In history, three decades can be everything—or nothing at all
I have this vivid memory. It is so clear, in fact, that I can almost feel the sensations I felt in that moment—the distinctive winter frost, biting yet pleasant on my face; that sensation of breathing in the crisp, clear forest air; the beauty of the landscape, overwhelmingly bright from the snow, yet with the white flaky birches somehow still standing out in the wintry woods; and that strange overwhelming emotion that comes from looking at beauty: the feeling that one would like to bottle it up forever.
It is New Year’s Day, the first day of 1991, and after a few kilometers’ hike in the woods my family and I have just emerged from the forest to the edge of a large snow-covered field. Gentle snow has been falling off and on for days, so the field is completely covered, and looks nothing like it does other times of the year. In the distance, just on the other side of the field, is the village to which everything around us belongs: Stroganovo, its chimneys blowing smoke in that picturesque postcard-worthy way.
It looks like a quintessential painting of a Tsarist-era Russian village, which it indeed once was, over seventy years before. Although it is daytime, even the brightness of the snow somehow gives hints of planning to fade soon. After all, in this region, located on the same latitude as Finland, there are only about seven hours of daylight in the winter. Dusk is approaching already, and we need to turn around to hike back to our dacha.
My dad was approved for a dacha, that typical Soviet reward for a job well done, a few years before that. While the world knows the dacha concept as a summer cabin or cottage, the reality was that someone awarded a dacha often received merely an undeveloped small plot of land in the countryside, where he was then expected to construct the summer cabin all by himself, playing architect, builder, engineer, electrician, and plumber all at once. There are blurry photographs of tiny chubby-cheeked me, playing in the dirt by the original small structure, still clearly under construction.
But by New Year’s Day of 1991, our dacha, part of a small neighborhood of other such plots with their cabins, had long been as complete as it would ever get. Originally just one bedroom and a living room with a kitchen space at its center, it grew eventually to have a small loft upstairs that served as my parents’ bedroom, and a tiny but separate kitchen. As a concession to my concert pianist mother and the long-suffering piano adventures of my own childhood, an upright piano occupied the place of honor even in the living room. Man cannot live on bread alone. And so music in my family was an essential good and a required daily labor, rather than a mere luxury.
Originally lacking any modern amenities and insulation, the dacha was designed for summers. This is where I learned to ride a bike—although “learned” is too strong a word for what actually happened. Clumsy and awkward, I never really grew comfortable balancing on it. It always felt like an enemy I was wrestling. Our final voyage involved accidentally driving into a ditch. I refused to ever get on it again. I think the bike was in much worse shape than I was afterwards anyway, so it was probably all for the best.
Since there was some land around the house, my parents planted a garden of mostly berries. We had beds of strawberries and a variety of other semi-wild berry bushes, some universally familiar—blackberries, blueberries—and others more distinctively Russian—red and black currants, and tart gooseberries, whose name I had to look up in the dictionary, as I had no idea what they are called in English.
One year early in the summer I saw beautiful flowers in the strawberry beds and decided to pick them. There was no strawberry harvest that year. But in other years, when my parents managed to keep my brother and me from inadvertently wreaking havoc on the garden, the harvest was abundant and delightful. The surrounding woods were filled with raspberries and mushrooms, so we often accompanied my parents, who picked both diligently. We kids were not generally trusted with mushroom picking, as we never mastered the oh-so-subtle differences between the killers and the edibles.
But that was in the summer. In that rare winter visit that we took to the dacha, celebrating the final days of 1990 and welcoming 1991, other pleasures awaited. We lavishly decorated a small evergreen tree, a Russian New Year holiday tradition that, I was surprised to learn years later, was really a Christmas tradition absorbed into Russian secular celebrations surrounding the New Year holiday. There was much hiking. And the joyful sensation at the end of each day, of falling asleep exhausted but warm and content.
Surely there were meals involved during this visit. Yet I do not remember a single one. By then, for a couple of years, Soviet food distribution involved lengthy lines for hours on end, as one tried to buy such basic items as butter or flour. All citizens were issued ration coupons that they could then trade in to buy these items, but just because one had the required coupons did not mean one could find a store that sold them. We never went hungry, but perhaps the food this New Year was simply not worth remembering.
Mere months later, my family was on a train, heading out of Russia forever. We did not get to see the dacha again before we left. It is funny to think how life is so often this way—we do not know when a farewell is complete and final, rather than just a see-you-later. But then, 1991 was a year of many other farewells, as the Soviet Union itself collapsed mere months after our departure. The aftermath of that messy collapse is still unfolding before our eyes, reminding us that in history, three decades could be everything, or it could be nothing at all.
But the friends that I did not even know I missed were the glorious Russian birch trees, these deceptively fragile-looking slender white giants, lovers of snow and northern marshes, quiet companions to the wintery wildlife. When my now-husband took me to Maine for the first time to visit his parents, I saw birch trees again for the first time in twenty years. It took every ounce of effort that I had within me not to burst into tears, as so many childhood memories came flooding back. It was summer. The following December, as we were driving through the snow-covered birch-filled Maine countryside, a mangy coyote was lumbering in the distance, resolutely looking for a meal.
Nadya Williams is Professor of Ancient History at the University of West Georgia. She is the Book Review Editor for Current.