Tied to the pier were two sightseeing boats, one named Druzhba, “friendship,” and the other Mir, “peace.” I chose Druzhba, and another dozen or so passengers and I chugged into the bay for about a half hour, watching one another when we were not watching the oil wells, which never broke their up-and-down, twenty-four-hour-a-day routine. We passed a yacht club. I was told that it was private, guarded, and reserved for “rich people.” One passenger kept staring at me, and I had a feeling he wanted to talk. So I approached him and in Russian asked whether he lived in Baku and what he did for a living. By this time we were already returning to the pier. As we left the boat, he started talking about his life in English. It turned out that he was Armenian, and his English was excellent. I bought each of us an ice cream cone and we sat down on a park bench. He said he was born in Palestine and lived there until 1948, when, as he put it, “I made the greatest mistake of my life.” He decided to return to Armenia, the land of his ancestors but a land controlled by Russia. “All Armenians love Armenia,” he explained. “Once we were a great people. I think we still are. I thought that the communists had given us a chance to build an Armenian life once again. I found out in one year that I was wrong, that such a life under Soviet rule was impossible.” He never gave me his name. Nor did he explain why he was now in Baku. “Since then I have been trying to get out,” he continued. “But this, I now know, I cannot do. I am hopelessly their prisoner, here so close to my own home.” Armenia borders on Azerbaijan.
Even as he spoke of himself as a prisoner, he showed no emotion. It was as if he had finished crying long ago. Now all he wanted to do was practice his English. All I wanted to do was listen.
“Baku is a crazy kind of city,” he said, matter-of-factly, his voice flat, betraying neither approval nor disapproval. “There are many nationalities here—Armenians, Jews, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians. But the Russians are a minority only in number. They run Baku. They call the Azeris zvery, wild animals. The Azeris call the Russians onionheads. But between them there is no hostility, none you can see anyway.” He paused, as if struggling for the right words. “During the day, they smile at each other. At night they hate.” Three Russian sailors happened to stroll by at that moment. My friend looked away, as though searching for something that had dropped behind our bench.
“Are you frightened of them?” I asked.
“No, but it is not good to be seen with foreigners. Actually, I don’t care. But still it is not good.”
I asked him whether, in his judgment, Russia had changed since the Khrushchev speech denouncing Stalin.
“Yes, this cannot be denied,” he said. “Things have eased up considerably. Now people will not be arrested as much in the middle of the night, and people talk a little more, but only among their best friends. In the presence of some who are not trusted, no one says anything but ‘the weather is hot’ and ‘when do you think it will cool off?’ The communists are like sheep. If the top man says boo, all below him will jump. They do not think independently, and why should they? They have it so good here now.” My friend again looked behind him, as if he was afraid of someone or something. “I only make five hundred rubles a month working in a plant, but my wife earns three hundred, and we get along. I must go, but thank you for listening to me. I feel like a person again.” He shook hands with me, his face breaking into a polite smile, and off he went into the night. As he walked away, I later noted in my diary, “he seemed so completely without spirit, so lifeless, so corpse-like.”
I decided that I would leave Baku the next day, but first I was determined to see “Nina,” who at fifty still had the ability to tickle my intellectual curiosity about her special role in Russian history. I had read about her, and wanted to know more.
“Nina,” a favorite of any student of Russian history, had lived for many years in an old one-story house, number 102 First Parallel Avenue, in a slum neighborhood that had recently been opened to foreign tourists. Why would such a neighborhood be opened? It was obviously an embarrassment. There could be only one reason: “Nina” had played a key role in seeding the ground for the Russian Revolution, and Intourist wanted foreigners to be impressed by it.
When I informed my guide that I wanted to visit “Nina” before I left later that afternoon for Tbilisi, he could not have been more delighted. “A ZIS limousine will be waiting for you in one half hour,” he said.
“No,” I objected. “I’ll walk.”
“No,” he insisted. “You’ll ride in a limo.”
We both understood that he did not want me to dawdle along the way and see the sorry mess that most of Baku still was—and, worse, stop and talk with people, who might want to share the story of their lives. I agreed to the limo. The ride was short and uneventful.
“Nina” was the nickname of a historic printing press in the early days of the twentieth century. In czarist Russia, such a press was illegal. It spread the message of communism and revolution, and it did so in newspapers called Iskra (Spark) and Borba (Struggle). Iskra, the more famous, harked back to an optimistic phrase associated with Alexander Pushkin: “From the spark will come the flame.” For Lenin the “flame” would be the Russian Revolution.
At Nina’s home, I was greeted by three MVD officers and the docent of the museum, who escorted me into a small room where the walls were covered with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. He explained Nina’s history with enormous pride, telling me of its central, controversial role in disseminating Lenin’s vision of revolution.
“Sir,” I said, impatiently, “where is Nina?” I was conscious of my tight schedule. I was to board a train to Tbilisi in a few hours.
“Just a moment,” he said. “Just a moment.” Slowly he led me to a tiny kitchen in the back of the house. It had a stove, a window, and a few cabinets. I did not see Nina.
“Where is Nina?” I repeated. At which point, the docent pulled a string, and, as in a magic show, the curtain covering the window dropped, revealing an opening to a small underground room lit by a naked light bulb. There in the middle stood Nina, an old printing press with many stories to tell.
“Nina began to function in 1901,” said the docent, making conversation as he and I made our way down a few treacherous steps into a dim cellar. “She played a very major role in the revolutionary movement, not only here in the Caucasus, but throughout the Russian empire. In September 1901 she began to roll off Iskra, the best illegal Marxist newspaper inside Russia.” The docent stressed that I was not to touch the press, which, he noted unnecessarily, was precious to him and historians. “There is only one Nina.”
“When it was printing, it made noise,” I said. “If anyone heard the noise, that would give away the whole show.”
The docent agreed. “The person most likely to hear this noise was the man who lived next door to Nina, the owner of this house. Fortunately he was drunk most of the time and only thought that he imagined the noise.”
“Why put up with this stressful situation?” I asked.
The docent had a simple answer. “These people had a mission. They did not like tyranny. They knew that to overcome tyranny, they had to endure great suffering, which they did. But they worked hard for their cause.” Their cause was revolution, and they needed newspapers to sell their message to the public. They needed Nina to produce their newspapers. Before the revolution, Lenin wanted and needed a free press, one free to publish his message. After the revolution, once in power, he banished freedom of the press.