Russia revisited
Christopher Booker
Russian Journal Andrea Lee (Faber £8.95) ince 1917 there must have been several 10 hundred books by Western visitors describing visits to the Soviet Union — the vast majority falling into one or two clearly- defined categories. On the one hand, as landmarks in the history of self-deception, were those stereotyped eulogies of the 1930's and 1940's, extolling the heroic col- lectivism of an imaginary paradise in the making. On the other, right from the start, has been a very different, much more per- sonal tpye of book, by authors ranging from H. G. Wells and Malcolm Muggeridge to Laurens van der Post and George Feifer. And despite the enormous variety of their styles and points of view, not the least in- teresting feature of this second group of books is how often they also have seemed to describe a familiar pattern of experience,
Initially their authors are exhilarated by the sheer strangeness and scale of Russia. Increasingly, however, they come to draw a sharp distinction between the people they meet, often so warm and attractive, and the extraordinary system they live under, so in- comparably more oppressive than most Westerners can conceive. Almost without exception, these visitors record an amazing lift of their spiritsas they finally escape from Soviet soil. But at the same time they return home in thoughtful mood. In some way they have left behind an important part of themselves in that eerie country, where one's personal contacts take on such inten- sity and where life has briefly seemed so much more serious than it often does in the trivialising West.
A distinguished addition to this second group of books is Russian Journal by Andrea Lee, a black American girl in her
twenties, who four years ago spent ten months in the Soviet Union with her hus- band while he studied at Moscow State University for his Harvard doctorate in Russian history.
The book opens on their first evening. Having been shown up to their tiny apart- ment in the University's huge 'Stalinist Gothic' skyscraper, Miss Lee sees a young student chasing a girl with tong braids round a courtyard, 'amid peals of innocent laughter. 'I felt disarmed and curiously moved. I realised that nothing this year would be predictable or easy to follow'. It strikes precisely the right note. That is how one does (or should) feel on one's first day in the Soviet Union, and from there on Miss Lee scarcely puts a foot wrong.
She does not attempt any sweeping analysis of Soviet life or 'the Russian character'. She merely observes, with what, if our contemporary novelists wrote so well, one might be tempted to call a 'novelist's eye' — through some 35 almost self- contained vignettes of people and places. We visit scenes familiar and unfamiliar Moscow student life, a Moscow peasant market, a bath-house full of giggling Muscovite ladies letting their hair down like children; further afield, Stalin's birthplace in the little Caucasian town of Gori, a Len- ingrad nightclub (from where they were driven home by a taxi-driver singing Verdi arias at the top of his voice). We join Miss Lee and her husband as they take part, with a 'worker' friend Petya, in the great May Day parade past Lenin's tomb, catching a rare close-up glimpse of Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo (`they really do exist ... how little they are, and how tired!').
We meet Gtigorii, the over-friendly fellow-student who materialises as soon as they arrive and is obviously their own per- sonal stukach or 'informer', commissioned to watch them by some nameless power in the background. There is Sasha, the photographer, obsessively building up his store of English from a cherished Webster's Dictionary — 'my wife, she is not en- couraging to my studies. In fact she is a hellcat, a termagant'. There is Seryozha, darkly handsome and blue-blooded, like some throwback to the world of Lermon- tov, who is becoming more and more enmeshed in a web of trouble involving his estranged wife, her parents and the KGB. There is Rima, who perilously survives on a succession of little deals — icons, currency exchanges, language lessons to diplomats. There is the brave, forlorn little group of Russian 'hippies' with their smattering of out-of-date slang CI dig you the most'), standing out in that drab culture like surreal ghosts of the American 1960's.
Some of the longer episodes read like vivid short stories, such as a chilling Christmas Day visit to the luxurious dacha, where Victor Louis holds court with his upper-middle class English wife Jennifer; or a strange encounter with Tikhon Khren- nikov, the unspeakable Chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers, who invites them to a premiere of some of his music (which showed 'the influence of Brahms and Tchaikowsky as a small, barren planet might reflect the light of the stars'). Then there is the moving profile of Ibrahim, a proud, sad Ethiopian, brought to Moscow like so many of his young countrymen to be educated as a loyal Marxist, who has con- ceived such a passionate hatred of the Soviet Union that he wishes only to return to fight with the anti-Soviet Eritrean nationalists. His brother has already died in this cause, and when Ibrahim requests in a session of table-tapping to speak to his brother's ghost, the answer to his first unspoken question comes back, 'Death'. What did you ask, a girl timidly enquires. 'I asked my brother what I could expect when I get home'.
The dark, oppressive underside of Soviet life is constantly present in the background, but all the more forcefully for being so understated. An old woman sneaks past the guard into the brightly-lit Aladdin's cave of a beriozka (hard-currency shop), just to take a look at the forbidden plenty on the shelves before being hustled out. Andrea and her husband go up onto the Lenin Hills with Petya to watch a fireworks display, and are shocked to be brusquely pushed by armed guards into a tiny stockade. Even the loyal Petya is forced to comment 'it embar- rasses me to have you see that. Our govern- ment is awfully afraid, of riots, you see. People gathered together make revolutions, and we can't have another of those'.
In common with so many predecessors, Miss Lee finally records how, when they left Soviet soil, she and her husband were flooded with elation. But they had un- doubtedly left behind some part of themselves with the unforgettable people they had met in that poignant land — even with Grigorii, their 'informer', who makes his last appearance taking them out into the woods of the Lenin Hills, in his `bureaucrat's suit', to hear the nightingales.
Grigorii removed his comical taped glasses and unashamedly wiped his eyes. He admits that he has a tape-recording of nightingale song which he plays when he is alone. 'It makes me think of spring and the forest'.
What a country!
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