Initially though, our concerns were somewhat more prosaic. As I came with my wife and two sons through the terminal in Canada, where we had a stopover en route (the tensions between our nations meant that it was impossible to take a direct flight), we realised we had no experience of how to proceed to make our connection to New York; we did not even know how and when our flight would be called. I remember sitting there, munching on a sandwich, waiting in vain to hear the announcement. It was only when my wife suggested I speak to an official that we realised the plane was about to leave – I don’t think that airport has ever seen four Russians run as fast as we did when we sprinted to make sure we didn’t miss our plane.
We were followed by 200 kilogrammes of household possessions and two decades’ worth of assumptions about American life, many of which were soon proven wrong. Before we left for the posting I had engaged in a period of study so intensive that by the end of it I could have worked as one of the city’s tour guides. But no matter how much preparation you undergo, it is still difficult to adapt when you are thrust headfirst into a different culture. (That said, I was some distance from being like the old revolutionary I read about who visited New York City and was so shocked by the amount of food she saw on sale that she started to cry, or the two Soviet delegates who after observing one overstuffed candy store demanded to be taken to another to satisfy themselves that the first they had seen had not been a trick.)
Small things seem bigger when you are in another country. One thing that always struck me was the huge gulf between the ways in which Russian and American children behaved. Their children were completely unreserved – they had absorbed their parents’ unlimited way of communicating – whereas Soviet kids were far more solemn and self-possessed. When we went to the UN on the day after our arrival to take photos for our passes, the photographer could not believe what he was seeing: ‘Listen, you Russians, why do you always have such gloomy faces. Smile! You’re in the USA.’ He told my youngest son, Viktor, to say ‘cheese’ in an attempt to get him to grin. It was funny to discover that Viktor had a wicked sense of humour: he replied with the Russian translation ‘сыр’, whose pronunciation (‘syr’) certainly does not involve smiling.
Something of the American spirit must have rubbed off on the Soviet diplomatic community in the States, for it was far more democratic than its equivalents in other postings. For instance, usually the first secretary does not mix socially with the third secretary, but in New York there was a great deal of trust between us. Perhaps it was something to do with our generation – people who were well educated and who already had some knowledge of foreign culture. For instance, seven years previously I had travelled to Malaga on my first ever assignment, having been inserted into part of a delegation of scientists who were attending a conference on semiconductors. (How surprised I would have been then if you had told me the circumstances in which I would encounter semiconductors later in my life.)
Even a couple of years after Franco’s death, Spain seemed grey and lifeless, as if it was yet to recover from the legacy of El Caudillo’s baleful reign – it was a marked difference to the sense of release and excitement that ruled Russia’s streets during the final stages of perestroika. I would think of this visit to Spain again many years later when my path crossed with that of Juan Carlos I, who was then the country’s king. In the course of the curious, circumscribed childhood the dictatorship had restricted him to, the young royal became friends with a boy who would go on to lead the train manufacturer Talgo. When, during the 2000s, I returned to Spain as part of a Russian Railways delegation, who had travelled there to discuss the possibility of wider collaboration between our two companies, I was invited to meet Juan Carlos. The Spanish king was, they told me, passionately interested in a positive outcome for the deal. We talked and I came away struck by his warmth, and also his unaffected, democratic demeanour. A little later in Moscow this impression was reinforced when I received a call on my mobile. To begin with, I could not make out who I was speaking to. ‘Who is this?’ I asked, mystified. ‘It is me, your friend Juan Carlos,’ replied the voice on the other end of the line.
I would have been surprised if, in the middle of the cold war, you had told me that I would later find myself on friendly terms with a Western monarch, but then I also own the original copy of the eighteenth-century declaration of friendship made between the tsar and the Spanish king – a document that highlights the fact that, far from being a peripheral nation with one foot in Asia, Russia has long been an integral part of Europe’s economic and political history. (People are accustomed to seeing us as somehow ‘other’, but our culture has long been meshed with that of Western Europe. Consider, for instance, how large parts of Tolstoy’s War and Peace were written in French. It was the product of a society in which it was taken for granted that anyone reading the novel would also be fluent in more than one language.) I took much pleasure from the idea of being another link in a several-hundred-years-long chain of amity and cooperation.
But back in 1985 I was in a kap-strana (the more colloquial iteration of kapitalisticheskaya strana), what we Soviets called a capitalist country, for only the second time in my life (admittedly twice more than nearly all of my comrades); and it was in New York that I noticed that while we had been taught to treat our personal interests as secondary to those of the state and community, in the Western mentality they were paramount. On my first trip on the subway, I offered to give my seat up for a very stout old black lady who had got on at the stop after me – I still remember the shocked faces of the other passengers, even the woman herself. A man in a suit and tie giving up his seat for an old black lady? It was as if there had been a small explosion; they looked at me as if I was a lion that had come from the moon. I understood I had done something unusual, and did not make the same mistake again. I always stood when I travelled on public transport after that.
Perhaps I should have been more assiduous in learning how to advance my own needs: the apartment we were first assigned, which was in the Bronx and in one of the city’s cheapest high rises, was, now I look back on it, a disgrace, an embarrassment, evidence of a system that could be crudely indifferent to the feelings and comfort of its own people. We may have been considered valuable assets, but this was not always reflected in our salary, nor in the accommodation with which we were provided when we were posted abroad; any attempts to try to convert the prestige we enjoyed into material benefits, or increased personal comfort, were considered evidence of a suspect character. The carpet in our Spartan quarters was so thin and worn out as to be unusable, and instead of beds, my eldest son was expected to sleep on boxes that had once contained guns (God knows how they had got there), with boards resting on the top. It was puzzling to find ourselves placed in such conditions, but at the time I didn’t pay it much attention; I did not understand that some diplomats were able to secure money from the representatives to the UN to buy new furniture and improve their flats. Nor did I realise to begin with that my salary – half of which was paid in dollars, with the other half deposited in roubles into my account in Russia – was lower than a garbage collector’s at the New York Department of Sanitation.