In retrospect, we can all be experts now and say we saw a wave of freedom sweeping the globe in the late 1980s — a new era of global information and communication and economic codependence, an unacceptable spiraling of weapons costs and an unwillingness of the people on both sides of the Iron Curtain to die in a needless war.
We can spend the next decade analyzing the reasons for the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, but that may not be as important as trying to figure out where we’re all going from here.
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I’d written only two Cold War novels—The Charm School and The Talbot Odyssey—and my career and reputation weren’t tied closely to the continuance of the Cold War. Yet among some writers and some Cold Warriors, there is a certain nostalgia for the good old days when their services were needed and appreciated.
And maybe, on a certain level, the old Us versus Them thrillers can be enjoyed and appreciated as nostalgia. On another more important level, a book like The Charm School can be read and appreciated as a warning that the past is often prologue to the future — because if we forget what we all went through between 1945 and 1989, we are likely to repeat it some time in the not-too-distant future.
In any case, there must be something about this book that appeals to the reader because it’s been in continuous print since its publication and its sales have remained strong long past the demise of the system it portrays.
I’ve taken the opportunity to replace some material that was deleted in the original hardcover edition and also deleted in earlier paperback editions. Most of this material can be found in Chapters 3 and 23.
In Chapter 3, the deleted and replaced material is at the beginning of the chapter and was originally removed because it was felt that the scene gave away too much, too soon. I don’t think it does, and the reader can be the judge.
The material in Chapter 23 is an exchange between Colonel Sam Hollis and Lisa Rhodes, both of the American Embassy, and two American tourists, a man and his wife, both Brown University professors favorably disposed toward the Soviet system. Hollis and Rhodes, on the other hand, are on the run from the KGB. The dialogue among these four is amusing in that the American tourists are totally clueless about the predicament that their compatriots are in, and while the tourists are praising life in Russia, Hollis and Rhodes are expecting the KGB to show up and whisk them away. The original editor of The Charm School found something about this scene that she didn’t like — too political, I think she said. We argued; she won. But I’ve replaced the scene and again, the reader can be the judge.
When speaking of the old Soviet Union, it seems always appropriate to quote George Orwell’s 1984, and as he said so brilliantly in that book, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” What I did not do, however, is to change anything I’d written in the past in order to make me look more clever about predicting what was to come in 1989. Other than replacing what had been deleted, and making a few grammatical and technical corrections, and the addition of this Author’s Foreword, the book in your hands is what I wrote in 1987–88.
I have heard from college instructors that they offer The Charm School as optional or required reading in English or Contemporary History classes, and in fact, an English teacher in my local high school assigns it every spring semester. This has caused my son and daughter, who’ve both taken the class, the extreme embarrassment of having one of their father’s books discussed aloud by their peers. They survived the experience and are both now in college where they can avoid a repeat of this trauma by carefully reading the course catalogue for any references to The Charm School.
In 1994, I published Spencerville, which I describe as a post-Cold War novel. My purpose was to examine the life of a former Cold Warrior, Keith Landry, the book’s hero. Landry was a fairly typical product of his age — drafted into the army in the 1960s, fought in Vietnam, stayed in the service, and eventually wound up in the Pentagon doing intelligence work. As the book opens, Landry has been pushed into early retirement because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. His unique occupation is no longer relevant and he finds himself in his Saab on the road to his hometown, Spencerville, in rural Ohio. He’s going home, but home has changed and so has he and so has his country. This is a sort of nostalgic, bittersweet story of love lost and love found, of trying to rediscover roots, and trying to make sense of the past three decades, especially the turbulence of the 1960s.
The book worked the way most good postwar stories work, and I suppose I meant it to be a companion to The Charm School the way The Odyssey is a companion to The Iliad. The story of a returning soldier is obviously not new, but most novelists will tell you honestly that the war story is more interesting than the coming home story. The Charm School, then, written in the waning days of the Cold War, may have predicted the end of that era, but for all that any of us knew at the time, history could easily have gone the other way.
But enough about the present and the future — put yourself back in about 1988, pretend that the nuclear missiles are still targeting Moscow and Washington, New York and Leningrad, Peoria and Smolensk, and think about what James Kirkwood, author of Good Times/Bad Times and Some Kind of Hero, said: “The Charm School grabs hold of you, drags you off to the scariest Russia imaginable… and doesn’t let you out until the last page.”
Welcome to The Charm School.
Nelson DeMille
Long Island, New York
PART I
Whenever you are unhappy, go to Russia. Anyone who has come to understand that country will find himself content to live anywhere else.
1
“You are already staying in Smolensk two days, Mr. Fisher?” she asked.
Gregory Fisher was no longer confused or amused by the peculiar syntax and verb tenses of English as it was spoken in this part of the world. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ve been in Smolensk two days.”
“Why don’t I see you when you arrive?”
“You were out. So I saw the police — the militia.”
“Yes?” She leafed through his papers on her desk, a worried look on her face, then brightened. “Ah, yes. Good. You are staying here at Tsentralnaya Hotel.”
Fisher regarded the Intourist representative. She was about twenty-five years old, a few years older than he. Not too bad looking. But maybe he’d been on the road too long. “Yes, I stayed at the Tsentralnaya last night.”
She looked at his visa. “Tourism?”
“Right. Tourizm.”
She asked, “Occupation?”