Calgary, January 2020
Yesterday I got an obituary notice that my friend Alexei Ivanovic Pavlov died. It was no surprise; he was over eighty and his health was failing. Last time I saw him, shortly before his death, we talked about life and I asked:
“Alexei Ivanovic, we have known each other for a long time, but I could never figure you out. Who are you really?”
“I am nobody. I am neither Russian, nor Jew, nor American. I am nothing.”
The following is a toast to my friend Nothing.
As I said, we had known each other for a long time. We met at the Moscow State University where we both studied electrical engineering, but our friendship was not without problems. Alexei Ivanovic came from an orthodox Jewish family, and in Russia, antisemitism always was and still is strong. Unfortunately, my parents also suffered from that disease.
“Why are you hanging out with that stinking Jew!” yelled my father.
“He is not a stinking Jew; he is my friend!” I yelled back.
Needless to say, Alexei Ivanovic was not welcomed in my family, but I was not doing much better with his relatives.
“Why do you associate with this guy? You are Jewish and we are the chosen people. You should not degrade yourself by hanging out with others”, complained Alexei’s father.
“Given the long history of our suffering, I wish God had chosen somebody else” was Alexei’s standard reply.
In fact, Alexei was a Jew in name only. The religion meant nothing to him, and he hated the Jewish rituals of his family which he was forced to follow. He was not happy at home and after graduation he did not mind the one-year compulsory military service. The conscription system of USSR of the late 1960s required all young men to serve for two years, but university students did some military training while studying and after graduation they had to serve for one year as officers. This was way better then starting as a private and being abused by the sadistic superiors.
Alexei was hoping that by doing the year of service he will escape the orthodoxy of the Jewish religion, but the military replaced it with another religion: patriotic duty to defend his country against the attack of western capitalists and imperialists. “Why would western capitalists and imperialists want to attack my country?” Alexei wondered. Americans were already involved in their idiotic, unwinnable war in Vietnam and the last thing they would want to do is to start another war with the Soviet Union. But such a question could not be asked openly. That would be considered unpatriotic and there would be consequences. So, Alexei kept his mouth shut, just like he did at home.
After military service, Alexei presumed that finally he would be able to do what he had studied for; that is, to design electronic equipment. To find a job was no problem. The Soviet space program was at full swing; Russians were competing with Americans to send a man to the Moon and there were plenty of opportunities for young engineers. One particular place of interest was the city of Minsk, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Belarus. In the early 1960s the Minsk Plant of Computing Machines began to develop a family of computers, and by the 1970s Belarus was supplying 70% of all of the computer needs of the whole USSR. For Alexei, Minsk looked like a good place to start his career. He applied for a job, was accepted, liked his work and was good at it. All went well until somebody from the personnel department spread out the word that Alexei was a Jew.
Officially, antisemitism was prohibited in the USSR, but antisemitic traditions were strong, particularly in Belarus. During WW2 almost 70% of the Belarussian Jews were killed by the Germans and by their local collaborators. After the war, crimes against Jews were glossed over; neo Nazis liked to display Swastikas and the desecration of Jewish graves went unpunished. Therefore, Alexei was not surprised when he started to get nasty anonymous letters. He knew there was no point to show the letters to the police, so he contacted the small Jewish community in Minsk.
“You will get used to it; we all get these types of letters. Those people do not dare to commit murders or other serious crimes, they just want to intimidate you. The best thing is to ignore them”, said the local rabbi.
Alexei could accept that, but he had another problem. Being a young man, he was longing for a female companion, but antisemitism was a problem. It is not to say that all women were antisemitic but getting involved with a Jewish man was problematic. It was not socially acceptable, as one of Alexei’s coworker, Natalia, found out the hard way. She liked Alexei and he liked her. They started an affair which developed into a serious relationship, and they began to talk about marriage, but Natalia’s parents were dead against it. They threatened to disown her if she married a Jew. Alexei suggested to leave Minsk and move to a different city. Natalia reluctantly agreed, but her mom became hysterical. She cried and said that the move would kill her father and that Natalie would be responsible for his death. At the end, Natalia surrendered. There was no more talk about marriage, and even though they continued with the affair, it was not the same anymore. The hope of living together as a couple disappeared. One day Natalia, tears in her eyes, told Alexei:
“I will be getting married to a man that I do not love or want. I still love you, but I am weak, I have no strength to resist my parents anymore. Now I will lose not only you but also a job I like. I dread the future.”
“It is still not too late; we can leave Minsk together.”
“I am a coward. I do not have the will to do that.”
“Your parents do not care that they make you unhappy?”
“My parents care only about their own reputation.”
Alexei was not surprised, in a way he expected it. He immersed himself fully into his work and also began to learn English. The Soviet Union started to be more open and the English language became important for maintaining contacts with the outside world. But Alexei was not happy. He had a stigma of being a Jew, even though he did not feel like one, and that made him an outsider that did not belong to the Belarus community. Therefore, when in the late 1960s the Soviet authorities relaxed their emigration policies and began allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel, Alexei was one of the first to apply. “If they say that I am a Jew, I want to live in a Jewish state.”, he kept saying to himself. He was not alone, between 1969 and 1973 some 170,000 Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel. Such an influx of foreigners into the nation of no more than three million people caused problems. Besides the immediate need for accommodation and jobs, there were cultural clashes. The Soviet Jews, brought up in a secular state, had difficulties to adjust to Judaism, and the fact that almost nobody spoke Hebrew did not help. Considering all that, Alexei was lucky. In the 1970s the Israeli high-tech industry grew, mostly because of military needs, and scientists and engineers, particularly those who spoke English, were in demand. Therefore, Alexei soon found a job, making him a target of envy of his Russian co-patriots. But the religious frictions did not disappear. The Sabbath observation, the kosher food, no eating pork, all that appeared to Alexei as just a superstition. “Why am I supposed to follow all that? In Belarus I was too much of a Jew, and here I am not enough of a Jew. Why can’t I be left alone?” Those were questions without answers.
Alexei stayed in Israel for two years. Part of his job was to cooperate with various Americans who were working on joint Israel-American projects. Those guys were nice and friendly, talked about their life at home, and Alexei felt that perhaps the US could be the country where he would like to live. He inquired about the immigration, got some encouragement from his American friends, received several job offers, and accepted one from a large computer manufacturer in Boston, Massachusetts.
After he moved to the US, Alexei was happy in his new home, but he was lonely. He was approaching middle age and he was still hoping to find a female companion, but it was not easy. One problem was his accent, marking him as a foreigner, and foreigners are always suspicious. Also, Alexei was careful, perhaps too careful. He was making a good salary and was never sure if women liked him or only his money. The Russian community in Boston, with their hard-core anti-Soviet attitudes, was no help either. Alexei was not interested in political discussions. So, he stayed single.
You might ask: How do I know all of this? How do I fit into the story? Well, as I said, I have known Alexei for a long time, and throughout all of those years we kept in contact by exchanging letters. Therefore, I knew that he went to Israel, then emigrated to the US and lived in Boston. But unlike him, I stayed in Moscow, worked for the Soviet space program, got married and had a family. I have never thought of emigration, but life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s was hard. The disastrous war in Afghanistan consumed resources that the country could not afford to waste, and losing that war was a hard blow to the country’s prestige. Then came the Gorbachev years. His “Perestroika” and “Glasnost” were attempts to reform the Soviet economy by allowing some private enterprises and relaxing the censorship of the press, but the result was chaos. The economy collapsed, and even the Soviet authority admitted that about 20% of the population lived in poverty. Rationing for basic food was introduced for the first time since the Stalin years. The jobs in space industry disappeared and I became unemployed.
Because of all of that, I was forced to start to think about emigration. Therefore, in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union dissolved, I wrote a letter to Alexei asking him about the possibility of emigrating to the US. The response came promptly and was very positive. Alexei wrote that with my experience and knowledge of English, which I learned because of my job, I should have no problems. He advised me to apply for a visa while he made a request to the immigration authorities to allow him to fill a position which he created just for me. All went well, and there came a day when Alexei was waiting at the Boston airport for the arrival of me and my family.
It turned out that the emigration was a good move for us. I liked my job; Alexei was glad to finally have a friend, and my wife was happy to be able to speak Russian to somebody else beside myself. The years went by, my children became adults and we became old. Then came the obituary notice and now, when all is said and done, I raise a toast to my friend Nothing.