Or the young mother who has just metamorphosed from Madonna into wooden idol, with slanting eyes and the features of a Buddha? If I woke them up and asked them about their lives, they would unflinchingly declare that the country where they live is, give or take a few delayed trains, a paradise. And if in steely tones the loudspeaker were suddenly to announce the outbreak of war, the whole mass of them would set off, ready to endure the war as a matter of course, ready to suffer, ready to sacrifice themselves, with an utterly natural acceptance of hunger, of death, or of life in the filth of this station, here amid the cold of the great plains that stretch out beyond the tracks.

I tell myself there is a name for such a mentality. A term I have recently heard on the lips of a friend who listens in secret to Western radio stations. A formula I have on the tip of my tongue, that only fatigue prevents me from calling to mind. I pull myself together, and the phrase, luminous and definitive, bursts forth: "Homo sovieticus!"

The force of it pins down the whole impenetrable collection of lives around me. Homo sovieticus covers this human stagnation, down to its tiniest sigh, down to the clink of a bottle against the edge of a glass, down to the pages of Pravda under the scrawny body of the old man in his threadbare overcoat, pages filled with stories of targets achieved and perfect bliss.

With a childish delight I spend a moment playing with it: this phrase, a veritable key phrase, slips readily into all the keyholes of the country's existence, unlocking the secrets of all lives. Even the secret of love, such as it is lived in this country, with its official puritanism on the one hand, while on the other this prostitute plies her trade – a virtually licensed contraband – a scant few yards away from those great panels with their images of Lenin and their edifying slogans…