“You obviously have got to play the
dissident,” Amanda said, gazing out my Honda Civic’s front passenger window at
the seemingly endless kilometers of tall pines flashing past in a blur of
forest green.
“Why me?” I asked, throwing up my
hands, letting go of the steering wheel for just a moment,
causing the car to swerve unsteadily towards the sandy shoulder before bringing
it back onto the two-lane road.
“The Soviets considered all you
Lithuanian-Americans dissidents,” Amanda said, “and so they will view you as a
dissident whether you take on the role or not.”
“How about you?” I asked.“I will play an American who has come to the Soviet Union because I am enamored with the Soviet system: No unemployment; a flat for everyone; a chicken in every pot, and so on.”
I laughed. “You would,” I said.
“Hey, I don’t want any trouble,” Amanda said. “I’ve heard they push you, shove you, scream in your face, lock you up in a bona fide Soviet prison cell if they feel like it.”
“It would be too easy to turn this whole thing into a joke,” I mused.
“That would be a waste of our money, wouldn’t it?”
She was referring to the 100 litas ($37) each we had paid for the pleasure of putting ourselves in the role of a Soviet army recruit for three hours as participants in the 1984 Soviet Bunker Theater Show. You could only loosely call what we were about to experience a “theater show.” It was actually a participatory event, almost like a live reality show, only without the cameras, designed as an educational experience for Lithuanians too young to have experienced life under the Soviet occupation first hand and for foreign visitors who are curious about life in the occupied Baltic States. Actors play guards, KGB officers, and medical personnel and interact directly with the participants by immersing them in the experience. The entire show is conducted in Russian with no exceptions and it was up to you to understand or not. All the actors have lived the Soviet experience for real and therefore draw not only from their expertise as actors, but also from their own life experiences to recreate this evening of Soviet drama. According to the show’s director, Ruta Vanagaite, "Sometimes the actors get stuck in that time and forget they are actors. We had to fire some of them because they were a little too hard on people. It’s very easy to break people’s will – once you are down there, six meters underground and you feel like you can’t get out.”
The show takes place in an actual Soviet bunker located about an hour’s drive outside of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. Six meters underground, comprising 3,000 square meters of tunnels and cave-like rooms, the bunker was built in 1984 as an emergency base for Lithuanian state television transmissions, in case Vilnius came under attack from NATO. The bunker is equipped with stand-alone heating and sewerage facilities, communication lines to Moscow, and a roof designed to withstand the impact of a nuclear bomb. Needless to say, it was never used as shelter from a nuclear attack, but was used by members of pro-independence groups in the early nineties to disseminate information when Lithuanian radio and television was under siege by Soviet forces at the zenith of the independence movement.
A metal sign shot up alongside the road indicating that we had arrived at our destination. I pulled over and parked outside of the decrepit yellow brick building that served as the project’s headquarters, our first step into the netherworld of a bleak and terrifying Soviet reality. As instructed on the project’s web page, we placed our cameras, cell phones, GPS, and hand bags into the trunk of the Honda and headed inside the building. A woman dressed in a grungy gray Soviet-era quilt jacket and baggy gray pants ordered us in Russian to take off our jackets, hang them on the hooks provided, and put on one of the identical gray Soviet-era quilt jackets hanging on the coat rack. Dressed in our new clothes, Amanda and I were indistinguishable from each other, as well as from the other participants, who were standing around, giggling nervously or staring pensively. With the exception of two Italian university students, the other participants were mostly Lithuanian students, all of them looked too young to remember the Soviet occupation. There were few older Lithuanians as well. The banter among the groups of young people made it clear to me that they were here to have a good time. But what were the older folks doing here? Was it a need to return into the past? Or… Perhaps nostalgia?
A tough-looking woman gruffly shoved a clipboard at each of us and demanded we sign. I read the disclaimer. We would not hold the theater company responsible for any psychological or physical trauma experienced as a result of participating in the 1984 Soviet Bunker performance. The document clearly stated that “in case of disobedience participants may receive psychological or physical punishments.”
I signed.
The woman snatched back the clipboards and deposited them on a rickety Soviet-era metal desk.
A heavy-set young man dressed in a Soviet guard’s uniform muscled his way in and barked at us in Russian to follow him. He was followed by another guard, yanking back a snarling German shepherd on a short chain. He told us he would not hesitate letting the dog off its leash. All of us fell into immediate and total submission. We swiftly grouped ourselves into a line and marched outdoors behind the guard. He ordered us to stand in a row in a clearing in the forest. Friends grouped together. I stood beside Amanda.
The entire performance is conducted in Russian in order to replicate what it would have been like to live as an occupied people. You were expected to know the occupier’s language—he was not going to bother to address you in yours. I could understand about eighty percent of the guard’s orders because I have made an effort to learn Russian, which is a different language branch than Lithuanian, my second mother tongue. The older generation present spoke Russian fluently—the State language in their day. The younger Lithuanians caught the gist from a general passive knowledge of Russian that is common in the Baltic States because of the proximity to Russia and high population of Russian speakers. The Italians asked for clarification in English, and as soon as they did, our guard lifted his meaty fist threateningly and let loose a string of expletives.
The Italians shut up immediately.
Our guard demanded that we count off by twos in Russian: odin, dva, and so on.
“Odin, dva,” we counted off.
“I can‘t hear you!” the guard barked. “Louder!”
“Odin, dva,” we counted off, now with greater enthusiasm.
“Now, all of you who said odin step forward!” the guard shouted.
I stepped forward.
“Form a line!” he demanded.
I was separated from Amanda. I glanced back at her longingly. This was an old Soviet trick—to separate friends and family and regroup people.
“No looking behind you! March!” he shouted in a near hysterical frenzy.
Then he began to run in a trot. All of us odins trotted behind him. He demanded we chant, odin, dva, as we ran, and like a pack of fools, we did. We instantly lost our individuality. The dissident in me was not so much as putting up a fight. Would I really have been crushed that easily under the Soviet system?
We trotted behind our guard through a patch of forest and then descended into a cavernous opening into what appeared to be a man-made concrete cave. This was the bunker. I descended the tunnels and was amazed to see that long corridors extended in all directions in a web-like fashion. Rows of doors led inside individual rooms. We were ordered to jog behind our guard through the corridors. Panting to keep up as the group ran ahead of me, I was struck with a sobering thought: What if I could not keep up with the group and lagged behind and got lost in this underground concrete labyrinth? The low concrete ceilings began to weigh in on me. I glanced up and noticed that not just hairline, but rather large cracks ran across the length of the concrete ceilings. This bunker had been built decades ago, during the Brezhnev years, by Soviet workmen paid under the table with bottles of vodka. Would those ceilings hold? But there was no time for reflection now. The guard commanded we move swiftly inside a small room so that it didn’t seem possible our group could fit—group think had begun.
A primitive Soviet-era projector stood in the center of the room. A screen hung on the wall. The officer demonstrated how we must wait for the dvas to arrive by dropping down on one knee and tilting his chin upwards in servile anticipation towards the blank screen. He indicated that we must all do the same, adding a few succulent curses to get us in the right mood. We obeyed, dropping to our knees and striking the ridiculous pose, tilting our chins up expectantly. Our guard grunted his approval and snickered at our idiocy at the same time. Soon the bewildered dvas were herded into the room by the guard with the German shepherd. They were ordered to stand close behind us. I glanced around, looking for Amanda, but only caught a glimpse of half of her face at the back of the crowd. Because we were down on our knees and they were standing, the room could hold double the amount of the people than its normal capacity, an example of Soviet architectural ingenuity.
The ancient projector hummed to life and the year 1984 flashed onto the screen. Scenes of happy Soviets pouring out of concrete apartment complexes walking swiftly and stern-faced to their work floated across the scene. A narration in Russian described a happy utopian life in the Soviet Union in which every citizen was provided for: Amanda’s scenario. Scene after scene of utopian harmony and happy Soviet citizens enjoying lives lived in an orderly society flickered before our eyes. As I watched the film, I began to feel oddly comforted. I caught myself day-dreaming: What if such a happy world could actually exist? A world in which a responsible government, like a good parent, took care of everything for you and all you had to do was fulfill your daily quota and be happy the rest of the time? The images on the screen promised a world without the worry of putting a roof over your children’s head and food in their bellies. As the newsreel churned on, I forgot myself and became lost in the dream of the propaganda. I struggled to match the happy scenes on the screen with the Soviet reality I remembered seeing during my student visits to Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1983, 1984, and during the academic year I’d studied here in 1988-1989, but could not reconcile the two experiences. I forgot my current surroundings, my reality. I no longer cared that my knee was aching and trembling, supporting all my weight against the cold concrete floor and that the man crowded behind me was breathing hotly down my neck. I felt sad when the newsreel ground to a halt. I snapped back painfully into the present.
“Everybody up!” the guard commanded.
We leaped to our feet obediently. We were ordered to jog through the dark tunnels. I ended up at the end of the line and found myself just barely able to keep up with the gray-clad back retreating in front of me. The tunnel was not lit and I worried about tripping over something or making a wrong turn where the tunnel opened up and divided into two, sometimes three directions. Claustrophobic fears gnawed at the back of my neck as I ran: keep up, keep up, keep up with the crowd I repeated to myself.
I was so focused on keeping up that when we arrived in the gas mask chamber, I realized that I had not paid attention to how we had gotten there and had no idea how to get out of the labyrinth if I needed to. We were ordered to wait for the command to open the burlap bags laid out on the tables and listened to a drawn-out explanation of the rules and protocol regarding gas mask usage. When the order was finally given, we each opened our bags and removed an authentic Soviet-era rubber gas mask. Our guard delivered yet another long-winded explanation on how to disinfect our gas masks using a cotton pad dabbed in rubbing alcohol. He belabored every detail, emphasizing each point, as though he were addressing a pack of idiots, which to him, obviously, we were. Then, we were ordered to clean the gas masks ourselves. He paced the room as we rubbed our cotton swabs inside the gas masks, pausing only to shout at someone, humiliate them, or insult them on their stupidity. Once we were finished with this task, we were ordered to put on our gas masks. With the gas masks pressed firmly to our faces, we endured another long speech on how the enemy, the evil capitalist West, intends to invade the great Soviet Union with gas attacks and how we had to be prepared.
Wearing the gas masks, we were ordered to run, again, through the dark tunnels of the concrete bunker. After about fifteen minutes of running, with our gas masks fogged over, gagging for breath, we returned to the room for more “training.”
“You!” the guard barked at a young man standing in the line-up. The young man raised his finger and tapped his chest as if to say, “Who me?”
“Yes, you!” the guard screamed, his face growing red and hot with rage. The young man stood at attention. “Step forward!”
The young man took a hesitant step forward.
“How dare you conduct so serious an operation with a hard-on!”
The man gave the guard a look as though to say, “Are you kidding me?”
Everyone in the room burst out laughing at the expense of the young man, who stood there looking perplexed and furious all at the same time.
“Get the hell out of here!” the guard screamed, his voice reverberating against the concrete walls of the close chamber. “You’re a disgrace!”
The guard with the German shepherd grabbed the young man by the elbow and shoved him out of the room. That was the last we saw of him until the reality show was over.
“Now, I’m going to show you what to do in case of a gas attack from the Americans,” our guard explained, shifting his voice into an almost pleasant, friendly, tone. “I need a volunteer.” He scanned our crowd of gas-mask clad quilt-jacketed fools and broke into a seedy grin. With a leering, flirtatious, smile, he gently coaxed a stocky young woman out of the crowd. He handed her a white cotton sheet. She took it hesitantly.
“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to go to bed with me,” he grunted. “Open up the sheet and lay it on the floor.”
The girl began to giggle, looking over at her girlfriend, who snickered back at her.
The guard smiled coquettishly, but prudishly, like a prim old lady. “Davai, davai,” he said gently, motioning for the girl to spread the sheet down on the concrete floor and to lie down on it. Still giggling, the girl spread the sheet on the floor.
“Now grab the left top corner with your right hand and roll yourself up in the sheet,” he instructed.
The girl rolled herself up in the sheet.
“Everyone shout three times, urah!” the guard called out jovially.
And we did.
“That is how you survive a gas attack,” the guard announced triumphantly.
Somehow I had a hard time believing that an old bed sheet could protect anyone from a gas attack, but I was not about to argue. The girl unrolled herself, stood, folded the sheet, handed it back to the beaming officer, and returned to her place in the line-up.
After a brief tutorial on how to remove our gas masks and replace them into the burlap bags, we were again ordered to jog the corridors of the concrete labyrinth. Without hesitation we fell in step, jogging behind our commander, and soon found ourselves outside the Political Education Chamber—The Red Chamber. With a hushed reverence, our guard led us inside. He ordered us to stand at attention against both walls. Inside this small cell the walls were decorated with propaganda posters celebrating May 9, 1945. The collected works of Marx and Lenin were tidily arranged in a bookcase. A large desk dominated the room. Behind the desk stood a sly-looking, well-groomed, middle aged man in a more formal Soviet uniform, that of a higher level officer. He was the intellectual of the operation, I gathered, the brains behind the machinery. He was the KGB officer. I had heard that the show’s director had recruited unemployed ex-KGB officers to play these roles—for the sake of authenticity.
After a pregnant pause, the KGB officer emerged majestically from behind his desk and paced around the room, looking each of us menacingly in the eye. He took a small book from his desk and began to read out loud to us, as though we were a gaggle of school children. The gist of the text was that one was either for or against the Party. If you were against the Party, then you must be terminated. If you were for the Party, the Party would take care of you. The KGB officer then spoke of Siberia, of concentration camps, of a variety of possible punishments for those who disobeyed. He stepped behind his desk and pulled a sheet of white paper from his drawer.
“You!” he demanded, pointing at a young man, “come here.”
The young man did not seem to understand Russian, so the person standing beside him pushed him forwards.
"You don’t understand Russian?” the officer sneered.
The young man shook his head, no.
“A disgrace!” the KGB officer bellowed, “An illiterate! We have an illiterate among us!” He shoved the blank sheet of paper at the young man. “Sign here!” he shouted, tapping the bottom of the page with his index finger, and then thrusting a pen at him. The young man dutifully signed on the bottom of the blank page. The KGB officer snatched the paper and held it aloft triumphantly. “Now I have a signed document!” he said, pacing around the room, shoving the paper in our faces. “I can write anything I like on the top of the page and it is a legal document. It contains his signature.” Then he turned to the young man, “Perhaps I should write that you agree that your family are traitors and ought to be sent to Siberia? Ah? Or do you agree to come and see me every Thursday and tell me about your friends? I don’t need to know a lot, just the moods of your friends, what they are talking about, what concerns them.”
The KGB officer stopped in his tracks and gazed at each of us through narrow brown eyes.
“All of you have families, right? And you want your families to be safe, don’t you? Then, you ought to have no trouble agreeing to help us out.”
The officer stepped from person to person and posed the question directly to each one of us: “Do you agree to collaborate with the KGB?”
Person after person calmly gazed back into the KGB officer’s eyes and answered, “Da,” yes, I will collaborate. Just like that. No one resisted. Not one person in the room so much as hesitated before answering. All of them agreed to inform on their associates. Of course, this was only a reality show, but still? Because everyone had agreed to collaborate and not one person had resisted, the KGB officer moved through the room rather quickly. I was the second to last person left. He soon ended up in front of me. He looked deep into my eyes and calmly asked, “Will you collaborate with the KGB?”
The answer that rose up from deep within me was “Nyet.” No, I would not agree to collaborate or inform.
I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t rehearsed it. The word simply came spontaneously to my lips and once it was there it seemed absolutely right.
“Perhaps you misunderstood my question,” the KGB officer cooed. “I will rephrase it.”
He repeated his question.
Again, I answered, “Nyet.”
I knew my defiance was not about bravery, not about patriotism, not even about principle. It was about ego. I would not allow myself to be broken and that was final. In that moment, I was convinced that I would prefer death to buckling in to the KGB officer by saying, “Yes, I will collaborate.” In that moment I had learned something about myself: I was no hero.
I’d always had this nagging feeling inside when interviewing prisoners of conscience that their resistance was somehow about them. Editor and typist of the human rights journal, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania, Nijolė Sadūnaitė, used to play mind games with her interrogators. She wore them down. Even now she lights up when she talks about “the good old days” and all the excitement of being locked up in solitary, arguing with her interrogators, getting exiled to Siberia, and taking it all in stride. “It was like a tourist trip, she likes to say glibly. “They take you to the wilderness for free and provide you with armed guards to protect you from the local wildlife.”
It took not only strength of character to be a prisoner of conscience, but a healthy ego. In the dull gray monotonous world of the Soviet Union the only fun around was to challenge the all-powerful KGB to a good fight. I experienced that same thrill the moment I said, “Nyet.”
The group gazed at me in disbelief. The KGB officer ordered me to step forward. He told me to raise my arms. He told one of the women who’d agreed to collaborate to search my pockets and she did. This woman pulled out a plastic baggy with white powder inside of it and handed it dutifully to the KGB officer.
“Drugs,” the officer said in mock surprise. “Just as I suspected. We have a drug addict among us.”
He held the plastic baggy containing white powder up high for all to see. “Guard, bring her to the Med Punkt!”
The guard with the German shepherd wordlessly led me to the closed door of the Med Punkt, the medical center. I was told to wait in the hallway.
After a few minutes, the guard opened the door and shoved me inside. There were the dvas, lined up against the wall, looking aghast. In the corner stood a primitive Soviet dentist chair connected to a drill powered by foot pedal. The instruments laid out beside the chair looked rough, primitive, brutal. A terrified young man sat in the chair with his mouth hanging open, waiting for his “dental exam.” Meanwhile, the dentist, who doubled as a doctor, a Soviet bottle red-head with a cynical sneer, was busy behind a screen giving a frightened young woman a “gynecological exam.”
The doctor emerged from behind the screen and launched into a propagandistic tirade about how the Soviet citizen’s body belonged to the Communist State and therefore should be well maintained to serve the Communist State. To abuse the body was to cheat the State. There was nothing soft or conciliatory about her. She barked propaganda and waved her primitive sharp implements dangerously, flaunting her power over her victim’s bodies. She interjected two endearing words of praise, “pravilna” and “atlichna,” every few sentences to soften her harshness. She was terrifying in her cold precision. She was capable of petting you and being good to you if only you submitted to her will. She was the most dangerous type, the good cop and bad cop wrapped up in one. And she played her role exceedingly well. You can still occasionally meet her type on the trolleybuses—old women, now powerless, but once almighty during the Soviet era. They are the type who will give you a sharp elbow in the back, curse at you, and when you lose your own dignity and say something rude back, they smile and nod and accept you into their sordid fraternity with a commiserating smile.
The doctor launched into a speech about the evils of people like me who used drugs, and who undermined the utopia of the Soviet Union. She demanded to know who gave me the drugs. I answered simply, “Your KGB officer.” The doctor slammed her fist down on the desk, frightening the dvas lined up against the wall. She broke into a rant, spitting out her fury in a stream of superlatives. I had done the unthinkable. I had accused the KGB to her face. She finished her speech by demanding that I be placed in solitary confinement.
The guard with the German shepherd led me into a bare windowless cell painted that ghastly Soviet pale green one sees only in prison cells and in Stalin-era apartments inhabited by senior citizens who’ve not been able to renovate. Inside the cell was an iron bed with a badly stained mattress. A bucket stood in the corner. But the most frightening part was that the door had no handle. That detail shocked me out of the game for a moment. I began to imagine wild scenarios in which the reality show ended and the actors had forgotten to come back and unlock the door and release me. I assessed the bed frame. Could I lift it and knock out the door if necessary?
Stop it! I commanded out loud. I knew from prisoners of conscience that the only power the prisoner has is the power of the mind. I had to hold onto my will and I had to focus my thoughts and think positively. Locked up alone in this cell with no door handles, I could tumble into madness very quickly. I thought of what a real prisoner of conscience would have had to face in this moment: beatings, torture, interrogation.
Nijolė Sadūnaitė had been kept locked in one of these cells as her strength slowly drained away and her hair fell out. When she returned to her cell in 1991, days after the KGB evacuated headquarters after the failed putsch in Moscow, she found two large x-ray machines set up against the outside wall of her cell.
Eventually, the guard with the German shepherd did return to fetch me. I was passed on to a woman who led me through the corridors and whispered to me in Lithuanian, “You can get yourself out of this mess. When you go see the interrogator, all you have to do is sign a paper explaining that this was all a misunderstanding and that you agree to work for the KGB. Everything will be forgiven.”
This tactic was familiar—informers planted in the prisons who posed as fellow prisoners and who acted compassionately towards the prisoner who did not reveal information under torture. Their job was to gain that prisoner’s trust and to wheedle information out of them nicely. They proved to be more effective than the interrogators who administered brutal beatings.
I was led back to the Red Chamber. As I walked through the corridors I thought to myself: How far do I want to push this game? What will they do if I continue to resist? What other punishments have they devised for resistors like me? How far are they willing to go? I remembered the release I’d signed.
Just as I was brought back into the Red Chamber, a group was being led out and marched to the work camp. I fell in step and marched along with them. Nobody stopped me. I simply slipped away from the KGB officer. This was another absurdity of the Soviet system: Inconsistency. You could be an enemy of the state, but if the show must go on, you get overlooked.
In the work room we were given shredded canvas gloves and were instructed to haul scrap metal from one table to the next, our work quota. Our guard played with us by making us go faster, then slower, as if we were dancing some absurdist polka at the mercy of a mad fiddler.
When our work quota was complete, our group was herded into another room to view the electric chair. The guard explained to us that if we disobeyed orders, this was where we’d be brought to meet our end. Was this where I would have been brought—theoretically—had I continued to resist? Would my rebellious ego have been silenced into smoke? Gazing at that chair I was knocked out of the state of mind of the game and stood facing reality. The chair was real. And it showed signs of use. What terrified me more than the chair itself, was the stove pipe leading out of the back of the chair. The ashes and smoke had to be funneled out from somehow. This stove pipe was just like all the other common stove pipes one saw connected to wood stoves and masonry heaters all over the world—something practical and familiar.
The guard took in the frightened looks on our faces and let out a long hearty chuckle. That was the signal that the show was over. We were invited to visit the Beryozhka—the special shop for foreigners filled with Soviet “luxury” items. Our guard metamorphosed from a shouting tyrant into a great big puppy, laughing, telling jokes, entertaining us with his wit, slapping us on the back in a friendly manner. Even the German shepherd stopped barking and began wagging its tail and nudging his muzzle towards me to be pet.
Amanda and I were reunited when both our groups were herded together into the Beryozhka. Our now cheerful guard launched into playful descriptions of all the items for sale. He had the most fun with Soviet factory-issue women’s undergarments. He held up the biggest and ugliest bra I’d ever seen in my life, pressed it against his chest, and launched into a mock-propaganda speech on how, naturally, Soviet women have the biggest boobs in the whole world. We laughed heartily, partly because it was funny, partly to relieve pent-up tension. He invited us to select a gift for ourselves from the shop’s shelves.
Afterwards, we were led down the hall to the canteen for dinner, Soviet style. We sat in comradely fashion on benches pushed up against long tables covered in red table cloths. Amanda told me how she had immediately admitted to being an American early in the show and in the Red Chamber had gleefully written a statement saying how she wanted to immigrate into the Soviet Union. As we were talking, our KGB officer sauntered up to me and said gently in Lithuanian, “I was a little hard on you back there. Please forgive me.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Have a drink of vodka,” he said and poured me a shot.
I asked an older man seated beside us why he had come. He said it was his son’s birthday, and pointed to a young man who looked to be about twenty. He said his wife bought the tickets as a birthday gift, so their son could understand what life had been like for him and his grandparents, who had been deported to Siberia after World War II. He explained that he had been born in a prison camp. He had lived through the Soviet years with a constant nagging feeling of fear. This experience had brought it all back to him.
The 1984 Soviet Bunker show was an interactive theater performance and I always knew in the back of my mind that my tormentors were actors and that eventually the show would end and I would return to my normal life. I wondered, however, whether I was really so brave when I visited Soviet-occupied Lithuania as a high school student in 1984 and a few years later when I lived and studied there for a year in 1988-89? As an American citizen for me the Soviet Union was just one big reality show and I could always get out if I had to. But the people who lived in that system could never get out. I remembered a story a man told me about the first time who told he visited the West after independence. His first instinct was to “escape.” He spontaneously began running across an open field, until it dawned on him that Lithuania was free and that he could stop running now.
