Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (39 page)

This was the political backdrop against which my book was going to come out. My intimate account of the last sixteen years of their lives was going to appear in English, in the West. How would that play out for them, living here? There were times, much earlier on, when I believed that it might offer them protection. Not anymore. Ghosts from Russia’s Soviet past were giving me a hard time.

So how would my account affect them? The question was so delicate that I had not dared raise it. My friends had stayed clear of it, too. Now, as Anna evaded my embrace in her usual way, as I hugged Tatiana, the risks to which I was exposing them hit me like a truck.

I hurried onto the train and settled into my compartment without looking back, without waving. That Russian phrase about “leaving in the English way,” meaning without saying good-bye, came back to me. It had always seemed so funny, so un-English, and there I was doing it. Their unspoken question followed me in: could they trust me? These were the people who had taught me so much about friendship. Here in Russia, where everyday life was a battle against poverty, bureaucracy, or corruption, friendship was the true currency, the resource that made all possible. How would I turn out to have repaid that friendship with this book? Would it have repercussions on their lives? The questions were painful, and there were no answers.

My hope was that the positive lessons which my brave, independent-minded friends had drawn from the 1990s would not turn out to have been in vain. Whatever happens to my friends and to Russia, those lessons will always be there, in the compost heap of history which Anna Akhmatova evokes in her
Poem Without a Hero:

As the future ripens in the past
So the past rots in the future—
A fearful festival of dead leaves

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IF EVER THERE WAS A BOOK WHICH DEPENDED ON THE GENEROSITY
of friends, it is this. I am infinitely grateful to the Russians whose lives I have chronicled in this book. Anna, Tatiana, Misha, Natasha, Igor, and Vera (these are not their real names) befriended me after the fall of communism, when visitors from the West were objects of deep suspicion in that part of the countryside. They have had the courage not to withdraw their confidence in my good faith over the years, even now that the relationship between our governments has hardened into a familiar antagonism.

Sixteen years is a long time. Behind this book stands a tribe of supporters, people who backed me even when they no longer understood what I was doing, or why I was persisting. My husband, Roger Graef, has been my unfailing champion, chief critic, and my life support, backed up always by Chloe and Max Graef. Without the three of them, I would not have made it. Equally important was my “family” in Moscow, Elena Vasilieva, her daughter, Ira Vasilieva, and son-in-law, Alexander (Sasha) Radov. Adventurous, and unfailingly cheerful, Ira and Sasha were my ideal traveling companions.

That same spirit infuses those most experienced travelers, Vladimir Nikolaevich Alekseev and Professor Elena Ivanovna Dergacheva-Skop, to whom I am boundlessly grateful for taking me to meet the Old Believers of Burny.

The key that unlocked my visit to Nina Stepanovna was Sergei Filatov’s research on the rebirth of paganism among the non-Slav Volga minorities, published in
An Atlas of Religious Life in Russia
Today
, edited by Michael Bourdeaux and Sergei Filatov (Keston Institute, 2005). What I found there would have been even more mysterious without the help of Joanna Hubbs’s book
Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1988).

SUSAN RICHARDS is the author of
Epics of Everyday Life: Encounters in a Changing Russia
, which won the P.E.N. Time-Life Award for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits openDemocracy Russia, part of openDemocracy, the Web site about global affairs which she cofounded. After her doctorate on Alexander Solzhenitsyn from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, she initiated the program of talks, conferences, and debates at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and worked as a film producer. With her husband, the television producer Roger Graef, she started Bookaid, a charity that sent a million English language books to public libraries throughout the Soviet Union.