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
