At first imperceptibly, the years of Soviet repression began to draw to a close. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had become head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and almost immediately, gestures of rapprochement with the outside world signalled an unprecedented thaw in relations between ideologically-opposed former foes. Acknowledging that the time for economic and social reform was long overdue, Gorbachev and his successors introduced into the English language the Russian words perestroika (‘restructuring’) and glasnost (‘opening’), oversaw the dismemberment of the former Soviet Union into fifteen separate republics, abandoned the unworkable communist state, whose promises of freedom, equality and material comfort and well-being had turned out to be a hollow travesty obvious even to the most doctrinaire Marxist, introduced a free-market economy and, crucially, facilitated greater freedom of expression and movement for the Russian people. This included the freedom to worship. In 1989, that brutal symbol of ruthless Marxist Soviet control of its subject peoples, Germany’s Berlin Wall, came down with a resounding crash, and the Russians this time did nothing to crush the spirit of those who brought it down, so unlike their previous willingness to interfere in the affairs of their Warsaw Pact allies—really puppet governments—in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in the early 1980s. It was, Olga’s husband Nikita told her, the right time to try to meet her father. It was, he might have said, time to close the circle.
The letters from Yevgeni had become sporadic and had then ceased. Olga, happy and settled in her new life as mother, wife, teacher, and productively grateful Canadian citizen, nevertheless began to yearn for contact with him. He was as he had always been, a “mythical figure, a great hero from a fairy tale: untouchable, perfect and comforting.” But this was no longer enough. He needed to become real for her. One day in 1986 she had found her father’s address in her mother’s desk in her condominium apartment and, without telling her, wrote to him.
Within two weeks, he replied. She did not tell him that his ex-wife knew nothing of the correspondence. He revealed that following his release from prison, he had worked in a hospital for tuberculosis patients, in a clinic for patients with venereal disease, then as a director of another clinic in Agora in the Krasnoyarsk District of central Russia, and as a radiologist in Izhevsk at the foot of the Ural Mountains, before retiring at the age of 55 on a minuscule pension. He had re-married, and his wife had helped take care of his widowed mother, Deda’s wife. Soon they exchanged telephone numbers, and Olga, knowing her father had to share access to a telephone with several others and would find the cost of a call prohibitive, finally summoned up the courage to call him herself. “My heart stopped when he answered. We could not talk. I know I cried, tears like those I had never cried before. These were tears for my living father, not for someone lost and found, but for someone misplaced for a long, long time, not forgotten, and now miraculously recovered! Burning tears both of joy and devastation. So much was no more. We had to grasp what remained.” Before she left Ottawa to meet him at a pre-arranged place in Moscow, Olga told her mother of her contact with her father. She was predictably shocked, but Olga was relieved that she no longer had to hide anything from her. The time for secrecy and subterfuge was long past.
