The earth mother
Fitzroy Maclean
Moscow: A Traveller's Companion Laurence Kelly (Constable £9.95) Among the Russians Colin Thubron (Heinemann £8.95)
'Th• ussia' wrote Maurice Baring from .1\ Moscow in 1906, `is different from all other countries . . . You live here, walk about, talk and forget that you are in a place which is quite unique, until some small sight or episode or phrase brings home the fact to you and you say "This is Russia".'This fundamental truth applies as much today as it did then and strikes one again and again as one reads these two excellent books. The world you enter when you cross the Russian frontier is an entirely different one, of which you can only get the flavour at first hand and both these books in their different ways are first-hand accounts.
In his Moscow: A Traveller's Compan- ion, Laurence Kelly does for Moscow what he has already done so successfully for St Petersburg, namely collect a number of particularly telling descriptions and accounts of the city and its life by people who visited it in one context or another and viewed it from one angle or another over the eight centuries which have elapsed since the boyar. Kuchko, led there by a two-headed eagle, first built himself a little wooden palisade on the hillock where the Kremlin now stands, only to be quickly overrun and massacred by Prince Yuri Dolgoruki who, realising its strategic advantages, wanted it for himself and Kuchko's beautiful daughter Ulita for his son.
Starting with Kuchko, the author carries us all the way through to Lenin, whom we find looking for suitable accommodation in the Kremlin in the spring of 1918, when, after an interval of 200 years, the Bolshe- viks abandoned Peter the Great's `Window on the West' and symbolically shifted the seat of government back to the old capital, half way to Asia. What strikes one is the surprising continuity of Russian history, the extent to which Lenin and Stalin and their successors have inherited the traditions of Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible and the other Assemblers of Russia and how the Com- munist Party has in many ways assumed the role of the Orthodox Church (a tota- litarian hierarchy, Kelly calls it), while under Tsar and Commissar alike, the Russian people, steadily resisting all efforts to transform them into some kind of new Soviet man, remain staunchly and pro- foundly Russian.
Mr Kelly's choice of passages illustrates innumerable aspects of the Muscovite scene. Even today, the manner in which the first Romanov became Tsar in 1613 has a topical interest. Wishing to ensure that the Zemski Sobor or Territorial Assembly picked the right man, a number of armed Cossacks called in their old friend, the
Abbot of Sergievo, who, after celebrating Mass, addressed the assembled delegates as follows: `You are not here to enjoy yourselves. You are here to elect a Russian Tsar . . . A Tsar is the father of the nations. Moscow is the mother of the nation. You can neither select nor elect your father or your mother. They are sent to you by God.'
`Amen!' said the members of the Assem- bly devoutly. `Quite right. And now tell us who is sent by God to be Tsar.'
`Who but Michael Romanov?' replied the Abbot promptly and then called for a vote. One hundred and fifty-six of the delegates could neither read nor write and asked the Abbot (who could) to fill in their voting papers for them. After which a vote was taken and Michael Romanov unani- mously elected Tsar of All the Russias, a position which his descendants (or alleged descendants) were to occupy with varying degrees of success for the next 300 years.
Through the centuries, generations of foreign visitors have continued to gape in amazement, horror and admiration at the sheer strangeness, magnificence and incon- gruity of Moscow — and the Muscovites, always fascinated by foreigners, have gaped back. `The Prince of Wales', re- ported the Daily Telegraph's Moscow cor- respondent in November 1866, `went through the bazaars, where he made some purchases . . . All day long the Royal party was followed by a mob of idlers, who never seemed to grow tired of staring at the Prince. Even the sealskin peajacket which HRH wore was an object of never-failing curiosity on the part of the bystanders.' It would be the same today.
Colin Thubron's latest book, Among the Russians, can only serve to enhance his well deserved reputation. I enjoyed every page of it. It is well observed, well written and, unlike many books about Russia, gives proof of an unusual and penetrating insight into the character of the country and people. Having long been fascinated by Russia, the author learned Russian and, climbing into his Morris Marina, set out to explore it, covering about 10,000 miles in the process. Not everyone realises that, despite the machinations of what he aptly calls 'a jungly and unconquerable bure- aucracy', it is perfectly possible to do this.
During his journey, Mr Thubron made a number of important discoveries, not least that the Second World War so haunts the Russian consciousness that no understand- ing of Russia is possible without it. He also discovered, as he motored across it, the immense size of the Russian plain, its psychological effect on the Russians and their close attachment to their country's soil. 'From her own people,' he writes, `Russia elicits a helpless worship of belong- ing . . . She contains them with the elemental despotism of an earth mother.' With this he rightly links the average Russian's almost mystical sense of patriot- ism, now coming (and being brought) increasingly to the fore. `The old Russian belief in an apocalyptic history continues: history with a divine purpose,' a persistent belief, in other words, in Russia's God- or Marx-given mission to enlighten and, if necessary, discipline a naughty world. `The tradition of all the dead generations,' wrote Karl Marx, 'weighs like a nighmare on the brain of the living.' Of few coun- tries, as Marx would have been the first to agree, is this truer than of Russia.
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