Crocodile Skin, or the Fraternal Curtain (Part II)

Tomasz Kamusella
University of St Andrews

What we really despised were Soviet films, and the only ones that were even worse than them, from Romania or North Korea, though at least they were mercifully rare. Soviet movies filled most of the television’s ‘programmatic’ offerings. It was the same in the cinemas. Most days of the month the films came from the Soviet Union or from the communist bloc countries; the deal was that each month a single Western (usually American) film was allowed. The biggest hit I remember was Star Wars, when the cinemas were engulfed by seething crowds outraged that there were not enough tickets for everybody. Some Soviet productions did get a faithful following, such as the television series Seventeen Moments of Spring or the epic film Siberiade. In the latter movie we were pleasantly shocked to see some timid sex scenes (though no more than a flash of a naked female thigh), which was just unthinkable, because the Kremlin’s view was that u nas seksa net (‘there is no sex in the Soviet Union’). Late at night, when my parents dozed off, I found myself spellbound by Andrei Tarkovsky’s dystopian Stalker and Solaris, and the old-fashioned beauty of Sergei Parajanov’s avant garde Sayat-Nova. Alla Pugacheva also won us over, as did the Czechoslovak singer, Helena Vondráčková. The initiated tuned in to the unforgettable ballads of Vladimir Vysotskii and Bulat Okudzhava. But most of the Soviet fare consisted of war films, of the za rodinu, za Stalina (‘for fatherland, for Stalin’) type. They were an affront to the viewers’ intelligence, really. They depicted puritanical men and women, ardently believing in communism and fanatically trusting Stalin, selflessly sacrificing their lives in defense of the Soviet Union against fascist Germany’s murderous armies. No love, family or material problems, no doubts or vacillation, no such complications for the new Soviet man. Homo sovieticus, however, turned out to be a sterile creation, infertile and himself also as rare as a unicorn. I never met one.

The Soviet Union was our unrequited love (if a bit sadomasochistic), looming so large on the map, east and northeast of Poland, but so inscrutable, so distant. From the fifth grade of elementary school through university we had to study Russian, while our second – Western European – language (usually English, German and French in this descending order) kicked in only in secondary school. All students were expected to join the TPPR (Polish-Soviet Friendship Society), which had been founded in 1944, when Stalin was busy putting the finishing touches to his plan of where and what a communist Poland was to be after the war. Each week we opened our Russian lesson with a discussion on the new issue of the glossy Soviet propaganda magazine Kraj Rad (‘The State of Councils,’ a poetic name for the Soviet Union). But it was published in Polish, so in addition to this journal we were made to subscribe to a genuine Russian-language periodical as well, though this was something we didn’t want. To help us make up our minds, we were given booklets listing hundreds of titles of Soviet journals that we were obliged to choose from. Boys favored Tekhnika molodzezhi (Technology and Youth) and Unyi tekhnik (The Young Technician), in which you could at least get a glimpse of interesting pictures and diagrams, if reading Russian remained beyond you, as in most cases it did, despite spending eight to ten years pretending to master this language. In secondary school we graduated to the popular science magazine Znanie - sila (Knowledge = Might) and the monthly Western-style press digest Sputnik. I noticed that the latter was published in different language versions, and so, trying to be clever, on my order slip I wrote the numerical code corresponding to the English edition of Sputnik. My Russian teacher saw through me in time; if he hadn’t, my wiliness could have cost him his job.

In my group in secondary school we all learned English and made good progress, though no English books were available at bookshops apart from Soviet editions of some anodyne novels that fully conformed to the ‘revolutionary worldview.’ They couldn’t fail us in Russian, as we well knew. The tacit agreement was that we pretended to learn it and the teachers gave us make-believe tests. It was a good preparation for adult life in communist Poland, where our parents were expected to pretend to work, and ‘They’ pretended to pay them. In January 1985, when I was too sick to participate in my PE class, I curled up on a pile of mattresses in the corner of the gym and proceeded to read a copy of Newsweek – a rare treat – that somebody had brought from West Berlin. A journalist predicted that the progressive and youthful apparatchik Mikhail Gorbachev would soon stand at the helm of the Soviet Union. The great hulk of the teetering communist superpower was just then rudderless after the period of geriatric leadership that lasted from the final years of Leonid Brezhnev’s reign at the turn of the 1980s, through the brief interregnum of Yurii Andropov, until it finally ended in March 1985, when Andropov’s successor and the last member of the gerontocracy, Konstantin Chernenko died. And indeed, Gorbachev was installed in no time as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1986 we took our matriculation exams (matura), during which all but one of the students took their language exam in English. The same year I entered a course in English philology at the University of Silesia, at the campus in Sosnowiec.

Well, I am writing this essay in English, which is perhaps a tell-tale sign that I never succeeded in mastering Russian as I should have done after so many years of arduous study. Why? The answer is so simple: we had no motivation, while the patriotic subterranean strain of Polish history that was whispered to us at home and spoken aloud in church had instilled in us a hatred of things Russian, even the language. We gave a reprieve to the SF stories and novels by the brothers Strugatskis and to those of Kir Bulychev, but we read them in Polish translations. It had fast dawned on us that we would never have a chance to visit the Soviet Union, which was the biggest dampener on any initial zeal we might have had to acquire Russian. ‘The motherland of the world’s proletariat’ was as tightly isolated from the Soviet bloc countries (if not more so) as they were from Western Europe. Everybody has heard about the Iron Curtain, but next to nothing by the way of ink has been spilled on the big ‘Fraternal Curtain’ that extended along the Soviet frontier separating it from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And across the latter sea the Kremlin maintained a particularly close watch on Bulgaria, even though it was arguably the most loyal member of the bloc.

Going to the Soviet Union was out of question. Places on package tours, organized for propaganda purposes, were few and far between and they were in any case allotted only to trusted comrades. Tourists were bussed and escorted from one highlight to another around Moscow or Leningrad (St Petersburg). No chance was given to mingle with the crowds. Meeting an average Soviet citizen was unheard of; there was no one you could speak to in Russian. That’s how effective the Fraternal Curtain was at enveloping foreigners inside extraterritorial cocoons while they were in the Soviet Union.

My own childhood dreams of the Soviet Union as the world leader in technological progress and astronautics received a deathblow in the summer of 1977. I had been excitedly leafing through my first Russian language textbook then and I was looking forward to learning the language when the new school year would start in September. My family went by car for summer holidays to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. This meant we had to drive across the Soviet Union on our way to Romania. It was a travel adventure my brother and I had dreamed about, camping in tents, every day going to a new place.

We got stuck at the Polish-Soviet border in Medyka for three days. It wasn’t surprising to us kids then, as we already knew from what we had heard that borders were notoriously difficult to cross, and rightly so, as gateways to other worlds should be. This timidity the border felt toward its potential (ab)users, its opposition to penetration added a spice to the overland voyage. A ten- to fifteen-kilometer long line of cars inched on slowly, meter by meter, toward the border check. It was swelteringly hot, no shop, no water in sight, just expansive fields of corn extending on both sides to the far horizon. Corn didn’t grow well in soil that was poorly suited to its needs; perhaps other kids like us foraging for cobs caused damage, too. Soon we realized there were no toilets. Later, a couple of kilometers before the border we would actually see one, a small wooden outhouse with feces flowing like lava out from the half-closed door to the road ditch. The latrine was unusable; the stench and flies made this section of the road unbearable for the waiting. Closer to the border, the corn, though still in the same soil, improved markedly, the weakling stems that farther back had been shorter than a ten-year-old boy suddenly turned robust and shot up taller than an adult. Human manure must have helped. Maybe the relaxed slowness dominating the border was part of a five-year plan to improve their agricultural output? Mama despaired, while preparing bivouac meals on a primus stove at the side of the road. We had the time of our lives playing with other kids in the cornfield. Tata (‘Dad’) cracked jokes about communists with a friend with whose family we teamed up for the trip. At night, when the border came to a standstill around midnight the two paterfamilias downed a bottle of Żytnia (Rye) vodka together, and then slept nervously, making sure to wake up before 5am, when the line of cars started moving again. Failing to do so would mean another delay; the overtaking cars would not allow the laggard back to its old place in the line.

When the border came into sight it loomed large, as we had imagined it would. No border could be worth its salt if a traveler could fail to notice it, and remain unintimidated by it while crossing what was in reality a thin imaginary line. Nature (or God, though the communists were loath to admit this) had obviously slackened when it came to frontiers, already exhausted by the effort of creating the world during the seven days of Genesis. People were divided into nations, but frontiers failed to grow up around them, so the delimiting of the territories of one state from another was left in the untrustworthy hands of men themselves. But the Soviets excelled at least in this forgotten nook of botched human affairs. No other borders have managed yet to match their achievements in this field. Keeping a man from an intentional or accidental crossing of a frontier is not easy. That is why in Western literature one of the adjectives most frequently applied to borders is ‘porous.’ The Kremlin not only brooded about the hitherto unseen phenomenon of a non-porous border, but actually exerted itself to realize this philosophical ideal, a bureaucrat’s ultimate dream.

Beyond the Polish passport and customs control point, the three- to four-meter high barbed wire fence stole the show. Behind it lay a freshly plowed stretch of no-man’s-land, about fifty meters wide and marked at its farther end by an identical copy of the fence. Between these fences, the liminal crack between two neighboring polities gaped, dotted with watchtowers, spaced at regular intervals of a quarter of a kilometer. Guards kept watch, scrutinizing their zones through binoculars, their machine guns primed for instant use. No one was to dare to leave a footprint. In no-man’s-land, naturally only no-men were allowed to live the true nation of frontiers, or maybe I should write ‘Frontiers,’ today the largely forgotten Fourth World. The first one was, who else but the ‘countries of people’s democracy,’ the capitalist states constituted the second world, while the third one was left to those spineless polities who couldn’t get their act together to choose clearly where they stood between the first two worlds. And the Frontiers, by some geometric paradox or trick, was somehow squeezed in between all the others. I wondered how come that all the four different planets – these worlds from the first to the fourth – could fit onto this single Earth of ours.

My brother and I were daydreaming, while our parents were sweating profusely, the wheels of our car trundling on the uneven makeshift road surface, here asphalt and there just a dirt road. There was a sudden bump when we drove across a wide indentation filled with grayish foamy liquid, which was identified on the bilingual sign as ‘disinfectant.’ Cleanness, purity, cleansing and purges, communism was a system truly devoted, nay, addicted, to fighting dirt and deviation, daily enemas helpful in keeping your mind and body alert.

The best part came on the Soviet side of the border. Every single car was meticulously searched. All the luggage was taken away and spread out on the road for inspection. A customs officer was literally crawling in and out from the trunk and from underneath the seats, feeling with his nimble fingers every empty or squeezable space where contraband could be hidden. Next, the car was hoisted up and its mud-encrusted underbelly was patiently hammered centimeter by centimeter, the officer with perfect pitch waiting for a note out of tune. We heard that the previous week an entire car had been cut up, when a suspicious note had been sounded. The driver had been petrified, his wife had gone hysterical, and their children had wailed. A perfect family summer rest was ruined. Nothing was found, so the fraternal Polish authorities would inevitably cover the motoring loss with little more than a simple ‘We are sorry.’ The unfortunate car owner would be handed a car ration card without delay, but between that moment and the actual receipt of a new car two to five years would elapse. And how to commute to work in the meantime? How to display the status of a middle class socialist family? Nothing doing. They were ruined, pauperized, declassed, proletariatized, chastened of their obsolete petit-bourgeois urges.


(to be continued)