I Experienced the Last Soviet Summer

Nearly forty years have passed since I crossed the frontier into the Soviet Union. That is now almost as much time as separated my journey from John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal, written after he traveled through the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa in 1947.

The symmetry is unsettling.

Steinbeck saw the Soviet Union as it emerged from the Second World War – and from the decades of revolution, civil war, famine, purges, and terror that had preceded it, a twentieth-century Time of Troubles (Smutnoye vremya) – into the long confrontation we would call the Cold War. I arrived forty-one years later, in the summer of 1988.

The Soviet Union still possessed thousands of nuclear weapons, commanded an enormous military establishment, dominated much of Eastern Europe, and presented itself as the ideological rival of the United States.

Three years later, it was gone.

Another thirty-eight years have now passed. Entire generations of Americans have grown to adulthood with no memory of the Soviet Union except as history. The hammer and sickle can seem almost quaint. Marxism is again discussed in some quarters as though its twentieth-century record were an unfortunate complication. Socialism is routinely confused with the market economies and extensive welfare states of Scandinavia. For some, “collectivism” can acquire a certain warm glow.

Memory has a short half-life. That is one reason I have found myself returning to the summer of 1988.

I was seventeen years old, interested in Russian history but nowhere near the understanding of it I would acquire later. Russia remained mysterious to me, as it has to generations of Westerners – Churchill’s famous “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Through the People to People Student Ambassador Program, I had an unusual opportunity to see a little of it myself.

Our North Carolina delegation flew from Raleigh-Durham to New York, where we joined students from West Virginia. From JFK we crossed the Atlantic, stopped in Stockholm without leaving the aircraft, and continued to Helsinki.

Then we boarded a Soviet train for Leningrad. There was no mistaking whose train it was – Soviet insignia saw to that – yet it moved smoothly over Finnish rails. That detail has stayed with me because a distinction Americans sometimes blur today was anything but blurry in 1988.

While many Americans associate the Nordic nations with a benign – and more palatable – form of socialism, Finland in the 1980s was better understood as an extensive welfare state operating within a fundamentally democratic market economy built on private property, private enterprise, functioning markets, and political competition. OECD figures put Finnish general-government expenditure in 1988 at roughly 40 percent of GDP. 

For perspective, the comparable figure for the United States in 2023 was 39.1 percent. 

The country across the frontier left considerably less room for semantic confusion. Its name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Finland understood the distinction with a clarity that distance can obscure. It shared a long border with the Soviet Union and a considerable history of conflict with its eastern neighbor.

Within living memory, the two countries had fought twice. Finland preserved its independence, but only at great cost: it lost substantial territory, including most of Finnish Karelia, and more than 400,000 people were displaced from the ceded lands. Homes, farms, churches, and entire communities suddenly lay inside the Soviet Union.

There would be no right of return.

Nor did Finland in 1988 enjoy the NATO guarantee it has today. It preserved its independence beside an enormous neighbor through military preparedness, careful diplomacy, and the knowledge that if things went badly wrong, it might have to stand largely on its own.

I crossed directly from one system into the other.

You could feel it through the wheels of the train.

At a frontier station surrounded by tall green trees, border guards in Soviet Army uniforms carrying automatic weapons boarded. They searched our luggage and personal effects. The food we had brought for the journey was rifled through, and some was confiscated. One guard reached the Bible I had packed. As I remember the moment nearly forty years later, the tip of his weapon touched it.

The encounter lasted only seconds, but nearly forty years later, the moment remains seared into my memory.

Then the train moved onto Soviet track. The ride became noticeably rougher; it was the first of many contrasts. From the train windows, I saw horse-drawn plows working fields in A.D. 1988. 

Throughout my journey, cars were remarkably scarce. Occasionally a dull-looking Lada or another Soviet automobile passed by as if the road belonged to it alone – because, to some extent, it did.

Leningrad’s railroad station appeared tired after Helsinki, a grimy relic of an earlier age.

We had been warned before arriving not to drink the city’s notoriously dicey water. We tried not to. Many of us became sick anyway; some became extremely ill. I remained sick for weeks.

None of this squared easily with the image of technological modernity projected by the Soviet state. This was, after all, the country that had launched Sputnik, put Yuri Gagarin into orbit, built nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and fielded one of the most formidable military establishments on earth.

The paradox became increasingly difficult to miss. The Soviet system could concentrate enormous resources on priorities selected by the state. It seemed considerably less capable of satisfying the ordinary requirements of the people who lived under it. 

Safe water could not be assumed. Neither could reliable plumbing, adequate toilet paper, a decent automobile, or the ordinary consumer goods Americans scarcely thought about.

The stores offered their own lessons. We were shepherded toward Beriozkas, relatively well-stocked shops where Western visitors – and certain privileged Soviet citizens – could spend hard currency on merchandise generally beyond the reach of an ordinary Soviet citizen carrying rubles.

This workers’ paradise had a peculiar way of arranging its abundance. Yet material scarcity was not what struck me most. The greater shortage was belief.

Red banners remained everywhere. Our Soviet minder dutifully spoke of the “Great October Socialist Revolution.” We met young Soviets, including members of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, who knew the prescribed revolutionary litany by rote. But something was missing.

This was Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, the era of perestroika and glasnost. The old formulas were still recited, but I remember resignation more than conviction. Among some of the young people, I sensed an apprehension that the future was unlikely to resemble the radiant one their ideology had promised. More unsettling still, they seemed uncertain of their own place in whatever came next.

The Soviet system increasingly seemed to require something like the willing suspension of disbelief that theater demands.

One could believe in the workers’ paradise if one did not look too closely at what workers could buy. One could believe in technological modernity while avoiding the municipal water. One could believe religion had been consigned to the primitive past while standing before some of the most magnificent churches – and among some of the most devout parishioners – on earth. And one could believe in the permanence of the Great October Socialist Revolution while sensing remarkably little enthusiasm for it.

Lenin still lay under glass in his mausoleum, receiving visitors with a solemnity that sometimes seemed almost religious. The cruiser Aurora remained a carefully preserved relic of the Revolution, though I remember precious little popular excitement surrounding it. The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood had been reduced to warehouse use. St. Isaac’s great cathedral once housed a Soviet museum of atheism. At Orthodox vespers in Pskov, an armed Soviet soldier stood at the door.

Those stories deserve telling in their own right.

So does the warmth of the Russian people we encountered. They were curious about Americans, frequently generous, and very different from the gray machinery of the state governing them. Our minder herself seemed less a revolutionary evangelist than a woman dutifully repeating lines that almost no one believed anymore. The Soviet people were not the Soviet system.

That system, however, remained formidable – or so it seemed. Its military power was real. So was its coercive power, much of which faced inward. Foreign travel for ordinary Soviet citizens was tightly controlled. At the end of our journey, we flew out of Moscow aboard British Airways. What I remember most about the international airport was how cavernous and empty it seemed.

The international gateway of a superpower had precious few travelers.

By the time I returned home, these impressions had accumulated into a conclusion I could not entirely explain but felt with considerable confidence: the USSR could not last.

I told people that I did not think the Soviet Union had five years left. Almost nobody believed me. My father was skeptical, but for another reason. The Soviets, he told me, would not go down without a fight.

He was right. In August 1991, communist hard-liners attempted to preserve the old Soviet order. Tanks appeared in Moscow. For a moment, the coercive machinery of the Marxist-Leninists seemed prepared to reassert itself.

Then even their will to fight fizzled. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. That is why I think of 1988 as that last Soviet summer.

It was not literally the USSR’s final summer. Three more followed. But it was the last before the unraveling became unmistakable. By 1989, events in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere had made the crisis of the communist world impossible to conceal.

In 1988, the façade still stood – teetering – but from across the vastness of Europe and the oceans, it was easy to mistake for something solid. The Soviet Union could still compel obedience. What it increasingly could not command was belief.

Discredited political ideas can seem abstract when the generations that experienced their consequences disappear. Words acquire new meanings. Old promises receive bright new packaging. Socialism can become whatever its latest advocate wants the word to mean, collectivism can sound warm, and Marxism can be detached from the governments that attempted to implement it in the past.

But history does not disappear merely because living memory does.

I went to the Soviet Union expecting to encounter America’s great rival. I found one. Its weapons were real. Its power was real. I also encountered a system that seemed to have exhausted its promises before it exhausted its power. At seventeen, I could see the symptoms without fully understanding the disease.

Nearly forty years later, it is worth going back. All past is prologue. History leaves its warnings behind, but it cannot make us heed them. That part is left to us.