Among the Russians(17)
The countryside bristles with memorials, of which many are quite new—tanks and field-guns elevated on concrete plinths, mounds and circles of glory, eternal flames, sculptured heroes, obelisks, symbols, epitaphs. In every city callow-looking cadets of Komsomol stand guard in twenty-minute shifts at the monuments of a war which even their fathers are too young to remember. Teenage boys clutching sten-guns and Kalashnikov assault rifles goose-step (ironically) to and fro, and schoolgirls stand at knock-kneed attention on little wooden shutters, their hair bursting from under khaki caps in a froth of baby ribbons. These are the points of sancity which married couples visit after their weddings. Shivering with cold, the thin-clad bride lays her bouquet at the shrine; the pair poses for a ritual photograph, lingers a while as if something else might happen, then drifts away. Such places are not really memorials to the dead at all. They are symbols of Russian regeneracy after the bitter humiliation of German victories and of German propaganda that the Slavs were semi-human. They are hymns and panaceas in stone.
‘They are also useful points of unity for rallying our ethnic minorities,’ Boris said, ‘since we were all fellow-sufferers in the war…’
Occasionally I sensed that Boris and Nikolai were flashing warnings or inquiries at one another, as if their talk approached invisible frontiers. After a while something made me ask: ‘Is your phone tapped?’
Boris’s laugh was more a sick cough. ‘Not just my phone,’ he said, ‘but this whole flat.’ He indicated the room’s walls in two places. ‘Here…and here. Oh yes, Orwell’s books have come true in our country.’ His gaze drifted across Tanya’s reclining head and back to the table. He said: ‘They’re listening to us now.’
A sudden silence fell. Light rain was dropping in the dark outside; I hadn’t noticed it before. For a moment we were all thinking of that other, unseen presence with us. I felt a naive amazement at their outspokenness. Only long afterward, when I had myself been followed for days by the KGB, did I understand how hard it was to live a continuous lie, and with how passionate a sense of release a man casts off any feeling of guilt in the celebration of his own eavesdropped integrity. But for the moment my gaze hesitated between Boris, with whom friendship was an act of folly or courage, and Nikolai whose beard (I suddenly noticed) was faintly glossed with grey; and back to Tanya, whose very bedroom intimacies could never be quite holy.
‘And you may be sure the KGB know about you too!’ Nikolai’s voice melted into a sarcastic sing-song. ‘A Westerner in his own car! Alone, unmarried, and here for so long! That’s not a foreigner they like, that’s not a good foreigner!’
I answered—speaking both to him and to the unseen ear—that I found the police supervision of his monotonously passive countrymen to be inexplicable, and the numbers of police absurd. Their huge manpower, I suggested, would be better disbanded and employed in something more productive.
Nikolai stared at me hard. His restless lips and whitely tapering cheeks turned him more than ever into a mocking saint. Very distinctly he said: ‘You are in error there. The government needs them. It needs the KGB too, they’re the backbone. It needs them in order to stay where it is. We’re docile only because of them.’ He paused, as if to allow me (or the ear) to digest what he had said. ‘The ordinary police are an easy tool. They’re mostly young ex-National Servicemen, uneducated country lads. Their job earns a middle-grade salary, and if you’re stationed in Moscow it carries citizenship with it and you can live here. So men join the force to further their status.’ It seemed to me that the Russians’ intense desire for order assumed some fearful anarchy in their core, a profound self-distrust whose justification I could not gauge. But Nikolai continued deliberately: ‘The Party’s imposition of order is not neurotic. It is absolutely rational. If we had an election, only fifteen per cent would vote for this government.’ He paused. ‘No—less—ten per cent. Because nearly half our people believe in God—Christian or Moslem; and half are not ethnically Russian at all. You realize we are the only empire left on earth? And even those who are Communists are lethargic and disillusioned. This government has no base whatever.’
At last I understood him as he wanted: that tension and combat are built into the Party’s very heart. It can never relax, because its fear comes first from within. Outside pressures are necessary to it in order to prevent the whole system from flying apart. So the age-old Russian nightmare of encirclement—from China and Japan, NATO and America—not only creates the Russian fear, but is created by it. War readiness is like a fever here: the aggression of a dangerous and insecure child.
These thoughts filled me with a cold helplessness. It seemed suddenly innocent ever to have hoped that the world was divided merely by some mammoth lapse of trust. When I said good-bye to Boris, I pulled him out of his bugged doorway and onto the landing. Was there anything I could do for him, I asked?
He looked at me with his fatalistic patience. No, he said, nothing. It seemed less a refusal of help than a statement of fact. I slid out of his apartment block by the back way, grateful for the concealing rain.
The queue for Lenin’s mausoleum stretches several thousands long out of parkland gardens along the Kremlin walls, and shuffles across the grey loneliness of Red Square. In itself it resembles any ordinary Russian queue, neither more nor less reverential than those for bread or beer. It is drab, dogged, muttering. All along its line it is watched by police and uniformed KGB with a lingering scrutiny. But as it turns to face the tomb, a low ziggurat in red marble, it falls silent. People remove their hats, smooth down their hair. The aura of sanctity is suddenly intense and oppressive. This is the Holy Sepulchre of atheism. The youth in front of me was told to take his hands out of his pockets. The woman behind was ordered to stop talking.