PITTSBURGH (TNS) — “Ho ho! Pink Floyd!” the fellow said, laughing. “Rolling Stones!” said his companion, also laughing. We’d met in a dark street in a major city, and they wanted to talk to my friend and me, even though talking to us was dangerous.

It was 1978, in Kyiv, if I remember right, when the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, a very bad man at the top of an evil regime, seemed invincible. Some scholars and observers predicted that the totalitarian regime would never fall, because its control was too complete and the people too powerless. It did, just a decade later, but as things worked out, now ruled by a tyrant, once himself a trusted servant of that evil regime, it didn’t fall very far.

We were just 22, and the two young men, just a few years older than we were, desperately wanted to connect with Americans, even though the only English they knew was the name of rock bands. We gave them a few they didn’t know, and they seemed very happy to have them. We parted cordially.

They’d taken a big risk coming up to us, because Soviet citizens were forbidden to talk to westerners without an official present. The penalties were said — Soviet officials themselves told us — to be severe.

A HAUNTING EVENING

I’m still haunted by the evening a week or so later, when a young man, also a few years older than us, slipped into our cabin in a campground outside Moscow. He was a very gifted violinist who had been brought to Moscow because he was rising to the top of the Soviet’s musical world.

We could see his status in the very nice, and well-fitting, suit he was wearing. We’d spent enough time walking around Soviet cities and taking the Moscow subway to know how the average Russian dressed. The clothing was what we would think of as cheap, both in material and in the careless way the clothes had been put together. I don’t think you could find clothing that bad in any thrift store in America.

He was a member of the elite, and enjoyed the privileges of the elite. Yet he couldn’t leave the country to perform because he was single and didn’t have a family for the state to hold hostage. He was held down by the Soviet version of golden handcuffs.

He spoke English well. We thought he would want to talk about America or his own country, but he didn’t. He wanted to about developments in music, at the level a serious musician talks about such things, which was many levels about ours.

All he could learn about serious music was what the officials in the music bureaucracy would let their teachers teach. Apparently, the Soviet cultural officials imposed a musical orthodoxy as they’d once imposed a literary and architectural orthodoxy called “Soviet realism.”

ORTHODOXY AND HERESY

Like “Soviet realism,” the musical orthodoxy did not allow much, if any, innovation and experiment, did not like the testing of boundaries, and that is what our guest wanted to do. And wanted to learn about from these Americans he could actually meet.

He wanted to talk about freedom, but a specific kind of freedom: the freedom of the artist to create what he has in him to create, to try to do something new, different, special. To say, in music, what he had to say.

He wanted to do something that ought not to have mattered to the people who ruled his life. What does it matter if one violinist creates something unusual, works outside the box?

But to the totalitarian mind, any deviation threatens the system, and the bureaucratic rule is better safe than sorry. The most musically esoteric experiment, that only sophisticated musicians would understand, looks like dissent, and dissent is intrinsically dangerous.

The violinist didn’t stay long. He clearly felt frustrated, even angry. He’d come up to one of the other people in our group on the street. That person had, in the careless American way, invited him to meet us, not thinking what a risk he would be taking and how little we would be able to do for him.

We had no reason to know his subject at his level — I wanted to be a writer, my friend to go into business — but we still felt terrible that we couldn’t tell him anything he wanted to know.

MY LAST MEMORY

My last memory of him is the soles of his shoes as we held his legs as he crawled through the little window at the back of our cabin, about 6 feet off the ground.

With us holding his legs, he would have been able to put his hands on the ground, but then he would have had to drop and roll in the dirt, in his nice suit. I’ve long wondered if the man we’d disappointed got up from the ground to find himself under arrest, and possibly off to the gulag.

It was almost impossible for us to see what life was like for him and others we met. Part of that was that as Americans we strolled through the world as if we owned the place.

A bigger part of it, I think, was that as Americans — and specifically educated middle class white kids — we simply could not imagine a state fundamentally hostile to us, one that would pointlessly frustrate us in the use of our gifts and demand from us allegiance to a dumb and crippling orthodoxy. We had been blessed to be oblivious.

As frustrating and sometimes angering as our country can be, I know, from those weeks in the Soviet Union, how how much damage a state can do. That regime fell, but the world is filled with others like it, if not quite as brutal. We could be living in one of them.

We’re not. We’re living in America, which maintains, even if imperfectly and selectively, a vision of human dignity and human freedom. It’s a reason for thanksgiving.

(c)2024 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Visit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at www.post-gazette.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.