Among the Russians(66)

Angrily I extricated myself and walked back down the hill. As if to obliterate this encounter by some happier meeting with his people, I lingered round the little synagogue in the old district; but nobody came. I telephoned friends of Lyudmila—a doctor and a secondary school teacher. But the day seemed to be cursed. The doctor was away, and while waiting for the teacher in a metro station that evening, I was arrested by an inquisitive policeman. I had no idea who he thought I was, or what I might be doing. But he did not believe me British. He led me into a booth-like office and made me read out a passage from an old medical treatise which he had. ‘This is English,’ he said. ‘Can you read it?’

I was surprised to see that it was Latin, and told him so.

‘It’s English,’ he declared.

‘It’s Latin.’ I was becoming embittered with the whole day.

‘It’s English,’ he repeated. Concealed under his fat, hirsute hands were parallel texts in Russian and German. ‘Read it.’

I read it, appending some schoolboy fragments from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, to annoy him. I was thoroughly angry. Then our impasse was ended by a pretty girl who looked in laughing. ‘He can barely read Georgian,’ she said, pointing at the blushing policeman. When she took up the treatise to test him, he let me go.

The teacher Malhaz turned out to be small and bookish, but even in him Georgian patriotism bubbled like the national champagne, the more explosive for being bottled up. His flat was full of friends. They congregated to the blare of pirated American pop songs, re-recorded and sold in Moscow or bought in Hungary and Poland—all bellowed out on his Estonian Hi-Fi. They spoke of the Russians with more indifference than hostility.

‘They’re undeveloped,’ said Malhaz. ‘We feel there’s nothing in them. But look at us!’—and the sweep of his arm paraded a roomful of seething faces in which the Slavic dourness was exchanged for a fiery, reactive life. ‘Yes, of course we want to be free. It’s impossible to be Georgian and not to want freedom. Think of our country! Who says we can’t be independent? We could be rich on tourism alone! As for Communism….’ He scratched his head in mock perplexity. ‘Ah yes, Lenin…there’s a statue in our main square. I believe he’s shouting about something….’



Gori is like a town of one inhabitant, and he a ghost. The cobbler’s son Yosif Dzhugashvili, who called himself Stalin, was born here in 1879, and even during his lifetime the place became a mausoleum to his memory. In 1937 the hovels around his father’s workshop were demolished, the cobbled street beside it encased by marble paving, and a pseudo-temple raised above, with a vast garden and Italianate museum. All through the forties and early fifties the pilgrims poured in.

But now these acres lie frozen and dead in the town’s heart. Ever since Kruschev’s denunciation of him in 1956, Stalin has stood in half-light: a borderland between deification and dishonour which may only be resolved after the generations which loved or loathed him have gone. I drove down Stalin Prospect through utter emptiness. In the town square, a colossal statue of the Vozhd, the Great Leader—the only such one left in the Soviet Union—looms over a tarmac void once filled by visiting delegations. Mine was now the only car.

In the lanes beyond the boulevard you may still sense the constricted poverty in which the cobbler’s son grew up. The photographs which hang in the tiny cottage groan with the same remorseless hardship—a brutal father, a suffering mother, and the boy Joseph whose eyes are already alert.

Ten or twelve Russian tourists waited in the museum foyer. Apart from two girls, they were middle-aged, and some wore service medals. At the head of the stairway a statue of Stalin posed under muted light, and our tour began in a hush of consecration. For this was not a museum at all, but a temple to a still-worshipped god. Stained-glass windows bathed the halls in an opaque sanctity. The wooden floors were inlaid like those of a tsarist palace, and the ceilings dripped with chandeliers. Yet there was scarcely a true relic in the place. Like some monstrous and continuing coup de théatre, it projected instead a glorified life-history in blown-up photographs, statuary, battle-charts and inscribed quotations. We were a captive audience. We moved from Stalin’s childhood to his revolutionary youth. Martial music played from concealed microphones. I watched the pictures grow more enigmatic, the busts more prestigious, the plaudits more grandiloquent. But as time went on, the photographs of the Vozhd showed him peculiarly isolated. Even in a meeting, he seemed alone. Some psychic space had appeared around him, and widened, just as now no houses encroach upon the house where he was born. The boy’s face had become bluff, unreadable.

I stared at my fellow-tourists. They were absorbed, devout. They whispered together. Only the girls looked rather bored.

The rooms unfolded before us like a liturgy. The god to whom they were dedicated was the one who wrenched his country into the industrial twentieth century and hurled back the Nazi invader. For the rest, the shrine was a sightless lie. There was no hint of the horrors which beset enforced collectivization; no mention of the cynical pact signed with Hitler in August 1939, nor of the partition of Eastern Europe; no suggestion that Stalin ever had a daughter—she who defected to the West. Above all, those who died in the years-long reign of terror by torture, firing-squad, famine or sheer despair in labour-camps—the flower of Lenin’s old collaborators, the cream of the Party, of the armed forces, the sciences, the arts, the secret police themselves, together with innocents whose numbers run into numbing millions—all these (and the tens of thousands who killed them) were utterly suppressed. They screamed in the silence.