Among the Russians(11)
By now the vodka bottles lay in an empty collage over the floor; the last dregs had splashed out of their tooth-mugs into our flaccidly open mouths, and we were sprawled among the chairs like bacchantes, fingering the glasses and grinning philosophically at the cracked ceiling. A gentle and absolving inertia was dropping onto us out of the night sky. Dimly, with a drink-sodden wonder, I recalled that only yesterday I had been afraid the Russians were inaccessible.
2. Moscow
THE ROAD APPROACHING Moscow must be the most heavily policed on earth. Beneath the concrete and glass checkpoints, which multiply as the city approaches, burly officers fret and strut, or swagger into the road’s centre drumming their truncheons against their jack-boots. The traffic slows to a servile crawl as it approaches them. They seem to embody a deep national insecurity. Within thirty miles of the capital the kerbs are lined with stopped motorists patiently explaining themselves. The roadside gendarmes, the police car drivers, the officers telephoning in the checkpoints, all seem to be participants in some fervid patriotic dance against an invisible evil. They had rarely seen a British car before, and often I glimpsed whole groups of them clustered in the glass checkpoints, staring at me like fish from an aquarium. I was stopped continually, my papers examined with a scrupulous and faintly bemused courtesy, then sent on my way. And as if the police were too few for this frenetic and sterile-looking labour, they were supplemented by posses of civilian volunteers in red arm-bands.
The outskirts came suddenly. Great white apartment blocks burst up from the skyline. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five storeys high, they glimmered over the whole horizon, and were followed by others in pale pink brick, and by still others which lurched towards the road in monolithic piles hundreds of yards long. Stalinist neo-classical, the brick giants of the sixties, modern glass and ferro-concrete hulks—they covered the land with their desolate similitude. The anonymity of Minsk was intensified a hundredfold. The blocks loomed doubly high; the trees beneath them looked small and crippled as bonsai. Over the Moscow river, a distant tributary of the Volga, and into the city’s heart, the planetary habitat thickened, as if its people had been packaged or broilerized for state purposes. Its chilling immensity became a hall-mark, almost a distinction, and reached an awesome zenith in the ministerial skyscrapers which Stalin built in the thirties. Their gravity-defying height lent them a baleful ubiquity. Architectural Big Brothers, they shot up with a terrible vertiginous power. Forty, fifty, sixty storeys high (it became pointless to count), they inhabited the heavens with the mysterious naturalness of mountains: the offspring of early Manhattan skyscrapers and Muscovite fortress towers. Their summits seemed to recede into a supernal mist, tapering out at last in star-crowned spires, filled with an unimaginable Byzantium of civil servants. Bureaucratic citadels, archaic, defensive, they epitomized the public face of Russia.
Only a weft of trees sometimes mediated between the buildings and the passers-by below, where regimented parks lent a magisterial monotony to the sweep of prospect and boulevard. Between people and buildings a great vacuum seemed to lie—a space which in the West is thronged by restaurants, shops, café, pavement enterprises, all the private enthusiasms, love or grossness which we call freedom. But here there was nothing—only the sense of a deep division between the seen and the invisible, so that I became obsessed by the thought of the lives which the blank buildings hid. The shops were all gaunt and poor. I saw coiling queues for fresh fruit or a little meat. The identity of stores was reduced to ‘Food’, ‘Culinary’, ‘Footwear’ instead of the names of proprietors. The People, as Alexander had said, were the collective owners. Everybody owned everything.
The very streets seemed uncrossably wide. Starting across their tarmac, you feel you may be run over by a car still below the horizon. You have no rights. Pedestrian crossings merely indicate where you may pass; they give you no precedence over cars, which behave as if you did not exist. These are the least democratic roads on earth. The black Chaika and Volga saloons of government officials glide about them with impunity. A special lane down the centre is reserved for them, and their flouting of traffic rules is ignored by the thronging police, whose frenzy of officiousness reaches crescendo in the city centre. An uncanny tension reigns, which is more than the workaday strain of urban living. Just as the roads at Moscow’s heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings.
Driving in hypnotized circles around the city’s inner boulevards, I was already judging Russia with romantic disillusion. The treatment of pedestrians or the privileges of officials would have seemed insignificant in another country. But Russia is haunted by absolutes. This country, after all, had dared to set itself up as the exemplar of the future, the lost paradise remaking; and I judged it automatically by the light of its own ideals. So every failure here was peculiarly wounding; it denied anew the possibility of imposing selflessness on men by any system. And my sensitivity to its dishonesties, I suspect, was in part a disappointment with all humankind, a self-accusing. This, after all, was the great experiment gone wrong, the Eden which became Babel.
Yet for all this I was conscious that these people still inhabited a different perspective from those in the West. However barbarously they may fall short, however corrupt their institutions and hypocritical their rulers, they belonged to an ancient spiritual extremism. They were still the rebellious children of their repudiated God, entertaining a vision, even in cynicism, of the consummate community.