Among the Russians(57)

If the old are not protected by their families, a state pension will barely keep them alive. But the woman seemed too robust for my pity. She gossiped and laughed through gleams of silver teeth. I left her at the factory: a ramshackle building employing many hundreds. But work was better than loneliness. She offered me ten kopecks—Russian motorists ask money for lifts—but pocketed it gratefully on my refusal and marched away through the gates.

All day the country had lain in dead-flat calm, washed by a sky which paled to mist along the vast circumference of its horizons. But suddenly, north of Rostov, I was driving among the waste heaps of the Don basin coal mines. Black or pink discoloured pyramids shot up from a treeless roll of valleys. Sometimes they stood along the skyline in hazy isolation, like forgotten tumuli. More often it looked as if a titanic mole had burrowed beneath the valleys, nudging up cones and earthworks along its run. Mile after mile they continued on a scale as elemental as the land where they stood—inky scarps which loomed above miners’ cottages, ventilation plants, pit-heads, mills, compressor houses. They were desolately impressive, like a poster from Russia’s thirties.

So I came to Rostov-on-Don. This, too, might symbolize the march of industry over the steppes—the triumph of the new Russia over the old Cossack anarchy. It is the gateway to the Caucasus and the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Its citizens are proud of it, and the campsite authorities alighted on me—a rare, lone Westerner—with a language student as guide.

‘This is Yury,’ they said. ‘He’s a Cossack.’

I looked into a near-featureless face, its gaze as grey and unfocused as his native wilderness. I remembered my experience at Minsk, but I had not the heart to send him away. I was his first ‘real Englishman’, he said.

For two days he showed me round the official attractions of Rostov. He recited his facts dutifully—good and bad—in a throaty, smothered voice. He showed none of the hectic evangelism of Alexander Intourist. One skyscraper, he said, had already taken fifteen years to build—he was a child when it had been started—and nobody knew when it would be finished. It was a half-standing joke. And the huge Gorky Theatre, built in the shape of a tractor—a last shout of Constructivism from the early thirties—only faintly stirred him.

Yet Yury was touchy. And he understood nothing of the West at all; he could scarcely focus his imagination for a coherent question about it. Around him the Soviet Union was so vast and hermetic that it comprised all the conceivable world.

One thing I remember with peculiar clarity. This was when I told Yury that we in the West were afraid of Russia. For an instant he stared at me open-mouthed, then burst into disbelieving laughter. It was the only time I heard him laugh, so preposterous to him, so manifestly silly, was the idea of his country’s dangerousness. This disbelief had already been echoed by other Russians along my route. Twice Yury asked me if I were not joking, then gazed at me for long moments, astonished at the depth of my delusion.

And I, in turn, became mesmerized by his enclosedness. Rostov to him was the measure of all things. He took me to the gates of the mammoth Rostelmash factory, the country’s biggest producer of agricultural machinery, which had won the Order of Lenin, he said, and the Order of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He chanted the orders like a liturgy. Then we went to a People’s Palace of Culture. We peered into music and ballet rooms, filming and sculpture studios. They were heavy with control. Yury sensed my distaste, but he could not gauge its cause. He grew disconsolate, and redoubled his efforts. He took me to leisure centres run by trade unions on the south bank of the Don. They were compounds of tin-roofed huts, decorated by plants set in rubber tyres. Everything was violently painted. People came here in summer to escape their apartments, Yury said; the best compound had been visited by Gagarin, and displayed a commemorative fountain, which was falling to bits. No breath of proletarian jollity fired these camps. They were almost deserted. In three different compounds I saw only one netball pitch, a split table-tennis board and a billiard table whose pockets had rotted to shreds. It was the nightmare of some Marxist Butlin.

But Yury felt none of this. He liked the trees, and the sense of the river nearby. Living in a city, he was yet a countryman. He took the steppeland into the streets with him. It lumbered in his walk and filled his inarticulate gaze and hands. He typified, perhaps, the Russian whom Westerners underestimate: decent, conscientious, enduring.

His ancestry was as remote and glamorous to him as it was to me. We spent a morning at Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital—a town like any other now, he said. But two triumphal arches celebrated the entry of Platov’s Cossacks into Napoleon’s Paris, and the crypt of the forbidding cathedral was filled with the tombs of wild atamans. There were still a few old Cossack families living in the town, Yury said, but they kept to themselves and he did not know them. So we wandered round the Don Cossack museum, gazing at a booty of velvet, glass, carpets.

The Cossacks refuse any ideological mould. Refugees from serfdom or revolution, flamboyantly whiskered men and braided women, prodigal of life, roisterous, drunken, free—this seemingly indestructible people coalesced into unruly democracies on the frontiers of empire, pushing it forward but half independent of it, and became in turn the martyrs of peasant revolution and the brutal instruments of imperial repression. The later tsars elevated them to an élite military caste, until they formed the hardest and most reactionary regiments of the army.