Gorbachev took a bold pro-arts initiative, for example, when he appointed a prominent stage and cinema actor as culture minister. One of the minister’s first important interviews revealed that many theatre companies would have to find free-market ways of contributing to their own keep. He also noted, with what mixture of emotions I found impossible to know, that the trend of so many professional artists letting themselves be subsumed into politics and public service was, well, a sort of double-edged sword. (Not long after my trip, the new culture minister led a performing artists’ protest against the state of Soviet culture—in effect, against his own policies.)
So I set out to try to learn something of the current state of the arts, not just their political economy but also, so to say, their texture. I began at the point of easiest access, the offices of Oktyabr. They were located in Pravda Street, so named because much of the opposite side of the quaint tree-lined boulevard was occupied by that newspaper and its giant printing plant and various affiliated buildings, like the “palace of culture” (concert hall and all-purpose performing arts centre) and “sanatorium” (health club) for the use of its employees, such as most of the largest industries, unions, and professions enjoyed—another manifestation of the older, more rigidly planned approach to culture.
Oktyabr was in an old mansion with a large shady garden in front. Inside it looked like literary magazines every where: secondhand furniture; proofs, files, and manuscripts in permanent disarray; a few dedicated people, though more than one would find on a similar journal in the West. I drank glasses of tea with Nina Loshkareva, the deputy editor-in-chief, and Inessa Nazarova, the executive secretary. Another employee, a young copy editor, married to an editor at an encyclopedia publisher, kindly volunteered to take me the following day on a tour of Old Moscow, which carries many of the same associations as Bloomsbury, with a little bit of Soho thrown in. It was once the student quarter, but Moscow University long ago relocated to the Lenin Hills outside the city.
In this part of Moscow, abutting the famous Arbat, with its colourful shops, small cafés, and ensnared tourists, there are unexpected pieces of the architectural past, including a great many with literary, artistic, or musical associations, around every corner. One stately classical mansion in Vorovsky Street is said to be the model for the home of the Rostov family in War and Peace; it had become a kind of retreat of the Association of Soviet Writers. Nearby is the House of Writers, a club and meeting hall, where I was invited a number of times. It was formerly a Masonic lodge, and the rich panelling in the dining room is carved with such motifs as the double-headed eagle of the tsars, while the cellar is a bar. I sensed that this was to Soviet writers what the Groucho Club is to English ones—there is a delicate ego system at work there.
The area is rich in museums dedicated to such figures as Pushkin. When one of the foreign embassies, which are also centred here, wanted to build on a small park, the protesters erected a sign indicating that the tree in the centre of it had strong associations with Pushkin, thereby mocking them-selves while preserving the spot. We also stopped at the place where Pushkin was married. My guide called it the Church-of-Jesus-Christ-Going-Up-in-the-Air, which I took to be the Church of the Ascension. It was being restored, but there was some debate as to whether it should be a museum or a living church; there was recent precedent for either, as Gorbachev had returned some old monasteries to the Russian Orthodox Church and caused some of them to be restored as well. Which brings home the fact that there are political currents even in the museum field. Only in the past few months had the state made a museum of the house occupied from 1843 to 1846 by Alexander Hersen, the revolutionary editor who spent most of his exile in England. He has risen from relative obscurity partly because it turns out that he was the first person to employ the word glasnost in the contemporary sense.
However refreshing such communion with the past—and to me it was one of the major pleasures of Moscow, to an extent that quite took me by surprise—my task was to report on the present. And so, over the course of several more days, I set out to make my rounds.
Book publishing was another point of entry. Western writers and readers all know the stories of how the classic Russian writers are revered, and even read, by the true proletariat as well as the allegorical working class, and how contemporary Soviet writers, or those who carry the seal of approval, saw their works gobbled up in editions of many hundreds of thousands of copies; how writers are debated, argued about, and accorded signs of importance such as in North America are only ever given to figures in big business, entertainment, sport, and crime. There is some truth in this supposition, but of course the situation is rather more complicated—as bad as it is good. In any event, the kind of Soviet publishing North Americans were most familiar with, the English-language editions of Soviet and Western writers associated with Progress Books in Toronto or International Publishers in New York—the loving editions of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, and so on, with their flimsy paper, mundane design, and quaint 1950s hot-lead typography—turned out to be another area, surprise, that was undergoing rapid change. Such was what I learned from a visit to Alexei Faingar, one of the editorial department chiefs at Progress Publishers, the state’s foreign-literature works and, with 1,500 employees, the country’s biggest publishing house. Each year it brought out 600 titles in 50 languages, and another 100 in Russian, in the fields of literature, history, politics, law, and the sciences.
Faingar was a beautifully tailored man in his fifties, polylingual, relaxed, and sophisticated, with the look of a shrewd negotiator and a keen judge of a fluid marketplace. He looked like any European publisher you would expect to find at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We met in the boardroom.
“How are the books selected? Ah, that is a complicated process, but I would say that we rely one-half on our editors here and one-half on out-side specialists living in Moscow. The latter may work in some academical institution, as in, to take an example, the Institute for the United States and Canada. As for ourselves here, I offer as an illustration my own department, which is concerned with essays, works of quality journalism, and so on. We try to use every possible source of such literature, even private sources. We read foreign periodicals, especially the book-review sections; we have a special department for ordering what might be of interest, and we have [hard] currency for the purpose. As a result, we can plan a year’s activities.” When he spoke, in early spring 1990, he was engaged in planning his 1992 releases. On subsequent days I spent some time in the foreign-language bookshop in the same building . Recent releases in English literature included a selected writings of Evelyn Waugh, a lesser novel of Robert Penn Warren’s, and an anthology of journalism with the status of literature that included a long extract from Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. I perceived no common thread with respect to ideology—perhaps those days had already gone—nor with respect to the usefulness of the texts as teaching aids. Taste was the only basis for selection obvious to me.
The typical press run for a work of mass literature was 50,000 copies, a figure that corresponded roughly to Canadian numbers if you allowed for the fact that Canada had less than 10 percent of the Soviet Union’s population. For the blockbusters, as many as half a million copies might be printed, while for specialized or scientific works, the total might be as few as 5,000 copies. Soviet publishers didn’t ordinarily maintain extensive backlists of popular titles, but printed a book hoping to sell it out so they could move on to the next. People shopped for books as they shopped for food, gobbling up whatever was available on that particular day. So at least some small part of what outsiders took to be the average Soviet’s voracious appetite for culture and learning was the buy-now-and-hoard-for-tomorrow-it-will-be-gone mentality. (I keep remembering the sight of a stylishly attired woman on a trolley-bus, opening her expensive Western handbag in search of a five-kopeck ticket to reveal a half dozen of some vegetable—it looked like a cousin of the rutabaga—caked in mud, just as they had come from the farmer’s field. Whenever Soviets saw valuable goods being vended, they joined the queue and bought some, for these goods would soon be worth more than rubles.)
Not all that long ago it was commonly supposed in the West that Soviet publishers of foreign writers were motivated by a desire to show the West in an unfavourable light and would undertake
