All the Clean Ones Are Married

And Other Everyday Calamities

Lori Cidylo, Lori Cidylo

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781613734636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1991, Lori Cidylo shocked her Ukrainian Polish-born parents when she told them she was leaving her reporter's job on an upstate New York newspaper to live and work in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union.

For six years she lived on a shoe-string budget in Moscow, in tiny, run-down apartments, struggling with broken toilets and indifferent landlords and coping with the daily calamities of life in Russia. Fluent in Russian, she rode on public transportation, did her own shopping and cooking, and shared the typical Muscovite's life––unlike most Westerners who were still sequestered in the heavily guarded compounds reserved for diplomats and journalists. As the country experienced its most dramatic transformation since the Bolshevik Revolution, she realized she had stepped into a fantastical and absurd adventure.

Cidylo's wry, insightful account of what it is like for an American woman living in Russia is a dramatic tale full of insouciant laughter, in which the immediate sense of vivid experience shines on every page. With the sharp eye of an acute observer, she captures the momentous events no less than the everyday trivia: how do Russians address one another now that the familiar "comrade" is passé; or how do you find your way home in a city where the streets keep getting new names? As Russia even now continues to struggle with the Cold War's aftermath, Cidylo gives a delightful, surprising, warmly human view of post-Soviet life.

A Coup to Remember

I HAD JUST RETURNED from a brief vacation in New York. The flight had been long and uncomfortable, and by the time I got back to my apartment on the Highway of the Enthusiasts, I was so exhausted that I went straight to bed. It must have been about two o’clock in the morning when the telephone rang. Dimly I heard a woman’s voice on the answering machine—something about Parliament—but I was too sleepy to pay much attention. When I woke up, at 7:30, I remembered that someone had called in the middle of the night and got up to check my answering machine. “Hi, it’s me.” It was Sonia. “I just wanted to make sure that you know what happened. Yeltsin dissolved Parliament. I’m sure I’ll see you soon. Bye.”

Having been away for almost two weeks, I was a bit jet-lagged. I made myself some coffee and turned on the radio.

“Yesterday evening President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree ordering Parliament to disband. The president said that the ‘irreconcilable opposition’ of the legislature to his policies had made it impossible for him to govern and that new legislative elections would be held in three months.”

The announcer went on to report that Parliament (which was dominated by hotheaded Communists) had voted to impeach Yeltsin and had named Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi—a headstrong general and Yeltsin’s archnemesis—acting president. Although Yeltsin had ordered the legislators to leave the White House, as Russians called their parliament building, a number of hard-liners had refused and spent the night building barricades from scraps of metal and blocks of concrete.

My first thought was: I’ve been back less than twenty-four hours, and already there’s a crisis. In the two years that I had been living in Russia, the ruble had crashed several times; members of the cabinet had been fired, re-hired a few months later, then fired again; and Parliament had tried to impeach Yeltsin so many times that Yeltsin himself had probably lost count. Would Russia ever be a stable democracy?

I called the local bureau of Newsday, one of the papers I freelanced for. Ken, the bureau chief, answered the phone. “You came back just in time,” he said. “Can you be here in an hour? I have no idea how long this assignment will last, maybe one day, maybe three months, but I need you from now until this thing is over.”

When I arrived, Ken’s wife, Susan, who worked at the bureau as a correspondent, was in her office, reading the latest news reports. Like me, she had seen it all and wasn’t that concerned.

“Anything exciting?” I asked as I hung up my jacket.

“Not really,” she murmured, without looking up.

Sonia, who was sitting in front of a computer, translating a newspaper article from Russian into English, turned around.

“Hey, welcome back to Moscow! Sorry I called so late last night. I wasn’t sure if you’d heard. What time did you get in?”

“Around ten.”

“How was the flight?”

“Terrible. I took Aeroflot [the former Soviet airline]. Thirteen hours, and all they gave us was one scrawny chicken leg, a cup of tea, a slice of bread, and a tiny packet of jam labeled, ‘Manufactured by the Experimental Jam Factory.’ I figured they were probably experimenting on us, so I didn’t eat it.”

I sat down at my desk and glanced at the note that Ken had left for me, explaining what he wanted me to do that day. As usual, the television was on. The anchorman was interviewing a panel of political commentators, all of whom were quick to defend Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve Parliament. “Boris Nikolayevich [Yeltsin] is incredibly patient,” one of them, a bald man with thick glasses, remarked. “But how much can a person take?” He reminded viewers that for the past two years, the Soviet-era Parliament had blocked the president’s reforms at every opportunity. “One can hardly blame him for wanting to get rid of those people,” the analyst concluded. Jump-cut to Yeltsin sipping tea in his Kremlin office. Speaking in his stern baritone, Yeltsin put down his teacup and warned that anyone who tried to interfere with the upcoming elections would be arrested immediately. Jump-cut to a press conference inside the White House. “This putsch will collapse with a crash,” the Speaker of the House, Ruslan Khasbulatov, declared. Back to Yeltsin again. “What is the next step?” a television journalist asked him. “When do you foresee yourself holding a dialogue with the Supreme Soviet to work out a compromise?” Yeltsin replied coolly, “There is no Supreme Soviet. Therefore, there is no dialogue, and there can be no dialogue.” To cap it all, Rutskoi, the renegade vice president, told the ABC News program Nightline that he had appointed his own defense and security ministers, creating a parallel government.

In the United States or Western Europe, such a turn of events would be cause for alarm. But in Russia this kind of political brinkmanship was not unusual. Those early years of reform, from 1991 to 1993, were particularly volatile because the Soviet constitution, which was written for a dictatorship, was still in effect. No one knew how a democratic president or a real legislature was supposed to function. Because there were no rules for the division of power between the executive and legislative branches, president and Parliament clashed constantly. If you turned on the television or radio, you were likely to hear Yeltsin or a member of Parliament say something like, “If we do not reach a compromise, there can be only one outcome: civil war.” Each side would use some variation of this line (“Russia will once again be awash in blood, and it will be on your conscience,” to quote just one) in an attempt to get the other side to the bargaining table. When you hear such remarks virtually every day, they become like background music: you hardly notice. All of this was just more of the same, I thought, as I watched the news that day.

The fax machine rang, interrupting my musings. I got up and went into the next room to read the latest dispatch: Yeltsin had posted five thousand armed guards around the White House, ostensibly “to prevent bloodshed.”

To prevent bloodshed? But such a move would surely lead to bloodshed. What if the deputies, as Russian legislators are called, armed themselves too? I pushed the thought out of my mind. Surely the deputies had more sense than that.

A few days later the Russian press reported that the deputies were brandishing pistols and automatic rifles.

Meanwhile Rutskoi—who was now writing decrees on stationery with the words “The President of the Russian Federation” printed on top—ordered Russians to protest against Yeltsin’s “dictatorship.” Yeltsin fought back with his own brand of spin control. One image was replayed constantly on television: a smiling president taking a stroll through central Moscow and exchanging pleasantries with ordinary Russians. The scene was reminiscent of Yeltsin’s days as Moscow Party boss, when he earned a reputation as a man of the people. Unlike other government officials, who preferred to cloister themselves inside the Kremlin’s jewelled towers, Yeltsin would show up at a factory, grocery store, or post office, unannounced, just to see how things were going. He would chat with people in his easy, affable way, and they loved him for it.

I knew firsthand how charming the president could be. One morning in 1992 I took a cab to Parliament, but it was snowing so hard that the roads were nearly impassable. By the time I got there, I knew that I had probably missed most of Yeltsin’s speech. Hoping to catch at least his concluding remarks, I ran inside. Quickly I took off my coat and boots and handed them to the coatroom attendant. I had just slipped into my high heels and was about to dash into the chamber when I saw Yeltsin, who is usually surrounded by bodyguards, descending the long, red-carpeted staircase by himself. When he reached the bottom—I was standing about ten feet away—he smiled at me and said, “Zdravstvuytye! Hello!” I was too stunned to return the greeting, but I was impressed by his warm, friendly manner. He smiled at the coat lady too, and with a gallant little bow he bade her a good morning. The woman, who was perhaps seventy-five, giggled like a teenager. “Hello, hello,” she said excitedly. Still starry-eyed, she turned to me and said, “Isn’t he wonderful?”

I recalled this episode as I watched Yeltsin walk through the city with prime-time television cameras rolling. The president stopped at Pushkin Square and told a crowd of surprised Muscovites, “We want everything to be peaceful, bloodless. That’s our main task.” As he spoke, people smiled and gathered around him. He was soon joined by the ministers of Defense and the Interior, General Pavel Grachev and Viktor Yerin. Both men said that their forces were loyal to the only legitimate government: Yeltsin’s. Although this display was undoubtedly meant to reassure viewers that the president was still in charge, I, for one, was not convinced. Okay, I thought, so Grachev and Yerin are behind Yeltsin, but what about rank-and-file soldiers?

When the Soviet Union was a superpower, being in the military was a source of pride. Now it could only be described as humiliating, a painful reminder of the country’s diminishing power. Thousands of soldiers hadn’t been paid in months, and many of those who had been pulled out of Eastern Europe (under Gorbachev) still didn’t have a decent place to live. Faced with two presidents, whom would they support? Rutskoi, a decorated hero of the Afghan war who presented himself as sympathetic to the military? Or Yeltsin?

I needed some reassurance, someone to tell me that the situation wasn’t as bad as it looked. With the television still blaring in the background, I dialed Svetlana’s number.

“Alyo?”

“Svetlana, hi. Are you worried?”

“About this latest nonsense, you mean? No, what is there to worry about?”

“How can a country have two presidents? What if people start taking sides?”

“Don’t be silly. These political games don’t mean a thing. Soon it’ll all be over. You’ll see.”

I was still uneasy, but as the days passed and nothing happened, I convinced myself that Svetlana was probably right: each side would defend its position for another week or so and then a compromise would be found. That was the way it always went. Why should this time be any different?

Ten days after Yeltsin issued his controversial decree, about a hundred deputies and several hundred of their aides and supporters were still holed up inside the White House. Government leaders had tried to persuade them to surrender their weapons, but the talks, which were mediated by Patriarch Aleksy II of the Russian Orthodox Church, collapsed. Every day images of unshaven, exhausted-looking deputies (many had not left the building since the last official session of Parliament) were broadcast on television. Shaking their fists, they looked straight into the camera and spewed invectives at Yeltsin, comparing him to Attila the Hun and even Hitler. “We will not leave this building, even if Yeltsin comes here with tanks!” one of them raged. Such footage was always followed by a newscaster’s calm assurance that there had been no violence and that the situation was “normal.”

Early one morning, while yet another such scene was being shown, I was sitting at my desk, sipping coffee and skimming through the dozens of news dispatches that had been faxed during the night. One in particular caught my eye: a list of all the anti-Yeltsin demonstrations scheduled for that afternoon. By 1993 such demonstrations had become so commonplace that many Western reporters stopped covering them. After attending the first dozen or so, I, too, lost interest. The speeches and slogans were always the same. But the current political crisis seemed like an important enough reason to go. I felt that we needed to get a sense of the mood in the city. Ken agreed, and at one o’clock we set out for Smolenskaya Square in his car. When we arrived, a military man with a chest full of medals was shouting into a megaphone, calling for the resurrection of the Soviet Union and an end to market reforms. The requisite portraits of Stalin were held high in the air by a few elderly war veterans dressed in faded military uniforms, an array of colorful medals pinned to their lapels. Every once in a while they cheered the speaker on with a weak “Oorah!” Also in the audience was a frail, stooped-over woman with a large, hand-written placard: THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ROBBED THE PEOPLE! The woman next to her held a picture of Lenin in one hand and a sign that read: YELTSIN IS A CRIMINAL in the other. They were both silent.

“I’m hungry,” said Ken. “Do you want to get something to eat?

“Okay.”

We got back in the car and drove around until we spotted a small kiosk. PIZZA, read the sign in English. Ken parked the car and we got out to inspect the food in the window: thin slices of Russian bread with watery tomato sauce and kolbasa slices.

“Well, it sort of looks like pizza,” I said.

“Would you rather go someplace else?”

“We don’t have time—the next demonstration starts in twenty minutes. Never mind, I’ll survive.”

We ordered two of the little pizza look-alikes and some Cokes. There were two white plastic tables but—oddly enough—no chairs. We put our jackets down on one of the tables and ate quickly. Then we drove to October Square to see what was happening there.

In the middle of the square is a colossal statue of Lenin, his fist raised in the air, the lapel of his coat shifting in an imaginary breeze. Although it was October, some of the leaves on the trees were still green. Others had turned orange, yellow, and brown and were crunching beneath our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: So What Do You Think of this Crazy Country?
• This Way to the Russian Federation
• Everyday Calamities in Moscow
• A Little Help From My “Russian Mother”
• Sorry, No Wrinkled Dollar Bills, Please
• The Washing Machine That Needed Time to Rest
• All the Clean Ones Are Married
• Life is Cheap in Our Country
• He’s More of a Feminist Than Most Women I Know
• The Train Has Already Left the Station
• A Coup to Remember