Among the Russians(56)

The road lifted and fell in great calm sighs, flowing between fields of maize and birch forest. Here and there a line of willows traced the idling of a river, and hundreds of black and white cattle drifted nomadically over the pastures. The highway, the main artery to the south, was no more than a stubbly, two-lane scrawl. I was still a thousand miles north of the Caucasus. For two days I drove in a clanking file of lorries, and ate at roadside canteens where truck-drivers talked gloomily about football or prices, drank their watery beer and downed bowls of noodles, sausage and cabbage soup. Imperceptibly we passed from the headwaters of one river-family to those of another. At first the westernmost tributary of the Oka wound among islets; then branches of the Dnieper appeared—marsh-filled coils of water, lazy with fishermen and canoes. Sometimes the road would lift to show a vista of rain-soaked woods or farmlands, but the trees had grown bright and deciduous in windbreaks of oak and acacia.

Something else was changing too. The stifling waves of authority which rippled out from Moscow had begun to subside, the formal grip of the police easing. The distances elongated between check-points. Roadside markets appeared: gatherings of babushkas who bargained stoutly with passing motorists over baskets of apples and potatoes. These sparks of enterprise warmed me. Nowadays I was comforted, rather than disappointed, by the shortcomings of Communism. I had undergone an obscure change of heart. I belonged too deeply to the world of private love and choice which Communism sought to supersede. The danger was that like a Soviet visitor to the West disgusted by things alien to his society—unemployment, organized crime, pornography—my observation might be held too compulsively by the shortcomings which consoled me.

But now I was driving through a region which thirty-five years before had lain derelict. Oryol, Kursk, Belgorod, Kharkov—they had risen up from devastated cores. South of Kharkov I struck the chernozem—the darkly glittering earth which spreads from the Ukraine into Siberia for more than three thousand miles. This is the steppeland soil whose horse-high grasslands nourished the Tartars westward; and the millennial decay of these same grasses created the rich black humus which today bears the great Soviet cornlands. It was patterned over the shallow valleys as if scorched there. I hid my car among trees and wandered along its fields. Around my feet the no-man’s-land of sedge and cornflowers sent up a whirr and chirrup of insects. The earth crumbled through my fingers; the land was flooded in sunlight. I was in the south at last.

I plunged into a mammoth field of sunflowers. Their spatular leaves flopped around my shoulders, and the sun had turned all their heads one way, following its trajectory in an idolatrous worship. When the wind blew among them, these Van Gogh faces shifted in a somnambulistic dance, drowsing and nodding about me at eye level. Bees were drinking at their hearts, where the fallen seeds had left black, burnt-out whorls.

South-eastward from where I walked, the valley of the Don river was muffled in islets. It gathered its strength secretly, apparently motionless, easing southward through the soft soil in long, connected lakes. Across the fields’ skyline ridges of harvested hay stretched a hundred yards long each, like yellow carpets rolled back from a black floor. At first glance it was inexplicable why the harvest of this gigantic earth could not feed the whole nation, the whole world, however erratic its rainfall and brutal the winds. But the collective and state farming systems fester in chronic failure. The peasants are the serfs of Communism. Until recently they were denied even the privilege of a passport for travelling within the country. Between them and the industrial worker yawns an ancient apartheid. The townsman has long regarded them either with disdain or guilty romanticism. They are worse paid than he, worse educated, cut off.

I gave a lift to two labourers. They talked about their work without a flash of pride. They were young. The Stalinist myths and dreams of collective farming had died in them, or never been born. The old truisms were still true: that Party functionaries and accountants stultified the system even here. The collective farmer is motiveless. Thirty per cent of Russia’s agricultural product is grown on just three per cent of its tended land—the private plots of the peasants. Nobody will work for an abstract concept as he will sweat for a wife or a child.

The farmers’ brick houses nestled possessively among their private fruit trees, and this free enterprise had overflowed in larger markets under makeshift awnings along the road: buckets of apricots, green peas, melons, sunflower seeds, yellow-capped mushrooms. They were more expensive than collective food—they were dear by any standards—but they offered choice and a little quality. All day old peasant women would sit before a jar or two of plums or a handful of sourish grapes—yet such markets were more varied than in any northern town.

I stopped for a woman hitch-hiking. She looked almost sixty. Five days a week she hitch-hiked twenty miles to work in a fabrics factory. The return bus fare cost a rouble, she said, and she couldn’t afford it.

It was already eleven o’clock. What time should she be at work?

‘Ten, eleven, twelve! What does it matter?’

Had she no family?

‘Ach!’ She waved them away. She lived alone in a tiny flat. In four years’ time she’d receive a pension of forty-five roubles a month. It wasn’t enough to live on, but she looked forward to it. As for her husband, she’d left him because of drink—the old, commonplace tragedy. ‘He drank so much it was hopeless. We’d been married twenty-seven years, and still I put up with it. But in the end he was completely gone. He didn’t understand anything, or make sense at all. My daughter said: You must leave him. And so I did.’ She spoke stridently but without rancour. ‘What else can a woman do?’