Behind enemy lines Whispers from Boris's backyard to today

Author: Andrey Tolstoy

One night, when I was three years old, my mother told me to pack my things and get ready to leave. I grabbed a stuffed animal along with a bag of pretzels, and climbed into the cab with my sister. Four hours later we were in Paris. We stayed in a dingy hotel, the first one we could find at 3 a.m. There was no food left in Russia, my parents explained, so we were going to live here for a while.

It was hard starting from scratch. My father, a former dissident, worked at a Russian-language newspaper, earning peanuts. My mother, a genetic engineer, got a job babysitting for wealthy Russian families. Our first Christmas we didn't have money for a tree, and we waited until our Catholic neighbors threw one out, so we could put it up for Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7th.

One of the many freelance jobs my mother took up that first year was in cinema. She was hired by a studio to coach local star Nathalie Baye in speaking French with a Russian accent for a film about a Canadian cleaning lady of Russian descent, who returns to the motherland to get in touch with her roots.

I'm not sure whether my mom was amused or horrified by the plot. Russia was then run by Boris Yeltsin, an alcoholic who had a degree in construction (senior seminar in cement mixing and all that jazz) that rose through the ranks of the Communist Party as part of Gorbachev's plan to enliven the ranks of the aging and discredited political apparatus. Sensing the imminent decline of his mentor, Yeltsin put himself in opposition, breaking from the establishment and arguing for an independent Russia. The public was captivated by the fact that he rode the bus to work, didn't hide his village accent, and was once caught on camera in a documentary taking shots of vodka after work. Yeltsin was a maverick, in that if there was a number of ways you could do something, he would almost invariably pick the worst. His extreme free-market policies, known as "shock therapy" by their supporters and "economic genocide" by their detractors, left the country in shambles, run by thugs and highway robbers. In the second year of his presidency, he used tanks to shell an uncooperative parliament. Because he was not gifted intellectually, he was easily enamored of various "progressives" and criminals that bled the country dry in the eight years of his reign. He left office with a 2% approval rating.

In real life, the village where Nathalie Baye's character ended up is called Provideniya, Russian for "providence." It is inhabited by two thousand Yupiks, a branch of Eskimo, and was administered until two months ago by Roman Abramovich, more famous for his ownership of Chelsea FC. The Yupiks and ethnic minority Russians make most of their money in tourism, showing neighboring Canadians and Alaskans what their homes look like from the other side of the Bering Strait. They also have a statue of Lenin in town, which is kind of a pain to dismantle, so he just stands there, a sixty-foot tall anachronism, with his right arm still pointing toward the bright future.

And today, we can hear the echo of bygone lovers, whispering across the Strait:

"Darling," he slurs, "I'm going away to Moscow, to serve in the government."

A sullen look comes across her imperfectly aligned eyes, and she snuggles into the moose carcass keeping her warm. "Is that far away?"

"Eleven time zones."

"What are those?"

"It's far."

"Like can't-see-it-from-Alaska far?"

"Yeah."

"Doggone it...""