Free Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland by Susan Richards

“Igor’s become impossible. I can’t bear to be with him. He won’t take a job, and he’s quarreled with all our friends.” But in the evening, the three of us would sit long over supper, my company seeming to act as some sort of buffer between them.
    As for Igor, he paced up and down the house like a caged animal, rolling his dark eyes, releasing his frustration in scathing diatribes against the backward dolts of Marx. With his dark southern features and distinctive mustache trimmed around his mouth he might indeed have been a zoo animal, so exotic did he look in that small town. Natasha accused him of being lazy and spoiled, and the accusation stung. Yes, he did turn down a job editing a newsletter for the mayor: “But not because I’m lazy—I just won’t work for fools! I’d be only too happy to work, if there were anything decent on offer. What I won’t do is to put up with the old Soviet way of working—and I don’t see a new one emerging. Look around you. You’ll see nothing but people who’ve been broken by the system—I was, too. When I came out of the army I worked at this place where they were developing something like the photocopier. After a while, I started coughing blood. I asked for ventilation. They did nothing. I asked nicely. I explained, I pleaded. Useless. In the end I just stopped working. They finally sacked me for negligence!” He sighed: “In the life of everyone in this country you’ll find some such story.”
    In fact, Igor was not lazy, just in despair. He really did love nothing better than work. His ex-wife, who had set up a dressmaking business in Moscow, had commissioned him (in exchange for a ton of sweets, a currency more reliable than rubles) to devise a machine for making shoulder pads. He was putting the finishing touches to his invention. Whenever he came back from working on it he would be in a sweet mood.
    Leafing through back issues of The Messenger , I understood why Natasha and Igor lost the editorship. To start with it was lively and intelligent, a breath of fresh air after the thudding provincialism of The Banner (of Communism) . But gradually, Natasha and Igor’s despair at the town’s Luddite opposition to change spilled onto the pages.
    The articles were unsigned, but there was no mistaking their voices. Igor was the thunderer: “Don’t be fools! If you haven’t got the strength to meet the challenge of this new age yourself, don’t make it worse for others than it already is. Don’t betray those who saved Russia from the communist nightmare! Have a little patience, help each other with a word, a crust, a smile. And particularly the children—they will never forgive your treachery, your greed, your ignorance …”
    Natasha’s style was more literary: “ ‘When will he come, Russia’s liberator?’ we complain. We can’t make up our minds to take that step ourselves. Hello, it’s me! I’m a free person in a free Russia! I’m not a worker, I’m an individual, and I hate lies and slavery!” she wrote on the occasion of Russia’s newly established Day of Independence. “I believe that sometime this day really will become a national holiday. But before that can happen, each one of us must ‘squeeze the slave out of ourselves, drop by drop’ as Chekhov advised us.”
    •  •  •
    As I sat there, reading their articles, I heard music. A funeral was passing in the street below. A saxophonist and two trumpeters led the way, playing wildly out of tune. Four men carried the bandaged body in an open coffin. A crowd followed, then a procession of cars and buses. The man looked quite young. He had lived a few doors down, said Igor. He fell ill after spraying his carrots. “It’ll pass. Just drink lots of milk!” the doctor said. Next day he was dead.
    Death was lurking in any can or bottle on sale now. Half the products were fakes, but which half? Mostly, the labels were convincing enough. The day before, I went out to buy a feast for