ANOTHER VOICE
Will A. N. Cabdriver drive Graham Greene to a last terrible practical joke?
AUBERON WAUGH
Sceptical at first, I am beginning to accept the reality of Mr Gorbachev's glas- nost. For the first time in their lives, Soviet citizens are being invited to confront the truth about the miserable system under which they live. No doubt Gorbachev's reasons for this are tactical. There is opposition all along the line to his desper- ate efforts to clean up the Augean stables left by Brezhnev. Corrupt and incompetent officials are entrenched in powerful posi- tions throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. The only way he can get rid of them is by exposing their malprac- tices, even if, in the process, he allows the West a glimpse of what conditions are really like 70 years after the arrival of socialism, 42 years after the end of the war, 34 years after the death of Stalin.
At least we can now be sure that glasnost is not part of socialism's fancy window dressing. It is intended for domestic con- sumption. We may have read Xan Smiley's excellent summary of Soviet achievements in public health provision by the simple process of opening our Daily Telegraph on page 11 last Tuesday. But he appears to have derived nearly all his material from the published statements of Mr Yevgeni Chazov, Gorbachev's new health minister, rather than from some questionable CIA briefing.
We knew — or at any rate I did — that male Soviet life expectancy, at 64 years, is one of the worst in the civilised world; that infant mortality at 26 deaths per thousand live births is twice the British rate; that basic medical equipment and antibiotic drugs are unprocurable; that the average Russian woman has eight abortions in a lifetime, this being the only available method of contraception; that sanitary towels are almost impossible to find and tampons non-existent. "Our health system is in a pitiful state', says Y. Chazov. 'Of district hospitals, 35 per cent have no hot water, 27 per cent have no sewerage, 17 per cent do not even have piped water.'
Faced by such horrifying facts, one's first reaction is to suspect the man may be pilgering, although it seems rather an odd thing for the Minister of Health to do. No doubt Soviet citizens, from bitter experi- ence of their own health service, already suspected that these were the true figures. To see them set down and publicly pro- claimed, with the blessing of the First Secretary, may drive many Russians mad. It is the denial of everything the Russian leadership has ever stood for. Nobody should under-estimate the extent of the calamity from the point of view of the ordinary, conformist, law-abiding Soviet citizen. Few, I suspect, will possess the mental agility, or be able to make the imaginative leap, from living a lie to confronting the truth, from saying nothing to discussing things openly. But at least they are beginning to make the effort.
Is it coincidence, I wonder, that even as the Russians are beginning to creep out from the great, wet, all-enveloping blanket of secrecy at least two Western govern- ments seem determined to creep under it? Perhaps our government has always been secretive, and all that has changed is that it has suddenly become more strident and aggressive in the defence of its 'secrets'. But there is also an intolerance of dissent in the air which adds to the weather-house effect and seems to confirm that as the Soviet Union comes out into the open air, we are determined to take its place within.
Last week we treated to the hilarious sight of the English-language Pravda hav- ing pages cut out of it before it could legally be sold in Britain. This is where the latest twist of the Wright fiasco has led us. Nothing could better illustrate the function of the great secrecy industry, which still employs many hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There could be no reason for withholding the information cut out from Pravda on grounds that it might be useful to an enemy, since it had already appeared in the Soviet Union three days earlier. The issue was simply one of principle, that secrets are things to be kept. But what secrets? Oh, the secrets of how we keep our secrets, and try to find out the enemy's secrets of course . . . .
The whole multi-million pound secrecy industry does very little but guard its own secrets about how it guards its own secrets. It is like one of those revolting Russian dolls which fit into each other five or six times, with emptiness in the middle.
Except that in the obsessive self- importance of these secrets-freaks, they do tend to torture, kidnap and even murder each other when they get excited. This is what has happened to poor Mordecai Vanunu, accused of imparting 'secrets' to the Sunday Times because, as a Christian, he doubted the usefulness or morality of the Israeli bomb. I did not even read the article in the Sunday Times last year: everybody who is interested already knows how to make an atom bomb, and we all assumed the Israelis were making them. It is the principle of the thing which infuri- ated all those Mossad and Shin Bet agents who seduced, entrapped, drugged and kidnapped Vanunu, who now bundle him into a secret court manacled and forced to wear a ridiculous helmet to prevent him telling anyone how the Israelis protect their secrets.
It is in this context, surely, that we should judge the treason of Kim Philby. I was saddened to see the virulent attack on Graham Greene written by A. N. Wilson (or A. N. Cabdriver, as he is affectionately known in the trade) in Saturday's Daily Mail. Greene's crime was to have passed the time of day with his old friend and colleague in Moscow: 'He is a dangerous traitor, not only to his country but also to the West and to all the values we hold dear . . . . Having a holiday with Kim Philby is morally on a par with having a holiday with Dr Goebbels while this country was at war with Nazi Germany.'
Fiddlesticks. The only 'secrets' involved are secrets about keeping secrets. Perhaps a few secrets-freaks murdered each other as a result of Philby's defection, but that is their nature. There is no earthly reason why Graham Greene should not visit his old chum in Moscow, if that is what he wants. No doubt one of his motives letting it be known he had done so was to annoy the A. N. Cabdrivers of this world.
But the hysteria of Cabdriver's attack so reminiscent of the unspeakable A. A. Milne's attack on Wodehouse in 1941 makes me worry that Greene might be goaded into one last, desperate practical joke. At 82 he has little to keep him in the West, beyond his books and his flat in Antibes, with a somewhat decrepit 're- tired' MI5 Watcher in the flat below. Can only I see the temptation for him to do a Solzhenitsyn in reverse, fleeing Thatcher's oppression and A. N. Cabdriver's persecu- tion to spend his last years — possibly only months — in Moscow?
I hope he resists it. He might overstay his welcome. It would not be much fun to die in a hospital without hot water, or sewerage, or piped water at all. The great thing about jokes is to know when they have gone far enough.
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