I have known Moscow since childhood. Not just because Zīlīte would occasionally feature a childhood friend, Nikita Khrushchev, with a white dove of peace in his white-gloved hand and the Kremlin towers in the background. Among the countless photos from the first two years of my life, there are also some images that Granny always described with these words:

“This was before leaving for Moscow,” “And here in Moscow... and here... and here too...” Of Moscow itself, there is not much—a couple of pictures showing a street with a plump trolleybus that always reminded me of a smiling little old man, the likes of which ran in Riga at least until the late 1960s, if not longer, only this one had a number unusually high for the Riga trolleybuses of the time; then a few where a poster with Slavic letters is in the background, all in a light, twilight haze. I am sitting in a pram (as plump as the trolleybus, which stood out with its super-stylish archaic submarine streamlines and surprisingly low “draught”), wearing a rabbit-fur coat. Interestingly, unlike other items of clothing, I don't remember seeing this one in later years, even though we lived modestly, clothes were not really thrown away, and all my clothes in childhood were bought or sewn with plenty of room to grow and then “let out”; the coat is also obviously too big. Anyway, a rabbit-fur coat, like the one many of my classmates wore, remained an unfulfilled childhood dream of mine (I won’t count the white rabbit-fur collar which—with a black coat!—I got sometime in my teens and which shed fluff in desperate clumps) and, interestingly, was always associated with Russians. I blame the aforementioned photo. In another picture, I am seen standing on a table (I am about 6 months old), next to an inflatable rubber duck, and on the wall, which is covered with (to my perception) exotic wallpaper, is a decorative Russian beauty.

Archetypes were further supplemented by the rubber Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf left on the table, which I played with for many years, despite the fact that I had bitten a large notch into the back of Little Red Riding Hood’s red bonnet with my very first baby teeth, and both she and he gradually covered themselves with a network of tiny cracks—that is what happened to old rubber back then. My arsenal of toys also included matryoshkas, whose painted wood, especially when moistened with saliva, smelled bitterly alluring—and that would be all of my materialized memories of Moscow. Everything else is elusive—stories, versions, and interpretations.

The main storyteller in my childhood and teenage years was Granny—we lived in one room and, quite naturally, spent a lot of time together. The storytelling went best on those evenings when we were the only two at home and, having obediently turned off the light at the instructed time, lay in our respective beds. Granny was an excellent storyteller—with smooth, perfectly rounded sentences, vivid comparisons, and metaphors. As the youngest child who had grown up without a mother in a poor, large family, she had only spent “one winter” in school, but the volume, brightness, or credibility of a story does not depend on fancy schooling.

For example, my father had studied in those “fancy schools”—he finished the Riga French Lycée (though it was already the 11th Secondary School by then) with a gold medal, and MGIMO—the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the “Harvard” of the Soviet Union—with summa cum laude, yet as a storyteller, he was a distinct mediocrity. I think it might be because he was not used to trusting his audience, mostly undervaluing them, sometimes trying to outsmart them, and at other times simply trying too insistently to tell “everything as it is”—as if the truth lay in indisputable facts.

But for now, i.e., in my childhood, my father is silent. No, not entirely—I remember him impatiently teaching me French, arguing with my mother, and, in my mother’s absence, making a violinist brought home to play “for the child” in the middle of the night, scaring me to death and forcing me to flee to Granny’s bed with the embroidered pillow and rough linen sheets, as well as—perhaps the brightest memory?—the two of them, he and my mother, on the seashore pretending to be the Moon and the Earth to teach me about the movement of the planets, and I want to be the “little star”... And the stars, of course, I imagined exactly like the ones on the Spasskaya Tower spire, and that is how I drew them for all castles. But soon my “smart,” “Moscow-educated” father disappears from my childhood, leaving behind a trail of “drunkard,” “womanizer,” and “destroyer of lives.” During this period, while discussing various more or less disturbing events in my six-year-old life with Granny, we also mentioned Moscow. According to her version, Father was offered a job in the Soviet diplomatic service (“Either in Romania or Bulgaria, I don't really remember”), for which he was prepared in some kind of courses in Moscow. Everything was apparently all set, almost time to move abroad, a sofa was already bought, money had been borrowed, but... “Well, he had that drinking affliction, surely that’s why they didn't let him go.” And the sofa? “They probably sold it for a pittance,” she dismissed with a wave of her hand.

Questions as to why Mother and I had to go to the “courses” didn't somehow cross our minds, but anyway, after a couple of months, Granny was also summoned to Moscow—to “look after the child.” And so we all lived there, Dad and Mom went to “courses,” Granny looked after the child and watched Moscow. Overall, it wasn't even a bad city, the streets were wide, the houses high, “our” house on Mira Avenue must have been magnificent (“But what kind exactly, tell me!” - “Well, like a ‘Stalin cake’. Like a palace.”) underneath there were shops where you could buy this and that, the house had a lift, hot water (our apartment in the Grīziņkalns neighbourhood, which shared one wall with a factory, was heated with wood, there was no bathtub, but there was a courtyard, our own cherry tree and flower beds, a shed, a cellar, an attic, and other excitingly mysterious places), only those Russians were so strange. Well, well, in what sense? Well, for example, they mostly only recognize artificial flowers. Seeing Granny sitting on a bench with a bouquet of real flowers in her hand, they immediately identified her as Latvian. And they dressed terribly colourfully—almost like Catholics. But otherwise—pleasant, friendly people. Not like the Russians in Riga.

We didn't really have any special dealings with the Russians in Riga, because there weren't many of them in proletarian Grīziņkalns. My father’s parents remembered the local wood sawyers and laundry roller workers from pre-war times—even though they lacked the desired Marxist-Leninist worldview and proletarian consciousness, it would still be incorrect to consider them class enemies, so unless something had gone wrong during the times of change, they were still living in their cramped little apartments and wooden houses. The composition of the residents of our house at 115 Matīsa Street had also changed only slightly, mainly in the “big,” three-storey house (9 apartments), and the only newcomer Russians were one family—the Sokolovs, who lived on the first floor right across from us (our house had 4 apartments). From their Ira, who was a couple of years older than me, I did get beaten up now and then, but on the other hand, I actually picked up my first useful Russian language skills—excellent counting rhymes (“Na zlatom krilce sidelil Carj, carevič, korol, korolevič, sapožņik, portnojl - Kto ti budeš takoj, govoriposkoreje, Ņe zaderživaj ludej!”[1. Translation from Russian: "On the golden threshold sat / Tsar, tsarevich, king, king's son, shoemaker, tailor / - Who will you be, say quickly, do not delay the people!"]), courtyard game vocabulary, and swear words; little Galya was quite a screamer, but generally harmless. Sometimes the girls invited me over and I went with pleasure—their apartment smelled completely different from ours—of that same cologne (“Landysh” or “Krasny Mak”, I don't really know, at any rate, I saw the bottles—and I still see them before my eyes—both), just like Ira and Galya’s mother; moreover, the large room had a wonderful painting of a naked woman in sheets reaching for a yellow butterfly, which in reality is a small, naked woman too—sometimes Granny and I even went to the Vagonrūpnīca club to concerts, where both girls danced Russian folk dances. Well, she was forced to admit, of course, “our” Russians are more like those friendly Moscow Russians. Not like the others.

Mother, who had a very reserved attitude towards the Russian identity, mainly referred to Moscow as a “big village,” not forgetting to express horror at the toilet culture (“Even in fancy places, metal pedals in the pit!”), yet she raved about the opportunity to get to know the young genius (and one who never became the old genius) pianist Van Cliburn up close—closer!—who won a sensational victory at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in 1958, and the handsome French actor Gérard Philipe, who visited the capital of the USSR three years earlier, when my father was studying there with the sons of the Soviet elite (girls were not welcomed at MGIMO at that time) and Mother went to visit him. In early 1959, when we all lived there, a large US exhibition took place in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, which was reportedly visited by 2.7 million Soviet citizens, 2 of them—my parents—to look at pulverized, compressed, and frozen food semi-products, modern household appliances, nylon and kapron (motto: away with irons!) clothing, televisions, apartment models, and much more, characteristic of a capitalist consumer society. American works of art were also on display—selected not to please the tastes of viewers constantly steeped in socialist realism, but, in the words of one of the exhibition curators, to “nudge” them a little, “making them understand the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning... I only found out about the presence of art much later, but one of the family treasures was an incredibly thick catalogue, possibly obtained at the exhibition, from the American shopper’s temple Montgomery Ward, belonging to the middle class and those below it, with a Jackie Kennedy lookalike dressed in an elegant red coat on the cover. Go figure what exactly this lady’s role in my life was—in any case, I studied that catalogue just as often as any beautifully illustrated fairy-tale book.

And Moscow’s role, too, has been truly indefinable, changing. Like a revolving stage—the space is the same, but the scenery and its meaning are different every time. In adulthood, I finally heard other versions of my “childhood Moscow” story—now from Father and Mother. The story actually began three months before Father graduated from MGIMO (1956). A man arrived at the Riga apartment where he was writing his diploma thesis at the time and introduced himself as an officer of the Maritime Department of the Latvian KGB. Would Imants be willing to reconsider the possibility of working for this institution after graduating from the institute? Father had answered evasively because he had already applied for a job at the newly formed Committee for Cultural Relations. But a few days later, the same KGB worker invited him to come to a higher KGB chief to discuss job opportunities in more detail. However, Colonel Smirnov, head of the KGB counter-intelligence department, offered no job, but instead barked angrily: “Liars like you have no right to represent our country’s foreign policy!” Namely, when entering the institute with the highest-level recommendations of the Latvian Communist Party (all his study years he was the only Latvian there, and even later “national cadres” at the institute were a great rarity), Imants had not mentioned that his father had been conscripted into a police battalion in February 1944 and then, after the “liberation” of Latvia, quite naturally ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in central Russia. Having berated him thoroughly, Smirnov let him go, telling him to write the “true autobiography” at home. At the next meeting, the Colonel’s tone was completely different: Imants, of course, was green and inexperienced, but still a good Komsomol member and gifted in every way. The KGB was willing to forget his father’s “criminal past,” if only Imants was willing to redeem his and his father’s sins by helping to fight the “class enemy.” Imants accepted the offer, signing the usual oath of a KGB agent-informer. “If I had rejected Smirnov’s proposal, my six years at the institute would have been completely in vain. All I could have hoped for then would be the work of a manual labourer,” he writes in the introduction to a book that remained only an introduction. Interestingly—Arkady Shevchenko, a fellow student of my father, received a similar offer shortly before finishing his studies. Unlike my father, he rejected it, using the excuse that he had already been hired by the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The refusal (admittedly, there was no blackmail in his case) did not prevent him from later building a brilliant career, becoming an advisor to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and later an Under-Secretary-General of the UN under Kurt Waldheim. Shevchenko also eventually defected to the Americans—in the same year of 1978, four months earlier than my father, who was also working at the UN at that time, only at a lower level.

In the aforementioned introduction, Father writes that after meeting Smirnov, he was in complete despair. By the end of his studies, he had completely lost his ingrained and school-polished leftism (at the Henri Barbusse 11th Secondary School in the late 40s, he had been one of only 4 Komsomol members): “Having experienced how the parents of my fellow students, the offspring of the nomenklatura, lived in Moscow, having participated in their parties and drinking bouts, having known all that barbarism and cynicism on which the Soviet system was based, as well as having seen on weekends how the Stalinist ‘friendship of peoples’ was turning Riga into a suburb of Moscow, I had become not just an anti-Soviet, but also an anti-Marxist and anti-socialist. [..] I was a Latvian and an anti-communist, but now I had to serve the most despicable Soviet institution. If someone had urged me to carry out a terrorist act at that time, I would have agreed without hesitation. I considered the possibility of creating an anti-Soviet underground organization and even started doing something in that direction. It was the time of the Hungarian Revolution and Polish unrest. Every free moment I spent listening to Western radio broadcasts, in the hope that the revolution would spread to other satellite countries and also to the Soviet Union itself.” But with time he calmed down and started thinking that he could, after all, destroy the system “from within,” so he diligently performed his duties. He did not need to report on his colleagues at the Committee for Cultural Relations or other Soviet citizens, only on emissaries of peace and friendship—various groups from Great Britain, France, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, which were visiting Latvia in relatively large numbers at that time. In 1958, for instance, he earned praise from the head of the Latvian KGB, General Jānis Vēvers, for a carefully prepared and detailed dossier on General Raymond Schmittlein, a confidant of General Charles de Gaulle, whom the KGB considered a resident of the French intelligence service in inter-war Latvia.

The young agent’s diligence and reliability eventually led him back to Moscow. In April 1958, Smirnov introduced Imants to the head of the intelligence department of the Latvian KGB, Colonel Pāvels Pumpens, who announced that the “Centre” had chosen him for a top-secret mission in the West. Several discussions with KGB officers in Moscow followed—they found it appealing and interesting that Imants spoke such good French and German and, furthermore, “was oriented in the Western way of life” (I don’t know, perhaps not only the excellent MGIMO professors were to thank, but also the stacks of *Atpūta* and old newspapers carefully studied in the attic of his uncle’s house in Zaļenieki during the war), which was especially useful since the Motherland wanted to send its twenty-six-year-old agent abroad—to some German-speaking land. As an “illegal.” Namely, someone living with a fake identity, feigning loyalty to their host country, but actually serving other gods and masters; in short—spying. “I accepted the proposal with true enthusiasm,” my father writes. Honestly, it just seems to me that a sensible Satan allows his victim to comfort himself with the thought that he is very smart and cunning, and will somehow manage to wriggle out, slipping something else in place of his soul. It may well be that sometimes this even succeeds.

Anyway, on August 1, 1958, the Chairman of the USSR KGB, General Ivan Serov, signed an order appointing Lesinskis as a KGB officer (for some reason Father avoided revealing the rank, but it was supposedly no lower than major), who now had to undergo thorough training. For this purpose, he was issued fake documents and settled into a one-room apartment in the centre of Moscow. His main “curator” became a certain Sergei Terentyevich, around sixty years old and with a past worthy of the Soviet film hero Stirlitz. At the beginning of World War II, he had infiltrated Germany with the impressive task of killing Adolf Hitler. Even though the plan obviously failed, Terentyevich managed to become an SS officer of decent rank, but after the end of the war, now in the role of a wealthy businessman, he settled in Austria, where he established extensive connections in “establishment” circles, reaching even the federal chancellor, and built an entire network of Austrian and Italian spies. Meeting for two hours six times a week, the old and young spy mainly discussed German and Austrian ways of life, as well as the peculiarities of Western life in general, but occasionally turned to the basics of the trade—I quote: “observation and evasion of it, organizing secret meetings, and recruitment methods.” Other teachers taught Imants to receive coded messages, “using the most ordinary radio receiver,” build hiding places, write with invisible ink, use various firearms, and drive a car. In this list, one can feel a kind of pride—Imants, who as an only child, pampered by his mother and kept away from the games and adventures of the Grīziņkalns boys, always smarter than everyone else and not particularly physically agile, had finally got to do real men’s things! Mother, however, says that often Imants and Terentyevich simply played cards.

And now we finally get to the real explanation of my first Moscow experience. Namely, in January 1959, Mother and I arrived in Moscow not so she could learn the minimum of a budding diplomat’s wife, but so that she too would learn to take photos and develop them (that is why I have so many photos from my infancy! “And besides me, what did you photograph?” I asked Mother. “Well, anything. Let’s say, some buildings.” “And where are those pictures?” “I don’t know. Maybe I threw some away quite recently.”) handle radio receivers, decode messages sent in Morse code (according to Mother, they listened to tapes on which knocks were recorded—at first slowly, then faster and faster; one had to write down the combinations of knocks as sets of numbers), as well as to polish her knowledge of German. She was not trained by Terentyevich, but by a lady who told her in detail about life and customs in German-speaking lands and assigned *Themen*— “And now, Frau Lesinskis, tell me how you go to the theatre... Tell me how you shop for a family dinner...” Not a single word of Russian was spoken in the classes, and within a month, Mother knew German so well that she could calmly read her beloved Remarque’s novels in the original. “We heard wonderful things from our instructors,” writes Father, “for example, about their role in Operation Number One (stealing nuclear secrets in the forties), kidnapping people from the Western zones of Germany and Austria, breaking into diplomatic safes, etc.” By the beginning of August, everything was prepared—visas for Poland and the German Democratic Republic had also been received—the GDR was supposed to serve as a kind of transit station before our family, according to KGB plans in Berlin, “defected” to the then FRG. Imants and Marta, for their part, planned to defect for real after the “defection.” In this regard, their stories converge, only to immediately drift off in different directions. Around the same time that the Lesinskis were to carry out their intended mission, Khrushchev suddenly noticed that the “thaw” he had initiated in Latvia had thawed too much; the “nationalist clique” headed by experienced communist Eduards Berklavs was disbanded, replacing them with “reliable cadres” from Russia, while the screws were tightened for others. According to Father’s claims, since Berklavs had been his indirect mentor, the KGB was no longer willing to entrust him with such extremely responsible and secret tasks, so Terentyevich simply announced that under “current circumstances” the mission was “postponed indefinitely” and Imants had to return to his native Riga. Mother’s version, on the other hand, is more interesting and even more in tune with the paradoxical logic of the spy world: “In my opinion, it happened because that recruiter of ours stayed in the West.” “Which recruiter? What was his name?” “I don’t remember. Ah, Boris Vasilyevich... No, I think it was Oleg. Oleg Vasilyevich.” But one shouldn’t rely on names, she warns, “Clearly, the ones we knew were just codenames.” Just like in the counting rhyme: “Govori po skoreje, kto ti budješ takoi... ”

I repeat—all these complicated peripeties I learned many years later—only after I myself had “stayed in the West.” Until the age of 16, I didn’t even know that my father had any relationship with the KGB—only that he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper *Dzimtenes Balss*, unknown to any of my friends, and later the head of an equally mysterious institution with the long name Committee for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Abroad (now that building houses the Ministry of Culture), was “one of the few intelligent and interesting communists” (that is from my diary at the time) and travelled abroad a lot. That such relationships had also existed for Mother came to light much later—she raised me, as they say, “in a deeply Latvian spirit,” strictly distancing herself from everything Soviet, official, ideological, and also Russian, even though she had worked for many years at the Supreme Soviet as the deputy editor-in-chief of the *LPSR Supreme Soviet and Government Gazette* and—to make the paradox more subtle!—had obtained higher education in Russian philology. The whole story from individual threads, a good many of which are thoroughly tangled, I am still trying to crochet together even now, although I have long realized that the result will not be “the whole story” anyway, but just another variation. However, I allow that even as much as I knew then—and that was quite extraordinary—could have served as a certain impetus that February day when I was walking past the *Aeroflot* ticket offices located at the corner of Brīvības and Raiņa boulevards, and suddenly thought that I could do something that hadn't occurred to me before, because it was simply *a priori* written off as too fantastic and inconceivable: namely, just buy a ticket and fly to Moscow to finally clarify “what and how” at the “very top.” The “top” in this case was the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the “what and how” was related to an invitation from Father, who was already a UN Secretariat employee in New York at the time, to visit him during summer vacation. For such a visit to take place, i.e., to receive an exit visa, a character reference was needed from the faculty, the university Komsomol committee, the Kirov district Komsomol committee, as well as yet other unknown institutions and, of course, the acceptance of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the university’s “foreign department,” a certain “c(omrade) Kuharenoks” (such a figure appears in my 1978 pocket calendar) had already kindly but unambiguously dismissed me the day before, saying that “yet other institutions” were not sending their acceptance, so the university could do nothing and one “simply had to wait.” But I had already been waiting for many months, I was fed up. In my pocket were my just-received 40-ruble stipend; a ticket to Moscow cost, if memory serves, only 20, and with the remaining 20, one could spend a few days there quite calmly. And so I bought the ticket and set off the next day.

I had no idea where I would stay in Moscow. One could, of course, assume that all doors were open for such a “nomenklatura child,” but that would be quite wrong. Firstly, my parents had already been divorced for 15 years and Mother was not even in the Communist Party; secondly, Father, even though, in Granny’s words, he was a “big man,” was scrupulously honest in that he did not use any of his connections and did not participate in the all-encompassing “blat” system (Restaurants were perhaps the only exception—in Riga, doormen bowed and let him into any of them, and waiters sought out the best table). Besides, it never occurred to him that I had decided to handle American matters “directly,” bypassing all the many and sluggish Latvian instances. First, I tried the cheapest central hotels—hauling my suitcase, which seemed heavier and heavier, I walked through many blocks, but without success. Then I decided to take a suburban train to Setun, on the distant western edge of Moscow—there, my friend and I had spent a few pleasant days in very modest conditions the previous May. Back then, I walked around a lot alone and discovered that, contrary to what I had heard, I quite liked Moscow. Not just because it was so different from Riga—so frankly direct in its redness, so naively sincere in its “village-like nature,” always emphasized by Latvians, that it no longer seemed frightening. I didn’t go to look at Lenin, because I considered it perverse, but I dropped by the Pushkin Museum several times. And there I met Jonas, a Lithuanian film director and actor who was about ten years older than me and was studying in the VGIK postgraduate programme. I don’t know how to tell about what followed; it will suffice if I say—we had an adventure, a one-afternoon adventure. In my notes, this episode appears indirectly; after returning from this first trip to Moscow, I write: “Jonas said that he was gripped by horror when he realized what the world is really like. But I guess I am not afraid of the world. I am afraid of myself.”

[.. ] I desperately want to escape from everything, no matter where. That is why I could also enjoy Moscow with all its magnificent and repulsive qualities with my whole being—spaciousness, freedom, philistinism, naivety, *prostodushiye* and *poshlost*, the atmosphere of the herd, etc. But the main thing, of course, is simply that I was away from the agonizing problems I had become mired in again upon returning to Riga. As soon as I start walking along the narrow path of hope, believing that it will lead me out of the labyrinth, I find myself in a new dead end.” What are those problems? The death of several close people. Disgust for the Faculty of Foreign Languages: “To tell the truth, I am strongly surprised by the fact that even in higher education (at least in this one) no one demands or expects thinking from a person. There is a constant, coquettish playing around with bits of knowledge, trying to pass off something approximate as true and significant. I find the teachers narrow-minded; I don't understand my fellow human beings. Even those who I seem to find attractive—well, how can there be such heightened interest in themselves, while in others they look for only something super-original; why must everything be imbued with an aura of mysticism?” The despair of a young person who wants to think, which is relatively typical: “For every phenomenon in my chaotic head, a different explanation arises every moment; a new feeling is born. And that is why it is probably bad that I write some of this down. In the end, it turns out that I am not capable of judging at all. Or maybe I am simply living in someone’s dream, and everything I see and feel is actually a phantasmagoria?” Depression: “I can stare for hours at the monotonous landscape, as if washed in watercolour, down there, and listen to how cars rush somewhere very purposefully, splashing mud. Nothing changes. Nothing will change. I feel like a louse.” In other entries, I call myself a “cowardly lizard.” Or also: “I feel like I am accused of serious crimes all the time. Why are compromises constantly demanded of me, while they themselves firmly and unyieldingly maintain absolute positions? And why am I trying to justify myself all the time? A criminal only confirms his guilt that way. Why must I be forced to lie and be hypocritical?” “This existence is just a nightmare. A dream from which it is impossible to wake up. Something distant and alienated that cannot be felt. Under my feet—no foundation. [..] I feel tired. Empty. And like the last scoundrel. That is why I look for people who would free me from this feeling for even a moment. Illusions have great power, after all. [..] Tomorrow I turn 19. When I say that I feel old, everyone laughs. But it is true. In these 19 years, I have not done anything worth mentioning or remembering. Everything is postponed to the future—as if one could simply bring something along. But the future is shrinking smaller all the time. The thought that life could be as meaningless as these 19 years seems terrible.” Well, that, in short, somewhat pathetic words of the time, is the second, equally essential reason why I went to Moscow. Not Jonas (whom I never met again), but Moscow itself—so big that one can get lost in it, do everything that comes to mind, because there are no witnesses—namely, they are anonymous. Paradoxically—freedom. Seemingly—from oneself.

On that very first day, I didn’t feel very free, because I was freezing in Moscow’s minus twenty degrees, I was hungry, and I had no shelter. In the end, I decided that I could leave the suitcase, let’s say, at the Belorussky station and look for a place to stay without it. Why Belorussky specifically, I can’t say—maybe I already knew it was a major transit point, having seen it on my previous visit (by the way, now there is a “day hotel” there on the second floor—well, an opportunity to spend hours between trips in a more civilized manner, instead of squatting on bundles, as hundreds of arrivals from various exotic corners of the Soviet Union did “in my time”). Then, for some reason, I decided to ask the station shoe-shiner to polish my muddied boots (since this fact is noted in my diary, I must have allowed myself such a posh behaviour for the first time in my life), but afterwards I drank a glass (well, as in those times) of “over-sweetened coffee” and ate a pie. Having fortified myself this way, I suddenly realized that I was ready for something else completely uncharacteristic—namely, to call the acquaintances of my friend whom I had met once and ask them for a place to sleep. And that is what I did, receiving a kind—no, almost stormy!—invitation to come there right away—somewhere in the Troparjovo micro-district.

The next day, it was time to tackle the main thing—clarifying “what and how.” I see this nineteen-year-old girl in my mind’s eye, standing rooted to the spot and staring at the huge twenty-three-storey building on Smolenskaya/Sennaya Square, where not only the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but also the Ministry of Foreign Trade was located—a faceless, cold Stalin-era structure, which finally makes the brazen young girl realize that here, my dear, there will be no pleasant “na zlatom krilce...” Gold on the domes of Kremlin churches and on that legendary threshold—here only cold, rough concrete. Some sort of proto-Western notions must have been muddled in my head—I will go, look for it, say it, clarify... But it is not clear at all who to turn to here! However, while dragging myself to the nearby metro, I was suddenly struck by inspiration again—there is, after all, some A.V. Soldatova, whose return address I have written in my pocketbook and from whom I occasionally receive—well, what were they called? Certificates, I think—those little pieces of paper of various denominations, with which one could shop in special stores, for instance, the *Beryozka* in Moscow. The dollars Father set aside at the UN, or perhaps even a special allowance “for the child,” were converted into certificates, because, according to US laws, I was not yet an adult (by the way, the UN paid a decent salary, as is characteristic of international institutions, but at the end of every month, Soviet citizens stood in line at the USSR mission accountant with the dollars they had collected to turn them over to the Motherland, which in turn gave back what it considered necessary). Mrs. Soldatova luckily did not live too far from the centre; I got there without much wandering, and furthermore, she was even at home. Ah, I am Imants Albertovich’s little daughter, well yes, her children also live and work in New York, are friends with the Lesinskises, and in this way, through her, Soldatova, it is more convenient to send that money—nothing goes to waste. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—oh well, she herself has no dealings with such high institutions. As I was starting to get used to in Moscow, I was immediately seated at the table and fed—this time with stewed fruit compote, biscuits, tea... But while we were drinking tea, she suddenly remembered, yes, she did have one number for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Wait, wait, just a moment...

And so, the very next day, I went to Comrade Deineko. “A guard post at the entrance, a guard post at the lifts. Six lifts, it is not clear which one one should take.” (From Arkady Shevchenko’s book I learned that the second guard post was placed so that the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which occupies the first six floors of the building, would not “snoop” on foreign affairs, because it is generally accepted that “those merchants cannot be trusted. The third post guarded the seventh floor, where the office apartments of the then-Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko were located, to which one could also get from below by a special lift intended only for him). “A grey-haired, solid gentleman kindly helps me find what I need and then asks: ‘Vi sluchaino ne iz Zhenevi?’[2. You are not by chance from Geneva?]) Yevgeny Nikolayevich Deineko is also very kind. Well, of course, of course, what an oversight on the Latvian side, it is clear that children must be allowed to visit their parents. We will clarify, we will take care of it, do not worry. And he looks the whole time as if instead of a face I had bent, transparent glass. In any case, in any case, we will take care of it. You know, come back tomorrow at three. Perhaps we will have clarified something by then. Nothing much had changed by “tomorrow at three.” Deineko had “taken care and clarified,” progress is being made, you will certainly be leaving soon, only now you still have to wait a little bit. Do not worry and wait. We will take care of it. The “taking care of it” dragged on for several months—I flew to New York only on the morning of July 30—but during these months I was in Moscow several more times. Perhaps even more for that second, unofficial reason. Furthermore, within a few months, I had acquired many friends there who gave me a place to sleep themselves or asked their friends to do so, who eventually became friends of mine as well. I met a large part of them “incorrectly,” “in the way decent girls don’t”—on the street, in the metro, and, of course, in the Pushkin Museum. I must again mention this freedom of being elsewhere, which allows you to put on a different skin, so to speak, to forget for a while who you are and what role is intended for you on the usual stage, where actors know each other’s texts well. Are you shy? But what if you try not to be? Go boldly into unfamiliar places, engage in conversations with strangers, not be afraid of “what it could lead to.” It could indeed lead to all sorts of things, but I was very lucky. I was close to very real danger only twice—when an official from the Ministry of Foreign Trade invited me for tea in his communal apartment, where, as it turned out, he had only one room with mirrored ceilings and German and American porn magazines around a huge bed. Since it was the only piece of furniture and it was unambiguously clear that tea-drinking was also intended to take place right there, I became very hurried and somehow managed to “talk” my way out of that apartment. The second time was with the hot-blooded Yugoslav (that is how he called himself, so I don’t know his exact nationality) Franko, with whom we had walked so nicely along the then Gorky Street (today’s Tver Boulevard), studying the figures of socialist five-year-plan heroes on cornices and colonnades, where there should supposedly be Greek deities, wandered in the transparent spring evening through the Novodevichy Convent and cemetery in the bend of the Moscow River, pressed through crowds in the Tretyakov Gallery hand in hand... until suddenly one fine day he was no longer talking about how the two of us could go to his native Split (“otkuda do Italii - rukoj podatj”[3. From there to Italy—a stone’s throw]), but in a park lunged at me, threatening to kill me if I wouldn’t agree to crawl into the bushes with him. Oh yes, there was also that degenerate MGIMO student ‘Andre’ (well, Andrei, of course), who at some party stole a giant value from me—namely, a carton of *Marlboro* cigarettes purchased at *Beryozka*—and watching whom, I couldn’t stop praising myself for the correct decision not to listen to Father and not try to apply to his *Alma mater*.

Other acquaintances were much calmer and, moreover, helped me educate myself on matters about which I knew nothing in Riga or had only heard something about in passing. Nothing of what I read later can be compared to Natalia K.’s story about the *Holodomor* in Ukraine in 1932-33 caused by Stalin’s insane policy, because some of her relatives had survived it; likewise, I cannot forget what Igor B. told me about the miners’ riot in Novocherkassk in 1962 caused by food shortages. Never again have I drunk Tokaji, let alone together with Armenian artists and musicians, a Bulgarian doctor, and a Russian geologist, taking turns proposing toasts for the freedom of Bulgaria, Armenia, Latvia, and Siberia.

In this citadel of communism, at the gloomy apogee of the Brezhnev era, I read Solzhenitsyn’s *Cancer Ward*, Kopelev’s *To Be Preserved Forever*, Babel’s stories, and the underground-popular in the sixties *Faithful Ruslan*—Vladimov’s allegory about the KGB—in typescript for the first time. I don’t know what I did to deserve such trust, which in those times could have ended at least with a ruined career, if perhaps not with a camp; I assume, only with the fact that I was from Latvia, thus, in the understanding of the time, “almost from the West.” Eventually, I had become so accustomed to these forbidden talks that I wasn’t even surprised when one afternoon I was addressed by a middle-aged man named Ilya, who at first simply wanted to give me a gold (or perhaps only gold-plated) wristwatch, so that I would no longer feel so much like a “zhertva tovarno-denezhnoi sistemy” [4. Victim of the commodity-money system]—but then began to pour out quickly that he had just finished a devastating study titled “50 let muchenij russkih rabochih” [5. 50 years of suffering of Russian workers], had stored it in a three-litre jar and buried it in the ground, but perhaps I wouldn’t refuse to take it out to the West... I don’t know what exactly he meant by “the West,” because I, of course, did not tell him about the upcoming trip to America, and likewise, I have no idea if he was even in his right mind (admittedly, even some recognized dissidents occasionally gave the impression of being abnormal—which is perhaps logical); in any case, his work seemingly never reached the West. In my circle of Moscow friends and acquaintances, there were many Jews who began to use the new USSR leniency regarding “family reunification”—thanks to President Jimmy Carter, who consistently linked the conclusion of the *SALT II* [6. Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty] treaty, desired by the Soviet side, with the improvement of human rights in the Soviet Union. Perhaps by analogy with their own desires, the majority of them were convinced that I would never return to the USSR. Ironically, they turned out to be right, but that, of course, is a different story.

My Moscow story concludes in September 2008, when I spent a few days there after a thirty-year hiatus. It is difficult to say what I hoped for from this trip. I knew that the old circle of acquaintances had long since been broken, everyone scattered across the wide world—some in New Jersey, some returned to Armenia or Georgia, some doing something—go figure what—in Syria, Israel, Nigeria. Some are dead, some simply missing. I seemed to know that everything had changed. But, as often happens, the shock was not exactly what I expected. If one ignores the Pushkin Museum, where the ticket seller first shook her head at my request for the more expensive foreigner ticket: “Nu kakaya zhe vy inostranka?” [Why, what kind of foreigner are you?], but when I said I was from Latvia, she quickly tore it off and threw it at me with a distinctly hostile gesture, I didn’t feel any particular attitude towards myself as a Latvian. No one attacked me for the oppression of Russians, but they treated me quite kindly and with interest and, yes, sometimes even addressed me on the street or in the metro. This time, however, I had not the slightest desire to pretend to be other than I am (I think I am)—perhaps I am too old for that, or simply have pretended enough already. This time, Moscow at least visually reminded me more of a “golden threshold” than it had all those many years ago—clean, polished, with restored church domes and a multitude of construction cranes—and the Tsar “sat” there too—namely, at every step one could feel the desire to seamlessly weave together the old Tsarist empire with the emerging, restored Putin one, without the nasty Bolshevik seam—I came across several new monuments to Tsars of different eras; in the restored Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in the place of which in Soviet times there was a large swimming pool, in the basement, I saw an exhibition dedicated to Nicholas II—with many unique photographs, with touching little notes from the Tsar’s daughters to their parents, with poems by Tsarevich Alexei, with diary entries of all family members from their exile in Yekaterinburg, everything very precise and detailed, only for the uninitiated it is not explained why the Tsar and his whole family and servants perished in such a cruel death. Just now, he, sitting on horseback, is taking a parade and is now being magnificently buried. One shock element was this swept-away history, embodied in ladies sitting on the roof of a “glamorous” shopping centre overlooking Lubyanka Square and flipping through design magazines.

The second—the “glamour” itself, which seems to thrill so many of my Latvian contemporaries. Well, I’ll be frank—I loathed it. One could at least laugh at the earlier slogans, posters, and portraits of the Politburo—it was all so stunningly tasteless and idiotic. Now, in place of ideology, there is greed—just as stunning and tasteless, but I feel no urge to laugh. Because it feels as if the two are overlapping again, even more than in Soviet times—in Moscow, as if in a slightly crooked mirror, I see Riga. Admittedly, still without many cars full of soldiers or policemen during city celebrations (only when it is Pride), still with some things intended also for a human, not just for a supermodel or a Deripaska clone in a Bentley or Ferrari, yet on that same blindingly empty road. I looked for the past but found a possible future. And from the first day, more than anything else, I wanted to be away—no matter where, just away. Like once from Riga. I felt lost—not “lost myself,” but strayed, as if I would never be able to break out of this thick, sticky Moscow air again. But planes still take off and land, and I have been lucky to return. To the place where I can freely think about my Moscow of yesteryear, which has had such a paradoxically significant role in my life.
Article first published in the January 2009 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks