the two of them had a connection that I could never come close to having.
And, in a way, I must stand for Mum. Neither my father nor my mother have ever gone back since we left in 1989, not to Russia, not to Ukraine; my sister and I are the family’s self-appointed shuttles. My parents had their own distinct reasons for staying away. Believing he was leaving for good, my father made a decision to cut himself off. It was a case of mutual, consensual rejection, he says – his country stripped him of his citizenship and his rights for leaving at the end of 1989, and he stripped his country of its centrality in his personal universe. It worked for him. He is fine. He never was a tragic nostalgic. There were people, he tells me, some of them his friends, who called the Soviet Union ‘this country’, demoting it to the mere status of an involuntary place of residence long before they could depart for good. He never did that. My father always said ‘my country’ and meant it. And the forty-eight years he lived there he counts as happy. He is not bitter. But the ties (with the place, not the people) have been cut once and for all. My father has always been allergic to ambiguity and indecision; since I have known him he has only ever done death by one cut. It seems clear to me that he has resolved to live wholeheartedly in Australia, to turn it from this to my country. Could he have been so interested and attentive otherwise, so invigorated by difference, so untouched by the frequently schizophrenic immigrant condition, in which an inner sense of superiority battles with outer disadvantage and inadequacy? He always struck me as a ‘one-country man’.
‘There is such a thing as survivor’s guilt,’ says my mum. She is talking about what it would feel like to see her Kiev friends again, none of whom had a choice to leave Ukraine. Not being Jewish, they could not have applied to emigrate for that reason to Israel, the United States or Australia like we did. As to moving somewhere in the name of a better life, they were, on the whole, too broke for that. (One of life’s little ironies is that you need money to escape having no money.) It would make my mum feel deeply uneasy to see her friends now, or so she thinks – like she won the lottery and they did not, and then she came back to brag about it. But it is not just this guilt but also Mum’s lifelong fear of insincerity: she cannot bear the thought of falseness creeping into her dealings with people who were once her closest friends. How can simplicity, purity and freedom – once the hallmarks of their friendship – survive twenty years of this kind of apart? she wonders. For her the answer is that it cannot: ‘We lived a shared life and we no longer do. I do not think we could possibly pick up where we left off. To remain real friends you have to be part of each others’ lives. But when you don’t have that and when you live completely different lives, your relationship is inevitably changed at its very core.’
Knowing that this is her attitude, and knowing how much she cared for the friends of her youth, I ask her what it was about my father that convinced her in her twenties to marry him and move away hundreds of kilometres from Kiev. ‘He stood out amongst his peers,’ she says. ‘He was intelligent and well read, but also so interested in everything; every sphere, every aspect of life. He was a great communicator too, you could talk to him about anything.’ My father took his work very seriously (A man should take what he does seriously! she thought), which is why she decided it was right to move to Kharkov. He had a job there already and there were no guarantees about what would happen to him professionally if they made their lives in Kiev. And, one more thing, he had great friends, a lot of them; he knew how to be a real friend and these were fully-fledged, strong, enduring friendships. And because of what Mum’s friends meant to her, because of how deeply and passionately she was attached to them, she recognised that quality in my dad straight away and loved him even more for it.
Of course, that time in Kiev, the time of my mother’s late teens and early twenties was unlike any other in Soviet history, at least before the 1980s. It was not the capital-s Sixties that the children of the West experienced. Still, the late 1950s and early 1960s were an absolutely blessed time to be young in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev was, of course, nothing like the counter-culture revolutionaries of the West. ‘Small, temperamental, aggressive, prematurely balding, with a shrill voice and confused speech’: this is how journalist Ilya Milshtein described him. Though he could not (and would not) give his people the Summer of Love, he gave them a few years of a warm spell, the famous thaw that followed his secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, in which he condemned the cult of personality. This speech kick-started de-Stalinisation, as well as a brief but intense flourishing of the civic society and the arts. In his biography of the Soviet leader, historian William Taubman called it the bravest and most reckless thing Khrushchev ever did. ‘The Soviet regime never fully recovered,’ wrote Taubman, ‘and neither did he.’
From the Ukrainian factories and mines where he started to the Politburo where he ended up, Khrushchev was the very embodiment of Lenin’s dream of a cook being able to govern the country. ‘Semi-literate, with savage, almost Neanderthal ideas about culture, history, politics, littered once and for all with the Party propaganda, Khrushchev was a classical Stalinist.’ (Milshtein again.) How could a man like this set into motion a chain of events that would eventually lead, decades later, to the collapse of everything that Lenin and Stalin had so painstakingly built? For this is precisely what he did. While Khrushchev himself was formed in the thick of Stalin’s epoch, Gorbachev came into his own in the looser, slippery time of Khrushchev’s era, at the time when, in the immortal words of poet Anna Akhmatova, ‘Two Russias looked each other in the eye – the jailers and the jailed.’
The thaw allowed for the emergence of a whole new kind of people. They were called the children of the Twentieth Congress, or shestidesyatniki (’people of the 60s’). ‘The first semi-free generation in the unfree nation, the most surprising, striking, charming generation of the Soviet people in the last century.’ (Milshtein one last time.) The term shestidesyatniki is, of course, misleading because it attempts to encompass people who had not much more in common than their in-principle agreement that it was freedom that their country so painfully and devastatingly lacked above all else. But beyond this, shestidesyatniki had startlingly different ideas about what that freedom should actually look like and how it could blossom in their country. Some believed that all that was required was a return to Lenin (since Stalin was the original villain who corrupted Lenin’s vision), while others were convinced that the system in itself was by its very nature inhuman, sadistic and bound to implode (and they, of course, could not wait). Among shestidesyatniki there were enormous festering divisions between the dissidents on one side and those, like Joseph Brodsky, who rejected the belief taking root among the new generation of artists and writers that they were in fact cultural revolutionaries and saviours of their people.