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Jim Wake is a freelance writer and journalist. He has been contributing to AkzoNobel publications since the mid-1990s.
In 1989 I was between lives. A couple of years earlier, I’d taken a detour from my career as a writer and journalist to join a software venture in Silicon Valley, but the project was unraveling and I’d been shown the door. I was contributing freelance articles to a local newspaper for about $100 a week and eating up my savings to make up the difference between what it cost to live and what I was earning. In contrast, my younger brother was a paragon of respectability – a young diplomat serving as Deputy Counsel in what was still called Leningrad at the time. He encouraged me to visit and in April of that year I flew to Helsinki and took the train to Leningrad. I was what you’d call a politically engaged person and I had a hunch that Russia, in the midst of “glasnost” and “perestroika” (openness and restructuring), would be a politically stimulating place to travel. But I never expected it would be quite as exhilarating as it turned out to be. It was in part thanks to my brother. He was the sort who played by the rules, but who was every bit as intrigued by politics as I was. In a sense, he was a sort of “above-ground” spy – part of his job was to know as much as was possible to know about the political climate in the Leningrad area and in the Baltic republics, where a long repressed nationalist fervor was coalescing into powerful independence movements. He’d met all sorts of fascinating characters, and within a few days of my arrival, he’d hosted a small reception at his apartment attended by artists, intellectuals and a handful of young political
activists allied with a fledgling opposition movement called the Democratic Union. They became my friends and often my guides as I explored Leningrad. I found that people all over the Soviet Union were hungry for Western contact. They invited you into their homes, fed you sweets and tea and forced you to consume copious amounts of cognac and vodka. Then they would lay into everything Soviet with a cynical vengeance. Some predicted the eminent collapse of Communist Party and Soviet rule, while others foresaw a cataclysm of violent repression. The disheartening crackdown in Tiananmen Square – which had been protested on the streets of Leningrad by liberals – served as an ominous reminder of what could happen. One of the things that astonished me as I wandered the streets of Leningrad was what a basket case the place seemed to be. This was a superpower? You couldn’t even buy coffee or sugar. One day I saw a crowd of people around the back of Gostiny Dvor, the large government-operated department store. It turned out they were mobbing a black marketeer who had a supply of razor blades. I was shooed away by a police officer when I tried to take pictures. Officially, I was required to pay $1.60 per ruble. Unofficially, street hustlers offered up to 12 rubles per dollar. I traveled widely – to the Baltics, Georgia, Armenia, Minsk and Moscow – and around the outskirts of Leningrad as well. In the Baltics, they were already acting as if Soviet rule was a thing of the past. At the end of May, I traveled to Georgia with my parents and my brother. The day after our arrival, we were out on the main street near our hotel and saw a boisterous crowd approaching. We asked what was going on. It turned out that we had arrived