NICK HAYES

            ...A blend of Eisenhower’s politics and the theology of Bishop Fulton Sheen shaped the cultural environment of my childhood and defined the Russians as nothing less than communist devils.  I remember two images.  One of the Sisters showed my class a photograph of old Russian women with their heads wrapped in scarfs which we misnamed “babooshkas” and thus confused the Russian word for grandmother with the traditional women’s headdress.  This particular nun had a case against the girls in our parish school who would wear only dainty kerchiefs on their heads to church rather than the proper berets that came with their school uniforms.  She declared that the proliferation of women wearing these “babooshkas” in the US was a communist plot.  Incidentally, though Irish, she also felt that she could not support John Kennedy for President.  He had not attended Catholic schools and was therefore probably prone to communism.  Another image is more menacing.  It appeared in my fourth grade civics text book.  It depicted Red Army soldiers crushing Russian boots a Eucharist inside the sanctuary of a Hungarian Catholic Church. Yet, this provides the key to my interests in Russia:  a curiosity for the dark side from whence came the Russian devils of my childhood.

During my college days, I gradually poured this old curiosity into new academic bottles.  For the record, I believe my first encounter with Russian history came in a lecture by old “Prof” Heininger in my first year Introduction to Western Civilization course.  In a lecture on Tsar Peter the Great, “Prof” dwelt upon the infamous anecdote about how the Tsar banned the wearing of beards and would rip the beard off the faces of any Russian man who dared to show one in his presence.  That only goes to show, boys,” “Prof” concluded, how thin is the line that separates civilization from barbarism.  I always say that my initial academic interest in Russia came from a love for Russian literature.  True, but I can’t remember where I first encountered Russian literature.  I have a vague memory of reading a Classic Illustrated Comic version of War and Peace in my childhood. Otherwise, I know that at one time and within a few days of each other I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory and Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts. And that was it.  I dropped my course in German and switched to Russian and started on the less travelled academic road that led a Ph.D. in Russian history at the University of Chicago, Russian studies at the Sorbonne, and then a third and truly astonishing chapter as a year’s residence as a visiting scholar – or “stazhor” – at Moscow State University in 1978 and 1979.

            This chapter – my year with my family as an IREX visiting professor at MGU, or Moscow State University – was my Russian baptism, an immersion baptism into Russian life. I arrived in Russia with my wife Marcia and our two children – Kevin aged twelve weeks and Patrick aged two and a half.  (Slides:  Patrick at detskii sad; Kevin on the Russian sled; the boys in my arms). The rot of communism was then palpable.  At the moment of his arrival in the old Sheremeteva Airport through his entry into our “bloc,” or university dormitory rooms, Patrick screamed.  A colleague observed Patrick’s shrieks and commented, “Patrick was the only one who had the right, sane response to arriving in Russia.  Scream bloody hell!”  To be candid, my progress on research that year was marginal.  I did trudge Monday through Friday to the Academic Reading Room of the Lenin Library.  Its card catalogue contained around five entries for my research topics – Soviet political history in the 1920s.  Although I did manage to eek out enough to produce my first publication, perhaps the most memorable contribution of the Lenin library to my sense of Soviet history was that it was in that room where I met Molotov and shook his hand.

            In actuality, I spent my energies in that year, much as an ordinary Russian would have standing in lines for shopping, searching the stores for anything, and negotiating with harsh Soviet realities for the daily needs of my family.  I became an expert on how to locate Soviet disposable diapers – which I learned the hard way were not called detskii pantilon but pod-guzniki.