How the Soviet elite lived

Getting away from the depressing events of the world, I have been reading about depressing events in the past, in particular the Diaries of Alexander Tvardovsky for 1950 - 1959. Tvardovsky was for years at the heart of the Soviet literary establishment, both as a prolific and well-known poet and, more importantly, as the editor of the monthly journal Novy Mir, which, in the very late fifties and sixties was crucial in the temporary liberalization of the country's cultural atmosphere. They published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and a number of other "shocking" works that were suppressed in the seventies. 

Tvardovsky himself escaped arrest but had a good many problems with censorship, political attacks and criticisms and was forced to resign from editorship twice, once in 1954, described in this volume and again in 1970 not long before his death. He has been much honoured post mortem with a stamp, at least one memorial, a planet named after him and a good many other things, which are presumed to have made up for the problems he faced in his life. (Then again, if one looks at the list of monuments to Soviet writers one can find quite a few to people who had been imprisoned, murdered or simply destroyed as artists.)

A fair proportion of Tvardovsky's time was spent in various rest homes and sanatoriums where he could forget about the many party, editorial and political duties and perhaps do some writings. Often these stays were really drying out periods as the man was known to drink heavily (for which one can hardly blame him in those nerve-wrecking circumstances).

A particular episode caught my attention. In March 1955 he was spending some time in the newly opened and not quite completed "Istra" Sanatorium, which still seems to exist as an hotel but was then owned by the Writers' Union - a place for the Soviet cultural elite though few of them managed to rest easily and many required the oblivion provided by vodka. This site says that the hotel sanatorium now belongs to the professional union of nuclear energy industry.

On March 19 he wrote this [my translation]:

This appears ghost-like, a semblance of my conscience everywhere: there you are, hoping to enjoy your rest and enjoy nature and you see young girls trying to excavate ground that is frozen to depth of about one metre or doing other hard, unwomanly labour while you are trying to walk off your 80 kilograms. They are excavating trenches - sewage for the standard dachas meant for Ministry employees. Workers for that project are taken away, it is said, from the building of the sanatorium. The Deputy Minister came down and issued an order: "Those dachas must be ready by April 15."

Yesterday complete strangers said to me: "What utter insolence. Can they really not use the outside lavatories in the summer?" Today, on the other hand, I thought that those dachas are another sign of everything being tied to Moscow. Where else do we see such care for living officials? Houses are desperately needed in many places, such as the "virgin lands" or anywhere else.

The girls earn 10 15 roubles a day and their food is terrible. Today I joked a little as I went past: "Why not wait till spring? It will be easier to dig." A pleasant young girl replied with sad determination: "We have to do it."

How much there is that we prefer not to notice.

It is clear from this excerpt and other entries that many of these elite holiday places did, indeed, have outside lavatories even if they were close to Moscow. At no time did Tvardovsky or anybody else as he described events seemed bothered by that. Nor did he seem anything odd in the fact that there seemed to be no machinery to help the hard labour of digging the frozen ground. These points are just as interesting as those that did bother him: the stupidity of ordering impossible work to be completed by a certain date when that could not be done; the sight of girls doing hard manual labour (the way in which equality between the sexes all too often manifested itself in the Soviet Union) and the appalling lack of thought about those who really needed new housing in places where life and work was very hard.

An interesting vignette of Soviet life, I thought, and one that is not much known in the West among admirers (of which there are far too many still) or among detractors of the late unlamented Soviet Union.

That's enough Stalin (Ed.)

It is time to recall a couple of other people who died on this day, in one case sixty years ago. Both of them were great artists and both suffered under the Soviet system though neither was actually arrested.

Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev, one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, died on March 5, 1953 and his death was overshadowed by that of the great tyrant. His last years were overshadowed by persecution and the arrest of his wife. Even in death he found difficulties.

He had lived near Red Square, and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out for the funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composer's Union.

I think, people might like to listen to the Radio 3 programme on Prokofiev and here is Valery Gergiyev conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Dance of the Knights, one of my personal favourites. I shall be happy to put up any other piece that readers prefer.

 

How can one forget the other great artist, in this case a great poet, who died on March 5 though she managed to outlive the old tyrant by 13 years? Anna Akhmatova, one of the greatest of the twentieth century poets and one of those who created a wondrous memorial to the victims in her cycle Requiem, died in 1966, having witnessed the cultural thaw but also its ending. Sadly but predictably Requiem, Poem without a Hero and her essays on Pushkin remained available only in the West till many years after her death, when they were finally published in the Soviet Union. For some people March 5 is Anna Akhmatova Day.

Oh, and incidentally, I have written about her before: here, here and here.

A requiem for the victims

May Day is an odd sort of holiday (where it is treated as such). The day after Walpurgis Night, when the witches fly in many countries, it had many pagan connotations and continued to be a feast in Christian Europe well into the sixteenth and seventeenth century, later in some places.

More recently, however, it had been taken over by the rather notional international workers' movement. Actually, rather a lot of events seems to have taken place on this day including the birth of the great Duke of Wellington in 1769 and the issuance of the first penny black stamp in 1840. Nevertheless, since the 1890s the association between May Day and the international workers' movement has become ever firmer, especially promoted in the various Communist countries and by trade unions in the non-Communist ones.

It seems to me that this is a goo day to recall the many victims of Communism and to remind people of what that international workers' movement really led to.

So, I have been re-reading Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, the great sequence of poems about the years of Yezhovschina, that is the Great Terror, dedicated to its many victims. It seems to me that it is a long time since I translated any Russian poetry and the time has come for a return to that occupation. What better way to start than Akhmatova's wonderful cycle. Completed sections will be posted on the blog but in the meantime, here is the easy bit, the quatrain and the prose introduction, both of which I have posted before in a long blog on EUReferendum2 on the subject of an exhibition of art from Russia in the Royal Academy and the disgracefully mealy-mouthed curating.

No, I did not live under an alien sky 
And was not protected by alien wings - 
I was then among my own people, 
Where my unhappy people were. 


INSTEAD OF AN INTRODUCTION 


In the terrible years of yezhovschina I spent seventeen months in Leningrad’s prison queues. One day somebody recognized me. The woman immediately behind me, whose lips were blue with cold, and who, presumably, had never heard of me, seemed to shake off the numbness that had overtaken us all. Leaning close to my ear she whispered (we all spoke in whispers): 


- And this. Can you write about this? 


 I said: 


- Yes I can. 


Then something resembling a smile glided across what had once been her face.

A Russian writer speaks

Back from an event organized by the Foreign Policy Centre: Freedom and Russian Society. Had it been entitled Freedom and Russia it would have been an extremely short talk. As it is there was some meat but the event was so badly structured that it was easy to lose sight of that.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a very well known and highly regarded Russian writer who became involved in political activity at various times in her life because there really was nothing else to do. She was, nevertheless, an odd person for the Foreign Policy Centre to invite. When you add to that the fact that everything she said had to be interpreted, and the presence of Dr Rachel Polansky who seemed to have nothing of any significance to add to the discussion, it is clear that whoever planned the evening was having a rather difficult day though not as difficult as the evening the audience had trying to make sense of the various aspects.

I noted a few interesting points in Ulitskaya's talk (and none at all in Polonsky's contributions). Some of them were personal, some about Russia or, perhaps, her view on what is going on in that country.

First of all, let me explain that Ulitskaya started her working life as a biologist but was fired from her institute in 1979 because she had been helping to distribute Samizdat material, specifically, copies of banned books. As she said, she is not a political person but as so many in Russia, she has time and again found herself drawn into politics.

After some years of unemployment she found herself working in a theatre and her literary career began. It was, she explained, as if she had become a writer according to the Stanislavsky method of acting - she was placed into a writer's position so she became a writer. To this day, she added, she was not sure whether she really was a writer or merely acted a writer according to that famous method. How true that is about many of us who spend our lives scribbling. Are we really writers or merely actors in the Stanislavsky school? Or, indeed, nothing more than graphomaniacs, which is part of every writer's make-up as Ulitskaya cheerfully added.

Then there were a couple of points she made about Russia and its travails, which, she pointed out accurately enough, were not nearly as bad as the situation under Stalin was. Both her grandfathers had spent many years in labour camps for various reasons or none at all. There is no longer the all-pervasive sense of fear that was a constant in the Soviet period. However, it would appear that fear is beginning to surface again or, at least, bubble away somewhere just below the surface.

To the question as to why Russia was cursed by yet another appalling government (and it is truly appalling even if not as bad as the Soviet regime was) she produced the theory I first heard many years ago from a well-known historian of Russia and the Soviet Union: survival of the unfittest or negative selection. From the very start of the Soviet Union there was a concerted drive to rid the country either by exile, prison or death of all those who were in any way special, successful, full of ability and achievement. Whether it was officers of the White (and later the Red) army, intellectuals, successful peasants and businessmen, industrialists, trade unionists, politicians with ideas, even leading Bolsheviks, they were all destroyed or, at the very least, silenced in successive waves of oppression. Survival meant being grey, mediocre, unimaginative; if any signs of anything else appeared you were likely to find yourself behind bars or, in the later years, without a job and, thus, unable to survive. Towards the end of the Soviet period people once again started leaving the country. Four generations of negative selection take their toll on a society.

Ulitskaya's career has proved that in Russia, once again as in the days of the Tsars, it is the writers who fill the vacuum left by all others though when those writers are journalists they suffer for it. Russia, as this blog has noted several times, has had more journalists murdered than any other country that is not at war. Beyond that there are the innumerable journalists who have been beaten up, threatened, had their offices and homes thrashed and so on.

She has been drawn into politics again and again as, indeed, writers in Russia are and have been throughout history (if only by Stalin and his henchmen threatening and punishing them for being writers). Her most recent activity has been a correspondence with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which she has published; the letters in which the imprisoned former businessman explains various aspects of his life and career, she maintains, have helped to change public opinion towards him.

"I'm not afraid," Ulitskaya insists, speaking through a translator. "Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws … Having said that, I believe that Khodorkovsky is in jail because the whole society was so scared that no one stood up for his defence. There were threats: the court was afraid, the witnesses, the judge, because no one had the courage to speak up and that saddens me. That loss of dignity frustrates me because our society had only just started overcoming its fear after so many years of oppressive rule. The Russian people have once again started to be gripped by fear."

Afraid she may not be but optimistic she is not either. Her view of where Russia is going remains sad and depressed as that quotations shows. One could argue that no country is completely lost while there are people like Lyudmila Ulitskaya around but it is a slender hope.