Jurassic Park at Noon

Finally, I thought, finally! I’ve waited for this all my life! Ever since I was a small child growing up in the Russian émigré community in London I was told about the legendary protest of 1968: the eight dissidents who risked their lives by demonstrating on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Out of a population of 250 million only eight had the guts. ‘They cleansed our conscience’ my parents told me, ‘they made me believe there was a different way’ said their friends, ‘it was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union’. Momentous stuff. I grew up with the eight as legendary figures, but knew so little about them. I would hear trickles of information over the years. One had gone on to drink himself to death in Paris. Another stabbed a friend in a frenzy. A third became a handy man in the US.  But most intriguing was the figure of Natalia Gorbanevskaya. She had caused outrage by taking her baby to the demonstration: had she used it as a shield? Recklessly risked its safety? Even her friends thought it extreme. So when Red Square at Noon, Gorbanevskaya’s book on the 1968 protest, came out recently I thought: finally, finally I will find out the inside story of the demonstration, will find out the back stories and inner lives of these heroes of my childhood, their thoughts, loves, fates.

I was to be disappointed.

Gorbanevskaya’s book completely eschews traditional historical writing. No biography, narrative, analysis. Indeed, there’s hardly any writing by her. Red Square at Noon is a compendium of different texts, ranging from 1-page memoirs of the protest itself, through a 100-odd page transcript of the trial, protest letters to international bodies,  articles from Soviet newspapers, a few photos, a couple of poems. All she gives us are imprints left by the day, hard but scant pieces of evidence. They are laid out for us like museum relics of a prehistoric era: a piece of parchment here, a fossil of a strange animal there, a barely recognizable battle-axe under a glass case in the corner. There is a power in the rigorousness of Gorbanevskaya’s approach. Instead of being swept along in a gushing narrative, we are left alone to deal with the solid facts. This is a valuable tome. But what about what I was looking for? The inspirational, twisted fates of the eight? Their rows? Love affairs? How did they drink, make love, rebel? What did their parents say to them, their children? Do they have regrets? All that Gorbanevskaya offers me are fossils and archeological remains. Where are the flesh and blood stories?

I have spent the last five years in Moscow as a film and TV producer and have found no feature films about the dissident movement, no new novels, no TV mini-series. As if this generation, my parents generation, never existed. How do I find them? How do I begin to make emotional contact with them? How do I begin to understand why Gorbanevskaya was prepared to risk her baby’s life to go to a demonstration?

Maybe they are an irrelevance- the dissidents of the 60s and 70s. Most of my Moscow friends, trendy young media types in their twenties and thirties, have no time for them. They yawn when I mention the old heroes of my youth. Who could be inspired by these kitchen-politicians when there are so many fascinating stories in Russia today: the dashing and dangerous oligarch plagued by his conscience; the mafia-man trying to go straight; the millions of Russian Holly Golightlies; the naïve provincial boys arriving to conquer Moscow. These were the stories that everyone I knew discussed loudly and intensely in the hip new restaurants mushrooming across Moscow. Louder and more intensely than in any other city I have known.

A while back something happened to those loud and intense conversations. Something changed in the restaurants. It was a couple of years ago. A scriptwriter friend was telling me about a film he was writing. The film was based on the rise and fall of Mikhail Hodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before being jailed for crossing the KGB clique who run the Kremlin. The scriptwriter was waving his cigarette about, talking loudly and intensely and building up to the part about the oligarch’s arrest when he stopped mid-flow. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘I’d better not talk about this here…never know who might be listening…you understand’. Since that day this has become the norm. Whenever any discussion in a public place turns to matters political, everyone glances over their shoulder and lowers their voice. What are they glancing over their shoulders for? Do they really think the waiters are going to snitch? It’s the same in taxis: politics is taboo. As if the taxi was tapped by the KGB, the driver a secret agent waiting to make a detour to Lubyanka if you dare criticize the state while in his car.  If you stop to think this fear is absurd- but you play along without noticing.

The food in Moscow’s restaurants is a delight, the music is hipper than London, the girls more chic than Paris. It’s not 1938—’68—it’s 2008! But no. The old fear is still there, this time it’s just better dressed.

And in this context the fossils and archeological remains of Gorbanevskaya’s book completely change their significance. Prehistory has become contemporary. Russia is a Jurassic Park where the carnivorous dinosaurs of totalitarianisms long-thought dead have returned to life, terrorizing the humans. Gorbanevskaya’s book seemed like a museum piece: a stone-age hammer to be admired through a plate-glass. But now the glass needs to be broken, the hammer taken out. There are no other weapons.

Now, wherever I go in Moscow I carry Red Square at Noon with me in my bag. I leaf through it as a survival guide to the Jurassic Park. In the evenings I come home to my daughter. She is the same age as Gorbanevskaya’s baby was in 1968. As the dinosaurs rage outside my Moscow flat and scream down my television the old questions I had about whether Gorbanevskaya was right to take her baby to the protest fall away. I only wish that another Gorbanevskaya appears soon with a new child and a new protest to cleanse my conscience. I’m from a softer generation. I don’t know whether I’ve got the guts to take my own daughter.

Written for the Prague Writers’ Festival by Peter Pomeranzev