Russian papers only arrived weeks after they were first published. So eager were we to receive information from our country that we swallowed any scraps we could get, like starving men scrabbling over a crust of bread. Depending on what we read or heard, we swung wildly between puzzlement, fascination, and, more rarely, exultation. What made the situation more complex was that American newspapers such as the New York Times presented a picture of almost complete ruin and chaos. It sometimes appeared as if they had swallowed Rupert Murdoch’s thesis – that the best news is bad news – whole. Every time I opened the pages of the American press I was left terrified for the safety of my parents and sister.
But then if we spoke to Soviet diplomats who had just stepped off the plane from Moscow we were told how the turmoil was accompanied by profound enthusiasm. That there were meetings taking place across the length and breadth of the country attended not by dissidents but rather by positive people seeking new lives, seeking new possibilities. We learned about the impact of dramatic legislation, like the 1988 Law on Cooperatives, which marked the first time in six decades that enterprises could be set up independent of the state, and saw how the new freedoms that were extended to the population encouraged a new spirit of openness and optimism. Suddenly, politicians were speaking without reference to Lenin, ordinary people could air opinions in public that just months before they would have been afraid of whispering to even their closest friends, and the state’s entire administrative apparatus had been convulsed by a series of electric shocks.
However, the virtuous attempt at de-centralisation resulted in a crisis of authority, as people who had previously been frightened into obedience began to exploit the new freedoms they had been extended, a process exacerbated by an abrupt, but devastating, economic crisis.
In time, we got used to reading in the US press what, in our eyes at least, amounted to propaganda. It was strange to be told by Americans that St Petersburg had become a militarised zone guarded by roaming gangs of cadets, or that out-of-control demonstrations were tearing the country apart. More often than not, one could laugh, but there was nothing funny about the atmosphere that still reigned even two years after Ronald Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech’. I returned to our apartment the following day to find my eldest son – who played baseball and collected Star Wars figures; how different was he really to the American kids living all around him? – bewildered to think that people might hate him simply because he was Russian.
I remember too, how when a friend of mine tried to invite my kids to visit his own children’s school at Red Bank in New Jersey, I had to tell him that I was terribly sorry, but that Soviet diplomats were prohibited from entering the borough because it was considered to be too close to a number of sensitive government installations, and that the prohibition extended to their families too. He looked at me with a mixture of scepticism and surprise. ‘Your propaganda has left you silly; they are kids, of course they can come!’ I had to tell him that they had the same diplomatic status as myself, and that I really did not think they would be given permission for this trip. ‘Don’t worry, I’m friends with two senators,’ he said, ‘I’ll get this fixed.’ Two weeks later I saw him again, he looked diffident, almost ashamed, as he turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Vladimir, I never thought that in the United States the authorities could behave like that about two boys who just happen to be the sons of a Soviet diplomat.’
But our friendship survived this, and we remain close to this day. The force of his country’s aggressive official position towards the Soviet Union paled in comparison to the warmth shown to us every day by men and women on the street. They showed that they were above ideology and dogma, and that what mattered to them was forging friendly relations with other humans, no matter who they were, or where they were from. We never saw any signs of hatred from the country’s ordinary citizens. On the day that I found my son so upset by the knowledge that he was a member of a so-called Evil Empire, I came to understand how deeply shocked he really was. So I rushed to the women of the UN’s hospitality committee, who assured me that they were horrified by their president’s words, and immediately arranged for my son to get tickets for the Christmas party at Macy’s department store. For us, this felt as prestigious and exciting as the New Year’s Eve party for children that was held every year at the Kremlin. We were met at the door by the women from the hospitality committee, who immediately involved my son in every game going. They were so unbelievably warm and kind that for the first time since we had moved to New York he started to speak in English.
On another occasion, on a trip to a remote lake to take my sons fishing, I accidentally locked my keys in my car. We were in the middle of nowhere, and to this day I still have no idea what I would have done if a police car had not drawn up beside us. The officers got out of their vehicle and asked whether we needed any help. ‘Yes,’ I said, explaining the situation. ‘It seems I do.’
They presented me with two options. The first involved using their guns to shoot the door open. It would have undeniably been effective, but the car was a brand-new Buick and I did not fancy explaining to the Soviet Mission what had happened to their new investment. OK, they said, here’s the second option: there’s an individual who has just been released from one of our cells who is something of an expert at getting into locked cars, we can probably persuade him to lend a hand.
So we went back to the station where they immediately ordered an enormous pizza to keep the boys happy. I was feeling somewhat discombobulated – it is a strange experience for a senior Russian diplomat to spend any time in an American police station, whatever the reason – but those guys treated me as if they had known me all their lives. After forty minutes, they came to me and said, ‘Mr Yakunin, you can go to your car now,’ and there it was, the door open, the keys exactly where I had left them. There was no sense that they saw us as members of the Evil Empire, no sense at all that they saw us as anything other than a regular family who needed help.
We may talk differently, we may hold our cigarettes in a completely different way, but at the end of the day we are all human. People are people. We all want to live in peace, to have a good job and a nice home, for our family to be happy and our kids to get a good education. And never was this spirit more in evidence than in the response I witnessed to the catastrophic Spitak earthquake in what was then the Soviet Republic of Armenia.
The Soviet community in New York woke up on the morning of 7 December 1988 to be greeted by horrific news of death and destruction. The town of Spitak had been completely destroyed by two devastating shocks that struck just minutes apart. In fact the damage to its infrastructure and high-rise buildings was so severe that it could not be rebuilt – a completely new settlement had to be created on top of the wreckage. The nearby city of Leninakan (renamed Gyumri after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the second largest in the country, saw 80 per cent of its buildings turned into ruins. Over 25,000 lost their lives, and twenty times that number were left homeless. There were extreme shortages of clothing, blankets, excavators and medical equipment for procedures such as dialysis and blood-transfusions. The situation was so serious that, for the first time since the Great Patriotic War[5] (when the Allies proved that international cooperation between theoretically opposed power blocks was achievable, and replete with possibilities for mutual benefit), the Soviet Union appealed for help from the outside world. The nation’s representatives in the United States, like its diplomats in dozens of countries across the globe, were told to put everything they were doing on hold, and to do everything within their power to assist the relief effort.