Chapter 10

The gorillas of Sakharov

After completing my studies, I resumed my travels to the Soviet Union. I hadn’t been there since Grivnina’s emigration and, by this time, I was ready to resume my activities there. I booked a trip for the beginning of 1988 and I hit the road. Luckily I had been given a visa without a hitch. In the meantime, an article had been published in Izvestiya in which I had been openly marked as a colonel of the CIA. Funny enough, according to the newspaper, Robert van Voren was my real name, and my real name was mentioned as a pseudonym. However, apparently this article was not reason enough to ban me from entering the country. As usual, from the very beginning of my stay, I was followed everywhere I went, just like before. It was a comforting thought.

My first stay in Moscow coincided with that of a colleague of mine, Jan Veldmeijer, who had entered the country some time before. We agreed to meet in the lobby of Hotel Kosmos, a half round hotel located on the northern edge of the center of Moscow that had been built on the occasion of the Olympic Games of 1980. The hotel had been an architectonic tour de force of French origin and a rather unusual sight in a Moscow full of grey Soviet concrete. However, in the course of the years the quality had deteriorated considerably. In the rooms, the curtains were hanging crookedly, furniture was often broken or rickety. In the fireproof doors at the end of the fire escapes big holes had been drilled through which a chain with a fat padlock had been placed. In practical terms, this meant that if ever a fire would break out, the people who would come running down the fire escapes would be trapped mercilessly. In other words, within a few years, a classy French hotel had been reduced to a Soviet monster.

I met an enthusiastic Jan who had already fully tasted the new atmosphere in Moscow. He suggested that we change some money on the street in order to do shopping. I got angry: was he out of his mind? Illegally exchanging money on the street was something couriers had never done, as it could easily be a provocation leading to expulsion. “Ah, don’t worry,” Jan said, “everything is different now. You’ll see for yourself.” And indeed, everything was different. While access to the hotel had always been strictly forbidden to Soviet citizens, they were now all over the place, easily let in by the doormen. The bars were full, not only with amateur prostitutes, but also with youngsters who were in possession of some dollars as a result of small business deals and were enjoying this newly found luxury. Parties were organized in the hotel rooms and, in the evenings, we would stroll down the corridors from party to party. The control system on the guest 102 On Dissidents and Madness traffic had disappeared. The dezhurnaya’s, the floor ladies that invariably positioned themselves in front of the exit of the elevators and noted every move by guests in their little notebooks, had disappeared. Only their desks were still standing there, as well as the usually horrendously ugly vases that were supposed to decorate the corridor and were produced en masse by Soviet “artists,” often still bearing a sticker with “Art no.5” on them. I went from one surprise to the other.

The next day we hit the streets, visiting dissidents. The rather meager collection of addresses of the last few years had now been expanded enormously by the political prisoners that had returned from places of detention. The city was buzzing with life. While in 1985, I only had a handful of addresses to visit, the list was now endless. It was a combination of old friends with returned political prisoners, ‘new’ dissidents and the first politicians that formed the basis of the democratic movement. One of the first addresses was Andrei Sakharov, the figurehead of the dissident movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a nuclear physicist, who had returned to Moscow at the end of 1986 after years of psychological torture in Gorki (now Nizhny Novgorod). Sakharov had been banished in January 1980 to that city and in the course of the years, his exile had changed into complete isolation and constant presence of the KGB. This isolation was only broken by the regular visits by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who shuttled between Moscow and Gorki. Upon his return to Moscow, Andrei Dmitrievich, as he was always referred, had resumed his leading position within the dissident movement and, by that time, was a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet parliament. The reason for our visit was the fact that for many years we had been organizing Sakharov Congresses in Amsterdam and that now, with Sakharov being at liberty and freely accessible, we had to ask his permission to continue using his name for these congresses. In his apartment, we were seated at the kitchen table, where a number of dissidents were in the middle of carrying on a very intense political discussion. We listened to the debate, here and there adding a remark of our own, and only after a long time Sakharov realized that we

Andrei Sakharov, during the election campaign for the Supreme Soviet in December 1989, a few days before his death.