Among the Russians(38)

The labour of typing out innumerable copies must have been intense.

‘Oh that’s nothing,’ Volodya said. ‘We’ve typed out the whole of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago with six carbons! One copy may go through thousands of hands. We can’t even know how many—they get passed on anonymously.’ ‘We think we have a circulation of between three and five thousand,’ said a voice beside me. I looked into a face of earnest dreaminess: a twenty-year-old girl. ‘But we don’t know. After the journal goes out we scarcely hear any more. There can’t be any playback.’ She added in a voice of hushed, childlike melodrama: ‘We live in a phantom world.’

Yet when I turned to the back of the journal, the names and biographies of its contributors were boldly inscribed there, including Volodya’s. I was amazed.

‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘It’s all dangerous,’ Volodya said.

I gazed round the circle of callow men and soft-eyed girls, and thought of the KGB officer. They looked fearfully isolated. They lived in a garden of ideas, passions, possibilities still unfrustrated. They talked with all the brightness of their long, unknown futures. It was heady and irresponsible stuff, and reminded me of nights too long past when groups of students (I was one) in London perfected the world with the shake of an intellectual kaleidoscope. One man here was reading out some politically risqué poetry, another planning a dissident sculpture exhibition. The room vibrated with a half-adolescent excitement at the forbidden and the initiate. I felt afraid for them. Theirs was an energy which had tried for a better life in 1825, 1905, 1917; they were today’s revolutionaries. But instead of dogma and ruthlessness, they wielded poetry. Sometimes, listening to them, I felt as if the policies of the Kremlin were no more than the wish-fulfilments of patriarchal old men trying to keep the world as they had known it. But it was impossible, I thought, that the KGB were ignorant of Volodya’s journal and of its privately trumpeted contributors. And Volodya must know that they knew. Like the tsarist police before them, they preferred not to drive the whole apparatus of dissent underground, but to watch and control it. While the writers’ refusal to conceal their names was a statement of guiltlessness. I assumed, also, that we were bugged.

‘Have you seen these?’ the girl asked. One by one she gave out specimens from a pile of hand-printed engravings. They were illicit samples from the studio of an artist in Lvov—pictures too avant-garde to hang. We passed them round like talismans from one to another. They were dense, abstract compositions, suggesting religious symbols. In the West, I thought, they would be judged pedantic. But here their honesty was exciting. The illicit had become equated with the good. The intensity with which the circle of faces scrutinized each engraving betrayed how starved they were of new ways of seeing, thinking, being, of any stimuli at all.

To the Soviet authorities it seems that the avant-garde book or picture wields a terrible disruptive power. And perhaps it does. The fear of an abstract painting, which may unlace the understanding to a world less simple than was apparent, is the fear that primacy may pass to the private, rather than the collective, vision. And there can be no return, once the journey has started, to tribal innocence.

True words or images in the Soviet Union are precious and powerful precisely because they are forbidden. ‘A word of truth dropped into Russia,’ wrote de Custine as long ago as 1839, ‘is like a spark landing in a keg of gunpowder.’ In such an atmosphere art becomes both more valuable and more dangerous. Small wonder, then, that canvases of Malevich and others have been lying unexhibited in the basements of museums for more than half a century. And when I visited Leningrad’s Russian Museum, I was amazed to see in preparation an inaugural exhibition for Larionov, whose works have been familiar to the West since 1906.

In just such a way the dissidents themselves disturb the Kremlin not because of their numbers, which are tiny, but because they embody a truth. This truth accuses and makes guilty the whole system. It expresses what everybody in fact knows: that Communism is smaller than life. It dissolves the myth of the Soviet paradise. And for this it cannot be forgiven.

‘What do you think of the engravings?’ the girl asked, lifting the last of them off my knee. I said I thought them honest and interesting. Her eyes were shining. Even to me, the prints had taken on the excitement of contraband.

‘Have you seen work like this in England?’

I remembered with irony the unheard clamour of writers and painters in the West, whose honesties were two a penny; meanwhile the Kremlin was turning art and thought here into the most precious commodity of all, had recognized its catalytic power and paid it the compliment of persecution.

But now the conversation was turning to criticism of Soviet life, and was rife with disillusion. Their pile of accusations went to join the pyramid already in my mind (almost everybody I met had added a stone or two): rampaging bribery, ingrained corruption and universal political hypocrisy. The self-accorded privileges of top Party members were a rankling sore—their numberless grades of private shops, the select schools, universities and bureaucratic posts into which they inveigled their children; their permits to travel abroad, their country dachas—even their yachts. In all this, my companions saw the mushrooming of a class system—both an upper hierarchy and a bourgeoisie in middle-level management—together with lethargy and growing materialism in their own generation, who did not talk of ideals any longer. The gerontocracy in the Kremlin created suffocating centralism and an inflexible fear of change. A rampant underground economy accounted for some twelve per cent of the average citizen’s income (a Western statistic) and whole secret factories were turning out products in short supply. In Leningrad alone, said one man, there were more than twenty-six rouble-millionaires whose wealth derived from underground business.