Distant Voices (49 page)

Stop press: Dave and Don have found another Baby Hermes, circa 1960. Its best parts have been transplanted to mine, which has been completely restored. The lid, though, still won't come off without a thump. Some things are just timeless.

August 21, 1992

I FIRST WENT
to Russia almost thirty years ago, going overland from Brest, along empty rutted roads through Minsk and Smolensk. This was the ‘age of shadows', as the scientist Valentyn Turchin described it to me. I returned on several occasions and met many dissidents who were not protected to some extent by fame abroad. I met musicians, actors, miners, Volga Germans, Tartars, trade unionists and Christians. They shared an abiding bravery. During the mid-1970s, shortly after Leonid Brezhnev had signed the Helsinki agreement ‘to respect human rights and fundamental freedom', there was a brief period of tolerating dissidents, if tolerance it was. By 1977 this was past.

To meet Vladimir and Maria Slepak I had to leave my hotel at dawn, before the KGB shift took up position on their stairs. They lived just off Gorky Street; after a withering climb by torchlight to Apartment 77, I was greeted by Vladimir's great bearded head, beaming from the door ajar. He and Maria were scientists. Vladimir came from a family of devoted communists and was named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. They both served short prison terms for ‘anti-Soviet activities'. It was clear they had been singled out because of the help they had given others and specifically for Vladimir's work as an adviser to the beleaguered committee set up to monitor the Soviet commitment at Helsinki on human rights.

The day before I met them their telephone had been disconnected and their flat raided, and books and letters, even writing paper, confiscated. ‘What is bizarre', said Maria, ‘is that those of us who call on the state not to break laws
guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution are known as law breakers!'

As all their files had been taken away, they now drew on formidable memories. Case after case of discrimination, wrongful imprisonment and torture came out of their heads. ‘I run through the list every morning so I won't forget it,' said Maria. ‘It is very tiring.' That morning they had been trying to find writing paper to put down what they could remember of Vladimir Klebanov's case. He was a miner in the Ukraine, who had refused to demand overtime from his men and to send them down pits when he believed that safety regulations were being ignored. He had been imprisoned for ‘slandering the Soviet State'. His crime was that he had objected to twelve deaths and 700 injuries at one colliery and he had tried to form a free trade union. The Slepaks believed he had been moved to a mental hospital. ‘He is now an “untouchable”,' said Vladimir. ‘If we try to find out about him, the authorities will say he doesn't exist.' Maria nodded. ‘But we shall find him,' she said.

They gave me lunch, apologising for the stale bread and cheese, which was all they had. I contributed a bottle of brandy. ‘Oh my God, what will happen to the lists up here?' said Maria, tapping her head. We parted as old friends, and on the way out I got a taste of what they had to go through every time they entered and left their home. At the bottom of the stairs was a pack of KGB men. They all had apparent curvature of the spine, and an air of studied sullenness. They stared, blew cigarette smoke in my face and lunged at my briefcase. One of them cleared his throat in my path.

The next day I interviewed a senior editor at
Pravda
, who made a remark to be relished. ‘You must understand,' he said, ‘there would be no Russian dissidents if the Western press ignored them.' Did this mean, I asked, that if people and events could be ignored then they did not exist or they did not happen? ‘If you like,' he replied.

On the day before I left Moscow a friend and I set out to say goodbye to the Slepaks. As we turned into the courtyard of their block of flats, two men walked straight at us. ‘
Nyet
,'
said one of them as we started for the stairs. We kept going. A pincer of arms shot out, spun us around and ejected us back into the courtyard. And there we stood, looking up into the vicinity of the eighth floor, hoping to catch sight of Vladimir and Maria. We were about to leave when an object fell out of the sky. It was a tin mug and taped inside it was a note, which read, ‘Good voyage to you! Please remember us.'

Shortly afterwards the Slepaks were arrested for displaying an ‘anti-Soviet' banner on their balcony. Vladimir was given a five-year sentence of exile for ‘malicious hooliganism' and was sent to a camp in the Buryat republic on the Mongolian border. Maria was given a three-year suspended sentence and joined him in exile. In 1982 Vladimir completed his sentence and returned to Moscow, his health impaired. In his absence both his sons had been allowed to leave the country. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he let Vladimir and Maria go. Shortly afterwards they emigrated to Israel.

In the summer of 1990 I returned to the Soviet Union with my son, Sam. The ‘age of shadows' was no more. Almost everything seemed to have changed; it was the height of
perestroika
and
glasnost.
This was my diary:

Saturday.
It is almost midnight on arrival at Leningrad. The silver twilight of one of Leningrad's ‘white nights' is accompanied by a silence unheard in any other large city I know. The poetess Olga Bergolts described wartime ‘white nights' in a broadcast to the world from Radio Leningrad in 1941. ‘The silence', she said, ‘lasts for long intervals of twenty to thirty minutes. Then the German shelling is like a mad squall of fire . . .'

It is good to be a tourist. As a journalist, too often you don't have time for the past. I am reminded that during the 900 days of the German siege of Leningrad, perhaps a million people died, most of them from starvation. The silhouettes we pass in the half-light were witnesses; Pyotr Klodt's four bronze horses, which were buried as the Germans reached
the edge of the city, are back on their pedestals on Anichkov Bridge. Outside our hotel are the four funnels of the cruiser
Aurora
which fired the blank shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace and the October Revolution. It is partly obscured by a sign: ‘Levi Jeans – Duty Free', and in scribbled ballpoint: ‘No Russian money please'.

Sunday.
It is Navy Day. Warships, bedecked with flags, stand with the
Aurora
against the baroque façades of Peter the Great's city, still in the yellow that Peter ordered as a relief from the metallic sky over the Gulf of Finland. On the embankment are groups of dishevelled young men in camouflage jackets. Several are drunk and are shouting at the ships. They are veterans of the war in Afghanistan. To come upon such open, anti-state belligerence is a shock. The young men move across to the huge statue of Lenin at the Finland Station; the police eye them like cats, but leave them alone.

A fisherman watching this puts down his rod and greets me in German, then English. He was a draughtsman who has spent his retirement learning languages. ‘Soviet people have been ghosts,' he says, ‘not wishing to see or be seen, not wishing to know, just hoping to survive. But many of us have kept faith with language. It has been our secret act.' He produces a much-used copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie. ‘With
this
,' he laughs, ‘I began to learn English.'

As a teenager during the German siege he was pressed into carrying food supplies across Lake Lagoda, which became known as ‘the Road of Life'. When the spring ice could no longer withstand the weight of lorries, even horses and sleds, the city turned to its young to trek twenty miles across the ice. ‘Each step was uncertain,' he says. ‘If you fell down, you died quickly.'

His uncle was a member of the Philharmonic Orchestra which on the night of August 9, 1942, played Shostakovich's Seventh (or Leningrad) Symphony. Like orchestral artillery, this was broadcast on all wavelengths and heard in London and Berlin. ‘That,' he says, ‘was our last glory.'

Later, at Piskarevskoye cemetery Sam and I are much moved as both Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky are played across a landscape of graves and trees bound with red scarves. People come and go with single red flowers; many are young. I can think of no other city where the pain of war remains such a lasting presence.

‘Good day,' says a young man. ‘I have complete Soviet uniforms for you to buy. I have a soldier's suit and a sailor's suit. I have a Red Army belt and I have many Red Army watches. Everything in the Soviet military I have – a big bargain for you. You pay me in Marlboro.'

Monday.
Today, the first anniversary of my mother's death, reminds me of my first visit to the Soviet Union. She wrote to me here, describing the excitement in the mining town of Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, where she grew up, on the day in 1917 they heard about the revolution in Russia.

‘The miners were in the middle of a long strike,' she wrote. ‘Families were hungry. But that morning, when red flags were hoisted over the lodges, people were cheered up and couldn't give a damn about the war [against Germany].' I replied in a different mood, that people in the Soviet Union seemed ‘furtive and frightened'. ‘They look through you,' I wrote. ‘1917 might have happened somewhere else.'

‘Mr Gorbachev', says the Intourist guide, ‘has done good things. But we've had too many icons and saints in this country and we're fed up . . .' This anti-establishment tirade is delivered in front of the Winter Palace, whose storming she denounces as ‘no more than a
coup d'état
'. Would a tourist guide in London mount such an onslaught on the national mythology? ‘We don't have a history any more,' she says. ‘We had to throw it away when
glasnost
showed up the lies.'

She describes how the Soviet education system is being decentralised, and is intrigued when told that education in Britain is going the other way. ‘A national curriculum?' she says. ‘That's how you order minds, not educate them. Are you
objecting
to this?'

Tuesday
. In the shops on Nevsky Prospekt the leaves of cabbages lie on bare shelves. People do not shop, they forage, and the foragers are mostly women. A dozen of them are asleep in our Underground carriage, gripping their bags of bruised apples and plastic sandals. A survey published the other day says that two-thirds of girls aged sixteen and seventeen would rather consider prostitution than face a life as hard as their mothers'.

Of course, if you have the right sort of money you do not queue. At the restaurant in our hotel, the head waiter's greeting is: ‘What money you got, Mister? You got dollars, marks pounds . . .?' When I reply that we have Russian money we are almost thrown out. Sam says I must not play that joke again if we are to eat.

Money power, never before known in the Soviet Union, is the other side of
perestroika
. Western propaganda, that money power equals democracy, has become Soviet propaganda. The new economic order has made the rouble the currency of the poor and people will do almost anything to get hard currency. There are hard-currency prostitutes, who are said to be ‘safe', and soft-currency prostitutes, with whom you take your chances.

Wednesday
. The train to Moscow bounces along, with the passengers contriving an adventurous spirit. The restaurant car is Fawlty Towers transferred to rolling stock, run by a local Manuel. ‘Pssst,' he says, ‘Russian champagne, only five funts . . .'

‘What's a funt?'

‘You know, funts . . . English funts. Also caviar. Only ten funts.'

‘Excuse me,' he is asked by an elderly Englishwoman, ‘where is the toilet?'

‘Next carriage, Madam.'

‘You'd better hang on, dear,' whispers her husband. ‘It's full of Russians.'

Thursday
. Moscow is warm and not at all as I remember it,
a wan city seen through a curtain of rain. Tanya, the Moscow Intourist guide, is another subversive, funny and dry. ‘This week,' she announces, ‘Moscow has run out of umbrellas, even though there's no rain. When we ran out of alcohol, people started making moonshine. But they needed sugar; then sugar ran out . . . Over there is the statue of Uri the Long Armed. God knows why they call him that.

‘Now condoms are running out . . . and soap. You try living without condoms and soap! Of course, it's not too bad if you have five children. Then they make you a Hero of the Motherland and give you free cream . . .

‘Over there is the Soviet Union's first McDonald's where a Big Mac costs half a day's wages and you stand for an hour waiting to get it. In the West you call this fast food. In front of us is the new American Embassy, which is empty because the Americans refuse to move in. They say it's full of bugs. What do they expect?

‘Over there is where they're showing
Rambo
 . . . And that's where Gorbachev works. You call him Gorby. I call him . . .' She puts her hand over the microphone. Gorby is everyone's target, though there is grudging respect for him, perhaps even pride. In the museums there are ‘Gorbachev rooms' which apply
glasnost
to the displays and tableaux. The independence movements in the Baltic states are described almost objectively; ethnic problems are not minimised. ‘We are correcting the mistakes of the past,' says a curator in a monotone that gives rise to the suspicion that only the ‘line' has changed. This is a suspicion widely shared: that ‘the centre' is merely protecting itself by painting on a new face while, say the cynics, ‘the old heart beats unerringly'.

Friday
. Today the front page of the
Moscow News
has sensational news: the lifting of state censorship on the press for the first time since the revolution. ‘Human thought and word have at last been liberated,' says the paper, ‘so why aren't we celebrating? Why don't we journalists congratulate each
other? The answer is simple: the manager has been sacked, but the master has remained in place . . .'