Among the Russians(5)

As we drove down Lenin Prospect he fired off fresh volleys of logistics. He knew the numbers of dormitories rented out by the Communist youth organization Komsomol, the new housing units per year and even their rents, the amount of hectares reclaimed for forestation in White Russia, the count of graduates from the pedagogical institute, then broke into an elucidation of Marxist economic theory. I listened to him in appalled hypnosis, until I had a fantasy that mounds of decimals and percentages were piling up inside the car, lapping against our chests. Yet his talk was also full of telling pauses and shallows, moments when his thoughts darkened and he would be answering the challenge of some imaginary questioner before emerging to denounce the threat in a fresh salvo of arithmetic. I think he had almost forgotten that I was with him. His gaze was fixed on his own clenched hands. A long fusillade of figures came clamouring out of him in defence of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value. But to my untutored mind he seemed merely to be engaged in a phantasmal civil war. He positively thundered with the drama of it all, charged in with quadratic equations, retreated before counterattacking quotients or dug in behind differential calculus, then sneaked up to deliver the coup de grace with a vulgar fraction.

It was an awesome performance, at once dedicated, talented and futile. Somewhere he had picked up the British commonplace ‘I can’t quarrel with the statistics’—a saying which perfectly expressed him. In a moment of irritation I asked him why not (since Russian statistics are notoriously misleading) but he only winced at me, not understanding.

And it was in Alexander that I first heard the language of Soviet official sentiment. Certain words and phrases left his lips haloed in near-sanctity, and occasionally his talk became a positive blaze of these revered shibboleths. In this, too, he seemed deeply Russian, and intrinsically religious. As we approached the grey obelisk at the end of the Lenin Prospect, he announced: ‘Here is the Victory Monument over the Hitlerites [Nazis]. It stands 41 meters high inclusive of the blazon, 38 meters if excluding. At its foot is the Eternal-Flame-of-Memory [the shibboleths always struck me as hyphenated] commemorating the heroes of the Great-Patriotic-War [Second World War].’ He pointed out a small building hidden in trees, where the first congress of the future Communist Party was held in secret. ‘The Party was united then,’ he said. ‘That was long before the Great-October-Socialist-Revolution [the revolution of autumn 1917]. Later the Party split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.’ Then he added: ‘The Mensheviks took up arms against the Bolsheviks, so they had to be eliminated.’

I no longer looked at him, because I knew that this lie had fallen from his lips with the same proselytizing certainty as the rest. He absolutely believed it. So I waited in silence as the past was falsified, feeling a mingled anger and hopelessness. Because instinctively I liked Alexander. Perhaps in his devotion to answers and absolutes, I found in him an inverted image of myself.

I turned on the car radio brutally for music.



That afternoon we drove out forty miles to Katy, where one of the largest memorial complexes of the war is spread through a forest clearing. The Second World War so haunts the Russian consciousness that no understanding of the country is possible without it. Between June 1941—when Germany launched a four-million-man Blitzkrieg eastward on a front 1500 miles wide—and the moment four years later when the shreds of those armies were tossed back over the Fistula to Berlin, the Russians suffered as did no other nation. Their military casualties were unparalleled in twentieth century warfare. In the first few days the dead immediately mounted to hundreds of thousands, and the civilian population perished like insects, almost unrecorded. In the siege of Leningrad alone nearly a million people died, many from starvation. Of Russian prisoners-of-war more than three million were starved to death, massacred or died from exposure. Every occupied city was half gutted. In Hark, for instance, the Germans found a population of 700,000. Of these they deported 120,000 for slave labour (such people were rarely heard of again); 30,000 were executed; and some 70,000 more died of cold and hunger. Here in White Russia the Germans murdered over a million men, women and children, and almost the whole Jewish population was annihilated. Villages suspected of supporting partisans were simply wiped out. In the vast extermination camp of Madame, near Dublin, an estimated 1,500,000 Russians and Poles perished in gas chambers and incinerators. When the Soviet Union at last awoke from her nightmare of suffering and revenge, she found her economy in ruins, with 2,000 towns and 70,000 villages utterly laid waste. Her dead amounted to over twenty millions.

Such facts go far to explain Russia’s traumatized preoccupation with security. As we followed the road to Katy, even the continuing statistics of Alexander became forgivable. Through the fog of my thoughts I heard; ‘…45,000…the Eleventh Five-Year Plan…seven per cent….’

But now I told him gently that this religion of materialism filled me with misgiving. I said that in my world, older in wealth than his own, trust in the value of material advance was faltering.

But Alexander attributed this to capitalist decadence. ‘Where you come from,’ he declared, ‘people don’t make sacrifices.’ Whereas in his country, he added, the individual was still expected to serve the mass. He pointed out a village by the road. It looked clean and tended; an old woman was carrying buckets from the communal well, and a file of geese paraded along the verge. That village, he said, would have to be moved; it must be relocated to serve a collective farm, to serve the People.