Читать книгу One Russia, Two Chinas - George Fetherling - Страница 11
ОглавлениеI struck gold on the midnight train to Leningrad.
Like all the other overnight trains, such as those to Helsinki, Vilnius, or other points north and west, this one, called the Red Arrow, had compartments with two berths each, side by side, and I found myself sharing with a woman in her seventies, dressed in a very middle-class manner but with a ratty old cardigan over her suit. On her left lapel she had affixed pins or medals, ones I had never seen in that country of military decorations—both cameos of someone (not Lenin), one black, the other red and black. I asked her what they were, and she told me that they showed her membership in the Soviet Academy of Science and its Italian equivalent. “I do not usually feel disposed to wear insignia but today was different,” she said. She was a retired mathematician, and the occasion was a gathering of the clan in Moscow, from which she was now returning home. She spoke the English of someone who had learned it before the Great Patriotic War—might almost have learned it before the Revolution, the last time Russia was part of Europe.
How long had she resided in Leningrad?
“It has been my home uninterruptedly since 1947.”
Then she had not been there during the war, during the Nazi siege lasting 900 days?
“But I was there, yes. I was a young student, and I took very ill. The German circle around the city was complete except for one small opening, and I was evacuated and taken back to Moscow. When I recovered, I continued my studies there.”
We talked for many kilometres. She sat perfectly upright; her eyes shone, and when she broke into a smile, as she did at every opportunity, the change in her expression took up the slack that the years had given her face, the lower part in particular.
I asked her how she had come to receive the pin from the Italian academy.
“It was given to me two years ago, I believe it was, when I travelled there for that purpose. Things were not always as you find them now. There is libéralisme in the Chamber of Deputies and throughout the government; it is in the air. But this was not always so,” she said, taking advantage of her understatement to smile again. “I was the first woman mathematician to become a member of the Soviet academy.” I gathered that her discipline was almost as much a barrier as her gender, and that even after she was elected there were still more obstacles to overcome. “Perhaps six years ago the international symposium was held in Montreal, but I was not permitted to go.” But with the Gorbachev ascendancy, the mood changed instantly; the trip to Italy was her first and so far only visit to the West.
Finally we grew tired of talking. She put out the lamp, saying merrily, “There is too much illumination in the carriage.” We lay back on our respective bunks. Whenever we passed through a town during the night, I could see her head silhouetted in the flickering light. It looked as though it belonged on an ancient coin.
As it happened, I saw Leningrad in strict sunshine, which it is possible to do only 65 or at most 100 days of the year. This good luck no doubt contributed to my general impression that Leningrad was on balance one of the handsomest cities I had ever been in. I mean the old central city, which became the capital in 1712, a few years after it was founded, and retained the distinction for 200 years. But even the outer districts, with rusty factories in the Soviet manner, were not without a 1930s late modernist charm. They made you forget for a moment how northern a city Leningrad really is, with its Baltic air and immense skies. When you move beyond the city—and such is the density that you don’t have to move very far, considering that there are five million residents—you run into forests of white birch.
When leaving Canada, I had stuffed a bag with expendable secondhand paperbacks for consumption in queues and waiting rooms (and learned when I arrived that they made welcome gifts as the appetite for English books was hearty every where I went). Quite by chance I came upon a passage in Walden in which Henry David Thoreau enumerates his reasons for choosing to settle at Walden Pond. “No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving,” he writes. “It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.” But it’s not like that at all, at least not in the warmer months. The Neva is a broad river that cuts a deep blue pattern through the heart of the city, augmented by small canals that suggest a miniature (and cleaner) Venice. On both banks of the river, for as long as one can see in both directions, are perfect baroque buildings from the 18th century and classical ones from the early part of the 19th. Many are painted in pastel shades—not, as in Portugal, say, to display them-selves best in direct sunlight but to fight back against the absence of it. The Winter Palace, I was surprised to discover, is wintergreen (a mnemonic device in the making for anyone who has difficulty remembering what buildings were stormed in the Revolution). The low line of harmonious rooftops was interrupted here and there by a church spire or a gold dome. One such dome, in the distance, belongs to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose columns still bear some scars from the war. It is located across the square from the Astoria Hotel, which Hitler vowed to make into a museum of the conquest of Leningrad. Some chicken, some neck. The pockmarks on St. Isaac’s are retained as a reminder, like a sign on a building in Nevsky Prospekt, the principal commercial street, requesting pedestrians to walk on the other side of the avenue during periods of bombardment.
The damage done during the war went beyond what would be suggested by the word extensive; it was heartbreaking. But the Soviets were the world’s champion restorers and rebuilders, and neither the antiquarian symmetry of the riverfront nor the open-handed bustle of Nevsky Prospekt, with its often magnificent pre-Revolutionary shops, showed Leningrad for the tragic and violent place it had so often been. Granted that by now there should be no way of recalling that three-quarters of the buildings were destroyed in the war against Napoleon. What is implausible—and it flies in the face of all sensory logic, too—is that it is not easy to connect the place with its revolutionary past—Leningrad, where the Decembrists rose up, where the men of the cruiser Aurora, which is now a floating museum, fired some of the first shots of the Revolution, where Lenin disembarked at the Finland Station, his exile ended. But it is so. I found it much easier to conceive of Moscow, where intellectual and artistic ferment go together with a gritty workaday existence, as the epicentre of past political earthquakes than Leningrad, which was merely the hub of government, the aristocracy, and the capitalist business culture that were being overthrown. Not that it was remote from the present political turmoil. On the contrary. Only weeks earlier a crowd of 100,000 had gathered outside the Winter Palace to protest the possibility that the two former prosecutors whose stories of corruption had been printed in the Moscow News might lose their immunity. I saw graffiti such as FUCKEN POLICE and the letter A in a circle, the international sign for anarchism. Yet despite all that, Leningrad was definitely the quieter place, with both a deeper level of culture and a sense of inferiority, perhaps equally profound, about having become the second city. The comparisons are inexact enough to be odious, but Leningrad is to Moscow as Montreal is to Toronto, San Francisco is to Los Angeles, and Melbourne is to Sydney.
As befits a city that in tsarist times gave pride of place to its magnificent classical Stock Exchange (by now a naval museum), it was also, or so I found, a greedier place than Moscow in terms of the poor Soviets’ eternal quest for the magical American dollars—greedier and so ruder, because the mission was clear and the time to accomplish it so brief. My experience of Intourist employees I dealt with in Moscow, for example, was that they were uniformly helpful and efficient and usually friendly to boot; but the ones in Leningrad wore renfrogné expressions that were matched by their voices. One or two of the foreigners’ hotels in Moscow had a few discreet slot machines in the lobby to extract yet a few more dollars or pounds per year, but in Leningrad they were more numerous and not at all hidden; in one instance, there was a sort of miniature casino, gaudily lit. May be that kind of thing is to be expected in any city whose museums and treasures make it a place where tourism is disproportionately important to the economy (20,000 people per day visit the Hermitage museum, 40,000 per day in the summer and during holidays). One incident for me crystallized Leningrad’s position in this matter.
Wherever I went, I found, as so many Western visitors do, that people were forever approaching me to change dollars into rubles at the best black-market valuta (you would have had to be crazy to run the risk of accepting) or to try to sell me wristwatches or vodka. Leningrad exceeded all the boundaries. Spotting me as a foreigner (it is my fate always to look like a foreigner wherever I am, even when I stay home), young men would enquire in whispers whether I might wish Soviet flags or icons or caviar (three jars for $10—“special price”). The most original was a chap not far from the main entrance of the Admiralty. He was in civilian attire, but I took him to be a sailor by his distinctive haircut—and because Leningrad has been full of sailors since it was established originally to be the country’s Baltic seaport. He was carrying a bag of some rough cloth, bigger than a large pillow slip. I thought I saw it move, leading me to suppose that it contained a chicken or perhaps a litter of kittens. But what he wanted was to sell his—or somebody’s—dress uniform, complete with braided cap and epaulets. I declined, and we each scurried off in stoic embarrassment like two people whose stomachs had been rumbling in public. Naval discipline, I gathered, was not what it once was.
I stayed in Leningrad a couple of days, looking at paintings and buildings and talking to as many people as I could, including bathers sunning themselves on the sand beneath the walls of Peter and Paul Fortress, the old political prison. I marvelled at the brevity of their costume, given that I found it cold enough to warrant something midway between a mackintosh and an overcoat. They’re a hardy mob, those Leningraders.
I wish I could report that my return journey to Moscow was as rewarding as the trip up had been, but it was merely memorable. My roommate this time was a merchant seaman who kept addressing me as Englander. I had all the more reason to not split hairs, but simply accept this as the generous compliment it was, given that he was as drunk as a—well, as a sailor. He couldn’t move more than a few steps without banging his head into something, and he kept dropping the sheaf of roses that he told me were for his wife in Moscow. He also confessed, rather needlessly, that he had been out with his friends and had consumed quite a lot of vodka. He told me that he knew my country well, and rhymed off the landmarks: Tilbury Docks, Tower Bridge, Big Ben.… By the end of the list he was singing rather than reciting them.
I confessed my fatigue and asked whether I might put out the light. But when I did he would simply turn it on again. And my plan of going to the Soviet Union with the intention of ignoring my own shyness and talking with as many different citizens as possible was put to the test by the fact that, after an hour or so, I still couldn’t get him to shut the bloody hell up. So I was relieved when he announced that he was leaving our compartment in search of more vodka. When he found some, though, he returned to shake me awake and insist that I share it with him. I sent him away and fell asleep again. He then sent as an emissary to reawaken me the woman whose vodka it was. I told her to get out. Some while later the sailor barged back into the room to retrieve his wife’s roses, presumably for redistribution among women elsewhere in the carriage. That must have been 3:00 a.m. or so. When we pulled into the station at seven, he was asleep, slouched over like a big sack of onions, snoring a deafening snore. I left him there and went in search of a taxi driver I could bribe.
For all the reverence I saw in people’s behaviour at the Lenin Mausoleum, I also heard, throughout my stay, a lot of condemnation of his shade or maybe of the Lenin cuit. Much of it was expressed at the level of satire or humour, however seriously it was felt. One person told me that in his life-time he had seen 50 coats or suits that once belonged to Lenin hanging in various museums—“and they’re all different sizes.” At another exhibit I heard a woman argue quite seriously and cogently that Leningrad should be given back its old name; this surprised me, but soon a powerful movement would spring up around the idea. But of Stalin who betrayed the Revolution and commenced not only the Era of Stagnation but the long reign of terror, I heard much less derision. I couldn’t quite tell to what extent this was because his statue had been kicked over long ago and to what extent it was because the plinth was still warm. Maybe hatred of Stalin was simply taken for granted. Taking a poke at Lenin was certainly a different matter, a safe novelty, part of the new freedom, the changes in change itself, the liberal counter-revolution.
The joyous assumptions of Americans to the contrary, this new revolution was not necessarily a purblind rush to embrace America or the right. No one was advocating turning the Soviet Union into another United States; surely Gorbachev, faced with a deepening national emergency, was only making socialism far more flexible, as Franklin Roosevelt, when in a similar corner, made capitalism more flexible. The point wasn’t the Cold War except to the extent that the Cold War was too expensive for either side to continue fighting, most of all the Soviets, who had a standing army of four million but, according to the more liberal military planners at defence headquarters across the river from Gorky Park, needed a mere 1.7 million. It was simply about moving nearer the middle, with more democracy and a more mixed economy than in the past, trying to improve the lot of individuals (and preserving the power of those now bringing about the improvement). Yet the changes were abrupt. They could still turn out to be violent. Certainly they would cause some aspects of Soviet life to worsen before they improved. This much was brought home to me again and again as I spoke with people about their fears and aspirations.
It is obvious to the least observant visitor that the present system guaranteed full employment only by perpetuating a ridiculous level of overstaffing. Four people worked in a cloakroom that might be handled by one. To buy a plane ticket or rent a hotel room or get a loaf of bread in a bakery, you were passed from person to person, each of whom undertook some further perfunctory part of the process. A retail purchase that in a state-run shop in China might require the services of two or three persons could easily, in the Soviet Union, take those of four or five—one to show you where the item was, a second to fetch it down, another to take your money, yet another to take your receipt and do the wrapping. As the old socialist jest had it, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” There was an important difference between this arrangement in the Soviet Union and the impression I got in China that the government was at least making the best use of its most obvious asset—the labour force. That it was difficult to feel the same way about Soviets was no doubt coloured by the way the country was routinely rumoured to be on the brink of collapse—an ethnocentric Western view, I feel, since we had no real understanding of how long it had been as bad as it was and no way to measure the Russians’ extraordinary capacity for swallowing adversity and making the best of chaos.
This was the difficulty in trying to interpret events in the socialist world at the time: the Americans refused to believe anything good about the Soviets, that the people were generally better educated, less violent, and leading perhaps altogether deeper lives than they themselves were, whereas the Soviets, or the young ones at least, refused to believe anything bad about the West—the drugs, the crime, the homelessness, the AIDS. A general lack of attention to reality obscured the simple truth that the quality of life in the one place was improving and in the other place deteriorating but that, in any event, they were becoming more alike.
I was told that it wouldn’t be long before Soviet citizens would be free to possess credit cards—despite the absence, so far, of all the necessary mainframes and software. One can imagine what a mess eventually resulted, given that virtually every place of business in the country still used the abacus in preference to the cash register. They had cash registers, all right, but they didn’t use them for any form of tabulation but merely as places to keep large-denomination notes, as one might use a microwave oven as a book-case. In that environment the moves towards a market economy were bound to be painful. People may cheer when bureaucrats are put out of work, but what about when they themselves must go on and living standards plummet? As things then stood, 45 million Soviets lived on 70 rubles a month. In Moscow alone there were 1.7 million people below the official poverty line, and when I was there the new mayor announced plans for municipally funded soup kitchens. Before they could be opened, it was expected that the price of most consumer goods would rise 100 percent. No one disputed that such changes were necessary or that the existing social net had to be remade, but with new measures to protect pensioners and others on fixed incomes, if the country was to stabilize its currency. Stabilizing it was the first step towards internationalizing it. At that time the much-vaunted joint ventures between Soviets and Western businesspeople, about 1,300 of them when I was there, didn’t work because the Westerners didn’t want to be paid in worthless rubles and there were not enough dollars or Deutschmarks for that purpose. The joint ventures were necessary, however, to improve the supply and quality of consumer goods. To an extent I was prepared to accept but couldn’t quite fathom until I saw the situation with my own eyes, the problem of the Soviet Union was the problem of food. No one actually starved to death, as of old, but Gorbachev must have been aware all too acutely of a rule that has cautioned leaders for thousands of years, that hungry people are dangerous people.
Then there were social ills we don’t usually see, for a variety of reasons. There was indeed a slight drug problem in the Soviet Union, though hardly on the scale of any western European country. One of the reasons you heard so little about it was that it did not involve smuggling and international borders, for the drugs came from areas of the country close to Afghanistan (though intelligence specialists have long insisted that China illicitly supplies drugs to its old adversary, just as it is supposed to have flooded the Vietnamese market 35 years ago to help demoralize the American troops). Crime was rising in the big cities, as it is in big cities everywhere, I suppose. There were places in Moscow, just as in the West, where for fear of rape women were afraid to enter their own apartment buildings alone after dark. I saw beggars in the subway underpasses, but not many; so far there was virtually no homelessness as such, though the extent and quality of housing was a pressing problem and a major subject of anxiety—but having said so, there seems no point getting sucked up into any East-West comparisons when the systems are so fundamentally different.
By contrast, the whole range of women’s issues is a useful illustration of the similarities and differences. “There is no feminist movement,” a teacher in her forties explained to me. “We have equal pay for equal work, and women do about all the jobs that men do.” There is, however, a “women’s lobby,” which is expected to challenge the spread of such complacency and to address imbalances, such as that only eight percent of political offices in the Soviet Union were held by women (as compared, for example, with the House of Commons in Ottawa, where at the time 13.5 percent of the MPs were women—hardly a figure to justify smugness). Perhaps the harshest fact of women’s existence is that though both partners must work, the woman still performs all the domestic functions previously expected of her, and moreover that this presents even greater difficulty than in the West. The father does not usually take part in child care. It is also the woman who spends two or three hours shopping for food for the night’s supper (only to find sometimes, after getting to the head of the line, that the food is spoiled). Women are not social equals. What was called male chauvinism in the West in the 1970s was the common currency in the Soviet Union, though there was no name for it and it was almost completely unremarked on by either gender so far as public discussion went; it was simply part of the culture. If lucky enough to be invited into a private home, the Western visitor was often shocked by how the husband denigrated his wife’s domestic skills as a means of apologizing, needlessly of course, for the lack of what he imagined to be Western comfort. No wonder that 33 percent of marriages ended in divorce, which accounted for 70 percent of all activity in the courts; in more than 98 percent of divorce cases involving children, the mother was given custody. The parting couple paid a 300-ruble divorce tax (until recently 200 rubles—inflation again). Child-support payments were generous but of course that never really solves the problem. The nation might now be self-sufficient in blue jeans, much to the impoverishment of black marketeers and shrewd Western tourists. What it lacked so conspicuously were condoms which, when available at ail, were of unreliable quality. I was told that for Western visitors to give their host or hostess condoms would not be misunderstood but, on the contrary, would seem considerate. Abortion might be free on demand, but it was virtually the only form of birth control worthy of the name. Fully 20 percent of first pregnancies ended in abortion.
Alcoholism was another factor in marriage breakdown as it was in poor work productivity. One of Gorbachev’s first initiatives was the major campaign against alcohol abuse, even to the extent of banning the sale of hard liquor (but not its consumption) on trains and planes. Reaction against the “authoritarian” campaign was among the causes that enabled Yeltsin to get his political comeback underway. One sensed that economic loss, not health, was the primary concern, given that virtually no acknowledgement was made of the fact that 78 percent of adult males and 38 percent of adult females smoked cigarettes. The Soviet Union was, in fact, a nation of inveterate chain-smokers. “Sure, we have free housing, or virtually free,” I was told. One person I talked to paid just 17 rubles a month for an apartment in downtown Moscow, a tiny portion of his middle-class salary. “But the quality is poor. With health care, it was similar. It was free of charge, and available to everyone, but the quality I believe you would call lousy.” I heard stories, which I was not able to confirm, of a drug shortage so severe that patients in polyclinics had died from infection after routine operations such as appendectomies. People wanted change to come and soon, sooner than seemed possible, in fact. The good thing about the present, after all, is that there are no surprises.
Kropotkin Street, named to honour the great anarchist, was formerly known as Blessed Virgin Street. It contains a sinister building partly hidden by a high wall topped with barbed wire; this is one of the psychiatric institutions where dissidents were held against their will and, in a few cases, still were, if rumours were correct. A short distance along is a building that was long home to two elderly women who kept scores of cats. Five years earlier, however, the cats were removed and the house became Moscow’s first cooperative, which is to say free-enterprise, restaurant, known simply as No. 36 Kropotkin. It wouldn’t even accept dollars much less rubles but took only credit cards and was frequented by groups of foreigners or by single foreigners like me, eager to repay the genuine hospitality of some Soviet acquaintances. It was not the most expensive of the seven or eight such eating places in the city; I was advised in a hushed tone that at a Chinese restaurant called the Peking the shark’s fin soup cost 100 rubles. But it was representative, I believe, and symbolic.
Eating in any Soviet restaurant, you were conscious first of all that the printed menu, considered as literature and theatre, served quite a different function than in the West. In our tradition the menu is a basic list. You expect the waiter to ooze over to the table and say something like, “Good evening, my name is Mark, and I’ll be your server this evening. In addition to our menu selections, chef has prepared the following specials.…” Soviet menus by comparison were little encyclopedias, page after page of every conceivable chicken dish, fish dish, vegetable dish. The job of the server was to explain, in response to your enquiries, that the dishes you wanted were not available—until you began to suspect that they had never been available. “So what, then, do you suggest this evening?” you were finally forced to ask.
“Bifsteak.” Boiled beef.
“What would you recommend to go with that?”
“Cabbage.”
“Is there anything else available?”
“Cabbage.”
A cold fish course came first; the meat was the second course and was always boiled. Fresh fruit and vegetables were almost nonexistent. No. 36 was offering carrots that night, but they were cold. It was amusing to see the head waiter in evening clothes and the junior staff in stiff white tunics, trying to suggest the pre-Revolutionary style. They had the snooty looks down pat but kept serving and taking away from the wrong sides. The example might be a small one, but the point was bigger: one of the reasons why individual entrepreneurship was far more widespread and obviously more successful in China than in the Soviet Union, I heard it said, was that in China there was still an old generation that remembered how the salary system worked; 1917 was just that much longer ago than 1949 to make the same continuity impossible in the Soviet Union.
Outside in the street, however, the world before the Revolution is apparent enough, in the old apartment blocks, the former private houses, the hotels or public buildings that serve completely different functions now but are so clearly a part of their own time and place—and class. Even the arrangement of the streets and boulevards shows the wealth that once obtained there. It is like London in that respect, though in general the similarity to the United States seems more pressing and germane: another of those sprawling, powerful, ungovernable countries that can proceed only by lurching from extreme to extreme in a kind of slow-motion ricochet in which innocent people so often get hurt.
I managed to wangle a VIP pass to the May Day parade in Red Square, but was told to bring my passport and visa (the latter is a separate document, not something stamped in the former). Security promised to be tight because this was not an ordinary May Day, or Day of the International Solidarity of the Working People, to give it its full official name. For one thing, it was the 100th consecutive May Day parade to be held in Red Square. Some will be surprised to learn that this was a pre-Revolutionary holiday in new red clothes. It is in fact a pre-Christian celebration of the return of spring; even some of the Russian songs associated with it may date back the better part of a millennium. Some elements of the original ceremony survived into the era when aging patriarchs standing side by side atop the Lenin Mausoleum would give feeble geriatric waves to the endless line of troops and missile carriers passing below. That is the May Day we in the West know from years of television clips, though in fact the displays of unending might have always been more important as a feature of Victory Day on May 9.
In any case, this year was to be very different. No military parade at all and no rogues’ gallery of Red Army generals to take the salute—that would have been too Stalinist in tone and, in the present atmosphere, too provocative. This time the various trade unions and such would do the marching, organized not by the government but by the Society of Moscow Voters, a pro-reform organization, and others, but with the approval of the Council of Ministers, which also gave permission for a demonstration—a manifestation, as the Soviets said—to be held around the corner, so to speak, in Revolution Square. I couldn’t find anyone who knew for certain whether Gorbachev himself would turn up. In Leningrad and other cities the holiday would be marked in similarly radical ways; in Kiev local people did without government representation in the reviewing stand altogether.
By 9:30 or so the area around the Kremlin was filling up with humanity. I heard the size of the crowd estimated variously at 100,000 and 300,000—the latter seemed too high to me, but it made no difference really. I kept track of the number of times my papers were scrutinized at different checkpoints as I got closer to Lenin’s tomb; the final tally was nine. The soldiers were equally careful with diplomats, I noticed. From the concrete steps where I perched, closer to the reviewing stand, downwind, than to the Historical Museum to my left, where the marchers would proceed from, I had a fine view of the goings-on. I could see columns mustering, banners being unfurled and tested, brightly coloured groups of walkers pacing like horses impatient for the race to begin. To the right, TV camera crews on an unstable-looking scaffold were training their equipment on the top of the mausoleum, where the new extra-military dignitaries would stand. Soldiers were everywhere. There were also many security men in black leather trench coats with walkie-talkies. Through the long lens of my camera I could see others directly ahead, across the great cobblestone square, positioned along the rooftops.
I moved my gaze downward and began scanning faces in the crowd through my viewfinder. During one pan, I stopped with a jolt of recognition. The face was unmistakable. Yes, it was Honest Ed Mirvish, the zillionaire proprietor of Toronto’s oldest, largest, and altogether most garish discount store, a man who had parlayed the nine-cent light bulb and the job lot of slightly imperfect ladies’ ready-to-wear into a famous dynastic fortune. He was wearing a beautifully tailored dark blue wool suit and handmade Italian shoes that shone like obsidian. He seemed to be giving some people his business card. For just a moment, before he was swallowed by the crowd, I saw him framed against the GUM Department Store and could imagine it as perhaps he might hope to see it, its 2.4 kilometres of counter space brimming with toilet rolls and polyester tank tops, its long facade plastered in neon and witty sayings and blow-ups of articles from the Toronto Telegram extolling the legend of Honest Ed (boy, what a card). I couldn’t help but wonder whether he knew the significance of what he was about to see or whether it reminded him of the Eaton’s Santa Claus parade when he was a kid.
At the stroke of 10:00 band music came over the public-address system, followed by short speeches from a series of sonorous disembodied voices. The first speech was booed but not consistently or with real persistence. By now I could see the thin line of figures on the reviewing stand. The pent-up marchers were released, and there was another flurry of brass and drums, but live this time, from somewhere within the multitude. The participants lunged forward, men in suits, women in dresses, lots of children, some holding red flowers straight out in front of them like votive offerings. Suddenly I realized what a sea of colour it was, how surprised I was to see all the bright fabrics together, for after even so short a time in the country my eyes had become accustomed to the more limited spectrum that was certainly one of the features of existence there, quite apart from any quality-of-life considerations.
The parade went on. Then it went on some more, and some more. My vantage point was privileged, but I realized that it was also constricted. I couldn’t see Gorbachev from where I was; I couldn’t even see whether he had turned up. There were gasps now at the wording on some of the placards and banners bobbing over the heads of the crowd. I asked someone to translate. One read THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION EXPLOITS US. Another ran: GET OUT OF OUR POCKETS NOW! I felt compelled to see how the fellows on the reviewing stand were reacting. I needed to move to the east, but whenever I tried I was stopped by the militia police or by the plainclothes security. For the same reasons it seemed hopeless to try to make a circuitous route, westward to the museum at the edge of the square and then along 25th October Street, through the back door, as it were; that would have put the whole crowd between me and the mausoleum and I wasn’t certain I would find a sufficiently elevated spot there such as the one I already enjoyed where I was. The only thing to do was to join the parade and become one of the marchers myself. If anyone tried to prevent me from doing so, I would make a fuss and insist I was one of the cultural workers (for such is how my editor must think of me, I said to myself).
An organization of machinists was going past. I could identify them by the logotype of meshing gears on their signboards. I stepped down and slipped sideways between the guards and was swept up in the marchers before anyone could stop me. We hadn’t gone many metres before I caught sight of Gorbachev. He was the 12th from the right, in his trademark top-coat and little grey hat. His wool scarf had an irregular pattern of red in it, no doubt to honour the occasion. He was looking impassive and occasionally he waved in somewhat the same way we associate with the Queen. I got to look at him only for half a minute before the momentum of the crowd pushed me and my fellow machinists along. I didn’t see any obvious concern on his face, but my intuition, I believe, was correct. Shortly afterwards, thanks partly to an administrative mix-up, the demonstration in Revolution Square was permitted to tag on to the end of our parade, not far behind me, and when these other marchers reached the vicinity of the reviewing stand, they produced loud-hailers and began shouting personal insults at the president, who lost his patience and walked off.
