Among the Russians(12)

I drove towards Red Square through streets clamouring with state advertisements: ‘The Communist Party is the Glory of the Motherland’, ‘The Plans of the Party are the Plans of the Homeland’, ‘The Soviet Union is the Source of Peace’, ‘The Ideas of Lenin Live and Conquer’. Neon-lit, they straddled the skyline of offices and fiat-blocks, and even—with a resounding clang of hypocrisy—the roofs of luxury tourist hotels. The blaze of Western commercial advertising—all its sense of choice and possibility—were echoingly absent. These Soviet slogans fascinated me. They were interesting less for their effect on the people, who told me universally that they never noticed them, than as a betrayal of their rulers’ anxieties. Constantly they linked Communism with patriotism. It was as if they were trying to stoke the pallid fires of the Party, for which I had already sensed a deep-seated indifference, with the huge and potent furnace of Russian national feeling. Fancifully I experimented with inverting these slogans, as if this might reveal uncomfortable truths: ‘The Party and the Motherland are disunited’, ‘The Soviet Union is the Source of War’, ‘The Ideas of Lenin are Moribund and Fading’.

Through the towering wilderness of central Moscow the people were pushing with the same patient obliviousness as those of Minsk. Even in summer they formed a relentless, rather private crowd. Not for them the chatter and nervous smiling of the Westerner. Their faces were slow and unlit. Clerks, soldiers, housewives—they seemed defined merely by their function. And even here they were only half urbanized, touched still by the heavy candour of the peasant, and perhaps by his cunning and opacity too. Yet I was aware of trickles and splashes of young colour, of talk and laughter unknown ten years ago. And archetypal faces emerged. I noticed the blond hair and moustaches of Slav folk-legend, the skin pulled sparely over a gaunt frame of cheekbones, the eyes a wintry blue or grey. Another face—it might have been modelled on that of Kruschev—was collapsed in a counterpoint of fleshy curves and circles, rounded cheeks and double chins, its lips thrust forward as if to graze the uprush of the big, pitted nose. Yet another face (I came to associate it with the KGB) showed a mysterious blend of the masculine and the infantile; in its heavy, round head the nose was a mere incident, the mouth a sterile bud, and the small eyes were submerged in a tundra of incoherent flesh, so that they seemed to be peering out through a crevice.

But most of the people belonged to no distinct type at all. It was the strangely unawakened expression which marked them as Russian. This look of wide, inchoate nature is, I suspect, ancestral. The same faces gaze out from the walls of Moscow’s Tretyakov Art Gallery in some of the homeliest, fattest and coarsest-looking aristocracy of their time, whom even court painters could not flatter into beauty. The old, in particular, seemed the victims of their history as they trudged the Moscow streets. The bodies of a whole generation of war widows and war spinsters looked shaped only for enduring. But here and there the slimmer figures of young men and women presaged another era (the post-war generation, like that of Japan, looks down by several inches on its parents) and the subject peoples of the Soviet empire passed by in a sudden scent of mountain or desert—broad-faced Uzbeks in embroidered caps; the sombre, delicate features of Armenia; the black sparkle of a Georgian.

I merged with a tide of shoppers in the state emporium GUM, which faces the Kremlin across Red Square. This is a mazey nineteenth century caravanserai of shops, nearly a thousand in all. Ranged in three tiers and linked by balustraded bridges and promenades, they shelter under a glass and iron roof which sheds a jungle dimness on everything below. Perched in this Crystal Palace fantasy, and gazing down, I momentarily imagined myself looking on the polished ovals of Victorian top hats and spoon bonnets; but instead I saw the diligent Muscovites shopping—men in T-shirts and brown jackets, the flowered dresses of stocky proletarian women, war veterans with their medals sewn on their coats in faded ribbons. Among these crowds the rare Western tourist passed like a comet, so that I suddenly noticed the indefinable drabness, the sameness, of everybody else.

Shopping is the housewife’s weariest chore. She is condemned to tramp a labyrinth in search of even simple artefacts. On an average day (it’s been computed) she spends two hours in queues. In a single shop she may queue three times: once to select what she wants, once again to pay a cashier, and a third time to collect her purchase. It is like an Alice-in-Wonderland scheme for full employment. The only readily available goods are those which nobody wants—all the spiritless, home-manufactured fittings which are dismissed as brak, junk. Muscovite women, and men too, prowl the shops on the lookout for anything of quality, their string bags or briefcases ready to receive the sudden arrival of Yugoslav boots or Polish bras. In a state-planned commercial economy, insensitive to consumer demand, availability is more important to the shopper than cost. So shopping becomes a nightmare game of musical chairs in which most of the players are left out. Anything un-Soviet is as precious and unexpected as a unicorn. The moment it appears, queues coalesce magically out of nothing, snaking down the streets on a wisp of hearsay. The sameness of life gives to the new an outlandish value—beautiful, different, snob.

The queues in GUM had the look of prehistoric insects. They moved with only the dimmest shufflings and heavings of their multiple feet; and like most insects they had no centralized nervous system so that the queue’s tail did not always know what its head was gorging on. ‘What am I here for?’ said the last vertebra of a sixty-person centipede. ‘I don’t know. But it must be something…look at the queue!’ Caught head-on in the torrent of such shoppers, I realized that theirs was not a job but a full-scale campaign, filled with precious triumphs and costly defeats. It was materialism at its most necessary, and its most heart-breaking.