Among the Russians(18)

Beyond the bronze doors, flanked by two guardsmen, sombre passages enclosed us. We descended steps down walls of black and grey feldspar, which sent out faint blue lights from their stone. We were never allowed to stop moving, and can have been in the crypt for less than a minute. Light fell indirectly high above, where the decorated walls showed jagged and violently red. My eyes strained in the gloom. I was moving below the head of a glass sarcophagus framed in gilded banners, then up a half-flight of steps circling around it. Four guards stood immobile below.

Lenin lay there bigger than I had imagined, the hair fairer, sandy and almost gone from his head. He was bathed in brilliant white light. Against his dark suit the face and hands shone vivid and isolated. The cheeks were touched by a faint stubble of beard, the eyes closed. He looked irredeemably unimportant. The skin glowed with a glassy, wax-like sheen, unmodulated, textureless. In the suit there was no sense of a body at all; the torso seemed flat, non-existent, the arms stiff and propped, like those of a mannequin. I understood why some Russians suspect this is not Lenin’s body at all, but an effigy.

Almost before I had entered this presence, I was being moved out of it. I could only stare. The dead are not pitiful but changed, frightening. This was not, in any case, a face which I could gaze on with dispassion. History and the world’s dilemma blew about it. I felt as if I were not looking at a man at all, but at an icon. Even the face, whose bumpy forehead and Tartar cheekbones were familiar from a thousand statues, had taken on the impersonal stasis of sainthood—neither living nor dead.

The tomb has been disturbed three times. During the Second World War, as the Germans advanced on Moscow, the corpse was evacuated eastward to the Volga. At least once the mausoleum has been closed while cosmetic repairs were undertaken to the body. And between 1953 and 1961 the embalmed cadaver of Stalin, whom Lenin had come to fear, was laid by his side.

But there was no time to evolve such thoughts. A moment later I had mounted into daylight and was walking along the graves by the Kremlin wall—Gorky, Voroshilov, Gagarin, Stalin now—some with busts in little iron-enclosed flower-beds, others modest wall-plaques with pots of plastic peonies below. They were fittingly simple. They lay in the clean-angled and uncompromising shadow of Lenin’s mausoleum, and partook of that dark sanctity. The cult of Lenin seems to have stepped into some deep atavistic breach left open by a Christianity in retreat. It appeals to the same spirit in which people wept in panic and trampled women and children to death at the funerals of the tsars and of Stalin himself. It is part of the hunt for God. The megalithic gloom of the mausoleum reeks of it: a plea for immortality. And it is echoed, in a quieter way, by the hundreds of thousands of chapel-like rooms, filled with dusty photographs, which are dedicated to Lenin in factories and apartment blocks all over the country.

Yet this mausoleum had not the profound, almost organic sanctity of a true religious shrine. It was steeped in the anxiety of its own propaganda. Above all, it was an insult to the sobriety of Lenin himself, whose widow protested in vain at his embalming. Lapped in pharaonic glory, denied the decent privacy of death, he has become the victim of his own creation: a coup de théatre. He is the most stared-at human being in history. Yet ‘the cult of great men,’ wrote Marx, ‘is a bourgeois myth.’



After this my days in Moscow fragment in my memory. I cannot discern any pattern, but a brief week of kaleidoscopic moments and chance encounters.

One evening, pouring rain, as I drive into my campsite, a man comes floundering after me through wet grass and puddles, and signals me to open the passenger door. From his haggard face I anticipate trouble. Is he a harassed dissident? An informer? He throws back a cloud of dripping hair from his still-young face. But he has only one problem. ‘Jeans.’

‘What?’

‘Jeans. Have you any jeans?’

In the fascination of young Russians for Western things, jeans are the ne plus ultra of the modish, cult and modern. They can be sold for eight times their London price. Yes, I had a pair of new British jeans.

‘New?’ His face fell. He had hoped I owned an old pair. He was too poor to buy new jeans at black market prices. He was married with one daughter, he said, and couldn’t even afford a second child. He opened the door and prepared to plunge back into the rain.

‘Take the jeans for their English price,’ I said.

As he stared at me, his eyes grew watery with gratitude. Only later did I reflect that I was offering him the equivalent of a month’s salary. ‘Oh please, yes,’ he said weakly, ‘yes, yes….’ His fingers laced and unlaced under his neck like the forelegs of a mantis. ‘Do you really mean that?’

I glanced at his stomach. ‘I’m not sure they’ll fit.’

‘They’re bound to,’ he said, ‘of course they’ll fit. Of course….’ He seized them and dashed into a nearby camping-hut to change. A moment later he emerged encapsuled in jeans and gasping with triumph like one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters who has fitted the slipper. Where the jeans began, his whole body tapered away like a tadpole’s, while above them his chest bloomed in a monstrous burst of held breath and pigeon ribs. He looked terrible.

‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘perfect.’

Thereafter the demand for Western jeans accompanied my trip like an insidious litany. Their true value, pure cachet, was obscured by a haze of other, half-believed explanations. They didn’t wear out like Polish ones, they didn’t shrink or stretch. You could go to bed in them: they didn’t crease. Whatever the reasons, they had nothing to do with politics.