Among the Russians(26)
By nightfall I arrived at the campsite of Kalinin, and was assigned a tent-shaped hut among shrubs. A coach of Australians was parked in one clearing, some Belgians in another. Beside our village of wooden tents stood a modern restaurant where I hogged down two bowls of the meat soup called solyanka, and a dance-floor on which the town’s young gathered in the evenings. The moment the band struck up they rose from their tables in unison and began solemnly to dance the twist. There was an extraordinary quality of sameness to them. They jigged and bounced with utter unabandon, applying themselves conscientiously to the ritual of being young and modern. Many of the girls danced together in sad-seeming circles. They looked like English girls of the fifties, prim and untried. I watched them for a trace of Western ferment. There was none. The moment the hand stopped they left the floor like a regiment, suddenly laughing and smiling, as if relieved.
I wandered back to the campsite feeling depressed. A drunk had befriended some of the Australians, and was trying to reach them with a bottle of vodka. But only campers were allowed in, said a policeman at the gate. ‘Fascist!’ bawled the drunk. At that the policeman’s temper broke and he limbered after his quarry into the darkness, trying to hit him with a folded raincoat.
As I walked through the gates a tall figure took advantage of the policeman’s absence and slid in beside me with two cans of beer. Sasha was a schoolmaster, a teacher of mathematics. He was gauntly handsome, his face crowned in wiry black hair and touched by a slight moustache. A pair of scrutinous and restless eyes, together with the bony, thrusting movements of his body, emitted a suppressed frustration. We drank the beer together in my camping hut.
Sasha simply wanted to talk, to pour out his anger with the world around him and the poverty of his place in it. Things in his country were becoming worse all the time, he said. For seven or eight years now the economy had been sliding back. He spoke in embittered bursts. There were towns only a day’s journey from Moscow where you couldn’t buy a scrap of meat, fish or fruit. Salaries had been almost static for eight years, but prices had soared. The present leadership were just nonentities, he could barely remember their names.
Three or four times he sprang up and wrenched open the hut door. Each time only the night air, suddenly cold, blew in on us. ‘I thought I heard something. Didn’t you hear it?’ For a moment he would glare out on the rectangle of black shrubs and faded stars, then slam the door to with his foot. Each time I felt a sense of wonder at the risks he knew he was taking, and at the value set on these explosive moments of human exchange. Since Alexander I had not met a single Russian who was happy with the system. Haunted by memories of wartime famine, it was the food shortage which was on everybody’s lips. Even in Moscow the only meat I had seen was sausages, scrawny chickens and the ubiquitous tinned fish which Muscovites say is inedible. The failure of the economy—some called it decline, others stagnation—was the stockin-trade of guarded conversation; so was the dismissal of the leadership as privileged nonentities.
Sasha was one of those, increasing now, who looked back with nostalgia to the reign of Stalin. ‘Kruschev was wrong to denounce him. Stalin was a strong man, a great man. And who was Kruschev? Just a buffoon.’ Sasha was almost too young to remember Stalin’s time: either its low standard of living or its terror. He simply cherished the idea of power in his rulers, because their strength would be his strength. His was the old Russian yearning for a tsar or a god, for somebody to impose discipline on the nation’s ancient anarchy and indolence. It was perfectly familiar. When Stalin died a whole section of the populace was seized almost by panic, like children left undefended; and a contemporary English traveller wrote of Ivan the Terrible that ‘no prince in Christendom is more feared of his own than he is, nor yet better loved.’
I said bluntly that Stalin was a monster.
‘But we need him,’ Sasha insisted. ‘We need that strength and order. Have you seen the stickers of Stalin on people’s cars? Well, they’re increasing. Maybe people don’t actually want another Stalin, I don’t know. But it’s a way of protesting against today’s regime.’
We heard footsteps in the grass outside. He jumped up and jerked open the door. This time the night was blotted out by a fat, chestnut-haired girl who looked in on us with amused eyes.
‘Akh, it’s only you, Vera. Come in.’
She bounced down on the bunk.
‘She’s nice,’ he said.
His frustration continued in softened, disconnected sentences while he looked at her. Beneath his condemnation was an implicit envy of Western Europe, which he had visited in a supervised group six years before. He looked across at the girl. ‘But it’ no good my trying to explain to her, for instance. She’s never left this part of Russia. It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t been outside to understand.’ She smiled blandly back at him. Every Russian who had visited the West was afflicted by the contrast, and by the hopelessness of transmitting it. ‘Better to see once than to hear a hundred times,’ they used to say. But few of them wanted to leave for ever.
Sasha’s intolerance of what lay around him was rooted in personal wretchedness. He earned barely enough to feed his wife, whom he did not love, and his two small daughters. ‘Sometimes I supplement my income by unloading wagons at night. That way I can earn thirty roubles in eight hours—that’s a week’s salary as a schoolmaster! Doctors and teachers are paid like dogs here. I told my wife I was unloading tonight and wouldn’t be back until morning.’ He pushed a cigarette into the girl’s lap, letting his hand rest there. ‘I stay with my wife for the sake of my daughters. If you don’t get away sometimes you go mad. So I have these nights out—unloading wagons…with girls…’.