Dezhurnaya
One day In the Fall of 1986, a brochure came in the mail for a lawyer’s tour of the Soviet Union. I signed up and arrived in Moscow with a bunch of other LA attorneys on January 10, 1987. The first surprise was the shabbiness of the airport.
The next surprise was the shabbiness of my room in the enormous Rossiya hotel. This photo is exactly as I remember it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dhj9V2PXUAEZPJB.jpg
Gorbachev was trying to revive the USSR and, although we were chaperoned, our guide was young and skilled at being relaxed and friendly without saying anything critical of her country or government. Americans had no idea of how low the standard of living was. I was shocked by the meager offerings in their stores and general poverty. It seemed odd to me that I had never read anything about it, even though my college major was called “Russian and Soviet Area Studies.”
The hotel was organized by wings and floors. Each had a middle-aged woman with a dour expression called a dezhurnaya. I assume it comes from the French (du jour) beloved by Tsarist era aristocrats. You left your key with her when you went out. We assumed our lady was also tasked with reporting any American funny business to the KGB.
This lady looks a little friendlier than the dezhurnaya on my floor: http://vwp.su/pic/06img_set/d32e34345_0004.jpg
One night there was a fire. I later heard it was started by a television set. I also heard that there was a fatality.
The Americans on my floor smelled the smoke and started banging on doors to get people up and out of the building. The dezhurnaya sat at her desk waiting for someone to call her and tell her what to do. When I went outside, I could see the smoke was coming from a different section of the building, I remember a somber-faced fireman coming out. He looked tired with soot mixed with sweat on his face. He was older and short but still strong and lugging heavy gear, as dedicated and self-sacrificing as any fireman anywhere.
The passivity of the dezhurnaya was the most compelling impression of the trip. The complete absence of initiative stood in stark contrast to the self-organizing Americans.
Many years later, I visited Moscow after the Iraq war had gone wrong and the fact that it had been a mistake was becoming plainer by the day. I was riding into town in a cab that had a cracked windshield. The driver asked me”how could such a rich and powerful country elect a fool” as president.
I don’t remember what I answered. But the question made me realize that the great strength of the US system was not in picking great leaders. It was rather that it enables the populace to get rid of bad ones. Compare that with the poor Russians who will be stuck with Putin and his kleptocrats probably until he dies in office because under an amendment to their constitution that was just enacted, he can remain president until 2036.
And the American people have steadily improved their society. It’s not that we don’t mess up. We are sometimes number one at that. But we are reliably self-correcting. It may take a long time, but eventually, when things get bad enough we fix ourselves.
