Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

History is rife with waves of joyful transformation followed by descent into horror. A culture’s relationship to its history often reflects the citizenry’s sense of agency. Some cultures see history primarily as something that happened to them; others, primarily as something they did. Chronologies of events are often less significant than people’s understanding of the relationship between past and present; a revolution may represent both the full realization of a long tradition and a break from it. Democracy tends to arrive with an aura of revelry, which is partly to do with democracy but partly to do simply with arrival. Witness the Arab Spring, which delighted people in the countries where change was occurring as well as people abroad, many of whom erroneously assumed that whatever would come next must be better than what was being left behind.

The nearly universal fear of extreme change on an individual level sits comfortably beside the heady prospect of change in the vast company of one’s fellow citizens. I am susceptible to that little moment of romance when a society on the brink of change falls temporarily in love with itself. I’ve heard the same people speak of the great hope they felt when Stalin came to power and the hope they later felt when he died; others, of the hope they felt when the Cultural Revolution began and the hope they felt when it ended. The insistence that change is possible is a manifestation of hope. Many societies have reached forward, and for some, conditions really did improve; for others, not. Life in Russia in the twenty-first century is better for the average Russian than it was when the serfs were freed, but not by nearly enough. Afghanistan remains a mess. Iraq and Syria have degenerated from ostensible liberation to vicious bedlam. Libya was much worse under Qaddafi than anyone who hadn’t been there could understand, but it would be a stretch to describe its current condition as anything short of disastrous.

Sometimes, however, a great tyranny is dismantled. For all that has gone wrong in South Africa, the downfall of apartheid has renewed the world’s faith in decency. Life is better in China, too, than before Deng Xiaoping, though with plenty of room for improvement. Hope is a regular chime of political life; Americans lapse into it every four years, when many of us presume that our one-minute act of self-determination at the polling station might shift history. Walter Pater identified experience, rather than the fruit of experience, as life’s goal. Zhou Enlai is said to have suggested that it is too soon to judge whether the French Revolution was a success. But the French Revolution was not only a route to a new order; it was also an event in itself. Moments of shift can be valuable even if their promises are never realized. My lifelong fascination with resilience has often propelled me to places in the throes of transformation. Time has made me more cynical than I used to be; at history’s crossroads, changes that seem to be for the better often backfire, while great advancement sometimes goes hand in hand with tragedy. Nonetheless, the feeling of newness and rebirth is significant even when it dawns in a society muddled in perennial uncertainties. Furthermore, change is often the product not of gradual erosion but of burgeoning false starts; transformation arrives only when two or three or ten failed inceptions accumulate into a breakthrough.

Conversely, change prompts immediate nostalgia. A better present does not erase a flawed past, and no past wants for elements of great beauty. A person’s ability to remember an expired identity yet live in the present tense contains real valor. In 1993, one of my Moscow friends took me to see an old woman she knew. We climbed seven narrow flights of stairs to reach her cramped, dark apartment. She told me about growing up in a palace in St. Petersburg. Almost everyone she knew had been killed in the 1917 revolution. Later, she had lost her husband to hard labor in the gulag. She had managed to keep only one relic of her aristocratic origins: a teacup of nearly transparent Imperial Porcelain, elaborately painted with a pastoral scene. Because I was an honored guest, she served me tea in it. I have shaky hands at the best of times and have never wanted less to handle anything than I did that fragile emblem of a vanished life. “Who knows?” said my friend, who knew the older woman’s stories by heart. “Maybe with glasnost we will live in this way again.” The old woman only laughed. “No one will ever live this way again,” she said, and urged us to have more of the cake she had baked following a recipe from the czar’s court, with ingredients that she’d stood in lines four consecutive days to buy. That cake and that teacup: what courage she had evinced in her survival, and what passion lay in those last links to who she had been. She was wistful only as most old people are homesick for their youth.