Note of despair
TIBOR SZAMIJELY
Message from Moscow An Observer (Cape 32s) The anonymous author of Message from Moscow describes himself as a non- communist Western student who has spent the last three years in the USSR. Whoever he is. he certainly understands the country and its people. He loves Russia- --her culture. her people, her language. her traditional way of life, even her harsh and monotonous yet strangely beautiful landscape, which inspires abiding devotion in every Russian and maddening boredom in every foreigner. But, unlike most Western Russophils, his attachment to the country does not lead him to extol the political system. On the con- trary, Message from Moscow—calm, matter- of-fact, descriptive —presents a terrible picture of what fifty years of Soviet ruk have done to the soul of a great people, who once produced some of the noblest master- pieces of world literature, music, painting.
The author constructs his whole narrative
around a single date: 21 August 1968, the day Soviet and satellite troops invaded Czechoslovakia. The book opens on 21 August; its appendix reproduces Pravda's front page of that date; in between the invasion is referred to again and again. Like some powerful lens, this one event gathered together the disparate strands of Soviet life into a single ray: blinding to the reader as much as to the author, who had until then retained a certain optimism con- cerning Soviet development. Our 'Observer' was shocked, not so much by the invasion itself (by that time he had learned not to expect anything better from the gang of 'anti-intellectual, anti-semitic, totally un- civilised power-lovers' in the Kremlin); as by the extraordinary reaction to it 494114‘.. Soviet populace. To use one of the most belaboured—but in this case appropriate —images of English literature, it was exactly the same as the strange behaviour of the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story: there &vas no reaction whatsoever.
Admittedly, the author's progressive intel- lectual friends were unsparing in their con- demnation of their government's action— and here, too, 'it was less the invasion itself that appalled the intellectuals than the re- action to it inside Russia'. These men did not try to deceive themselves: 'As far as the Russian people had any interest in the invasion, the great majority vaguely approved'. The author's own observations confirmed this: 'When I heard anything at all, it was almost always condemnation of the Czechoslovaks'.
It is vitally important for the West to grasp this basic fact: the vast mass of the Russian people support their government's aggressive, colonialist policies. There are no CNDS, no peace-movements, no Vietniks in Russia. Refugees from Soviet Russia hope- fully suggest that this is not the case, that beneath the surface the people seethe with indignation. I am afraid they are wrong—all the more so since I was as much surprised by the popular acquiescence in the rape of Czechoslovakia as the author's friends. Things have changed since the mass wave of protest against the intervention in Hungary in 1956, and changed very much for the worse. What matter that five cour- ageous men and women went to protest in Red Square—only to be howled down by the mob? It is the people that count, not a tiny segment of disaffected intellectuOs with no outlet for their disgust except drinking themselves into a stupor. 'We're a- nation of political robots,' remarked an un- dergraduate physics student. 'We not only lack all the machinery for democratic government, but the instincts and the brains and the interest as well.'
Message from Moscow sets out to explain why, and, though superficial in places, it makes a convincing case. Centuries of auto- cracy; long years of Stalinist terror, misery and degradation; hopes of improvement repeatedly shattered; the renewal of police repression and the immediate Pavlovian reaction of a nation where memories of the Great Purge live in generations then un- born; the poverty, squalor, shabbiness of everyday life; the corruption, the cheating, the incompetence; the constant shortages; the gracelessness and the boorishness; the abysmal ignorance about the outside world; the effects of fifty years of all-pervasive, concentrated lying propaganda.
Yet the author is nothing if not fair to the Russians—even to their governmept. Some things, as he rightly points out, have improved since Stalin's day. No more in- discriminate mass-terror, for instance. In the old days millions were picked up literally 'for nothing'. Today, if you keep your nose clean and your mouth shut, you are safe. The importance of this change should on no account be underrated. Then, living stan- dards have also improved a little, however miserable they may seem to the Western observer. 'Easy vodka, easy marriage, an easy-going life—that's what the people really care about.' As for the liberal intel- lectuals' struggle, the population could hardly care less. The downtrodden Russian Socialist masses are anti-intellectual almost to a man—as well as anti-semitic, anti- Negro, anti-Arab, anti-Chinese. And, of course, anti-Czechoslovak. These lovable people have many hates, and who are we to blame them?
Message from Moscow presents a picture rather different from the one to which the Western reader has become accustomed. Observer's book is a message of hopeless- ness: there will be no change for the better in Russia. It is a terrifying message. It is also a true one.
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