Among the Russians(34)
She and Anatoly lived in a nineteenth century apartment house in the city’s centre, four storeys up magisterial stone steps with elaborate iron banisters, dark and filthy now, the windows cracking. Their three-room flat looked down into an echoing courtyard piled with crates. The living-room was monopolized by two huge beds raised on blocks of wood. The curtains were gossamer thin. Heavy furniture stood about, its drawers crammed with worn blankets, pillows, books. A budgerigar perched dumb in a cage. There were no carpets, no ornaments, no pretence at decoration at all. The Russian aesthetic sense seemed to have died with Lucia’s ancestors.
This was nothing unusual. Everyone I had met lived in the same discomfort. The strangeness lay in the outward sophistication of the couple—they dressed elegantly and owned a Volga car—and the wretchedness of their home.
‘This was how the poor used to live,’ Anatoly said. ‘But we’re all poor now. One day we’ll get round to painting the place, but we’ve no time.’ He glanced up to where a jagged crack split the ceiling. ‘Getting hold of a builder needs an all-out campaign in Leningrad. The best hope is to find a man moonlighting from his job. I’ll probably repair the place myself.’
That first evening, as we stared down into the resonant courtyard, I imagined that they were satisfied and slightly privileged. Their Volga saloon gleamed below us beside my dust-glazed Morris. I gently probed them. Was it an embarrassment, I asked, if their neighbours noticed they were entertaining a foreigner? But Anatoly shrugged this away. ‘Maybe in somewhere like Novgorod people get afraid. But here they’re used to it. Anyway, we don’t know our neighbours.’ He lapsed into silence. From out of the darkness came sounds of splintering glass and shouting where (he said) the police were probably breaking up crowds around a drink shop open after hours. I muttered something about the numbers of police in Leningrad.
‘The more police there are, the better,’ Anatoly said bluntly. ‘Without them we’d never have any quiet.’
Lucia prepared a supper which was even more costly in time than in money: tongue, black caviare, smetana, cucumber, champagne. She had also procured seats for the Kirov Ballet, which had extended its season into late summer. Such tickets were gold-dust. She and Anatoly obviously wielded blat—influence, ‘clout’—which is more important than money and which becomes a weapon in the hands of almost anybody from a doorman to a marshal. Jokingly, tentatively, I said that half the Kirov stars—Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov—had defected to the West, and that I’d be interested to see the other half.
‘It’s better that we lose those stars,’ Lucia said, ‘and that the world gains them.’ It was an extraordinary remark for a Russian, to whom the outer world is so shadowy and their own so passionately loved.
Surprised and still formal, I murmured that I hoped the West and the Soviet Union were drawing closer together; it was good that we should grow like one another. Yet it seemed to me that the new forces arising in Russia—all the separations of wealth and privilege—were precisely those which coarsened the West, and that our richer freedoms scarcely counted here at all.
‘Grow like one another?’ Anatoly laughed, then said very calmly: ‘It’s better only that we should grow like you.’ Either this remark or the champagne uncorked a river of sorrows from him. ‘We had a golden age in Kruschev’s time—then the axe came down in 1968 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And we’ve never recovered.’ He turned the radio to the forbidden Voice of America as if in revenge, and settled back in his chair. ‘Do you know that some lunatics here even want the Stalin days back? If that happened, Lucia and I wouldn’t be here at all, and you wouldn’t be sitting with us. As for television and radio, God knows…. Even now our only way of getting at the truth is often that.’ He cocked an ear at Voice of America, which was jammed a few days later. ‘Our newspapers preach at us as if we were kids.’
Many Russians had learnt to interpret the news in their own way. An instinctive mental sieve separated the facts from the trappings. From sheer boredom rather than disbelief, they ignored the turgid editorials of national self-congratulation, which painted a Marxist universe of class conflict, Capitalist conspiracy and a Soviet Motherland encircled by enemies. They tended instead to read the little news items: pure, important facts, and they took it for granted that big news often went unprinted, just as it had in tsarist times. In their own lives, after all, they practised the same techniques. With automatic double-think, they used one language to express their opinions in public, and quite another among their close friends. However much ordinary people might accept the general tenor of propaganda (and they did), and whatever their ignorance of the West (and it was profound), they found it hard, on some deeper or emotional level, to hate the individual. The concept of the West might be abhorrent, but the Westerner himself was human and susceptible, and the Russians’ open nature embraced him, at least in my experience, with an immediacy which was the more touching because it flew in the face of everything they had been taught.
Among the educated a growing disillusion with the leadership had turned people more sceptical of the media still. ‘Do you know,’ Anatoly asked me with mock solemnity, ‘the collected works of Brezhnev? Yes, six or seven volumes full of political hogwash. As if we didn’t have enough….’
‘You’ve read them?’