A Common Bond of Fear with Black America

Multiracial America is split over the decision in the O.J. Simpson trial. Eight thousand miles away, our uniracial but multicultural Russian-American family is split too. The debates are still going on in our Moscow kitchen. For my wife, it is clear that Simpson is guilty. But had I been a member of the jury, I probably would have voted to acquit.


American football means nothing to me. I didn't know who Simpson was until the trial. What decided me was the suggestion that racist Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman might have planted evidence. My reaction was the same as black America's.


Why? The answer took me back to the late '70s. I remember I was walking in a distant park with my first American friend, a Russophile named Anne. Suddenly we saw a militiaman coming. A flowerbed separated us: We could either go around the other side, or we could keep going straight toward the militiaman. I instinctively went the other way. "Why are you afraid of him?" Anne asked. "He wasn't even looking at you." I was embarrassed. What could I say? How could I explain the involuntary, sheer animal fear in the pit of my stomach? I felt like the rat in the classic Skinner experiment with the T-shaped corridor: If the rat is presented with the smell of a cat, it invariably runs the other way.


Anne's legacy was not confined to this less-than-successful psychological test, she introduced me to my future wife. A dozen years later, from under the shattered Iron Curtain, we finally managed a visit to the United States together. Among the things I liked best about America were the smiling policemen. How can that be? I thought. You're in the wrong, and he's not insulting you. Not using foul language. Not demanding a bribe. He's smiling and even apologizing: "Sorry folks. If you'd come back to your illegally parked car a little bit sooner, I wouldn't have had to fine you, but I've already made out the ticket."


By this time I had heard enough about American realities to be able to explain how I felt about the KGB in the following terms: Say you're on the New York subway and you get off at the wrong stop by mistake and a gang of threatening teenagers is coming right for you. You stop breathing, inside everything turns to stone, you break into a cold sweat. That is exactly how I felt when I heard the obsequious voice at the other end of the line: "Nikolai Aleksandrovich? Hello. This is the Committee for State Security calling." To understand what the "Committee" is, imagine that you are utterly defenseless before the gang bearing down on you, they can get you anytime they like, and if they don't, it's only because they're too busy getting someone else.


A year ago I realized that my impression of smiling American policemen was fairly one-sided. I knew enough English to understand American television. It was the anniversary of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and a black boy was describing the way he felt, how his insides froze, every time he walked past a policeman. I was astounded ? that was just the way I felt. The language of the stomach in knots transcended the English.


Nobody has to tell me about the way cops cheat. Once the younger brother of a friend of mine (again in the '70s) was picked up outside his apartment building: So as not to bother his grandfather, Alyosha had gone out at midnight to smoke. The police beat him the whole night at the station and in the morning he signed a confession that he had tried to rape someone. Two years later, Alyosha died of a ruptured aneurism. Nobody will ever be able to prove a connection between these two events.


Another boy from a neighborhood school was arrested on the eve of his graduation exams, again for attempted rape ? this time of a 12-year-old girl. But instead of beating him, they needled him: "You want to pass your exams, don't you? And you'd rather go to university than be drafted, wouldn't you? But you see, if you don't sign a confession, we can't release you. If you sign, we'll take care of everything. After all, we know you're not guilty." The girl could not identify the boy, but this was attributed to mental stress. Meanwhile, the boy, instead of his graduation paper, whipped off a 10-page tract on his "crime."


We didn't step on big landmines like that often, but we all stepped on small ones. My brother-in-law was thrown into an investigation cell for three days, accused of attempted auto theft simply because he had looked inside an unlocked car where the driver seemed to be passed out at the wheel.


When I was in the ninth grade, I was held for attempting to break into a bakery, drunk no less. The attempted break-in had occurred a half hour earlier, and I could not have sobered up in that amount of time, but the babushka eyewitness kept saying: "I guess that's him, I guess that's him." I had a simple choice to make: I could either go to the station, or I could prove my alibi and take the militiamen to the apartment of my relatives where I had been drinking tea. But how could I take them to an apartment overflowing with samizdat, to an apartment where they remembered numerous arrests under Stalin?


How could I be sure the militiamen wouldn't suddenly decide to search the apartment? Fortunately, the door was opened by Vitaly who knew better than to let them in. He came out onto the landing and confirmed my alibi. That time they didn't search me. I don't remember if I had anything with me (my friends and I were forever exchanging forbidden books). But I well remember my automatic sense that I was, indeed, a criminal.


I was searched only recently, last year in Almaty. I was walking through a park, on my way to a friend's house. Ahead of me were two men on horseback."Some things really have changed for the better if now anyone can take horseback riding lessons," I thought to myself. Alas, these were not athletes, but mounted Kazakh militiamen. They stopped me and pulled everything out of my rucksack.


"What are you afraid of?" one militiaman sneered.


"I'm not scared, I just don't like the militia."


"What, were you in prison?"


"No, I wasn't in prison, I just don't like the militia," I muttered.


"What do you mean, you don't like us?" the other one said threateningly, evidently suspecting an insult to his national pride.


"No, no, I don't like all militiamen. I don't like the ones in Moscow either," I said quickly.


Strangely enough, that explanation satisfied the Kazakh guards. I imagine that most Kazakhs living in Moscow feel the same way I do about the militia.


In Russia, there have always been two nationalities: People in uniform and people not in uniform. Unfortunately, the profound distrust of the ones toward the others is bound to color Russian life ? and hinder the implementation of an effective legal reform ? for a long time to come.





Nikolai Formozov is a researcher in the biology faculty at Moscow State University. He contributed this article to The Moscow Times.