Leningrad Revisited: Parallel Lives, Parallel Lines

Billy Joel’s Leningrad was one of those songs that arrived at precisely the wrong moment in my adolescence in the October of 1989, and therefore lodged itself with disproportionate force, offering, for the briefest of intervals, the illusion that the Cold War was not merely ending but dissolving into something gentler, almost utopian. I was fourteen, living in Budapest, and susceptible to the kind of sentimental geopolitics that only a teenager can sustain: I imagined that we were already living in the sweet hereafter. For a fleeting moment, the world seemed to be tilting towards reconciliation, as if history had finally tired of its own brutality and decided to give us a reprieve.

That moment lasted, in retrospect, about ten days. I remember watching the celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate on Sky News; the jubilant crowds, the champagne, the triumphant commentary, and then, in the corner of the screen, a banner hoisted by a group of revellers, a slogan I recognised instantly from the darker pages of my history books and from the way my grandmother’s face changed seeing it: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.

It was like a hairline crack appearing in what I had mistaken for solid ground, a reminder that the past does not vanish simply because we choose to forget it. The sweet hereafter evaporated, and in its place came the first adult suspicion of my life: that history is not a story with a moral arc but a set of forces that can reassert themselves at any moment, indifferent to our hopes.

Decades passed, and then someone who mattered wrote to me, with the startling candour of someone raised in a place where danger was theoretical, that what impressed him most was how we met in the middle; he from the safe, sleepy Toronto of his youth, I from a childhood shaped by dictatorships. The cadence and imagery of his formulation brought Leningrad back to me, not as nostalgia but as a kind of emotional geometry: two childhoods on opposite sides of a fence, two incompatible realities, and yet a meeting point that feels, even now, slightly miraculous.

But it begins, for most people, with the song. Leningrad is one of those Cold War artefacts that managed to smuggle a complicated truth into a deceptively simple melody: two boys born on opposite sides of an ideological chasm, one in the safety of suburban America, the other in the ruins of a city still echoing with wartime hunger and grief, their lives unfolding in parallel until history, in one of its rare generous moods, allows them to meet as adults and recognise in each other something like kinship. It was a sentimental construction, of course; Billy Joel was writing a parable, not a documentary, I thought.

And once the song was in my mind, Viktor followed. Not the symbolic Viktor of the lyric, but the real man behind it, the man who was born in 1944, in a harsher land and a harsher decade than anything the song could fully contain. His childhood was shaped not by the theatrical paranoia of late socialism but by the raw aftermath of war, by shortages and silences and the kind of state vigilance that did not yet bother to disguise itself. A man whose life did not resolve into a neat parable of reconciliation but into something stranger and more improbable. By the time Billy Joel encountered him in the late 1980s, Viktor had stepped into a life that seemed almost deliberately at odds with the severity of his beginnings: he was working as a circus clown, performing in a world of greasepaint and slapstick, a profession that looked, from the outside, like an escape into levity, though anyone who has lived under a dictatorship knows that humour is never simply humour, that every laugh contains its own sediment of pain, that every joke carries the faint metallic taste of risk.

Things were not exactly funny where I grew up either, even in the so‑called “happiest barrack” of the socialist camp, where the regime preferred to present itself as paternal rather than punitive. By the mid‑1980s, the punishments were less brutal, but the logic was the same: speech was never free of consequence, and the line between irony and insubordination could shift without warning. We lived with a kind of low‑grade absurdity that passed for stability. I think of this often when I think of Viktor; not because our experiences were comparable, but because the distance between them reveals something about the strange, uneven texture of the era, the way humour could be both a refuge and a trap.

But before I could return to Viktor, I found myself thinking of a boy from my own schooldays, a boy whose fate turned on a single sentence, and whose story reveals, in miniature, the texture of the world I grew up in.

Between 1982 and 1985, the Soviet Union buried three General Secretaries in rapid succession — Brezhnev in ’82, Andropov in ’84, Chernenko in ’85 — each funeral broadcast live, each procession accompanied by the same solemn commentary, the same choreography of wreaths and medals, until the whole spectacle began to feel less like state ritual and more like a recurring programme slot. By the time Chernenko died, my friend’s older brother’s friend, a boy of sixteen, found himself in a classroom where the teacher, tasked with ensuring that the students watched the funeral as a civic duty, miscalculated the time difference with Moscow and wheeled in the television two hours too late. The cortege had already dispersed; the commentators had fallen silent; the screen showed nothing but the tail end of the broadcast.

The boy — perhaps out of the weary realism that comes from watching leaders die annually — remarked that it didn’t matter, they could always watch the next one next year. It was not a joke so much as an observation, the kind of line that would have passed unnoticed in any country not held together by its own insecurities. But in ours it was enough to trigger the full machinery of discipline: he was expelled from every secondary school in the country, a punishment so wildly disproportionate that it revealed, more clearly than any political analysis, the fragility of the system we lived in. I was ten at the time, too young to grasp the implications, but old enough to understand that a single sentence could tilt the axis of a life.

That fragility shadowed my first hearing of the song. I found it deeply symbolic. Leningrad carried a charge that no other Russian city quite matched, except perhaps Moscow — a name that folded Lenin, the Revolution, the Siege, and the entire Soviet century into a single, instantly recognisable symbol. It was shorthand for tragedy and endurance, for the romance and terror of the Cold War imagination. And perhaps this is why Billy Joel’s Leningrad, for all its clichés and sentimental scaffolding, lodged itself so deeply: it worked the way Casablanca works, by arranging familiar tropes with such sincerity that the result becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The city had already become a symbol long before Billy Joel ever sang about it. Founded in 1703 as Peter the Great’s improbable window onto Europe, built on marshland and imperial will; the city of the Hermitage and Catherine’s glittering ambitions; the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, where culture and cruelty lived side by side; the city of 1917, where the revolution announced itself with a force that would reshape the century; and the city of the 872‑day siege, a wartime martyrdom so extreme it became part of the Soviet civic religion, and one whose Jewish population suffered almost total devastation — close to ninety percent did not survive, a statistic that rarely appears in the official narratives but shadows every Jewish family story from the city.

Later, long after the song, long after the Cold War had dissolved into its own ambiguities, it was the city I saw in 2003 during the tercentenary celebrations, a place staging its own grandeur with a confidence that felt both theatrical and deeply rooted, as if the city were rehearsing its past in order to decide what kind of future it wanted. By then it had already accumulated so many layers of myth that the anniversary felt less like a commemoration than a reminder that St Petersburg has always been a self‑inventing city, a palimpsest of splendour, rupture, and survival.

And then Viktor himself. Back in 1989, it didn’t even occur to me that Viktor might be a real person. I took him for what he sounded like: a fictional composite, a Cold War everyman crafted with just enough sorrow to move Western listeners but not so much as to strain credibility. For those of us raised in Eastern or Central Europe, his story — orphaned by war, raised under the Party, finding refuge in the circus — felt almost suspiciously gentle, the kind of biography that would have counted as a relatively fortunate life in our part of the world.

It was only much later that I realised Viktor was not a symbolic construct but an actual living man, and that the neatness of the song had obscured the harsher, stranger contours of his actual history, and that the details Billy Joel had smoothed into parable had sharper edges in reality.

But what startled me more was what came after the song, the part no Western lyric ever bothered to imagine: Viktor did not fade into the amber of Cold War nostalgia, did not become a relic wheeled out for anniversaries and retrospectives. He remained politically alive, sustaining a moral stance that carried real danger, not metaphorical, not the curated peril of a pop ballad. And suddenly the closing line of Leningrad — “We never knew what friends we had / until we came to Leningrad” — felt less like sentimental reconciliation and more like a quiet prophecy. The Jewish clown who had once symbolised shared humanity for Western audiences turned out to be one of the few who upheld that humanity when it counted.

Once I understood that Viktor was real — not a Cold War cliché or a symbol, but a Jewish man who had lived through darker decades than the song ever hinted at — I could no longer ignore a parallel that would have felt absurdly far‑fetched when I was fourteen. There is something archetypal about the Jewish schlemiel who grows into his courage, the man history underestimates until the moment it needs him. Viktor, the circus clown who became a quiet moral presence in a country hardening into authoritarianism, belongs to that lineage. And in the current political landscape, it is difficult not to think of another Jewish comedian who found himself, unexpectedly and unwillingly, defending his homeland with a gravity few had foreseen. It is striking that the archetype still holds, that there are still men who can grow into the task when history calls, even if they arrive at that moment by the most improbable routes.

I first heard the song in Budapest, a city that had, by 1989, become one of the main exit routes for Soviet Jews. Tens of thousands passed through Budapest that year alone, carrying suitcases that held entire lives, waiting for Malév flights to Tel Aviv because direct routes did not yet exist. They travelled under police escort, a precaution rather than a formality, because the threat of attacks was real; a threat that materialised two years later when a bomb exploded beside a bus of emigrants on the road to Ferihegy. Their presence was part of the city’s daily weather: the queues at the transit offices, the unfamiliar accents in the cafés near the station, the quiet urgency in the adults’ conversations. They were not abstract to me; they were simply there, a reminder that borders could open or close overnight, and that any of us might one day have to pack our own suitcases.

And it was against this backdrop — the movement of a people leaving one world for another — that Leningrad reached me, which meant that the song never arrived for me as a piece of Cold War nostalgia, but as part of a world in motion, where departures were real and their consequences visible.

The late 1980s produced all kinds of music about the Soviet twilight, but they were not doing the same work. Some songs tried to capture the geopolitical mood, like the anthemic optimism of Wind of Change, the sense that history was finally loosening its grip. Others, like My October Symphony, turned inward, wrestling with Shostakovich’s legacy and the private cost of living through a century of ruptures.

Leningrad belonged to neither category. What made it unusual was its insistence on parallel lives: an American boy and a Soviet boy growing up under incompatible skies, their stories unfolding side by side with a symmetry that was almost schematic and yet emotionally disarming. It didn’t monumentalise the Cold War or psychologise it; it personalised it. And unlike so many Western versions of the story, it did not romanticise one side while demonising the other. It admitted that both childhoods carried their own difficulties (though the scale and nature of those difficulties were far from symmetrical) and in doing so it offered a perspective more complex than good versus evil. It was a narrative small enough to feel intimate, large enough to feel emblematic, and naïve enough to believe — briefly, and with surprising force — that history might be capable of reconciliation.

If there was a middle in any of this, it belonged to Billy Joel and Viktor. They found one and recognised it for what it was. For me the lines never touched; they only passed close enough to cast the illusion of convergence. Parallel lines can look deceptively close when you’re standing inside them, but they remain parallel all the same. Perhaps that is the only conclusion the story allows. Perhaps that is the quiet truth the song never tried to name: that some lines meet, some run alongside each other without ever converging, and some only appear to intersect when viewed from within.

The rest is perspective.