Among the Russians(16)
They were quietly relieved. To the dissident such ‘confessions’ are as meaningless to truth as the credo screamed from a mediaeval rack. But to Communism’s public fantasy of faith, they are a grotesque kind of healing. The heretic is returned to the fold, no longer threatening the others by his separateness. The guilt or innocence of the flock scarcely seems to matter, provided it is united.
‘A priest has a hard job here,’ Boris said. ‘In the country he may serve as many as thirty villages. People say our churches are only full of old women, and that they’ll soon die out. But in the cities the congregations are growing. Somehow there’s always another generation of old women coming along.’
‘Where are their men?’ I asked, expecting a pious solution in the war dead.
‘Drinking, probably,’ Nikolai answered. ‘That’s their form of oblivion. The old women take to God, the men take to drink.’ He made a gesture of self-obliteration. ‘Unfortunately it’s easier to find a bottle of vodka than a church in Moscow. Some churches here look as if they’re working, but in fact they’re shut. The government restored them for the Olympic Games, and gilded their crosses to make it look as if they were active.’
Boris groaned involuntarily, and stared at his big hands on the table; Nikolai went on with a silky irony: ‘Oh yes, our rulers have always worried about the Church. In 1974 a secret report was drawn up for the Communist Party Central Committee. And somehow it leaked.’ His fingers waggled downwards in insidious seepage. ‘Actually that’s not surprising. The Central Committee numbers three hundred, and when you think of all their wives and daughters…’
‘And grandmothers….’
‘Anyway, this report dealt with bishops. It listed them in three categories. In Category One were those who supported the government’s atheistic policies—imagine such a bishop! Category Two was indeterminate, and Category Three listed those who looked after their flocks and tried to keep their churches in repair.’
‘The repair of a church—that’s a delicate issue,’ Boris said. ‘You see, a priest often feels his bishop’s too frightened to support him. As for those categories, they’re probably a farce, since bishops can always bribe their government supervisors to depict them favourably. But a report like that shows how closely the Party oversees the Church.’
Nikolai chortled. ‘Did you hear the joke about the bishop and the dissident? No? Well, a bishop meets a dissident who’s just read the secret report. “And which category am I in?” the bishop asks in trepidation. “You’re in Category One, among the atheists,” the dissident replies. “An atheist!”—the bishop crosses himself fervently—“Oh, thanks be to God!”’
Tanya looked up through sagging eyelids and smiled as if at something she had dreamed. Boris said: ‘All the same, the bishops are preserving what they can—even the Patriarch, who has to be a type of civil servant. I used to live near the church where he preaches, and—yes—I had the impression of a man of God.’
‘In Category Two, I‘d say!’ Nikolai laughed impenitently; he was like a precocious boy who has run away from a bad school. But then he leant towards me, suddenly serious. ‘The trouble with us Russians is that we’re hopelessly religious. Of course Communism’s a religion. It’s never existed, in any country, as anything else. It has its own dogma, its own prophets, and even—ugh!—its own embalmed saint. What else is that Lenin mausoleum? It’s pure paganism, or a throw-back to the relic-worship of early Christians.’
The analogies between Christianity and Communism, he said, were almost unending. Above all Communism shared with mediaeval faith its conscience-seated power and completeness. It resolved the troubling greyness of the world into a puritan black and white. Its heaven was the future forged by man on earth. Its god was the Party, whose service defined morality. But doubt one verse of its scripture, and the whole structure flew into fragments; faith demands submission. Like mediaeval Christianity, Communism precluded any fundamental speculation; its faithful walked in a blinding eternity of gospel. It was complete, dead.
‘But in fact the average Party member is utterly cynical,’ Nikolai said. ‘There are only a tiny few who really believe—and those are mostly senile or very young. For the rest, it’s just a career, a way of getting on.’
The feeling that Communism is a spent force had already seeped into me through—ironically—government advertisements. There was about them a ring almost of desperation, as if they were attempting a colossal confidence-trick on the people. For they were trying to equate the Party with that older, deeper Russian religion of the Rodina, the Motherland. Against this numinous and only half-translatable concept, the subtleties of Marxism-Leninism, with its vision of a nationless proletariat, broke in vain. ‘We are anti-patriots’, Lenin declared in 1915. But no people on earth indulge such a sentimental and subliminal patriotism as the Russians. It rises in them with all the unconditional love of child for mother. I knew White Russian nuns in Jordan who wept at their exile after more than fifty years of separation. Patriotism is Russia’s heart and womb, whereas Communism is merely—and not always—its head.
‘The Party’s tapping nationalism quite consciously,’ Nikolai said, ‘because it’s failed to drum up support for Communism. In my own lifetime I’ve seen an enormous growth of nationalistic ritual. These cults were very big during the war; then they faded, but now they’re returning. They’re like an attempt to replace Christian ceremonial. War memorials, you know, are our national altars. We’re still building them thirty-five years after the war. I used to work almost within sight of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin Wall. It was only created recently, but now brides and grooms come to it after their wedding, as if it conferred some kind of sanctity on them.’