The booth was full of holes, but the narrow slit prevented me from seeing fully what was happening inside. As the border guard clicked his invisible apparatus, I guessed that he was sending a picture of my passport to headquarters, where it was being checked against the KGB mainframe computer. All the while he was talking to his superiors on the phone. The guard queried the duration of my visa, and wanted his superiors' blessing. Even in Gorbachev's Soviet Union, no one will take responsibility if he or she can avoid it.  Satisfied, though, he waved me through.

I had been invited to the Soviet Union for the Compatriots' Congress in late August — the biggest reunion of Russian émigrés and exiles in Russian history. It was to be the first time émigrés could come back home not as prisoners in handcuffs or in sealed trains but as free citizens.

Still, I had my doubts about accepting the invitation. You become careful after spending half your life under threat of a death penalty. Only a year before, when I ventured into Russia for the first time in almost thirty years, I was, despite my formal rehabilitation by the authorities, detained on the border and held incommunicado for nine hours as soon as I disembarked my Aeroflot flight at Sheremetievo.

            So this time I decided to stop in Moscow briefly on my way to Europe, where I had other business to attend to before returning to the Congress. I wanted to smell the air for potential danger. It seemed reasonably safe, although the tension was almost palpable. Boris, my nephew, a captain in the police force, assured me there was no immediate danger of a coup. It was 1991. (How wrong can an "insider" be!) 

            Yet, as I reboarded my flight to Moscow from Paris almost a month later, my heart sank. Just a few days before, I wrote a poem, in which I spoke of my life as a "free fall into destiny". What was the destiny that awaited me? Surely, the conservatives could not tolerate a swarm of the past "enemies of the people" descending on Moscow at the invitation of Yeltsin's government? Yet I could not, would not, turn back. I had to face my destiny. At least this time I would not be alone, but with hundreds of others like myself.

The Author revisits Tomsk Psychiatric Hospital where he was incarcerated in 1962 and from which he escaped before his "treatment" commenced. Almost 30 years later and despite perestroika, the doctors refused to let him in and declined any attempts to interview them. (Author's photo, 1991)

So the Congress was going to be an occasion for formal reconciliation with my native country. Russia welcomes back its prodigal sons and daughters, seeking their advice and their views on the future of the country. Among other things, I brought with me my translation of a book on conflict resolution, negotiation and mediation skills, written by two Australian women, Helena Cornelius and Shoshana Faire — a resource badly needed in the Soviet Union as it began to split at the seams, baring conflicts suppressed for decades. The book, and my presentations at various round table discussions with Soviet and western experts, provoked a great deal of media interest. Yet my feeling of uneasiness remained. It all seemed too good to be true. My instincts told me that the people whose mentors had destroyed sixty million lives to get and keep their power and privileges would not simply walk away from it all.

On the night of the August 18, the eve of the coup, when senior Party and KGB officials moved to overthrow the Government, I had a dream. I was standing in front of a window, trying to hold it firm shut against a terrifying gale as at any minute the window could cave in. On the floor, I saw my sister, asleep with a child in her arms. I tried to wake her and tell her of the danger.

Next morning, I was woken up by a call from Australia. It was Pria Viswalingam, the presenter of the SBS TV Dateline show, asking me if I knew of the coup. I turned on a TV set in my room. An orchestra was playing against a background of tranquil meadows. An hour later, the announcement coup was read out. Nightmare had become reality.

That morning, the Congress members were invited to a special service in one of the Kremlin cathedrals with Alexey, Patriarch of All Russia. It was the Transfiguration service. As the ceremony proceeded, tanks and armoured vehicles gathered around Red Square, preventing our buses from leaving.

The next night, August 20 was the most terrifying. I had come from the Russian Parliament, known as the White House, which was surrounded by makeshift barricades manned mostly by young and inexperienced people, with a sprinkling of Afghanistan veterans, I was thinking: this is the Ghost Dance of the American Indians, trying to stop the well-armed whites by prayers and fasting. It looked like an exercise in futility, reminiscent of China's Tiananmen Square with its polystyrene Goddess of Democracy two years before.

I took up a position by the window of my hotel — an excellent observation point from which I could see parts of Red Square and the roads which led to the Kremlin. My faithful portable shortwave radio stood on the window ledge, linking me to the world. Through the light drizzle, I could see KGB limousines scooting, like hungry black cockroaches, to and from the Kremlin through streets emptied by the curfew. Suddenly, some time after midnight, Moscow Echo — the last voice of independent broadcasting in Russia — went off the air with an announcement of the impending siege of the White House by government troops.

I checked a change of Soviet-made clothing hanging in my wardrobe, in case I had to go into hiding or had to make my way to the border secretly.

I had no illusions of safety, despite a reassuring call to the Australian Embassy; if this mob could hijack a legally elected President together with his nuclear codes, my Australian passport and my journalistic credentials were not going to impress them.

This was crazy, I thought. I was going to have to repeat a journey I had made 29 years ago. I thought of heading for Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and somehow getting on the first train to Finland. A repeat of the 30-kilometer swim at my age and in that season in the Black Sea didn't appeal.

In the background, the TV kept broadcasting Swan Lake.  I slept fitfully for about an hour, seeing visions of Michail Baryshnikov pursued by men with submachine guns as he pirouetted into the sunset.

As news of Yeltsin's victory and Gorbachev's return to Moscow spread, I went to the White House again. For the first time in my memory, people in the subway seemed alive. Their faces were shining with subdued joy. As there were still no newspapers, crowds clustered around posters in the subway. A middle-aged man was reading a leaflet haltingly but proudly to the whole crowd.

That morning after the lifting of the unsuccessful siege of the White House, I felt a sense of profound gratitude for the people who had stood at the barricades, and for the three young men who had died defending their — and my — freedom. For the first time in years, I felt proud to be a Russian. Finally, it seemed, the Wall of Fear in Russia had come down.

Muscovites demonstrate at the Russian Parliament against the Communist-led coup.
(Photo courtesy The Good Weekend, 1991) 

After the Congress, I planned to fly to Siberia to visit my family. My nephew, Boris, still concerned about my safety, volunteered to come with me as companion and bodyguard. Unable to get plane tickets in time, we loaded a king-size can of Mace, together with some provisions, into our knapsacks and prepared for a three-night, two-day train ride across the Urals.

But the journey turned out to be relatively uneventful. The two women conductors in our car plied us with endless cups of tea, complaining that they had not seen any sugar for two months. Luckily, we had a can of jam with us, which served as a sweetener. Peasants on platforms sold pickled cucumbers and hot potatoes with sour cream at prices that were ruinous to locals but ridiculously cheap to us foreigners. A dollar would buy the two of us an ample if plain meal, with some change to spare.

Children played in the corridor. A worker in our compartment kept saying he did not mind who governed the country, as long as he could get a decent wage and buy things in shops. Leaking pipelines and belching smokestacks flashed by the window, interspersed with mist-covered lakes and ancient farm houses.

In Novosibirsk we were joined by my sister as we headed for Kolpashevo, my old “home”. During my previous visit, I was not allowed to go there. This was the town where tens of thousands of prisoners were butchered by the NKVD in the thirties as the river told us.

I was prepared for anything on arrival in the town. We came incognito, without even bothering to register at the local police station (our stay was to be only two days). A few months earlier the editor of the local paper was nearly sacked for reprinting an interview with me published in Sibirskaya Gazeta. A coterie of war veterans published a denunciation of my forthcoming visit that amounted to a war cry. I was a traitor who could not be tolerated on native soil. They were going to show me who was boss. That was before the coup, of course.

My first day in Kolpashevo was miserable. A light drizzle made everything look gray, misting the lenses in my camera, making it hard to take good photographs. We came to the war memorial – and my father's name was missing from it. The Party was eternally vigilant. The father of a "traitor" had no place among those who were the "approved" dead. (We must make sure his name is restored to its rightful place I thought.)

There was a ditch near the town store where I often played as a child. This was where I was sent to buy a bottle of vodka, and, unable to resist the temptation, bought myself a pocketknife instead and got a terrible thrashing. I stood now in front of the ditch. The 30-odd years that have passed had filled it with the debris of time: old shoes, plastic bottles, newspapers, and common dirt. I thought: this is my body, its memory crevasses dulled, made shapeless by the passage of time. I thought of that other ditch, the unmarked mass grave a few hundred meters away, on the riverbank. My little Siberian town was a monument to the tragedies of my country.

The Author's brother and two cousins at a picnic against the background of communal flats in the Siberian city of Tomsk (Author's photo, 1991)

As had happened so many times in the past — with the Aztec mass sacrifices, the medieval witch-hunts, the Holocaust, the Pol Pot massacres — the Big Promise had gradually turned into a Big Lie.  In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party bosses ended up building giant mausoleums and using the profits from their Chernobyls to give their children piano lessons and themselves Finnish saunas and imported toilet basins.  Their main purpose, as Orwell said so well, was to destroy the memory of the past and thus control the future.

All I could do was to try to salvage my personal memories, my own witch-hunts and Chernobyls.

Later, as we stood over the graves of our grandparents, I recalled that they had gone to their graves without the traditional forgiving of each other. For a moment I felt overcome by a sense of my own inability to forgive and to feel gratitude for life, (no matter how terrible).

It seemed to me then that this inability to forgive; this lack of faith and charity  - and not just the communists or the pollution - was the true cause of the destruction of human and material values I saw around me. It was the anger that we passed on from generation to generation. Some call this anger the original sin. Standing at the graves of our ancestors, my sister and I promised solemnly to forgive others and ourselves before we died.

On the day of my departure, the local newspaper asked me to give an interview and write a personal message to the town folk. I wrote of hope and reconciliation.

Next, we went to Tomsk, to visit my mother and brother. My brother was waiting outside mother’s apartment building, sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette. He was waiting patiently, although he even did not know the day of our arrival. I walked into the tiny flat. My mother stood in the middle of the room, slightly shrunken, but still sprightly despite her 86 years of harsh and demanding life. She was dressed in her habitual neat self-made caftan. She glanced at me fleetingly, greeted me briefly and then, much more openly and joyfully, Boris. A little wound opened again in my heart — I had been away too long.

The Author's sister. In the background is the police station in Kolpashevo in the vicinity of which mass graves of executed prisoners were uncovered.

Relatives came and went, sharing with me memories of their lives and their interrogations by the police after my escape. For the first time, I could tell them the full story. I was no longer the pariah of the family, lost to foreign shores. I was treated more as a sort of hero who came back from a long and dangerous odyssey. Even my older brother, who thought me a bit of an idealist, was impressed by my ability to convert pieces of plastic out of my wallet into bottles of imported cognac and cartons of otherwise unavailable cigarettes.

I felt contented but not happy. Where do I really belong? I recalled an old émigré, a ballet teacher in France who used to say: "When I am with the French, I know I am not French. When I am with the Russians, I know I am not Russian".

C'est la vie.

But, finally, it was over. I said goodbye to mother, sister and brother, unsure when we would meet again. We all knew a harsh winter was coming — not only with shortages, but with chilly winds of anger and grieving and decades-old fatigue.

The demagogues and the party sorcerers would be out in force again, finding scapegoats, proposing instant solutions to the bitter and the disillusioned. I recalled an acquaintance of my sister, a Party member, who brooded darkly over the failed coup and the "Gorbachev conspiracy" to destroy the Party, while savagely pruning trees at his country dacha.

It seemed to me then that even Russia, let alone the Soviet Union, would need a miracle to survive without selling its soul to the dark forces that would promise it salvation. Packs of scavengers, small and big, East and West, talking of "untapped resources" were poised to tear apart the remnants of Russia's ailing, poisoned body that would require another generation to heal.

Only a miracle can save Russia, I thought, as I drove back to Sheremetievo, my body groaning and creaking under a month-long overload of cholesterol, alcohol and nitrate residues, compounded by lack of sleep and emotional turmoil.

The taxi driver, a longhaired fellow looking like a relic of the 60's, played tapes of Russian protest songs that already seemed an age out of date. I thought of Russia's past and remembered the most poignant Russian fairy tale I knew: of Prince Ivan, lying in the field, hacked to pieces by Kashchei the Deathless, the evil male spirit who has been haunting Russia since times immemorial. Ivan is finally saved and resurrected by the powerful animal spirit to whom he had wisely betrothed his three sisters. The animals brought him the Water of Life to restore his life and limbs.

I remembered the women I had met on my journey — a professor of sociology in St Petersburg who was learning and teaching conflict resolution; a woman scientist in Novosibirsk who healed her son with native medicine and started a homeopathic and herbalist clinic; my own mother who held up through all the privations with her spirit intact and I thought:  maybe the miracle is already happening.

As I boarded the plane, I remembered a joke: it is easy to change capitalism into socialism — it is like making a fish soup out of an aquarium.  But it is much harder to reverse the process.  Yet, maybe the fish soup we were so artfully served was an illusion and the great fish of human faith was the reality that endured.  If so, Russia would endure too.  And with it, the world