Among the Russians(30)
A sadness haunts these buildings. They stand in rank grassland, locked and boarded up. Frescoed saints still brood about the walls of the Church of the Transfiguration, but are faded to shadows, their mana gone; and the narthex of St Nicholas Church has been turned into one of those ‘atheist museums’ so common between the wars—an abusive history of religion culminating in the poster of a black bat of a priest, who holds back his flock while the rocket of modern Soviet technology shoots past them to the moon.
Inside the kremlin the eleventh century cathedral is empty too. Its frescoed Christ gazes down with a lost sweetness. And in the vaulted chambers of the Palace of Facets, glowering with murals, the proud republic of Novgorod met its end. Absorbed by the risen power of Moscow in 1478, its independent spirit was chained at last by Ivan the Terrible, who slaughtered sixty thousand of its citizens and invited its leading boyars and clergy to a banquet in the palace, where they were massacred in mid-orgy. By the seventeenth century the populace numbered barely two thousand, rustling like ghosts in the shell of a half-forgotten city.
But the most impish fate of all has befallen the Church of the Intercession, glued against one of the kremlin towers. The day before I left for Leningrad, Vadim proposed we meet there for supper. It had been turned into a restaurant. A maze of stairs and storeys twined church and tower indivisibly together. Embalmed in the monastic aura of rough-hewn benches and wrought-iron candelabra, the diners were slopping down borshch and solyanka where once the incense-blue spaces had thundered to the cherubikon or (if they were in the tower) to some less holy language.
Vadim was nervous. He had booked a table in a shadowy annex, and hoped we could talk unseen. ‘I expect people will think you’re an Estonian,’ he said, comforting himself. Estonians were gaunt and tall like me, he added, and they spoke bad Russian.
For a while we shared the table with the family of an electrician from Baikal near the Mongolian frontier. They had never been to European Russia before, and the restaurant’s sophistication cowed them. A lethargic little boy seated opposite asked me to return to Baikal with them and go bear-hunting. This proposal drew a shame-faced rebuke from his mother, who crushed each bubbled of initiative as it surfaced through the child’s melancholy. ‘Don’t touch the cutlery…Elbows off the table…. Don’t scratch your neck…. Bear-hunting, how could you?…I’m sure the comrade gets plenty of hunting as it is…’
Vadim was relieved when they left, and suddenly ordered a carousal’s worth of drinks: Georgian white wine, brandy, several fruit juices and a jug of mead. He looked as if he were settling in for the night. ‘So the vodka hit you badly?’ he said. ‘Next time you must drink a little more in the morning. It takes away the headache.’ He tugged thoughtfully on his panoramic golden whiskers. ‘Vodka can cure most things, but can kill you in exchange. We call it “The Green Snake”, I don’t know why, and drunkenness “the White Fever.” He stared up at the ceiling. ‘Do you know this is the first time I’ve been in a church? My wife wanted a church wedding, but they’d have kicked me out of Komsomol for that.’
Two hours later the mead and the wine were finished, and the brandy gurgling musically in and out of our glasses. Vadim’s cheeks were lit by a sunset flush, but his eyes stayed lost. He began to complain about the system. These jeremiads were familiar to me by now. They rang with a deathly boredom and disillusion. No rebellion, no vision. Their cry of hopelessness fell into a world as stifled and changeless as the Soviet earth. Nor was any change expected, although these dirges belonged, above all, to the young. It seemed to me that half the nation’s energies were draining away in bitterness or drink, or were never awakened at all.
‘Talk of bureaucracy!’—Vadim laced the thought with an instant slug of brandy—‘Have you seen our Palace of the Soviets in the main square? Looks like a mountain and houses thousands of administrators, where five would do. We’ve got ten bosses to every one worker!’
I mumbled something about change.
‘Change! How can anything change? Even in elections to the local soviet, which don’t mean much anyway, there’s no real choice. The two or three candidates are already selected. In theory you can complain about them, but you’d have to go up to a little curtained booth, and everybody would see you go. And of course the KGB would be there.’
This sense of a jungly and unconquerable bureaucracy reaches down to humble levels. An Asiatic stress on the prestige of position has pervaded Russia for centuries. Behind a million desks and shop counters the faces of ensconced bumbledom look up at you—or do not—and clear little spaces of authority around themselves by momentarily refusing service.
Perhaps the mania for supervision is the reverse image of a natural anarchy. I remembered what Nikolai had said in Moscow: that without constraints, the system would fly apart. Only the previous evening I had witnessed a scene which seemed to occur in shadow-play, so noiselessly and totally was it smothered. While walking along one of the town’s boulevards, I saw three vans converge on a corner. A minute later eight or ten factory workers were being thrust inside by police and auxiliaries in red arm-bands. Their movements, as they vanished, showed only a dogged resignation, except for one tall man who shouted something inaudible to me and was at once seized by both wrists and hustled after the rest. Farther down the street I saw other police vans imbibing other victims. A minute later they had gone, leaving me with the uncanny feeling of having woken from a dream. The boulevard, meanwhile, had emptied. The only witness left besides myself was a lame roadworker; but when I asked him the cause he merely said ‘They’re taking them off in scores’, and turned away. But for a few eerie seconds a gap had opened in the placid surface of the everyday world, then closed again. It was unexplained: a Kafkaesque dumb-show. Victims and persecutors had seemed to collaborate together, so silently and inevitably did it pass. Such moments are sinister for their secrecy. They will probably never be reported.