As a fellow American student and I exited the Leningrad metro station on a clear spring day in 1989, a gathering crowd and booming voice grabbed our attention. As we edged closer, we saw a young man standing on top of a wooden crate, exhorting passers-by to vote for a maverick law professor named Anatoli Sobchak. There was something about the man’s exuberance on the soapbox; it was novel, raw and infectious. That young man was Zhenya. 

With curly brown hair framing blue eyes and high cheekbones, Zhenya was, literally, breathing life into a decaying political system. It was April 1989, a heady time of hope in the Soviet Union, with more open elections replacing past elections dominated by the Communist Party. Sobchak was running for a seat in the new Soviet Parliament. Outside the Primorskaya metro station on Leningrad’s Vasilevsky Island, Zhenya railed against entrenched communists who he believed were trying to derail his candidate’s chances. If spoken just a few years earlier, Zhenya’s words would have landed him in jail.

From the edge of the crowd, I asked Zhenya a few questions. Startled by our foreign accents, he jumped down from his perch and rode the bus with us to our dorm on Ulitsa Korablestroitelei or Shipbuilders’ Street. Zhenya turned out to be as fascinated by us as we were by him.

***

Young, enthusiastic and opinionated, Zhenya had thrown himself into the reforming politics of the Gorbachev era, called glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). As a top campaign activist for candidate Sobchak, who taught at Zhenya’s university, he led a group of 25 student activists to rally support for Sobchak. Zhenya himself led campaign events during the day- like the one I witnessed — and then at night put up posters of the candidate and his platform on telephone poles, sides of buildings and public transportation. In the first years of our friendship, he embodied a will and energy to change the Soviet Union from a totalitarian system into a democracy. Looking back with the gift of time, I’d call him a warrior for democracy. 

As well as rough around the edges. 

Raised in modest circumstances in Soviet Ukraine, Zhenya was passionate and impulsive. The phrase “unbridled like a wild horse” comes to mind. A few years earlier, fed up with bad living conditions and hazing, he told me he had gotten himself kicked out of the Soviet Air Force by buzzing the officers’ cafeteria in a plane. Zhenya became infamous among our group of American students in Leningrad for his statements criticizing gays. Zhenya’s views reflected the norms of a society set in its ways and closed off to new modes of thinking. But while he may have been a product of his society, he wanted to change it. 

Zhenya’s optimism was not that of the elite. He had had few advantages in life. His father was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair, and his mother, divorced from his father, lived modestly in the city of Kirovograd in Soviet Ukraine. Zhenya had been on his own since he was 17. He was rail thin, clearly just subsisting on the food he got at the university cafeteria. 

Zhenya was headstrong to a fault. During the run-up to the elections that spring of 1989, he took me to a campaign event with candidates. He brought along his pet hamster, whom he had nicknamed Vitya in honor of famous Leningrad rock musician Viktor Tsoi. When Vitya started to crawl over a man nearby, Zhenya said impishly to the man, “He wants to get to know you.” Soon, the meeting began, and Zhenya was his boisterous self, clapping loudly for his candidate and jeering at others. When an elderly man admonished him to be quiet, Zhenya retorted that it was his citizen’s right to clap. “Act modestly,” the offended man upbraided Zhenya. 

Zhenya loved the quintessential American toy – the Frisbee – and became adept at throwing and catching. We’d take it wherever we went, pulling it out of my backpack when an open space presented itself. To the consternation of strollers, we even played on Palace Square in front of the famed Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg when my brother and a friend visited.

When together, Zhenya and I spoke Russian as briskly as we were both living life. Seamlessly, we’d take on roles and act out stereotypes in exaggerated ways. I’d become the clueless American, and he the Soviet bureaucrat; I the wealthy Westerner and he the simple-minded Russian peasant; I the student of Russian literature and he the professor. Our conversations flowed easily back and forth, incontrovertible evidence that the walls separating American and Soviet people were crumbling. 

Go to Part III

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