Among the Russians(9)
The sheer size of the country has much to do with this, and with its shrouding strangeness. Wherever you touch it, you are conscious of a giant, alienating hinterland. You are always, somehow, on the periphery. Even in early historical times, people felt that the Black Sea shores passed northward into an echoing silence. The ancient Greeks confused the coastal inhabitants with a race living in perpetual mist at the frontiers of the world. Their knowledge petered out beyond the domain of the terrible Scythians, fading into rumours of a desert sub-continent inhabited by cannibals and gold-guarding griffins. But by the ninth century A.D. the eastern Slavs, who were to form the Russian people, were established and free between the Urals and the Dnieper; and it was through their heartland that I was now travelling.
This, above all, is a land of rivers. They wind among sodden fields and half-drowned trees—great motherly slugs of water crawling down to the Baltic, or tributaries of the Dnieper meandering hundreds of miles south. The Volga, the Don and the Dnieper all rise here within a few hundred miles of one another, and it was along their forest waterways that the early Slavic world grew up. They linked the Baltic with Constantinople; and the Vikings, riding their slow floods, carried furs and metals southward and dominated the trade routes all the way to the Black Sea. Kiev, Moscow, Novgorod, Smolensk all flowered in their wake. For a full century before the Norsemen were absorbed into the Slavic population, they guided the gleam of Byzantine traffic northward—jewels, silks, spices, Christianity itself.
Smolensk, which I reached that night, was just such a trading-town, but only the barrows of its tribal kings have survived from early years. Morning showed a fortress-city mounded on a hill dark with trees. Beneath it the young Dnieper was coiled in a brooding, sky-filled flood. A florid cathedral shone in the mist, and the empty streets and squares were bathed in a feeling of permanent Sunday.
I sat under the city walls, eating a picnic lunch. Pram-pushing women with galleass bodies trudged past, and a student from the town’s language college, noticing my foreign shoes, came up to practise his English on me. To discover a ‘real Englishman’—and not an English-speaking Scandinavian or German—struck him as a great triumph. The city was dead, he said, there was nothing to do here except die. All the same, he showed me round.
He spoke in a dry counterpoint to the possessed babble of Alexander Intourist. ‘This is the Smolensk Hotel…it’s pretty awful…here’s the stadium…I haven’t a clue how many it holds….’ Ivan was twenty-three. He came from Grodno near the Polish border. His father was dead, his mother a teacher of psychology. His barbered hair and tended good looks were strangely un-Russian. A slight moustache undercut his fragile nose, and his lips were permanently cusped together, as if tasting something bitter. He carried a fashionable shoulder-bag and his mannerisms were nervously homosexual; in a Western country town he might have been ridiculed, but in Smolensk, I suspected, he was simply an object of puzzlement.
We wandered towards the Park of Culture where a monument commemorated the defenders of Smolensk against Napoleon. It was ringed by the graves of early Bolshevik leaders, but Ivan dismissed them. ‘They’re not important. I don’t know who they are.’ At the park entrance the city’s board of honour announced the regional heads of factories and institutes who had won prizes or exceeded their output quotas. Their photographs gazed down at us with a hollow and illustrious fixity, as if responsibility had steeped them all in the same deadening brine.
Ivan sighed. ‘Who wants to know these figures and percentages? It’s all such rot. I can’t bear to hear about them.’ He glanced around. We were alone under the billboards. Their mute stare accused us. ‘I tell you,’ he added in his slight drawl, ‘the young are the government’s main problem here. There’s nothing for us to do, nowhere to go. Of course the older people had to fight the war. They’re more single-minded than us, grimmer.’ He glanced up at the portraits, which went on exuding public worthiness. ‘Naturally they don’t like our music and clothes. But my generation is different, you see, less categorical. We find it easier to assimilate the new.’
We turned down anonymous streets. He emitted a continuous, pale frustration. ‘There’s something I dread, I must tell you. Every teacher and doctor in our country is sent away to some village in the wilds on a three-year term of work. That’s all very idealistic, I know, and the old applaud it. But none of us young can bear the idea. We’d do anything to avoid it.’ His face convulsed in an expression of bitter frailty. ‘For three years you get boarded out with a family in a little room, and have to teach children who hardly know where Moscow is, let alone London. The Party’s said that this way our villages will become like cities, but how will that happen? There are things a government can’t do….’
On the rooftops around us the repeated Party slogans—‘Build Communism’, ‘Glory to Work’—seemed suddenly less like a shout of triumph than what I now understood them to be: a coercing plea for help.
We turned back along the hoary semi-circle of sixteenth century city walls. Their brick ramparts were slung between conical and polygonal towers, and rose to machicolated tufts of masonry like rotted teeth. I asked Ivan why he was attending language college here, and not in his native Grodno; but his face clouded.
‘It wasn’t allowed,’ he said. ‘There was some…scandal.’ He stared up embarrassed at the battlements. Here, at Smolensk, four hundred miles off, the rumour of his offence had died away, or never arrived. ‘I dream of living in Leningrad one day,’ he said. ‘The people there are cultured and gentle, and you can feel history pouring down on you like rain.’ He opened his palms to receive an invisible downpour. ‘Of course the old system which produced such things was evil, but the things themselves are beautiful, so beautiful. God!’ He rubbed his eyes as if he wanted to weep. It was strange to hear the word God in the mouth of a Communist, but I often did. ‘And half the palaces are reflected in the canals. You get them twice over! Moscow’s all right, of course, but new buildings like that happen everywhere—they’re all over the West too, I suppose. But oh, the old!’