Among the Russians(3)

But this froth of irresponsible questions subsided unanswered at a sign which said ‘Minsk Campsite’. The place stood deep in pines and was insulated by ten miles from Minsk itself. Through the gloom I glimpsed little wooden huts whose pitched roofs reached to the ground. I walked to one marked ‘Administration’. I had no idea what to expect. I had never met a Westerner who had tried to camp in the Soviet Union.

But by Russian standards these camps were all to be blessedly informal—no wardens, few administrators, no observable KGB (my troubles from them came in other places). A non committal and slightly lost-looking girl sat behind a desk with two pieces of paper on it: my first non-official Russian. She looked at me tiredly.

‘Are you a group?’ she asked.

It was a quintessential Russian question. I glanced down at myself. No, I was not a group. Solitariness here is rare, odd. It was not catered for. I found myself apologizing for it.

Then she said: ‘You must be Mr Thubron. You’re British.’

She checked through a folder and discovered my name on a telex. This ritual was to be repeated each night for more than two months, until the cold closed the campsites and forced me into hotels. I was invariably expected—and this foreknowledge struck me always with the unease of clairvoyance. I never quite got used to it.

But everything had been organized in London and on the Polish frontier. My route was prearranged and listed in detail, and was to be pored over by countless traffic police along my way. I had tickets for camping, tickets for petrol, tickets for hotels. But my technically accurate passport declared me a ‘building company director’ instead of a writer. I was, I think, unknown.

The girl looked at me uncertainly. In her enclosed face only the eyebrows seemed articulate; they flowed upwards strangely, as if stuck back by an icy wind. No Englishman had come to the campsite, she said, since…she could not remember. Her head bent down dismissively to her two pieces of paper again. But on this first night I was obsessed by the fear that the Russian people would remain as closed to me as their landscape was, and I started asking her about Minsk.

She did not come from Minsk, she said. She was wanly self-possessed. ‘Tomorrow you may have an Intourist guide to yourself.’ (Intourist is the travel agency which manages foreigners; it has links with the KGB.) No, I said, I didn’t want a guide.

I wandered out into the camp. The only other foreign cars belonged to East Germans and Poles. It was the summer of the last Gdansk riots before martial law stifled Poland, but no word had reached anybody here. The Russians were intermingled with us in rudimentary tents and huts. The pine-scented darkness was filled with their voices and lights. The tents lay under the trees like dim-lit pyramids. Their warmth and glow excluded me unbearably. I made my way to a little café, which was shut, then found the washrooms; the lavatory seats had all been torn out. In the clearing where I parked, three old women were rummaging among the waste bins for anything left by foreigners: bottles, polythene bags, cardboard boxes. I spread a blanket on the bumpy mattress in my car, but I wasn’t sleepy. A quarter moon hovered among the pines. Its unconcluded crescent seemed to symbolize the day. I felt a mingled elation and bafflement, as if every Russian—the very land itself—were the guardian of some secret from which I was ostracized. For the first time I was poignantly aware of my isolation. Was it possible, I wondered, to spend months in a country and yet not to touch it at all? Sheepishly I returned to the girl with the eyebrows and accepted a guide for next day.



Minsk, a city of over a million inhabitants, lies at the confluence of rivers no longer navigable. As early as the eleventh century it straddled the water-borne trade between the Baltic and Black Seas, and many different peoples—Poles, Tartars, Russians, Lithuanians, Jews—shared unequally in its wealth or despoilment. Eight times it was levelled to the ground. The Grande Armée of Napoleon razed it in 1812 and after the German retreat in 1944 there was little to be seen but a forest of brick chimneys whose houses had been dropped in ashes and whose inhabitants were living in makeshift shacks or burrows under the ground. One quarter of the whole population of White Russia—men, women and children—perished in the war.

Memories like these still haunt the earth of Minsk like a ghostly permafrost. Today’s wide streets and modern institutes, its theatres and stadia—all the vaunted newness, the aesthetic monotony and social inhumanity (ten-, fifteen-, twenty-storey flat blocks)—all are explained, and perhaps absolved, by the horror from which they sprang. Through dozens of these war-lacerated cities—Smolensk, Rostov, Kharkov, Simferopol, Kursk—I was to walk with the same equivocal feelings. I saw their necessity and admired the abstract achievement. But I wanted to close my eyes. Everything is planned on a titan’s scale. The placeless apartment blocks, the dour ministries, the bullying monuments, have streamrollered over the war’s ruin in a ferro-concrete tundra which is crushingly shoddy and uniform. Nothing small or different can leak between these sky-thrusting giants. Their size and conformity echo the blind stare of the plains.

‘Minsk is the capital of the White Russian Soviet Socialist Republic,’ intoned my guide—a young man dressed in an impeccable suit and categorical red tie. ‘During the Tenth Five-Year Plan four million square meters of housing were built. Our university has eight different faculties, and with twelve other institutes totals 35,000 students; twenty-four secondary technical schools total 110,000 students….’