Show-bands, Books And the Great Patriotic War

Travels in the Soviet Union by Anthony Cronin

The Peking Hotel in Mayakovsky square has been days. Chinese scroll-work on the pillars of the enormous dining room and the vaguely Chinese nature of many of the unavailable dishes whose names are still printed on the menu remind one that it was built to accommodate high-ranking delegations from the great neighbouring Republic in the days when there were such delegations.  There was no Borsch - there never is in the evenings. The waiter, being translated, turned out to be asking whether one would have meat or fish. One had a fish: never, like subsequent fishes in subsequent hotels, satisfactorily identified; but white, with a sauce, and not bad.  In the Peking Hotel, which no longer houses high-ranking comrades from Peking, the people were dancing to a band or combo which wore sequined jackets and sought virtue in amplification. If pushed to say what sort of a band it was, I would say it was a show-band. It played the music with a heavy beat which throughout the great Union Soviet Republics is referred to as rock and roll. It played ballads or folksongs, which its solitary, bare-shouldered, trousered girl singer rendered from the throat. It played undifferentiated pop, including an Italian number which is called Allegria (Happiness) and is sung throughout the great Union of Republics in the Italian tongue, though of course with various accents. It played foxtrots and old-time waltzes; and to them all the people danced freely and inventively, detached from the partner even during the fox-trots. You could call it souldancing.  And they really were the people. Having shed their street clothes, they were just like me and you. Not shiny, like Foxrock executives and their wives; not poncy, like Leeson Street; not desperately peer-group, as in the discos. Many of the men were in slacks and jumpers; some of the women in, well, frocks. Undoubtedly enjoying themselves having paid about four roubles (officially four pounds) for a meal, with wine extra. Smiling through perhaps. And aged, in this particular place, from the early twenties to the middle years, the years nel mezzo del camin.  They, and the band, made conversation difficult; they, and their bands, were to do in so many other places for the truth is that you cannot these days eat in a Russian hotel or restaurant without suffering a band or combo.  We were discussing our programme with Madame Prokva of the Foreign Commission of the Writers' Union and a charming girl called Marina Deemova, who had met us after we had debouched from our Aeroflot llyushin 62 at airport and explained that she would interpret for us throughout. There was the question of Leningrad, unresolved in Dublin, which would involve an extension of stay and a consequent extension of visas. It was then and there added to the itinerary, "inert bureaucracy with its endless delays", which I had been reading about on the plane, not in evidence in this matter anyway.  The people were still dancing when we left, to walk Madame Prokhorova to her Metro station. In fact we passed three stations, each with its large red neon M, before she decided to take the last one in Gorky. It was a beautiful, clear night, the temperature being about twelve, but somehow warmer-seeming than Dublin. We were very near the Red Square. It seemed natural to go on.  As I remember the streets of Moscow at night in 1955 there were very few people about except militiamen and police.  The flakes float from the gloom around the huge and empty squares; the star glows red below The murk of skysilence inhabits the streets i wrote. In fact the silence was one of the things that struck most: the deadening effect of the snow of course, but the absence of traffic and people.  On the night of 20 February 1983, we had quite a time getting across Marx Prospekt and into the square itself, because the traffic was coming at us from more than one direction. In front of the red granite and gleaming black dorite of the tomb there were about 300 people, a cheerful bunch, many of them from out of town, doing anything in particular, just out for a walk for which the tomb provided a terminus and an excuse. I quoted MacDiarmuid's "Second Hymn To Lenin" to Paul Durcan, who was travelling with me, and I thought: well, if you died in 1924 and can still draw 300 or 400 people coming up to midnight every night in the week, you've done something.  When we got back to the Peking the dancing was over and the last of the revellers were collecting their coats and fur hats from the cloakroom in the main lobby. There was a fellow with a moustache trying to get off with one or both or either of two women. They were in their 30s and they looked a bit tired and cross, as if the Peking on this particular Sunday night had not come up to expectations. He was being quite persistent, but he was getting short answers. The lift came and its doors closed off the little scene. At the 11th floor we collected our keys from the dezhurnaya and went to our suites — that being the operative word, for we had been allotted apartments of gigantic size and great, if somewhat faded, splendour.  I pulled back the window curtains and looked out at Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had committed suicide with a revolver in 1931; he had been rehabilitated by Stalin in a speech in 1935 and now had a huge statue and a square, the statue dating from 1956.  A year before this gargantuan but somehow not unfitting representation of the poet with one hand on hip, the other in trouser pocket, had gone up, I had sat beside an eminent Soviet critic at a banquet and he had asked me what Soviet poets I admired.

"Pasternak", I said, though this was before Zhivago; and I had read the poems in JM Cohen's wartime translation. "I'm afraid we no like", he said. ''Too pessimist. What other?" "Essenin", I said hopefully; but he seemed almost equally dubious. "A little we like", he said. "Most we do not. Mostly pessimist. Only sometimes optimist. What other?" "Mayakovsky", I said; and, perhaps because of Stalin, rang the bell. "Oh yes, we like", he said. "Very great optimist."

At which, moved perhaps by the demon of contradiction, and certainly still smarting under the previous reproofs, I hazarded that he could scarcely have felt highly optimistic the morning he blew his brains out, the result of this remark being that my dinner companion refused all my subsequent conversational gambits and preserved a chilling and impenetrable silence for the rest of the long evening.  Now, with the Collected Poems of TS Eliot in translation and Brideshead Revisited on the best-seller lists it would seem that pessimism in the ordinary sense is no longer disapproved of. True, the average Soviet anthology of poetry contains a deal more optimism than you will find in the average anthology in these parts, though it is hard to decide, through the medium of translation anyway, whether the hopefulness of the more affirmative poets is always real or sometimes, perhaps, assumed. Essenin or Yessenin has a statue and a boulevard of his own, off Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad Avenue, and not too far from the First Ball-Bearing Plant Palace of Culture. Akhmatova's "90th birthday" was recently celebrated by an exhibition of manuscripts and personal memorabilia in Leningrad. Mandelstam, who died because of a poem about Stalin; and Tsvetaeva, who died by her own hand because she had no friends and could not find work, can be obtained in foreign currency shops, as can Pasternak's prose writings other than Zhivago. Like the name of the aforementioned Palace of Culture, this may seem strange to dwellers in the West, where workers in ball-bearing plants are not reminded of culture at all and we are all so uncompromising about the importance of poets and their freedoms; but the Soviet Union is now, still, as it was not in 1955, a land of compromise. As one poet put it to me: "They are a bit like foreign rock records and a lot of other things. If you want them you can get them."  In 1955 "modern" architecture in the specific sense was no longer encouraged. Indeed it had more or less come to a stop with Le Corbusier's building on Kirov Street which now houses the Central Statistics Board. Begun under the supervision of the master himself in 1929, this had been considerably "modified" after he had gone home; and throughout the 1940s and 1950s the official style was that familiar to most people from photographs of Moscow University. Derived, whether the old tyrant knew it or not, from Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building on Broadway, and therefore just about four decades out of date, this sort of pinnacled Gothic, skyscraper style, was so beloved and encouraged by Stalin that it was made to house practically everything, including eventually Paul Durcan and Anthony Cronin, since both the Peking and the Ukraine, where we subsequently stayed, are models of it. Still known to every Muscovite as "the seven tall buildings", the seven monstrosities erected in this extremely religious mode are there; but they no longer dominate the skyline as they once did. High rise is everywhere, in the suburbs and along Kalinin, where 25-storey apartment and office blocks top shopping and entertainment centres. Much of this is mediocre, as is only to be expected, considering the scarcity of architects in the world in general. The giant Intourist Hotel at the Marx Prospekt end of Gorky and the headquarters of the Eastern European version of the common market, which the man in the street admires because it is supposed to be in the shape of an open book, are averagely decent modern buildings; the new RSFSR House of Soviets, which outstares the Ukraine Hotel across the Moscow River, has hankerings after the collonaded classics, as indeed much western architecture is beginning to have; but the recently erected Cancer Research Centre on Domodedovo airport road and the new Moscow Arts centre are models of new-found Soviet sophistication, at as good as anything in these parts; or, for the matter of that, in the US.  As a result of all the new building, Moscow, like everywhere else, is beginning to have a bit of a preservation problem and there are now scheduled areas and streets where no building can take place. It isn't an acute crisis, as Dublin's has been over the last 20 years — whether Dublin knows it or not — for Moscow is a peculiarly built city, whose concentric boulevards never had much between anyway except infill and in any case Napoleon and others saw to it that there wouldn't be all that much to preserve. But it exists, and since what is called Communism in the West is practically synonymous with preservationism, a good deal of attention is currently being given to old Moscow.  The typical "old Moscow" building is the nobleman's house with a porticoed central block, colonnaded loggias or wings and a central courtyard. Of such is the KGB Headquarters, ominously called The Reception Centre, on Kropotkinskaya; Museum of the Revolution on Gorky Street, once the English Club; and of such also is the Writers' union headers on Vorovskovo.  In fact the Writers' union building will be familiar to those who have never been to Muscovy because the exterior used as the home of Natasha's family in the Soviet television version of War and Peace. It is typical of the Russian attitude to conservation of this sort of a building that nobody seems to know exactly whose house it was. A while ago it was thought to have belonged to one lot. Now it is equally vaguely thought to have belonged to some other. Not much Irish Georgian Society about that. It belongs to us now is the attitude: and quite right too.  It is both Union Headquarters and social centre. Here you can eat, drink, watch the soccer on the television, play billiards, exhibit your paintings if, so be it, you are a writer who paints, use the writing room if you are a writer who can write in public, the library or the reading room if you are a writer who reads. As Paul said, it is big enough to go there for the day and not speak to anybody.  In the Verandah Restaurant, used by the members of the Board, painter guests have contributed impromptu murals, including a head of Essenin or Yessenin. In the Oak Room, which is, as its name implies, oak panelled, writer-types may be seen spending a long evening's eating or drinking, or both together. There is a bar adjoining, but the Russian preference is for drinking at table. As the evening wears on the writer-types sometimes begin to air their grievances with, or opinions of, each other; and it can get quite noisy, not unreminiscent of MacDaid's in its prime, in fact. At a meeting with the editorial board of the Foreign Literature Magazine, the question of why so few Soviet prose writers, other than dissidents, are known abroad came up. I said it was a widely held belief in the West that whereas poets could slip through the net comparatively easily, prose writers were still subject to a censorship process, perhaps beginning with the apparatus of publication and running right through to critical reception. This, to say the least, lessened the world's interest in what the Soviet novel is up to.  The expression of such a belief did not make me immediately popular; but, more revealingly, it evoked the response that if a censorship operated, it operated the other way round. Western publishers, western reputation makers, were not interested in contemporary Soviet literature. A few poets, yes; though always the same names. Prose writers, other than dissidents, no. Dissidents were good propaganda. Big money went into their publication and publicisation. What amounted to a positive ban operated against Soviet literature otherwise.  When you left the Peking hotel you were, as I have said, in Mayakovsky Square. Coming out of Mayakovsky Square you were in Gorky, the wide boulevard that is generally regarded as Moscow's main drag and is named after Maxim Gorky, the great Soviet writer whom Stalin said was murdered; who berated Lenin and has been berated for toadyism by Solzhnitsyn. About halfway up Gorky, going towards the Red Square, is Pushkin Square, which has a garden, a little lake, and a number of fountains. Here it is the custom for people to come and lay wreaths, on all days of the year, but particularly on the poet's birthday. Off the square is the entrance to the Pushkinskaya Metro Station, the whole decor of which is based on themes from Pushkin's work.  In view of all this it need hardly be said that literature is accorded some importance in the Soviet Union. Nothing in England's attitude to Shakespeare, or in France's to whoever, parallels in any way the Russian attitude to a man who died at thirty-seven in the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne; who said that "the history of the people is the province of the poet"; who may have been murdered, as Lermontov certainly believed, by agents of Nicolas I; and who wrote of liberty as he wrote of love. Books in the Soviet Union sell in hundreds of thousands of copies; books of poetry in tens of thousands, sometimes also in hundreds of thousands. Some of the gilt is admittedly taken off these figures by the discovery that there are 300,000 public libraries in the Union. If the librarians fill out forms en masse you get a sale. But it would seem, on the face of it, that anything that is published sells, and sells big; and that even people who are not specially approved of get into print and have these big sales. In a tiny Republic such as Estonia, population one million, 200 fiction titles were published last year, as well as about 30 books of verse. Since a book of verse sells, at the least, 3,000 copies, Estonians buy a lot of books.  In the foreign currency bar of the Olympic hotel in Tallin, which is the capital of Estonia, the Finns were getting noisily and uninhibitedly drunk. Both social convention and the law are against public drunkenness in their homeland and they come over on special excursions to fulfil what seems a real need, many of them having to be carried back to the boat. Freedom is a relative and a lot depends on what you're after.  Upstairs, in my room, the great patriotic war was on the television. It seemed to have been on for days and though I was assured that this was only because it was the week of Soviet Army day, there is no doubt whatever that the war of 40 years ago bulks larger in the Soviet consciousness than it does in the Western. The novels that do not get circulated in the West are still largely about the war; and everywhere you go the dread of another conflict is expressed.  In search of something else, I began to punch the buttons. Soviet television tends to be cultural and educational to a degree almost inconceivable to the foreigner accustomed to the heady delights of Dallas and Flamingo Road.  

There are lectures on ceramics, with close ups of the makers mark on the bottoms of cups. There are rather more rewarding lectures on painting. But in the Olympic Hotel in Tallinn one of the buttons yielded what after a few puzzled minutes revealed itself through the whirling, ethnically various legs of the finale as Fame. Of course the explanation took a while to register. This exotic bit of sex and schmalz was coming across the Gulf of Finland and the language into which it was dubbed was Finnish. The relativity of freedom again.

 From the large window of my room in this ultra-modern hostelry I could see Lutheran towers and Russian onion domes fighting for the skyline, rather as Catholic spires and quadrilateral Protestant towers do in Ireland. No less than three religions were imposed on the Estonians by German Barons and Russian Tsars - Catholicism, to begin with; then Lutheranism; finally, the Orthodox creed; but meanwhile the Estonians clung to paganism with an obstinacy which other pagans should respect. The last big rite was performed in the forest outside Tallinn as late as the early nineteenth century. Those guilty of participation were severely punished by the then Tsar, Nicholas I; and the more elderly, who were held to be the principal repositories of the tradition, were executed. Now religions of all kinds abound. Intellectuals are turning to Zen; but the Baptists are big among the young, so big that the state has turned over the largest, and consequently emptiest, Lutheran Church in town to them. As scribes were once free to remark: "Oh for the pen of a Voltaire to do justice to all this."  In the hotel Armenia, in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, the people were dancing to a band or combo. Besides the usual dances, they did a sort of stylised and simplified Armenian folk: soul folk, you could say, in which movement was pretty free but the hands were clapped above the head in a graceful manner. Beside me an Armenian poet was shouting to make himself heard above the music. I recognised fragments of “Burnt Norton”, then fragments of Ginsberg's “Howl”, both of which he had translated into his native tongue but was now renditing in mine.  In Armenia people break into poetry and song as naturally as do the Irish, who, contrary to report and rumour, really do sing and quote a lot. Earlier that day another Armenian poet had broken into song in an ancient Church which is hollowed out of the red rock. She had also prayed and lit a candle.  The whole thing had been very beautiful and very cheering, for one had the feeling that the Armenians, regularly massacred, conquered and scattered to the ends of the earth (two million butchered by the Turks in 1915) had found some sort of a haven in an uncertain world at last. Signs on, many Armenians of the diaspora have returned, including, in death at least, no less a person than William Saroyan, who, after several visits, requested that he should be interred in the beautiful Pantheon in Yerevan, where he has Khachachurian for neighbour. It seemed strange to be standing beside the grave of the author of “The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze”, which I read with such immense excitement while still at school, in such a place; but then he was an Armenian as well as a Californian, and so it isn't strange. Come to think of it, neither his expressed wish nor its fulfilment was recorded in any Western newspaper or magazine that I know of.  To Leningrad from Tallinn by night train, arriving not, alas, at the Finland Station, where the locomotive which brought Lenin is still to be seen, but at the Utarsaw. In all, on our trip, we covered well over 3,000 miles inside the Soviet Union, about a third of it by train.  For those who want to know the answers to such questions, yes, Soviet transport does have a first-class, though on airplanes it doesn't make much difference, since meals are not served on internal flights; and a guide book I have is in error in suggesting that the Moscow to Leningrad Red Arrow, the Soviet Union's most famous train, has several luxury-class sleepers, in winter anyway. We came back to Moscow from Peter the Great's old capital by the crack Red Arrow, and it had only one first-class carriage, which was at the far end from the platform entrance, so first-class passengers had to hump their bags farther than anyone else.  Everyone who goes to Leningrad under an official wing is taken to see the mass graves in which the three-quarters of a million or so who died during the siege are buried, showing you these and the log-book in which the number of bodies collected each day in the various districts is recorded being part of the Soviet anxiety to remind you that they know all about the horrors of war, part of the implication being of course that perhaps the Americans don't know so much.  And even yet some places in and about this incredible jewel of a city are still being restored, including, at enormous cost, the jade and amber inlaid walls of the huge baroque summer palace of Catherine the Great, known to fans of Tsardom as Tsarskoe Selo.  Pushkin attended the Lyceum in the township here and the whole enormous and beautiful complex has now been re-named after the poet who was instructed by his possible murderer, Nicholas I, to "send me all your writings from now on. It is I who will be your censor". There are plenty of other reminders of him in the city which is named after Lenin and has still, everywhere, echoes and revenants of the first revolution inspired by the Marxist view of history. It may be true, as Patrick Kavanagh said, that "the dead will wear the cap of any racket"; but unless it intends in the main, in the future, in the here and now of history, to live up to them, the Soviet Union will have created pretty formidable internal dissidents in Pushkin, the poet of liberty, in Lenin, the master of revolutionary change and in Marx, the philosopher of human discontent.