Among the Russians(25)

The centre of Suzdal, crowning the Kamenka in a ring of earth ramparts and scattered gates, was filled by another maze of churches: churches with needle spires and painted domes, single cupolas and clustered ones, churches plain or gabled like the peaked kokoshnik headgear of mediaeval women, churches lordly and domestic, silver, white, black, green, renewed, decaying. They rose in their pairs like parables of Christian marriage: the tall sanctuaries of summer and their winter spouses. Even in the centre of the town square the belfried Voskresenskaya accompanied his stand-offish wife, the Virgin of Kazan. There were morganatic marriages and incompatible ones, chic couples and dowdy twosomes and perfect love-matches. They continued far beyond the walls in fields and clearings. A pair of dwarf chapels sat high above the river, divorced by a ravine. And a complete wooden church, built in 1766, had been brought from the country and reassembled—a lonely bachelor from that village world of timber whose pagoda-like turrets and snow-deflecting, witch-hat spires were perpetuated in the architecture of stone.

In front of this church I encountered a notice-board and a sign which read: ‘Dear Tourist, if you wish to commemorate your name, write on this board and not on the monument. The administration guarantee to preserve your name out of the public funds of the museum.’ Never was the instinct for scribbling lawless graffiti so punctured! But there, sure enough, the tourists had obediently inscribed their names and cities: ‘Yuri from Leningrad’, ‘Natasha from Klin’. I realized then that I had not seen a single spontaneous graffito in the Soviet Union: not even a simple love message, let alone anything sexual or political. Watching the wooden-faced families of tourists trickling round the church, I suddenly longed to hear an argument or the yell of a recalcitrant child.

But not a mouse squeaked. Grass-filled spaces spread a halcyon quiet through the town. Its greatness had ebbed as Vladimir superseded it, and has leaked away ever since, leaving it lovable and unimportant. The thirteenth century copper doors of its cathedral, damascened in gold, come from richer, more imperilled times; but their inlaid figures, darkened now, still glimmer with life, while the campanile is hung with aged bells which chime and ding whenever they feel like it.

I crossed the Kamenka southward. Far away, over cattle-strewn pastures, the florid nineteenth century church of SS. Flora and Laura, massed under a flurry of sliver domes, had contracted a mesalliance with a dumpy little eighteenth century basilica. And all along the river, back to the shuttered and leaning towers of the Pokrovsky Monastery, these churches continued. The feel was of a world unchanged. White goats munched in cottage gardens, and fishermen were wading through the marshes, where families of domestic geese nested. But when I approached some old women to ask them the name of a nearby church, they started at one another with pursed lips. ‘I don’t know,’ said one. ‘How should I know? That’s all finished now.’

In the whole of Suzdal only a single pair remains open for worship.

I thought then how the near-closure of Russia’s churches—by 1939 their active numbers were reduced to about a hundred—must have thrown a huge spiritual caesura into the lives of ordinary people. Even today, in milder times, only 7,500 remain open in this vast land, barely one seventh of the pre-Revolutionary figure. In Suzdal it is easy to imagine the emotional impact of their loss. Aesthetically and physically the churches once dominated every Russian village, filling the air with the gold propaganda of their crosses: the serenity of eternal law.

Small wonder that the usurping creed had to mimic them. All through Stalin’s reign public buildings subconsciously strained for religious effect, and frogmarched into service half the paraphernalia of classical paganism. Municipal and Party offices shouldered their way skyward on fluted porticoes. Wedding-cake Corinthian and prestige Doric abounded. Plaster garlands tumbled and swung, urns slopped, cornucopia gushed. Railway stations proclaimed the new age of the Machine in bursting domes and walls afloat with bas-reliefs. No matter if the plumbing stank, it was the effect which mattered. Nowadays young Russians snigger a little at these monstrosities (they were denounced by Kruschev). But such buildings have become a part of Communist history. They are, fervent, primitive. They seem to belong to an innocence irretrievably gone. Their very trust is weirdly touching. They are exemplified most perfectly by the derided statues which adorn them—statues whose physical proportions, like those of ancient Greece, symbolize spiritual energies. But on these Communist plinths and pediments stand no Praxitelean Zeus or Aphrodite, but the working Artemis or Hercules of another age—mattock over shoulder, hammer in hand: the apotheosised ordinary man. The paradigms of this time are the firm-faced land-girls with men’s limbs and mothers’ breasts, blacksmiths and road-builders. The symbols they hold are spades and scythes.

The wreath and the lyre are gone.



Driving north-west through light rain, I turned towards that other great Muscovite principality, Novgorod the Great. It lay more than three hundred miles north on the Leningrad road, which was a typically Soviet two-lane highway, indifferently surfaced and thick with lorries. Towards evening a red, watery sun emerged on the skyline, the rain cleared and I found myself driving along a causeway over the Volga. I stopped the car and gazed. A great swollen calm of river, grey under the grey sky, it wound among marshy islets with the majesty of a whole lake or sea on the move. Even this far inland, seagulls were wheeling above it with harsh cries.

The Volga shares something of the numinous mystery of the Nile, and of those other great historical rivers—the Euphrates, Indus, Ganges—which heave through the deserts and jungles of Asia and a child’s imagination, so that from a first glimpse of them there arises this sense of their being already known. In such a way, perhaps through some folk-tale or poem long since unlearnt, the Volga stirred in me a memory of Slav and Viking traders, and of all those huge rivers—the Dnieper, Don, Dniester—which bend in liquid blades of civilization through Russia’s forests down across the dark centuries into the dawn of northern Europe. All rising close to one another in the glacial watershed west of Moscow, their trade was once linked northward by porterage to the rivers of the Baltic, and flowed southward to the fringes of the ancient world: the Don and the Dnieper to the Black Sea, the Volga to the Caspian where the old Silk Road passed. Thus they formed a corridor across the whole width of Russia. For two thousand years they joined the north to the sunlit orbit of Greece and Rome, Byzantium and Venice, and on their broad, softly-flowing backs carried silks, jewels and spices in exchange for furs and slaves. Where I sat on its bank, the Volga already measured hundreds of yards across, but moved on for another two thousand miles to the Caspian. Nothing about this sluggish womb of a river, neither its green shores nor its grey waters, betrayed that it was polluted by the toxic effluent of hundreds of factories.