Among the Russians(45)
The whole hillside has become a dizzying coup de théatre. Beneath the hovering symmetry of the palace, the double stairway drops in giant, glistening steps among a hubbub of gilded goods and goddesses who blaze and shimmer between leaping and corkscrewing fountains. Never was there such a hill-full of dribbling and spuming beasts and deities. Among the celebratory clamour and cross-fire of the water they dance and lounge and wrestle on their pedestals, or fondle one another in grottoes under the main terrace. Satyrs clash cymbals and wave grapes; Venuses hesitate; urns and vases crowd whatever space is left by the water—water tortured into arcs and columns, flung against gravity, spun to muslin.
For a moment of planned peace, this feu de joie succumbs onto a wider platform. Then the tumult begins again as sculptured serpents, throttled in the fists of giants, cough their poisoned streams into the wind. Momentarily the torrent dives underground or gurgles beneath the knees of reclining river gods to slither down fountain walls of greenish ferns. But far beneath, in the grand basin where all this contorted and flung spray at last collects, a monstrous gold Samson tears the jaws of a domesticated-looking lion, from whose stricken mouth a sixty-two-foot jet of water roars skyward. Gilded fish flounder and spout around his feet. Nereids blow their watery conches. Dolphins spurt. Frogs gurgitate. Everything is puffing and spewing, until at last, quiet at the foot of the hill, the water steals through a fountained corridor to the sea, where hydrofoils ply along the wooded slopes of the Gulf of Finland.
All down this cascade, during those spirited fetes champêters attended by peasants and nobles, tens of thousands of lamps once glowed with an unearthly charm beneath the fountain waters; while far away, terminating the vista, an imitation sun sixty feet in diameter seemed to be setting over the Baltic. The whole aqueous pageant belongs less to a garden that to a victory parade. It lacks the serene majesty of the Versailles on which it was modelled. Something, in fact, is wrong. The place reeks of bombast, and perhaps of insecurity. It is an early example of Russian gigantism. Through the mask of Hellenism and Louis XIV, a barbarian face is leering.
‘What do you think of Petrodvorets?’ asked a genial passer-by while I was strolling in the grounds. ‘Is there anything like this in America?’
There isn’t. The 300-acre gardens have become the most massive of all Parks of Rest and Culture. They bristle with the villas and pavilions of Peter the Great, with more cascades, ingenious water-jokes, fake trees. Huge fountains rustle and slop in formal gardens. The summer crowds follow paths to souvenir kiosks, outdoor theatres, restaurants, beaches.
But they generally return in the end to where the central terrace drops in trembling life towards the sea, and the bullying figure of Samson—the lion symbolizes defeated Sweden—releases its jet of national glory to the sky.
5. On The Baltic
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER I drove west from Leningrad towards those troubled Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—whose tragedy has been their tiny size, squeezed as they are between the twin bludgeons of Germany and Russia. The clouds which had been butting along the skyline all morning loosened and grew dark towards noon. At Narva, whose castles confront each other half-ruined over the fast-flowing Narova river, I crossed the boundary into the Soviet republic of Estonia, while to the north the Baltic Sea showed shipless and sombre in the rain.
I picked up a hitch-hiking student: a haggard Estonian. He lifted his booted feet gingerly onto the mattress which replaced my passenger-seat, and ran nervous fingers through a thicket of dripping blond hair. Such moments were perfect for honesty. Alone in a British car, met by chance and not even knowing one another’s names, we talked without fear. He was reading archaeology at Estonia’s Tartu University. Every student, he said—almost every Estonian—loathed the Russians. Official protestations of brotherhood with the Soviet Union were a degrading farce. The trouble was that the population growth of the Estonians and Latvians was virtually zero, while the Russians were pouring into their cities to take up jobs in industry. In the Estonian capital of Tallinn (we were already in sight of it) the Russians almost outnumbered the natives; in the Latvian capital of Riga they already did. The republics had the highest standard of living in the Soviet Union, he said, but their people were headed for extinction.
He clasped my shoulder with a fierce intimacy before parting. Little Estonia was lovelier than all Russia, he said. Had I liked Leningrad—that cold classicism? Well, Tallinn was more beautiful, more human. He said an Estonian goodbye—H??d aega (it sounded defiantly Scandinavian)—and walked away through the thinning rain.
No wonder nationalism is the Kremlin’s nightmare. The Baltic population may be stable, but that of the Moslem republics is increasing at five times the Russian average and within twenty years may have swollen to a third of the young populace. National consciousness has been fostered, not dimmed, by evolving education, and now matches Russian patriotism with thwarted feelings all around it. Within a few years the ethnic Russians—already only fifty-two per cent of the total populace—will be a minority in their own empire. Moscow may conceive the federal states as in transition towards a society of Homo Sovieticus—and Russians occupy powerful, quasi-independent positions in the Party branches of every republic—but the republics themselves show every sign of wanting to freeze or elevate their status into greater autonomy.
In the campsite at Tallinn I found many Estonians from Sweden or Finland, where they or their parents had fled in 1944 before the fleeting independence of the Baltic states was strangled by Stalin. They returned to Estonia on holiday now. Their big cars gleamed among the camping huts; their transistors roared; their wives and children were bright in Scandinavian cottons. Released from the restrictive Finnish drinking laws, they celebrated into the night in a long, free uproar, while the Soviet Estonians sat dourly round their Primus stoves, frying lumps of fish and boiling semolina.