Sitting in the second floor restaurant of Moscow’s National Hotel, near Red Square, Walt, and I were enjoying late evening tea with Russian pancakes and sour cream. We were talking about the ballet we had just seen at the nearby Bolshoi Theater and our jobs in the Embassy’s political section. It was late October in 1991, and Yeltsin had only been in power three months. The communists were out, but the conservative legislature resisted reform. No one said the words, but “civil war” seemed a possibility. Walt said, no, there was no going back, now that the people have had a taste of freedom.

The street names had just been changed, no longer called after “Lenin” and “Karl Marx,” or “Gorky” like the one out front had been. Statues of Lenin and communist slogans had mainly been taken down. Consumerism was taking hold, but democratic values were still not fully understood.

Images of the ballet we had just seen were floating through my mind, of the “Wilis,” the spirits of young brides left at the altar, suicides, hopping together each on one leg, bouncing in unison across the darkened, eerie set, their trailing legs extending straight out behind, two formations of dancers coming from opposite sides of the stage, passing through each other, with the swirling Alphonse Adam music in the background. It was pure beauty, one of the most beautiful things I know. How odd for ballet, to have the hopping, yet it was somehow graceful and gliding. The hopping maidens apparently touched something pagan in me, something subconscious, going back to archaic Greece.

It occurred to me as we were talking, that I had probably sat at this same table during my earlier tour, ten years before, when this was an Intourist hotel, and I was a junior Foreign Service officer ordering the same blinis and sour cream, coming here after some Soviet lecture, perhaps the one when an inebriated cosmonaut, Titov, the second after Gagarin, recounted his harrowing ride back to earth with no radiation shield, and an old woman in the audience yelling at him to stop, saying there were foreign spies in the audience, pointing up at me. What a society they had created. I said I would never return to Russia after that tour, but here I was.

Looking across the table, it occurred to me that Walt had not served in those days. He was a bit younger, and more open minded about Russia, not the Cold Warrior. But, he was not soft, either.  I admired Walt for his Russia knowledge and language skills, and for being an intellectual. He was a real Russia scholar, and the first in the Embassy to see that we had to give up on Gorbachev and go with Yeltsin.

Over the pancakes he asked: “Do you think Russia will make it?”  He was talking about the rough transition to democracy.  The elites were still divided between hard line conservatives and more moderate reformers.  On one week, Yeltsin would be on top.  The next week, the Duma would be openly challenging him.

“I think the Russian mentality is changing and that freedom can not be put back in the box,” I said..  “Communism will not reappear.  The Communist Party leader, Zyugannov, has little support.  But, Russia may suffer some setbacks over the next twenty years.  It will be a long process.  There may be some walking back from the free market and from Western style democracy, but they will get there.   They have to have time to change the mentality, to appreciate lawyers more and factory directors less. The mentality has to change, not just the institutions.”  I looked out the window at the bundled up pedestrians on the sidewalk below, heading home in the dark.

While Walt was looking at the street out front, I looked down to the alley below, and noticed a young white and gray cat searching for scraps near the street light.  Memories of another cat came to mind. I had a lump in my throat.

Walt said something that I didn’t get.

“I’m sorry, Walt,  what did you say?”

My mind was distracted, remembering Natasha, my cat from my earlier tour in Moscow, in 1980, when the Soviets were expanding into Afghanistan, threatening “Solidarity” in Poland, and shooting down Korean Airlines flight 007.  It was the low point of the Cold War, when American diplomats were being harassed. I had been jostled in Leningrad once.  There were “provocations,” Russian citizens passing us notes on the street.  Apartments would be searched and family photographs would disappear. Cigarette butts would be left behind. Car windshields were smashed. You might get bumped at a stop light by the car behind you. It might happen to your spouse. Sometimes there were physical attacks. The Russians answered our diplomatic protests by saying it was just drunks or “hooligans,” not the KGB.

During that tour, I had picked up a stray cat in my apartment compound, white with gray patches and green eyes.  She was a big talker who followed me around my apartment and slept on the bed.  I named her Natasha.  One day she slipped out of the apartment while workmen were there, and disappeared.  I was heart broken, and feared it was not an accident, but perhaps retaliation for my meeting with Soviet dissidents.  I watched for Natasha for the rest of the tour, for months, but never saw her again.

Seeing the white and gray cat in the alley brought the memory of her suddenly back.

Walt brought me back to the present, paying the check for the pancakes.   As we left the hotel and stepped out front, I could hear sparks from on overhead tram line. A white full moon was silhouetted against a starless black sky, illuminating onion domes across Red Square. I didn’t see any sign of the cat in the alley.