Читать книгу One Russia, Two Chinas - George Fetherling - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI once departed Canada for France aboard a ship with a Russian crew and came up on deck at dawn the next day to find them doing callisthenics in the rain. That had been my only experience of Soviets in groups. The recollection came back to me at once at Mirabel, that vast empty white elephant of an airport from which Aeroflot flew to Moscow several times a week. A crowd of a couple hundred people with the distinctive blood-coloured CCCP passports was going home—people with wide Slavic faces, many of them, some of the women with scarves on their heads and a large number of bulky bags or cartons tied with rope, some of the men wearing sweatshirts under their copious blue business suits. At neither end of the departure process—at the check-in counter or at the gate—was it necessary to ask them to form a queue, for they did so automatically day in and day out, though they didn’t make a religious obligation of neatness the way the British do. Everybody jumped ahead of everybody else while somehow preserving the queue idea, despite the way that the lineup once threatened to become as wide as it was long. There was much weeping and waving goodbye to relatives. One man in his sixties wore not miniature decorations but full-size tin replicas of his military ribbons but was not otherwise formally dressed (I would see many such people in the Soviet Union). Quite aside from questions of age and fashion, the people of that generation look fundamentally different from their sons and daughters and grandchildren. The younger people are simply more European.
The aircraft was bare-bones and the flight long—an all-nighter. Although, in obedience to Mikhail Gorbachev’s drive against alcoholism, a light beer was the only strong drink served, the passengers became restive, shouting across the aisle, socializing, fiddling with all their bloody packages, a number of which, I observed, contained VCRs. If they had held live pigs instead, the level of tranquility would have been about the same. People were alert with anticipation. When they did settle down to sleep, a few slept with their heads on their crossed arms and their arms on the folding trays in front of them.
Sherenetyevo-2 Aeroport, the one where foreigners usually landed, resembled Mirabel in being big and empty and surrounded by farms and patches of boreal woods. In the Soviet Union many things resembled Mirabel. The wait lasted almost two hours, but when my turn came I breezed through passport control and customs. I struck up a conversation with the clerk while buying currency at the bureau de change, and she told me that the taxi fare to central Moscow should be no more than 15 rubles. Outside I was approached by six drivers in turn, each of whom refused to take me anywhere except for U.S. dollars or Marlboro cigarettes or some combination of the two. Finally I told one of them what they all knew already—that one’s foreign currency is scrutinized and counted when one comes in and all hard currency exchanges (but not, it’s true, purchases) are recorded on a customs form and must tally on one’s departure with the amount remaining. The airport was full of warnings about the danger of selling dollars except at official kiosks; in the customs hall there were posters with photographs of the black marketeers of the week. It seemed clear that there was great pressure by the government to keep people from using dollars except in those places, run by the government and patronized by foreigners, where dollars were used exclusively. But no driver would take me on any other basis, and so I lugged my bags back inside and reported my consternation to Intourist. A young woman there shook her head sadly.
“Where do they think they are?” she said. “In U.S.S.R. or in U.S. of A.?” I responded sympathetically, but kept to myself the realization that I had just stepped into the present and learned my first lesson.
The driver who was shamed or browbeaten into accepting me for rubles was grumpy and sullen as we darted along the Leningradsky Highway, the main road linking the capital and the second city. He swerved in and out of traffic. On both sides were long buildings of various styles and ages, all impressive though many seemed a little shabby, albeit with the shabbiness that came with long use, not neglect. In the grassy median dividing the highway stood a modem sculpture, dedicated in 1966, that resembled a child’s jacks but on a giant scale; it was a memorial to the citizens who had defended the city against the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War and was meant to suggest the hedgehogs, or tank traps, that had laced the eastern approaches. This stretch of highway was a showpiece, clearly. We roared past parks and stadiums and the Northern River Terminal which, with its open arches and high clock tower, suggested what the Ferry Building in San Francisco would have been like if an Italian had designed it. We rumbled past the Petrovsky Palace of Peter the Great, where Napoleon did his hasty logistical planning for the retreat from Moscow. This section was a distant suburb then, and clusters of small single-family homes show that it remained so until the 1920s, perhaps even as late at 1937 when the Moskva was connected to the Volga by canal, and Moscow, after 500 years as an inland city, finally became a seaport. At the House of the Newlyweds I spotted a bride getting out of a car with red and blue streamers tied to the rear bumper. The highway had long since dissolved into Leningradsky Prospekt, one of the 11 wide spokes that cross three ring roads before coming together at the Kremlin and Red Square. The driver was still glum when we arrived at the hotel. He wore jeans. Rubles in one pocket, dollars in the other. He made a big display of dredging up change from the one and not the other.
The next morning I watched dawn break over central Moscow from a hotel window on the 15th floor. It was like being in a photographer’s dark-room, seeing the image come to life in the bath of developer. As the sky grew lighter—but without ever losing the suggestion of pewter—buildings were revealed row after row, following the contours of the river or else standing at attention along either side of the main boulevards. There were large patches of green everywhere, for a surprisingly high percentage of the city’s area is given over to parks. Ugly high-rises jutted up from the trees in the foreground and in the distance, some with the construction cranes still in place, others dating, I would guess, from the 1960s or early 1970s, when the much-reported-on housing crisis was first addressed seriously (but of course never solved).
At a distance, it was not always easy in the Soviet Union to distinguish residential buildings from office blocks, owing in part to the absence of signage. One distinctive structure, which I soon learned was one of the seats of the government of the Russian Federation, resembles New City Hall in Toronto except that the two halves of the clamshell are back to back rather than face to face and so take on an X shape when viewed from above. There are also the seven High Gothic skyscrapers, serving various functions, built by Stalin, who compared them to the seven hills of Rome. One is the Ukraine Hotel; another is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which sits across from a little pie-shaped park where I would see big protest demonstrations when Li Peng of China came to town. A third is the Moskva Hotel, which has mismatched wings. It is said that the architects submitted two plans to Stalin, expecting him to state his preference; when he did not, they built one of each and hoped for the best. As for some of the older structures, I noticed what I later saw confirmed in China as well: how one of the consequences of a revolution is that buildings are put to new uses that never quite eradicate all traces of their original purpose. Moscow’s ordinary domestic architecture tends towards long blocks, four or five storeys high and with steep metal-ribbed roofs, such as you expect to see in the workaday parts of Paris and in the centre of the other old European capitals.
This was a special day, the 120th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, and I decided to get my sightseeing out of the way and pay my respects to his mummified remains. After a breakfast of coleslaw and what I would call latkes, I bounded out into the crisp morning air for my ritual argument with a cab driver.
“Rubles!” he said. “Rubles I got here. And here and here.” He touched all the pockets of his coat and trousers and a zippered bag on the dash-board. We eliminated dollars and cigarettes, leaving him to suggest that I might like to pay in caviar. A coals-to-Newcastle proposition, I would have imagined, though he perhaps meant the white variety often reserved for hard-currency tourists. I decided to walk to the Kremlin.
For a city of 8.5 million, and one so associated with industry, there was little air pollution in Moscow compared with other cities its size. This was no doubt because there were few automobiles, though private ones were becoming more common all the time and cars were one of the important local manufactures, even if not so important as radio electronics. I walked along the circular roadway and down one of the spokes, the Kalinin Prospekt, a Western-style shopping street for which long rows of historic Russian houses were pulled down. Outdoor advertising was still mercifully scarce, though I thought that might not be true much longer if the pace of Westernization continued at the present rate, and so I was startled to see an enormous theatre poster plastered on a hoarding along the pavement. Dozens of market stalls, most of them free-enterprise businesses, which the Soviets, in a reversal of nomenclature, called cooperatives, were being set up as I passed along, some with sticky buns and Pepsi (far more common than Koka-Kola), others selling manufactured goods from toy soldiers to women’s blouses. The merchants did not seem to hustle, the way those in, for instance, an English market would do, but the customers were animated.
The closer I got to the Kremlin, the more soldiers were in evidence, and sailors as well. Officers with briefcases and young conscripts in groups with their girlfriends. It was in the crowds of military personnel, I noticed, that one was most likely to see all the various ethnic groups represented, including the distinctive Mongolians. Flags, too, became increasingly common. I sensed that I had crossed over into the official Moscow when I hit a duotone portrait of Lenin, several storeys high, suspended from one of the buildings of the Lenin Library. Just a bit farther on was 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Square, delineated on one side by a Greek Revival building that once housed indoor equestrian events but was now the Central Exhibition Hall. Then there was a brick gatehouse connected to a bridge over the Alexandrovsky Gardens, which must once have been part of the Kremlin’s defensive outerworks. I saw a few civil servants, bureaucrats, and military types flash their security passes to get across. The rest of us were pre-emptively sent down into the sunken garden where, before long, a queue began to assume shape. The Lenin Mausoleum wouldn’t open for almost two hours yet, but I sensed that this was my opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
I had decided against getting a ticket at the hotel that would have allowed me to jump to the front, for I hoped to find people who spoke English. As luck would have it, the man in front of me possessed English he wished to exercise. He was in his late forties, I would guess, a Moldavian who took frequent trips to Moscow but had never before made the pilgrimage to see the father of the Revolution and the Soviet state. His nine-year-old daughter was with him, dressed in a kind of ski suit, with her long blonde hair tied back with pieces of bobbin lace. She kept staring at me for the exotic foreigner that I was but reverted to excessive shyness when I smiled in response or tried to speak with her. My companion also had a son, of 22, who had recently made him a grandfather. This was an important holiday for the family, though the man went on with genuine sadness about how Moscow was looking so decrepit these days, not full of life and freshly painted as it was when he began coming here 15 years ago. I couldn’t determine to what extent it was his own—our own—advancing years he saw reflected in the surroundings.
The line now stretched for blocks and was suddenly made longer by the arrival of scores of Second World War veterans, some in uniform and others not, some with canes and crutches, most with at least a few medals or decorations, who placed roses on the monument to the unknown soldiers, a place where, on other days, brides and bridegrooms traditionally have their photographs taken. A children’s marching band stood to attention, and the old soldiers were then given priority in the slow march around the corner and up the hill towards Red Square and another part of the Kremlin wall. “They no doubt feel bad at being made to go ahead of us,” my friend said. But I saw only that they were caught up in their private memories. It is mildly shocking, yet somehow reassuring, to find one’s clichés about a country so often revealed true—never wholly true, mind you, but true nonetheless in their sheer accessibility. First all those peasants at the airport in Montreal, struggling with parcels as lumpy as themselves, and then the fact that the Second World War, in which 20 million Soviets were killed, was still a palpable reality in everyone’s life—and I hadn’t even got as far as Leningrad where the fighting had been worse.
As we filed into Red Square, the people grew quiet. Hands came out of pockets. One woman quickly combed her hair and straightened her clothes. The clock on the Spasskaya Tower struck 11:00 a.m., and outside the mausoleum there was a changing-of-the-guard ceremony. The soldiers goose-stepped; I had already seen many soldiers, but these were the first ones whose boots were polished. Two others, on either side of the entrance when we arrived, were armed with old bolt-action rifles with bayonets fixed. Others made last-minute inspections of people’s handbags, looking for cameras, which were forbidden inside, while another soldier moved up and down our part of the line photographing obvious foreigners (he snapped me twice, once, I suppose, because I was taller than most of the others, and again because I wear a beard). The interior was dark and cool and made of polished granite. We shuffled down some steps, turned a corner, and there he was, illuminated in his glass coffin, wearing a blue silk tie with white dots. He was a small man, and his goatee and the fringe of hair around the sides of his head were sandy red, which surprised me. By no stretch of the language could the corpse be called lifelike, though the fact that it had been preserved as well as this since 1924 does speak kindly of scientific method. Insensitive foreigners are renowned for remarking that the face and hands look like those of waxwork. On the contrary, it seems to me, the effect suggests wood carving.
One exits the sacred place to walk under a stretch of the Kremlin wall where state heroes, including John Reed, the Harvard alumnus who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, are buried. Revolutionaries, artists, cosmonauts including Yuri Gagarin, have plaques set in the wall and small memorial stones in the turf below. A few foreign names catch the eye, such as that of Big Bill Haywood (1868–1928), the Wobbly from Chicago. Other figures of even higher rank are memorialized by a row of stone busts. Konstantin Chernenko is one of the most recent additions. Stalin is there, too, though he used to rest next to Lenin; Khrushchev had him demoted in 1961.
When I got back to my room, I turned on my little shortwave radio to hear Radio Moscow’s report of the day’s events. Gorbachev was quoted as saying, somewhat pointedly so in the faintness of his praise, “We shall rely on everything lasting in Lenin’s intellectual heritage.” But the people I was with, young as well as old, seemed to me to be genuinely moved, perhaps even awed, not much ready for revisionism insofar as the cult of Lenin’s personality is concerned—a cult that is of course not justified in Lenin’s own teachings but not difficult to explain in a culture where icons are such an important form of art. In the ensuing weeks I would meet people who cynically contradicted this first impression of mine.
Later in the day I fell into conversation about what I had seen with a woman who told me that she was first taken to see Lenin by her mother when she was a small girl and so took her own daughter there when the child was about the same age and expected her grandchildren to go one day as well. The notion of such deliberate continuity—as distinct from the unending sameness over which one has no control—seemed quite at odds with the mood of the moment, when everything in the society appeared to be either improving quickly or just as quickly getting worse but, in any event, changing. Two days later, a 49-year-old Lithuanian stood where I stood and threw two fire bombs in the direction of Lenin’s body. No damage was done. He was arrested.
Events were moving so rapidly, in fact, that our memory of the present chronology is understandably jumbled. So perhaps I should pause here to give a more exact context to these remarks and observations.
At the time of which I write, Gorbachev was settling into the new presidential powers he had given himself and recently had gone so far in the direction of Western politics as to create the post of presidential press secretary. Politically and economically, chaos was barely being restrained. Ethnic tensions in Azerbaijan might have cooled, but the Lithuanians had declared themselves independent, forcing Gorbachev to cut off most shipments of natural gas and virtually all their supply of oil. His legal grounds for doing so were unclear, as there was simply no legislation on the matter one way or the other, but the action was better than sending in tanks; everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to see whether he could force the Lithuanians into a referendum on the succession question followed by a slow transition over five years. The Lithuanians had just responded with an embargo of their own involving those products, such as small electric motors and television tubes, on which their factories had been given a near monopoly long ago.
Back in Moscow, Gorbachev’s adversaries were snapping at him, not only the communist old guard who distrusted reform, a group we heard less about in the West, but also the more highly profiled radicals who felt that the reforms were not proceeding nearly so quickly as they might. The most conspicuous of these was of course Boris Yeltsin, the brusque one-time construction foreman and former mayor of Moscow who periodically would accuse Gorbachev of becoming a dictator and who clearly wanted to set himself up as president of the core state, the Russian Federation that accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population and four-fifths of its territory. At this time, a few months before he succeeded in that goal, his image in the West was still coloured by the visit he had paid to the United States and elsewhere in 1989, when he drank and talked prodigiously, and coloured, too, by an incident in Moscow shortly afterwards when he claimed he was abducted by thugs and thrown in the river. In Britain, therefore, he was being seen by some in much the same light as George Brown was regarded in the 1960s, while in Canada his big square head and rough-hewn manners often recalled Eugene Whelan, Pierre Trudeau’s perpetual agriculture minister. In fact, a closer approximation would have been a cross between William Lyon Mackenzie and René Lévesque.
When I arrived, Moscow was abuzz with the imminent swearing-in of a new mayor, Gavrill Popov, a free-market economist who had vowed to lease properties and businesses to organizations and individuals and otherwise move decisively towards a more workable economy, knowing that what Moscow does must inevitably be done in other cities and regions. When I got to know several leading journalists at Novosti, the state news agency, I asked whether these leases would be for long terms and whether they might one day be converted to freehold private property. “At the start, just leases,” I was told. “But wait a few months.” This was an answer I was to hear to several questions. For example, at that time there was still, officially, only one political party. But at the urging of Yegor Ligachev, the leading conservative in the Politburo, a number of radicals had been expelled before they could resign, and they were poised to set up their own party. They were already arguing about what the name on the letterhead should be. Similarly a green party was positioned to begin fielding candidates in the autumn, and there was a royalist party aborning, hoping to restore order by restoring the monarchy, as had happened in Spain. “In two months, you’ll see, there will be a dozen parties.” The number, like the timeframe, was arbitrary, but the thrust was accurate enough. There would no doubt be parties galore—reform and counter-reform, radical and reactionary, ones on specific issues, perhaps even religious ones; in time, they would probably be rationalized along economic and ethnic lines.
Most everyone I talked to was weary of the present and impatient for change, almost any kind of change, and yet at the same time fearful of what the immediate future would be like. Americans tended to interpret this unrest as a frantic desire to embrace Americanism, but that of course is ridiculous. People pursue some measure of democracy not out of the Americans’ cloying sentimentality about voting for its own sake but as a means of seeing a mixed economy in which their subsidized housing, unlimited education, and free social programmes might be enhanced by a convertible currency and a little decent food. The currency question was exceptionally thorny. To make the ruble convertible into dollars, Deutschmarks, sterling, and so forth would be instantly to erode the people’s pensions and savings. (And because there was so little they could buy in the shops, Soviets were champion savers, having put away 340 billion rubles in the state bank even though the interest was only 1.5 percent—this was in addition to an estimated 200 billion rubles in “under the bed” savings.) Yet inflation was quickly eating up this pile anyway. In 1989 the government deficit was estimated by an outside specialist at 120 billion rubles, up from only 20 billion in 1982; to service the debt, Moscow simply printed more currency at the rate of 50 million rubles a day, 18 billion rubles a year. The most imaginative idea voiced to date was to back the ruble with gold, of which the Soviet Union was the second-largest producer, thus bringing all the world’s savings and investment rushing in. Absurd of course, but wonderful. But the reason Gorbachev, the liberal reformer, could exist, and by existing save us by winding down the Cold War, was that he was a moderate who needed immoderates such as Yeltsin or the goldbugs to play himself off against. The phrase “five years” came to his lips as easily, and as frequently, as “two months” came to the lips of my newfound acquaintances in the press. I can only guess whether this carried an echo, in listeners’ ears, of all those long-ago five-year plans.
Friends at Novosti promised to help arrange some interviews and meetings, including one at the literary magazine Oktyabr, which I hoped I could turn into access to some of the writers and painters I desired to meet. I had also asked to observe the meeting between Gorbachev and Li Peng when the Chinese leader arrived in Moscow to pay his respects and discuss border problems, but the indications were that this would be difficult to arrange. Earlier the response had been favourable when I sought permission to interview Yeltsin and a few other politicos, such as the minister of culture, Vasily Zakharov. But in the present situation the possibilities had receded. Before I could get in to see him, for example, Zakharov had been replaced by Nikolai Gobenko, putting me back at zero, though there was a much bigger factor working against me. “They’re trying to keep foreign journalists away from politicians if they can,” said Slava Bogdanov of Novosti’s North American department with an admirable and characteristic frankness. He had been the press attaché in Ottawa but had returned home in 1988. He spoke perfectly idiomatic English and was the resident expert on English Canada. When I met him, he had just returned from three weeks in Vancouver and was soon to lead a delegation to a symposium in Ottawa.
Novosti is a difficult news agency to categorize. It was large, employing several thousand journalists to TASS’s several hundred, and in further distinction to TASS, which provided the official news from the party and the government, it was “public,” which the West usually interprets as meaning merely “semi-official.” It published informal books and slick pamphlets about every aspect of the Soviet Union in a variety of languages and responded to requests for customized stories from the overseas media. More important, it ran its own network of correspondents both domestically and worldwide, and acted as a clearing house, though not as a telegraphic news agency like TASS or Canadian Press. It was also the publisher of the important Moscow News, which was considered not just radical but sometimes quite fearless. Recently it had ventured into television as well. For example, it bought a regular 90 minutes of airtime from the state network for the broadcast of such programmes as the first-ever look inside KGB headquarters in Dzerzinsky Square. Its highly distinctive building in Zoubovski Boulevard, opening on a courtyard with terraced balconies, was also a communications centre from which Soviet figures and foreign heads of state addressed press conferences. “During the Moscow Olympics,” Bogdanov explained, sitting in a large meeting room with a bar, “this was full of TV monitors, and many distinguished sports journalists followed the various competitions from here, never venturing outside.” He pantomimed the chugging of alcoholic beverages and laughed wryly.
His colleague, Alexey Lipovetsky, was also part of the North American desk, which with 30 personnel was quite the smallest of Novosti’s branches. At 41 he was somewhat rumpled, with a drooping black moustache and a sly, cynical wit. Trained at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages to be a simultaneous translator, he was the agency’s specialist on Quebec and spoke English with a Québécois accent. He was the most experienced and productive kind of journalist, the sort you find a few of in the top ranks of the profession in every country: unstoppably curious, at ease with all types of people, and with a love of imparting all the accurate information he has at his fingertips but with a discriminating filter that automatically weeds out the patently false or illogical. We spent a good bit of time together, talking about, among other things, the press. More than a need for shop talk motivated my enquiries. It was clear that the press had become an engine of change as well as an instrument to measure it. One day we were walking through Gorky Park, very near where Alexey grew up. It was spring, but it seemed like an early autumn day; there were few people about, and the Ferris wheel and other amusements were silent.
“The press is at the leading edge of the idea of a free market,” he said. “Consider the case of Pravda” The official party newspaper was by no means the juggernaut it formerly had been (and perhaps remains in the heads of most Westerners who have occasion to consider the subject at all). Officials, and journalists who followed developments in the Central Committee, still consumed it and tried to decipher its levels of suggestion and implication, but millions of ordinary readers had dropped away. “As soon as a person realizes that there is something better, he changes his habits,” Alexey said. Any publication that professed to throw light into the dark corners of societal administration, or even to chronicle the fresh evidence of change all around, was the beneficiary. The most remarkable success story, though remarkable is scarcely an adequate word, was an eight-page tabloid weekly whose name, translatable as Arguments and Facts, was a fair description of its method as well as its content. Four years after it was founded, its circulation stood at 34 million, the largest periodical in the world. In addition, there were some underground papers, so called even though they had ceased to be samizdat ventures, produced clandestinely and distributed furtively hand to hand.
“I was curious about how many there are, and so one day recently I asked the librarian at our agency how many of these we subscribe to,” Alexey said. “It seems that we buy 210 of them. By no means all of these are from Moscow, of course, but no doubt there are many others we do not receive.” One of the better-known examples riveted attention on itself by publishing an irreverent investigation of Mrs. Raisa Gorbachev’s personal spending habits. (One day I looked out the window and saw an articulated lorry carrying rolls of newsprint and was reminded that this was another of the commodities included in the embargo against the Lithuanians.)
Some publications not previously considered radical began to take on a patina of radicalism. Nedelya, the weekly supplement of the decidedly middle-of-the-road Izvestia, is the obvious example. Only a thoroughgoing cynic, however, would suggest that they had done so solely in an attempt to lure readers by catering to fashion. Yet there was no doubt at least as to which were the true radical journals. They are the weekly newspaper Moscow News and the weekly magazine Ogonyok. I was counting on the freemasonry of journalists to gain me admittance to both places.
The News was founded in 1930 and owned jointly by Novosti and an organization called the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Accordingly there were editions in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Arabic, with an aggregate circulation of 300,000, as compared with 500,000 copies of the Russian-language original. The offices were situated on one of the most advantageous pieces of real estate in Moscow. On a bright moderate day, too warm for a coat, too cool for just a pullover, I decided to walk there, a distance of several kilometres, rather than add to my knowledge of Moscow’s extraordinarily ornate metro stations.
Gorky Street begins within easy sight of the Kremlin and runs north-west. Near the foot is the National Hotel, built at the turn of the century and once the U.S. embassy, before the Revolution forced its move to the present building in Tchaikovsky Street (and of course before the attempted new one, which the Americans discovered was riddled with hidden listening devices and so was razed even before they had finished constructing it). Farther up was the headquarters of TASS, the telegraph agency and news service. Its corner building is recognizable instantly by the huge globe over the entrance; the globe is supposed to revolve, but it had stopped working 20 some years ago and was never repaired. But mostly this wide and orderly boulevard, with some architecture going back to Napoleonic times, is lined with the city’s, and the country’s, finest shops; mews and side streets contain hidden parks and luxury flats. Many buildings are marked with commemorative tablets, each with a portrait relief, showing some historical figure who once lived there, and it seems clear that there will be a cause for more such plaques in future generations, for this is the haunt of the famous and the well rewarded. One richly decorated white building, I was told, is full mainly of ballet stars. My informant told me the flats have particularly high ceilings; I replied that this is probably best in the circumstances.
More than any other district, Gorky Street shows the extraordinary old European city that underlies our preconceived notions about Moscow, showing it to be the poor sister of London or Paris but a full sibling when it comes to complexity, age, size, style, and even grandeur. Which made it all the more significant that the Moscow News should occupy one corner of Gorky Street and Pushkin Square, the most Westernized place in this Westernized boulevard. Across the way, for example, is the world’s largest and by no means most unpleasant McDonald’s, owned by George Cohon of Toronto and employing 600 Muscovites. On opening day they faced a crowd of 30,000 customers and, as one of my new acquaintances put it, “ascended quickly to the record book of Guinness.” Whenever I passed by during my stay, hundreds of people were queuing to get in—queuing eagerly, it seemed to me, without the resignation that always appears to mark the faces of those passing their time in the constant lineups for staple goods. But kitty-corner, outside the News, there was a large crowd hungry for something more nourishing. When the paper first came out each Tuesday, its 16 pages were pinned up in display cases running along the side of the building, and citizens jostled one another for the chance to read the news. That side of Pushkin Square is a traditional spot for such anticipation, and a perplexing variety of newspapers is vended there.
Many Soviet papers organized their physical plants on the German plan, with one composing room and one stand of presses working round the clock on a cooperative basis to produce newspapers of different sorts and allegiances, each of which maintained only its editorial shop as a separate operation apart from the rest. The Moscow News was different, though. It had its own exclusive plant, which was located some distance from the editorial rooms in Pushkin Square. The arrangement was made all the more awkward because the News, like virtually all the Soviet press, had not yet progressed to computerized production.
Two months before my visit, the offices were gutted by a fire, and I found the staff holed up in temporary quarters in an adjoining building whose lobby still smelled strongly of smoke. “There was no suggestion of arson,” explained Sergei Volovets, one of the editors and the paper’s former London correspondent, when I located him at the end of a slot-like room, perhaps two metres wide and six metres deep. “It was an accident. But the fire was several storeys up, and the fire brigade poured so much water on the blaze that the floors below were ruined, too.” Hundreds of readers from many countries contributed to a relief fund. “We hope to get permission from city council to start rebuilding soon,” he said. “The climate here makes it difficult to begin work of this sort except in the summer, and we must be finished before the cold comes, because the building we are in now has no heat.” City Hall had bandied about the phrase “two months.”
The News was the sort of newspaper that you wanted to hug or applaud. It was quick to attack the Chinese for the outrage at Tiananmen Square and was critical of Li Peng during his visit. It had been hard on both Gorbachev and Ligachev on point after point, sometimes even recklessly so, to judge by the English-language edition I read, but there was a consistent logical voice from behind the formidable amount of information it provided, information, it would seem, that was often available nowhere else. One of its memorable scoops dealt with two former prosecutors who became members of the Supreme Soviet only to discover organized corruption in the highest echelons of that chamber; the pair narrowly avoided being charged by the attorney general after the News began printing their revelations. Similarly it was the News that finally proved that the wartime massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, an event the Soviet Union had always attributed to the Nazis, was in fact the work of Stalin’s henchmen, just as the Poles had suspected for 50 years. “And our stand on Lithuania differs from the official line in a number of respects,” Volovets said with a smile of understatement. The paper was too extreme for the Cubans and at one point was banned even in Hungary.
What struck me most in the issues I read was a certain trenchancy, even down to the back pages devoted to culture, where one day I found this item by a contributor named Alexander Vershinin:
It is a cultural event when new books appear on a library shelf. When books disappear from the shelves—this, too, can be an important cultural event. But the main thing is to know what will be put there instead.
I got a call from the library where I used to lecture about the theatre: “Tomorrow Brezhnev’s works will go into the shredder. If you want them, you’d better hurry.”
I went and stared at the shelves. Hundreds of heavy volumes—the majority being red. The paper was high-grade, the covers were excellent, and the minimum printed copy runs were 100,000. But what was most remarkable were the titles. For about an hour I rummaged through them, getting pretty dusty in the process.
Brezhnev, On Internationalism and Friendship of the People—150,000 copies. Brezhnev, The Virgin Lands—3,250,000 copies. Brezhnev, Rebirth— 3,250,000 copies. Brezhnev, Following Lenin’s Course in nine volumes—each 300,000 copies. Brezhnev, Matters of Topical Interest in the CPSU Ideological Work, in two volumes, 1978—100,000. Brezhnev, Matters of Topical Interest in the CPSU Ideological Work, 1979, in two volumes, second edition, enlarged, 1979 (the only change is the Fourth Star of the Hero in the portrait)—300,000.
On Lenin and Leninism—100,000 copies. Guarding Peace and Socialism— 100,000. It Is for the Young to Build Communism. The Party and the Government’s Concern About the People’s Well-Being, book two. The Party and the Government’s Concern About the People’s Well-Being, book three, part two. Ponomaryov, Selected Works. Romanov, Selected Works. Ustinov, Selected Works. Andropov, Selected Works. Grishin, Selected Works. Kunayev, Selected Works. Shcherbitsky, To Master the Leninist Style of Work. Chernenko, The People and the Party Are United.
For the people, about the people, with the people, but, alas, the ungrateful ignoramuses didn’t appreciate it. The books are six, 10, 15, 20 years old and none of them have ever been opened. The jackets are brand-new. The cards are clean with no names of any readers in them. And this, although ours is the country with the biggest number of readers.
I collected books weighing more than 100 kilograms. Not to change for Dumas, no. I shall put them in my house, admire them, give them to friends as presents on May 1, November 7.1 wanted to take a taxi but it was impossible. I caught an off-duty truck. We threw all this into it and hauled it to my apartment. Kids were playing in the yard—they rushed to help me. They dragged and panted: “Oh, uncle, where did you buy so much?” No, kids, I didn’t purchase this. This is a present to the people. This is priceless. These turn thousands of square kilometres of fine forests into useless paper. This is our damned past. This is us.
I couldn’t find Rashidov. Apparently, he came along a bit late. So much garbage! The paper is white, the covers are red and my hands are black. Only with great difficulty did I manage to get them clean.
“One of our biggest problems,” Sergei Volovets told me, “is that we can’t get enough paper to print on. There is a crisis of newsprint. To fill our needs we would have to buy paper from Finland for hard currency and…” He made a gesture to show the difficulty of that alternative. The Soviet Union had no newspaper recycling plants, but the Austrians and Finns sold to third parties the newsprint they recycled from Soviet sources. Space for news in the paper was further restricted by Soviet journalism’s discovery of advertising—mostly for foreign airlines, to judge by the Moscow News. “But our advertising revenues will only be $150,000 this year, and the biggest part of that goes back to the government in taxes.”
Two Western journalists, one American and the other British, had recently published a long article in The New York Review of Books entitled “How Free Is the Soviet Press?” based on a couple of weeks’ travel and talking to people. Quite high up in the piece they identified Yegor Yakovlev, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow News, as “an associate of Gorbachev.” It is precisely because of its opposition to Gorbachev, for supposedly being insufficiently committed to speedy reform, that the News was so popular and so important.
To find out about the pace and the twists in Gorbachev’s plans, one was more likely to turn not to Pravda or Izvestia but to a magazine called Ogonyok, whose masthead used to proclaim that it was a journal of the Central Committee, a statement that had been dropped. Ogonyok was edited by Vitali Korotich, who kept making and then cancelling appointments with me as he tried to determine just what the status of my visit was. The day of the last scheduled meeting, word came down that he had been called away to the Central Committee on urgent business; I made a mental note of the phrase so that I could use it myself on those occasions when “a slight indisposition” is simply not a good enough excuse.
Korotich is a well-known poet and nonfiction writer from the Ukraine, but most assuredly not part of the stereotypical Ukrainian right wing. His literary life has permitted him a lot of travel to the West, including several trips to Canada, and he once spent six months at the United Nations, resulting in a book about the United States whose title could be translated as The Ugly Face; he has also written about France and about the life of Siberian oilfield workers. Early on he saw in the still-young Gorbachev a latent streak of liberalism, and formed an alliance. It was said, no doubt with a little exaggeration, that they spoke on the telephone daily.
When Korotich got involved in it, Ogonyok was a small general interest and cultural monthly with a circulation of 50,000 or 75,000. Now it had 3.3 million readers, lured to it by endless exposes about bureaucrats and the “mafia” and also by its hints about Gorbachev’s current thinking and the delicate state of perestroika. It was in Ogonyok, for example, that the first sign of the anti-radical backlash in the army appeared.
So how free was the Soviet press? The Communist Party and the government still appointed the top editors, still imposed circulation ceilings, and still installed censors who sat in editorial offices—though admittedly the censors had little to do in the present mood of freedom. When I was in Moscow, the controversial Press Bill, the first in Soviet history, was meandering its way towards law in a few months’ time. Its main provision was to permit individuals or collections of individuals to found and publish newspapers or periodicals of their own, without sanction by, or hindrance from, the party or the state.
