Things I’ve Learned with Jeffrey Brooks

Jeffrey Brooks is a professor of Russian history, specializing in Russian literature and culture. He is the author of the book, When Russia Learned to Read, and he is currently working on another upcoming book called Russia in the Age of Genius. He has spent time traveling through Soviet Russia and has experienced its transition to a capitalist society. He took some time out of his schedule to sit down with The News-Letter to talk about what life was like in communist Russia, from buying illegal Russian trinkets to being followed by the KGB.

 

News-Letter(N-L): How did you get interested in Russian studies?

Jeffrey Brooks(JB): Well, I was in high school and I read Russian writers, and I thought this is so exciting and wonderful, and then when I was in college, Russia seemed so exotic. There it was, the Soviet Union, and we were in the midst of the Cold War. It was just exciting and exotic, so I took Russian in college, found it difficult, I confess, and I thought well, maybe I should go to grad school, and the teachers at college said to me, ‘if you got a grant, would you go to grad school?’ And I said ‘okay’; someone would pay me to read books, why not.

I decided to focus on the conjunction of literature and history, and that became the thing that I mostly worked on, the history of Russian culture.

 

N-L: When was the first time that you went to Russia?

JB: Sometime in the late ‘70s. The first time I went, I had a Fulbright to Finland because Finland had very good library resources, and the exchange with the Soviet Union was very small and it was hard to get on it. So my first visit to Russia was a trip from Finland to Russia where I spent a couple of weeks with instructions from my Finnish friends to bring back as much vodka as possible. So I had an interesting time there; I walked around, I talked to people, and then the second time I went, I went on the scholarly exchange. It was called the scientific exchange, and I was there for 9 or 10 months, and I lived in Moscow State University, and I lived in a dorm room.

 

N-L: How have you seen Russia change over the different times that you’ve visited, and what was it like being an American in Russia for the first time?

JB: Well, being an American in Russia, if you were on this foreign exchange, it meant you were followed by the KGB because they wanted to know what contacts you were making. They were also very interested in your attitude towards the Soviet Union because they tended to reward people who were friendly and punish people who were hostile. I was very critical. I wasn’t particularly friendly, but I traveled around the country quite a bit, and the people who helped us with travel, they were obviously reporting to the police.

In a country such as the Soviet Union, there are always people that oppose the idea of having scientific exchanges with the west because they thought of them as bringing in the class enemy, so those people were very eager to embarrass the exchange if at all possible.

 

N-:L: Was Russia any different from what you expected it to be?

JB: It was very different, it was full of all sorts of interesting people: on the one hand, there were a lot of educated people who were just eager to make contact with foreigners, particularly Americans. There were people who collected every bit of Americana they could get their hands on from stamps to records. The country, the system retained many of its attributes: the same fearfulness for saying the wrong thing, mixing with foreigners, doing anything to publicize disagreement with the regime. People were punished for that right up until when Gorbachev came in. I would say that there was more and more contact with foreigners and it became less exotic as time went on.

Of course when the Soviet system began to collapse, all sorts of strange things happened. Suddenly people could speak their mind, [and] a flood of western culture materials came into the country, so one of the features of Soviet economic life that included culture was the monopoly on foreign trade. So there was very little that was not officially scrutinized that came into Russia. But when communism began to fall, suddenly everything was there, Freud, pornography, Winnie the Pooh — they were all being sold side to side with the uniforms of Soviet generals and flags. People were very poor at the end, the money lost a lot of its value, there was a collapse in pensions, people were selling all sorts of things, [and] it was a very strange and difficult time.

 

N-L: Did it ever feel dangerous to be in Russia?

JB: I would say generally it was very safe. I think it’s more dangerous now than it was in Soviet times; in Soviet times it was very well controlled. If you took the metro, there was a police station at every metro stop and when you got at the top of the escalator, there was generally a woman who made sure you weren’t too drunk to get on the metro, and at the bottom of the escalator if you were a troublemaker, you would be arrested by a militia man. Now it’s less safe.

 

N-L: Do you think that attitudes towards Americans have gotten better?

JB: No, much worse. There was a lot of friendliness towards Americans under the Soviet system; now there’s a lot of xenophobia, Russian skinheads, Russian fascists, [and] there are a lot of attacks on people who don’t look Russian, whether they’re from Asia, [are] African Americans, [or] Africans. There’s a lot of racism that’s broken out that’s now in public life.

 

N-L: Do you have any interesting stories from Russia?

JB: When I first went to Russia on the scientific exchange, I was sent to meet a woman named Anya who was a casualty of the war in many ways. She was supposed to be an Egyptologist, but in the war she became something else and was never able to get back to it; [however,] she was supposed to be able to help me find books that I was able to buy, so I went to see her with my wife, and she said, “I can’t talk with you because I have to go someplace afterwards,” and then she said “On second thought, I’ll take you with me, my little chickens.”

So she took us with her to the outskirts of Moscow to a top floor apartment where there was someone named Siriyosha who collected folk toys, which was what she collected, and Siriyosha had a wild Siberian cat, and he was selling stuff illegally out of this really empty apartment with no furniture. The way the sale worked was that he painted terrible icons, and he would show you his collection of toys. You would pick out the toys that you wanted and you would pick out a painting and the price of the painting equaled the price of the toys because otherwise he would have been selling something illegally, and this way it was sort of a grey area. He was selling you the painting and giving you the toys as a present.

So there we were in the middle of a blinding snowstorm at the top of this place with Anya who had taken us under her wing as her little chickens, and watching her purchase these toys. And my wife became interested in collecting these toys and under her shepherding she ended up with quite a nice collection. These were clay toys that peasants made during the winter, and what we witnessed was the beginning of the intelligentsia’s fascination with folk culture, which was something that happened in the 1970s. That was a wonderful moment.

Then the alternative moment was the moment of being followed around by the secret police. Of course I was often followed, and as someone who walks very slowly, I saw it as their punishment because . . . [they would have] to follow me when it was 25 below. So I would get off the subway to visit some friend, and I’d look back and there would be an elderly lady following me. And I do recall one time going into a friend’s apartment and looking down over the stairs and what did I see? I saw the woman that’s been following me looking up trying to figure out what apartment I was going into.

 

N-L: Was it scary to be followed?

JB: Not really because these elderly women who were half frozen were hardly threatening. It made one angry and of course since I was obviously hardly spry enough to escape from being followed, I would just lead them on a long and painful following, [and] I would switch metros multiple times, but they had no problem keeping up with me. It’s just that they were sorry that I didn’t make it simple.

 

N-L: Why do you think that Russian culture is so important in America?

JB: You have Borodin, you have Shostakovitch, the ballet rus, Russian painting. I would say that Russian culture in its great age is . . . worth studying because it’s one of the great world cultures.

Unfortunately, Stalin destroyed the structures upon which it was based, and Russian culture is now interesting, but it’s no more powerful than any other. In an age of globalization, it’s just another culture, it’s not one of the most powerful cultures. Russian culture in its great age is something that everyone should partake [in]. I mean how can you be educated without reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, or to know modern art without seeing Malevich?

 

N-L: Are you planning on visiting Russia again soon?

JB: Right now I have no plans to visit since I just visited last year and now I need to focus on finishing my book. I might go back. I’m not sure. Life is full of surprises. Russia has been a really interesting place to study — I mean to be there in a time of capitalism where nobody cared a jot if you bought anything from their store, and when you could look around and some people were still wearing their old military coats from the war. Russia was a huge power, and it hasn’t lost it yet.