Goodbye Red Flag

GOODBYE RED FLAG

Today, May 9^th, Russians will gather in Red Square to celebrate their victory over the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War.

Party leaders, under a new president sworn in just this week, will line up along the wall above Lenin’s tomb (his 80-year old corpse is still there) and all Russians beyond a certain age will reflect on a more glorious period in Russian history.

In a small way, I’ll be joining them.

From childhood, a good part of my psyche was tied up in Russia, or rather, in the Soviet Union. As early as the sixth grade I remember having to practice ducking under my desk and covering my eyes in the event of a nuclear blast. In that same classroom I remember being given a red booklet titled Communism: The Nature of Your Enemy. I still have it. Even before I was born the Cold War was heating up, beginning with Churchill’s pronouncement in 1946, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent."

In places across the United States people were building bomb shelters in their backyards and in the mountains of West Virginia a secret fallout shelter was constructed in 1959 to preserve the Federal Government in the event of thermonuclear war.

In the '60s, sleeping out under the stars with my buddies, we convinced ourselves that we'd be the first to be fried by the atom bomb because Denver was so close to NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain, the doomsday war bunker and chief monitor of the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning). There was the Cuban missile blockade, the installation of the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin and, of course, the proxy war in Vietnam. I remember my father pointing out the model of Sputnik to me at the United Nations, the flickering images of Nikita Khrushchev on TV, and the silver and blue book jacket of Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago.

Then there was Berlin, the city where much of the Cold War between the representatives of the two great superpowers was fought. From the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and the building of The Wall in 1961, to détente in the '70s, Berlin became the barometer of the new "ostpolitik" of East-West relations.

It was ever-present for those of us of a certain age. If you are too young to remember John Kennedy’s funeral, or don’t remember getting up early in the morning to watch the splashdown of a Mercury space capsule, you probably can't fully appreciate the anxiety of the era and the considerable role the Soviet Union played in our lives. If you weren’t born under a 48-star flag, you’ll have to settle for “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” to get a sense of the specter of the Soviet Union.

The Glienicke, "bridge of spies" during the Cold War

Never did we believe that the Cold War—or the Soviet Union—would end, and when it did, beginning with the opening of the Berlin Wall, for me there just wasn’t enough fanfare to mark one of the greatest moments of the twentieth century and a landmark moment in my perception of the world.

As we boys, lying on our sleeping bags in Gary’s backyard, talked about our concern over the Commies starting a nuclear war, never would I have guessed that later in life I would be lucky enough to not only walk onto the set, but walk on to the set while the movie was still being filmed, and in some cases even have a small conversation with the actors.

In 1977 I was working at the National Geographic Society. Going to work each morning I would walk past the Soviet Embassy that sat somewhat hidden on 16th Street, straight across the street from my office and ironically, backed up to the offices of The Washington Post. In the ‘80s, that block of 16^th Street, in front of the Soviet Embassy was renamed “Andrei Sakharov Place” as a form of protest against his 1980 arrest and detention. The embassy was in the old Pullman (train cars) Mansion set behind tall iron gates, I never dreamed I’d go beyond those gates nor would I have reason to.

But a decade later I guess my secret dreams came true and with extraordinary fortune I found myself in a job that afforded almost surreal opportunities to shake hands with my Cold War ghosts.

Around 1987, a few of us were invited to that same 16^th Street Soviet Embassy which stood just a few blocks north of the White House. After passing through the iron gates and several security stops I entered the main foyer and started up the grand staircase. At the top of the staircase was a fifteen-foot-tall painting of Lenin that, I'm sure, raised the hair on the back of my neck. We watched a propaganda movie, had a Q and A session, and then were escorted into the ballroom full of Soviets, Russian vodka, caviar and hors d'oeuvres. The First Secretary was a caricature of an old Russian operative: heavy jowls, jovial, giant bushy eyebrows — a spitting image of the actor playing opposite Michael Caine in a Cold War movie I had seen in the '60s called "Funeral In Berlin." He asked me if my boss was a member of the COS (Conservative Opportunity Society), one of Newt Gingrich's early workings.

The 1st Secretary at the Soviet Embassy - a clone of this actor from "Funeral in Berlin"

I ended up talking at length with a guy who looked like Omar Sharif from his Zhivago days. In his impeccable English he suggested that we should have lunch. In spite of wanting to be able to tell my grandchildren that I'd lunched with the KGB, I never called him. About a year later, there was a big article in the Washington Post about the Soviet Union's spy activity in the United States. It featured a man whose face was circled in an accompanying photo taken at a Congressional hearing. Sure enough, it was my friend, Dr. Zhivago. His real name is Mikhail . . . I still have his business card.

The old Soviet Embassy on 16th Street in Washington

One of my trips to Berlin put me inside a strange box that sat in the middle of a large room inside the former U. S. Mission to the GDR (essentially the American Embassy in East Germany). The box had a kind of modular, manufactured housing-unit look to it but it was bristling with antennas sticking out in every direction. Inside it was large enough for a meeting of 10 to 15 people. It was an electronic counter-surveillance secure room.

The East Germans, even after the Berlin Wall came down, were believed to be an extremely hostile intelligence threat. During the Cold War the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, recruited 20,000 to 30,000 agents in West Germany. It was a kind of stealth weapon that wreaked havoc without leaving so much as a trace of its presence. They estimate that the Stasi provided 80 percent of all Warsaw Pact intelligence on NATO and its member states. Former Soviet intelligence officers have proclaimed the Stasi was best of the Soviet Block services -- "even better than the KGB," according to a former KGB officer. The KGB residency in East Berlin was the largest in the world producing as much intelligence as an entire directorate back in Moscow. But none of this was known in the West until after the Berlin Wall fell.

Checkpoint Charlie during the Cold War

On my last trip to Germany, eighteen months ago, we were taken to the infamous Bautzen Prison in former Communist East Germany where the treatment of prisoners is a catalogue of horrors: torture, degradation, interrogation, deprivation, solitary confinement and obsessive monitoring. An interesting side note is that there was an escape from Bautzen, almost exactly like the one featured in “Shawshank Redemption” but instead of a Raquel Welch poster it was a cupboard that the prisoner had put on hinges. Unfortunately he was caught just days afterwards.

Lenin's Tomb in Red Square

One time in Germany we were driving down a road near Potsdam and a knowledgeable colleague pointed out the Glieinicke Bridge to me. The Glienicke was known as the Bridge of Spies because this is where certain captured spies were traded between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War including Anatoly Sharansky and Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Russia. It was also used in my aforementioned film, “Funeral in Berlin.”

The edge of the Berlin Wall with the no-man's-land "death strip" to the left and the Reichstag in the background, taken in 1990 - just yards behind me when I took this shot was a mound of dirt covering the underground bunker where Hitler shot himself in the last days of the war (click to enlarge)

I walked the streets of Berlin in 1990 witnessing the quiet and peaceful dissolution of the GDR, the country that produced the most vivid images of the Cold War—of spies and checkpoints, of secret police, the goose-step, and the country which posed the greatest threat of sparking world conflict.

There was a clear sense of finality without mourning. Defecting GDR (German Democratic Republic) soldiers sold their uniforms to souvenir-hunting tourists and Soviet honor guards at the Berlin Soviet War Memorial secretly peddled their hats at a side gate to those who realized just how significant an act that was.

One of the great adventures of my Cold War fascination came one night at a conference dinner in Virginia. We had met Katya (I’ll call her), a young East German journalist in East Berlin months earlier. She was the product of all the elite education the Soviet Bloc could provide and had witnessed the collapse of East Germany from the inside. Now here she was sitting at a table for dinner, so I seated myself next to her and for hours squeezed out every last bit of her incredible story. Long after the dinner was over I was still asking questions. I’ve pressed her to write her story, especially because she’s now married to a well-known American journalist, but I don’t think she’s set one word to paper.

My colleagues all thought I was just hustling up a date (she is beautiful) but I was gripped by the fact that she had a first row seat to history, as it was being made. Her story of the night of November 9, 1989 is spellbinding. She was doing her laundry and suddenly an announcement came on the radio about a breach in the Berlin Wall. Katya immediately ran all the way to the Wall, got into West Berlin and went to the apartment of a man she had earlier arranged to marry as a ruse to get travel privileges out of East Germany. He was aware of the pandemonium and had taped a note to his door for her, which included a coin she could use to call him at a special number. In her position she had seen signs of the collapse as early as a year before the Wall came down. The details she revealed would interest any historian, journalist . . . or repressive government.

Opening of the Berlin Wall, 1989

UPI
Thursday, Nov. 9, 1989

East Germany opens Berlin Wall
By CLIVE FREEMAN

BERLIN, Nov. 9, 1989 (UPI) -- The East German government Thursday dropped all restrictions on travel to the West, and thousands of citizens of the communist state flocked to the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Iron Curtain, to taste their new freedom.

In announcing the easing of travel restrictions, East Berlin Communist Party chief Guenter Schabowski, said the checkpoints would remain in force until Parliament enacts a new emigration and travel law that is expected to lift many restrictions.

He said police had been told to issue visas immediately to those who want to move to the West.

As soon as the announcement was issued, East Berliners began arriving at the checkpoints, in small groups, and crowds later gathered along the western side. Easterners and Westerners embraced, opened bottles of champagne and called for the wall to come down.

On the eastern side, cars were backed up for a mile at checkpoints as people waited to drive through, some wanting to visit relatives and others just hoping to get a drink in the West, customs officials said.

At Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin's famous crossing point for foreigners, guards firmly told East Berliners they would not be allowed through until the new regulations went into effect Friday, and then only with visas stamped in their passports.

But elsewhere the barriers were lifted. An estimated 1,000 people crossed at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint and cars were waved through the Invaliden Strasse checkpoint late in the evening.

At the Bornholmer checkpoint, a 45-year-old West Berlin man in a blue tracksuit described seeing East Berliners happily arriving in the West.

''One couple ran toward me, and as soon as they crossed the white demarcation line into West Berlin, they flung their arms around my neck and the three of us wept for joy,'' he said.

A West Berlin customs official at the checkpoint said a couple living on the eastern side of Bornholmer Strasse walked through the checkpoint to see whether the house numbers continued in order on the West Berlin side of the street, which was cut in half when the wall went up in 1961.

* * *

My good luck getting to Moscow came at the tail end of a trip to the former Soviet satellites of Armenia and Azerbaijan (Nagorno Karabakh), which were in the midst of a war. The pipelines had been cut, there was no electricity and water was extremely scarce. None of us had a shower for a week. In Stepanakert, three of us (along with our interpreter) were lodged at a State Guest House formerly reserved for high-level Communist Party members. There was a sweet little lady who cooked for us and who let me take home a spoon. We had been sitting in the little dining room over soup that night, finally figuring out what the engravings of the Sputnik satellite and the dates "1917 - 1967" meant on the handles of our spoons: the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I wish I had asked for a place setting.

Later we boarded a plane for Moscow. Aeroflot, the old Soviet carrier, had been condemned by the international aviation community and I learned why. Beyond unseen mechanical horrors, the aisle carpet was so tattered that half the aisle was just bare aluminum, it was so cold people were putting on their coats, and the food was worse than Air India. We made an intermediate stop at some city that probably wasn't on the map and were almost arrested for snapping a few pictures.

* * *

I had heard the stories of Moscow — grey, bleak, cold. But, coming from where we'd been, Moscow looked comfortably cosmopolitan.

I had arranged for the three of us to meet with Steve, a former subordinate who had made it big and was living in Moscow. Little did I know that Steve had worked his maids and cooks all day to prepare a virtual banquet for us in his silk draped, Persian carpeted and wine-decantered dining room. It was a downtown Moscow flat he had renovated at, I'm sure, an obscene cost. It was pure, unabashed capitalism, a clone of a Central Park pied-à-terre . . . and we walked in lycra and Levi's having just had our first shower in more than a week.

After a late night dinner, Steve drove us the few blocks to Red Square. As I walked onto Red Square I was every bit as visually stunned as the time I caught my first glimpse of the nighttime golden glow of the Eiffel Tower. Red Square is one of the few places in the world that, because of the power of its history, brought a lump to my throat. Westminster Abbey, practically a shrine to the British Empire and Western civilization, is one of those places; Gettysburg is another. I was wiping away tears at Normandy.

Entering Red Square was like returning to a place I'd never been. The brightly lit onion domes of St. Basil's, the red star capped towers of the Kremlin and the austere tomb of Lenin were like scenes from old home movies because they were the primary images of the Cold War. Laurie and I stood in the middle of the dark square, raising our shoulders to our ears against the cold Moscow wind, just absorbing Russia. My one thought was that no one could witness Red Square, even without knowing its history, and not think that Russia was one of the world's great nations.

Red Square with Lenin's tomb and the Kremlin on the right and St. Basil's Cathedral on the left

* * *

Steve had arranged for our own private, all-day guide to show us the sights of Moscow. She was about my age and confided to me that she was bitter that, for most of her life, she had been taught, and had believed that Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were perfect men, nearly gods. Since the collapse of "The State" she had learned that her whole system of beliefs was mistaken. Throughout the day, through her comments, it was obvious she was a person a little off-balance, still dealing with having had the rug pulled out from under her.

This may sound made up or embellished but it is neither. We had no sooner left the Kremlin gate when we heard some commotion in a small park adjacent to the Kremlin wall. When we looked in that direction, we saw a black sedan come to a screeching halt. Three men in dark suits jumped out, grabbed a young man and literally threw him into the back seat of the car. Then they jumped into the car, slammed the doors, and sped off. Suddenly the park was quiet and people pretended they hadn't seen a thing. When I asked our guide about it, she just shrugged her shoulders. It made the Cold War-fabled Lubyanka Prison seem all the more menacing. Chris, who had visited Moscow before the fall, had pointed it out to me.

The headquarters of the KGB and Lubyanka Prison

* * *

To our amazement, Caroline [Lady Caroline Cox of the British House of Lords was the leader of our trip] announced that Yelena Bonner had agreed to meet with us. We arrived before Caroline, and the young man who was friend and interpreter to Bonner took us up the six or seven stories to her flat in the old-fashioned, iron-caged elevator. Thinking her friend had brought her some reporters, Bonner flew into one of her famous cigarette-smoking rages until she learned differently, then she led us into the study to await Lady Cox.

I remember sitting there thinking, "So these are his books." I believe it was his very study because I later read from David Remnick's book Lenin's Tomb:

"Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study."

" . . .When Bonner [later] went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him on the floor, dead."

“ . . .They strapped the body to a stretcher and carried him down seven flights of stairs to the car. Then Bonner had to deal with the reporters out on the stairs. She stuck her head out the door and lost it: 'You all worked hard to see that Andrei died sooner by calling us from morning till night, and never leaving us to our life and work. Be human beings! Leave us alone!'"

"Bonner did have a terrifying temper, but she, too, had to be admired deeply. She was indispensable to Sakharov, his lion at the gate. She protected him, inspired him, and he loved her ferocity. In their human rights work, Sakharov and Bonner were a team. They suffered, physically and psychologically, as equals. The KGB harassed the Sakharovs every way they could, even mailing them "Christmas cards" with grotesque images of mutilated bodies and monkeys with electrodes stuck in their skulls."

Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist and human-rights advocate, first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1975), banished to the city of Gorky in 1980, won worldwide praise for becoming the moral conscience of the Soviet Union.

"On a winter's night in 1986," Remnick wrote, "the phone rang. A woman's voice said, 'Mikhail Sergeyevich will speak to you.' Now Gorbachev was on the line, telling Sakharov that he and Bonner could return home to Moscow. 'You have an apartment there,' Gorbachev said without a word of apology or regret. 'Go back to your patriotic work!'

Reading the account of Sakharov's funeral is to understand his influence on Russian life. Remnick continued:

"It was not until we reached Luzhniki that I could see how many people had come to say farewell to Sakharov. No fewer than fifty thousand people had packed into a vast parking lot."

“ . . . Sakharov's casket was hoisted up in front of the flatbed truck where the speakers stood, and Bonner, wearing Sakharov's gray fur hat, stood near the microphone smoking cigarettes. She stepped up to speak only once, asking everyone to make room so that the ceremony would be peaceful and safe. Only a non-Soviet would have missed the reference: in the days after Stalin's death, the crowd outside the Hall of Columns was so dense and emotional that hundreds of people were crushed to death."

Yelena Bonner, of Armenian ancestry herself: lectured on the war in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh; wrote an article for The Washington Post openly appealing to all nations to create a network of international observers for referenda in Russia; and continued her ongoing human rights work through the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. It was like getting a seat at Center Court, Wimbledon.

Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner

* * *

The Commonwealth of Independent States had made the claim that all CIS visas would be recognized throughout the union, but as we were preparing to leave the country, Caroline reported, "Now they're telling us your Armenian visas may not be valid to exit Russia." Whatever the confusion, or the bureaucracy, the U. S. Embassy told us that airport authorities were extorting money from foreigners on the "invalid visa" ruse.

At the Moscow Airport, I approached the passport clearance desk with trepidation. It was a scene from 1942 Germany when the worst nightmare was realized with the words, "Your papers do not seem to be in order!" Sure enough, the officer firmly stated that my Armenian visa was not valid in Russia and that it would cost several hundred dollars to remedy the situation. Armed with the information I'd received, I just as firmly stated, "Yes, it is. The American Embassy has confirmed that it is. Thank you very much, goodbye." I snatched my passport, and walked through the gate praying I wouldn't hear shouts or whistles.

* * *

When I think of Russia, everything is on a huge scale. Not only because the country itself is so vast, but because the national character of old Russia, and particularly the former Soviet Union, was so forbidding and so austere. Beyond Red Square, the one all-encompassing image I have of the Soviet Union actually comes from one night in Hungary.

The Budapest train station looks like it belongs in an old Ingrid Bergman movie, with trains rolling in from all parts of Europe to pull up alongside the concrete platforms under the high roofed, hanger-like station. That night the trains all looked the same until, from out of the rainy darkness, a great old Russian train slowly emerged, crushing the railroad ties with its weight. The rail cars were bigger, the paint was darker, and its character so heavy I almost expected to see a giant iron hammer and sickle mounted on the engine and red flags masted above each car.

The colossal "Mother Russia Calls" in former Stalingrad, at 270 feet it was at one time the largest free standing statue in the world

Yes, Russia is the country of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and the Bolshoi Ballet. The Soviets beat the Nazis at Stalingrad, the Americans into space, and for seventy years they terrified the Brits, the Germans, the Americans, and the rest of the Western world. But as Churchill said, she is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." In the end, the whole Soviet empire, from Russia to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, and from East Germany to Siberia, had drowned in the lies and the absurdities of life in the U.S.S.R. No one knew that better than Andrei Sakharov. When Sakharov was a boy, his aunt Zhenya received news of her husband's death in the camps when one of her letters was returned, "Addressee relocated to the cemetery." Later one of Sakharov's friends died in the gulag, the authorities announced, owing to a "chilling of the epidermal integument.”

* * *

The Soviet Union was, indeed, the evil empire but, ever mindful of its continuing treachery, I still get a little nostalgic for those days when spy novels were simply lifted from the annals of the Cold War.

Soviet soldiers at the Reichstag, 1945

And Russians, too, are ambivalent toward the only life they knew for most of the 20th century and toward the love they had for the banner of their country. This famous poem by Yevgeny Yeytushenko tells it from a Russian’s perspective.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

You slipped down from the Kremlin roof

not so proudly

not so adroitly

as you climbed many years ago

on the destroyed Reichstag

smoking like Hitler's last fag.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

You were our brother and our enemy.

You were a soldier's comrade in trenches,

you were the hope of all captive Europe,

But like a Red curtain you concealed behind you

the Gulag

stuffed with frozen dead bodies.

Why did you do it,

our Red Flag?

Goodbye our Red Flag.

Lie down.

Take a rest.

We will remember all the victims

deceived by your Red sweet murmur

that lured millions like sheep

to the slaughterhouse.

But we will remember you

because you too

were no less deceived.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

Were you just a romantic rag?

You are bloodied

and with our blood we strip you

from our souls.

That's why we can't scratch out

the tears from our red eyes,

because you so widly

slapped them

with your heavy golden tassels.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

Our first step to freedom

we stupidly took

over your wounded silk,

and ourselves,

divided by envy and hatred.

Hey crowd,

do not trample again in the mud

the already cracked glasses

of Doctor Zhivago.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

Pry open the fist

that imprisoned you

trying to wave something red over Civil War,

when scoundrels try to grab

your standard again,

or just desperate people,

lining up for hope.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

You float into our dreams.

Now you are just

a narrow stripe

in our Russian Tricoleur.

In the innocent hands of whiteness,

in the innocent hands of blue

maybe even your red color

can be washed free of blood.

Goodbye our Red Flag.

Be careful, our Tricoleur.

Watch out for the card sharks of flags

lest they twist you around their greasy finger.

Could it be that you too,

will have the same death sentence

as your red brother,

to be shot by our own bullets,

devouring like lead moths

your silk?

Goodbye our Red Flag.

In our naive childhood

we played Red Army - White Army.

We were born in a country

that no longer exists.

But in that Atlantis we were alive,

we were loved.

You, our Red Flag, lay in a puddle

in a flea market.

Some hustlers sell you

for hard currency.

Dollars, Francs, Yen.

I didn't take the Tsar's Winter Palace.

I didn't storm Hitler's Reichstag.

I'm not what you call a "Commie."

But I caress the Red Flag

and cry.








____

R. Yeates, May 2008