portrait of an "ex"-Communist

[franksolich]

I met Viatcheslav Alexeivich when I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants during the 1990s; on a street, he had heard me speaking in English to someone, and was intrigued.

He later told me he had been intrigued because he had noticed the absence of ears, and was startled to find someone like that "speaking excellent English."

In America, I've always worn the hair long, so as to hide this particular absence, but because I was in a strange place among people strangers to me, I had decided it was better to make the absence noticeable by wearing the hair short--it would probably, and probably did, save me much "explaining."

Viatcheslav Alexeivich was an older man, in his 60s at the time, and grossly fat; he had a full head of white hair, and was afflicted with boils and warts and "skin tags."

After the preliminaries, Viatcheslav Alexeivich suggested I be a guest in his home for supper sometime soon, as he knew other Ukrainians who would be interested in meeting me.  His wife was dead, and apparently he hosted dinners two or three times a week for fellow comrades and their wives.

As I was doing nothing in particular, I said, yeah, sure, I'd be delighted.

Viatcheslav Alexeivich had been born and raised during the Stalin era, and when he was still a little lad, someone had discerned a talent in him, for foreign languages, and from about the age of 8 or 9 years, he had attended a special "English-speaking only" school.

It must have been pretty exclusive, as Viatcheslav Alexeivich had been exempted from conscription (here, I am talking of the early 1950s) into the military, and the Soviet military rarely exempted anyone.

After graduation from the Institute for Foreign Languages (now, I am talking of the mid- and late-1950s), Viatcheslav Alexeivich became a translator and guide for delegations from the United States, and all other English-speaking countries; academicians from Harvard and Berkeley, trade-unionists from England, "peace" groups from America, those sorts of people.

It was at our third or fourth meeting that Viatcheslav Alexeivich finally discerned my honest attitude about left-wing "intellectuals" and "pacifists," after which he opened up with his own honest evaluation of them as "suckers."

"Potemkin wasn't the only one to invent villages; we invented whole towns, cities for the 'suckers.'

"And they, as you say in America, 'ate it up,' even the inedible parts."

Viatcheslav Alexeivich's comrades were generally uniformly of about the same age, and former translators and guides for westerners, although not necessarily only English-speaking westerners (but they knew English anyway).  Ageing, creaking, fat, flaccid elders whose women wore too much make-up and whose men strutted.

I was considered a phenomenon by them, a deaf person speaking "excellent English," which considerably discombobulated my natural sense of modesty.  I explained to them that I had never spoken intelligible English until I was 21 years old, and a junior in college, when I undertook speech therapy, perhaps the most difficult chore in my life, up to then, and since then.

And besides, there was (and is) one glaring flaw in it; due to some anatomical or emotional "block," I could not (and cannot) utter the short "e" sound (meaning I cannot even say my own first name correctly), for which I compensated (compensate) by avoiding using words with that specific sound.  As the short "e" sound is the most common sound in English, well, it's difficult, but possible.

"But you speak so well, so clear, every word distinguishable," I was oftentimes told.

Being professional linguists, they of course had heard of the phenomenon where people born and raised in Nebraska have no accent, and speak the most-easily-understood English in the world, and we oftentimes speculated why that is.

During one of my visits, I noticed some business-cards, in English, on a nearby table; one for some investment counselor from Chicago, another from a metals-exporting company in Atlanta, a third from a ranking bureaucrat with the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., a fourth from the director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine.

Having been in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants for some time by then, I immediately knew how Viatcheslav Alexeivich was prospering, and greatly so, in a time and place considerably devastated and desperately poor.

Sometime during my acquaintance with Viatcheslav Alexeivich, I had visited the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) offices in Kiev, simply out of curiosity and homesickness to see another American. 

As a courtesy, the gentleman there let me "sit in on" a discussion between Ukrainians and American foreign-aid officers, these Ukrainians being as affluent and decadent as Viatcheslav Alexeivich and his comrades, but younger.

It was there that I finally grasped the notion of "joint ventures."  A joint venture was where the Americans gave the money, and the Ukrainians took the money.

Also, the press in Ukraine was reasonably a free press at the time, although essentially the newspapers, such as they were, tended to be of the National Enquirer type, scandal tabloids.

One of them, printed in dual English-Russian, one day would have a headline, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE GIVES UKRAINE $3.762 MILLION FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT.

And then the next day, in the same newspaper, but on a page where foreign financial transactions were given (the amounts of each transaction only, not names), there would be the notation that exactly $3.762 million had been transferred to Switzerland.

I have never been fond of foreign aid, but have since become even less fond.

The dinners that I attended, hosted by Viatcheslav Alexeivich and his comrades, could be described only as Bacchanalian.  I am not a gourmand, but I am reasonably sure that by even the most decadent standards of American "fine-diners," such feasts exceeded even their own tastes.

As I personally don't care for food unless I know all that's in it, and wouldn't touch fish or undercooked meat with a ten-foot primitive, I just generally tried to dine on the plain brown bread.  Sometimes I got away with it, sometimes I didn't, but to this day I thank God was I was never coerced into eating dead fish.

What was featured for six or eight people at one sitting would have fed dozens and scores of ordinary Ukrainians.

About two, sometimes three, times during the course of the evening, Viatcheslav Alexeivich would get up and go to a little room with a commode.  His apartment, although large and luxuriant, followed the usual socialist architecture of having the commode and a little sink in one tiny room, and the bathtub in another tiny room, both of them right off the dining-living room.

I heard nothing, of course, while Viatcheslav Alexeivich was behind that closed door, but it was apparent whenever the other guests heard something, they lifting up their eyes from the food to look at the door, with mild alarm in their expressions.

Me, I simply imagined that something on the other side of the door caused it to vibratingly bulge out, and then contract back in, billowing.

Near the end of my stay in the socialist paradises, Viatcheslav Alexeivich wished to have me over, but there was a problem.  I was leaving Kiev that night for the Donets region, to see where Nikita Khrushchev had been born and raised, and I had someone with me, a peasant lad from the boondocks, to serve as "translator" and "accomodator."  One can't very well wander around all alone, if one doesn't know the language.

At various times, I had requested of Viatcheslav Alexeivich that I be allowed to bring along a Ukrainian or two, to one of his dinners, a request always flatly squashed by his contemptuous opinion of such people, along with the suggestion that I should stay away from "nobodies," the peasants.

This time however Viatcheslav Alexeivich had to accede, because otherwise I couldn't come.  The "translator" accompanied me, and for the most part ignored all the other guests, instead constantly staring with both eyes and mouth agape at the menu.

The menu of course was stuff that had been common--and cheap--fare during the pre-socialist days of his ancestors; so common it was even fed to pigs if there was too much of it, but the "translator" had in his lifetime seen such foods only in picture-books, never with the palate.

Viatcheslav Alexeivich at one point had to go to that little room, and the "translator" later explained to me what had occurred.  My imagining the door as billowing in-and-out had not been too far after all.

Viatcheslav Alexeivich was apparently afflicted with all sorts of intestinal and rectal ailments that caused him to audibly groan and snarl and curse and squeak and yelp while sitting on the commode.