Last day in Moscow

John Charap

We were to meet at noon at the grave of Lev Landau, the physicist and Nobel Prizewinner. On the way in to Moscow Ivan didn't tell me the name of the friend we were to meet there, only that he was a physicist who'd lived all his life in Moscow and that he'd be able to show us things we'd miss otherwise. We'd come in from Dubna in an old black Zim from the laboratory, which dropped us at the Leningrad station. I'd put my luggage in a locker, and now we were in the Metro on our way to the New Maiden Nunnery and the graveyards. The escalator down is fast, very deep; as we go down Ivan explains that he hadn't wanted to tell me the

name of his friend before since the other passenger in the car spoke English. Now he tells me it is Mischa, whose work I know but whom I've not met before. Mischa is from an aristocratic family, his father was also a professor, a friend of Solzhenitsyn. He knows old Moscow well, and in any case he will be good company.

I've known Ivan, a Bulgarian physicist, for years now; we'd first met in Trieste at Salam's institute, and I'd seen a lot of him in the last couple of weeks at Dubna. The previous evening at the Scientists' Club a whole crowd had joined us at dinner and stayed on afterwards to drink Armenian cognac. As usual the talk had been mostly about writing and writers. They told me I ought to read Bulganov's fantastic satire, as good as Kafka even if I would not be able to recognise the real-life characters and events he used. Ivan had been reading the letters of Marina Tsvetaeva, the poet. They all agree that she was one of the four outstanding Russian poets of the last fifty years. Many of her letters are to Pasternak.

In one, she'd written to him that she despised the Russian intelligentsia, that the real strength of Russia was first in the aristocracy, and second in the peasants. Tsvetaeva had returned to Russia from Paris in 1939, and met Pasternak ; but it was not the same Pasternak as in her letters. She committed suicide in 1941. This admiration for the aristocracy puzzled me; I argued that the British aristocracy had, for the last couple of centuries at least, been separated from cultural, intellectual circles, and I was surprised that it was different in Russia. Ivan particularly defended the aristocracy; they had a refinement of taste, they even looked more refined, were taller, had more poise, more grace. Volodya arrived late and brought a succession of bottles of Isabelle—

a young peasant wine from Georgia out of his enormous briefcase, and conversation turned to the aristocratic taste for wine rather than for the cognac we'd been drinking before Volodya came. There were the inevitable toasts, light-hearted but serious, such as the toast to the 'invisible college.'

We drank again the toast I'd proposed at the conference banquet in Tbilisi; I'd found myself at the same table as Sakharov, and was amused by the irony of his being there as the guest of the Georgian government.

When I'd spoken with him earlier at the conference I'd thought he seemed edgy, tired, tense; but at the banquet he was relaxed and obviously enjoying himself. The food was good, there had been many, many toasts, and I explained that we had a traditional one in England which they might like. So we had drunk to 'absent friends.'

After the conference I'd spent a couple of weeks at Dubna, as a guest of the Laboratory, and now it is my last day in Moscow, and we are going to the graveyard. As we go in through the small gate in the wall, I am amazed by the crowds of people there. The place is thronged with children, families, soldiers, tourists, people with flowers, people just strolling in the sunshine, ambling down the pathways, looking at tombstones, at monuments, busts of scientists, writers, composers, politicians, soldiers. Many effigies, no crosses. It's as relaxed and carefree as Kensington Gardens or Kenwood. A slightly larger crowd at Khrushchev's grave, with its white granite abstract and black portrait bust, the pudgy peasant face with a Buddha smile; fresh flowers.

We meet M ischa. He is in fact tall, elegant, with straight hair falling across his forehead like an old Etonian. But with Russian grey eyes and Russian bad teeth and gold-filled smile. He is knowledgeable, courtly. We go to the old part of the cemetery, to the graves of Gogol and of Chekhov. On Gogol's tomb there is a brash modern monument, but also an old stone, with inscriptions from the Bible. Chekhov's monument is weird, like a cottage out of a fairy story. We see the grave of Stanislavsky, of actors from his theatre, of composers, musicians. We wanted to find our way to the grave of Nadeshda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife who committed suicide in 1932. But you don't just ask anyone for that sort of direction. Mischa asks a 'good' person, and we find the tomb with its pompous monument erected by Stalin's order. Nearby are other graves of Stalin's relatives, and of other politicians and their families. The wife of Mikoyan: we talk of his amazing survival, his peaceful retirement. Litvinov, another who escaped murder and suicide (in spite of the revolver he kept in case the bell rang in the night), and we talk of the persistent rumours and denials that there exist unpublished memoirs by him.

After we leave the cemetery we go for a

walk in the Arbat district, the old area where many writers and academics used 10 live, with many attractive buildings, form

erly family mansions, now overcrowded but still pleasant and quiet. We walk through a courtyard of one of these mansions. By

strange coincidence. it is one through which I had been taken just a fortnight earlier by.a

Jewish physicist 'refusenik,' fired from his

research post at the Physical-Technical Institute when he made unsuccessful appli

cation for a visa to emigrate to Israel two years ago. We had gone with his girl friend to a new block of flats near the old building

in which she lived for me to photograph the building in between--the notorious Sude-. bnoy Institute, the psychiatric 'hospital for those who dissent too vigorously from the official line. I had taken my photos, but had not seen the barbed wire nor the guard tower of which they had spoken; new construction work blocked the view. Still, 1 was nervous and wary as we took the lift to the tenth floor, then another lift to the fifteenth. then the stairs to the sixteenth: and it was with rather self-conscious bravado that I waved back to the soldiers who had waved me away from the window from which I had taken my photographs.

But this time, as we walk through the courtyard, it is a very different atmosphere. Mischa tells me that the building has for a long time been a school, a famous gymnasium before the revolution, at which manY of the Arbat intellectuals were educated. We walk on to a larger grander mansion: it was said to be the model for the Rostov home, but Tolstoy denied this; 'they were not so wealthy.' Now it is the building of the

Writers' Union, and it was here that Solthenitsyn heard that he was to be expelled

from his country.

We go to a teashop for cakes and tea. There is the usual queue, and the urn runs dry of hot water before we reach it. Mischa has to get back, but I will phone him later ill the day. Ivan and I go off to do some shopping on Kalinin Prospekt, a broad modern street of shops and flats carved out of the charming old neighbourhood through which we'd been walking. Here is the biggest foodstore in Moscow, where I got int° trouble for taking photos. I pretended not to understand the very explicit sign-language directing me to open my camera and black out the film, and stubbornly waited whilst the store supervisor and the militia mall she'd called over tried to get instructions oil the phone about how to deal with this stuPld foreigner. Eventually, as I'd hoped, theY got fed up and told me to go. Also on New Arbat is a very good record shop; they were featuring the Beatles, Bach and a superb Russian folk-singer, Janna BuchevskaYa. And nearby Moscow's biggest bookstore 'The House of Books.' Here I am disappointed, frustrated. It's not possible to browse as the books are out of reach. Aud the things I want, a guide to Moscow s museums, reproductions of icons, are Just not available. It's ironic that the Russians. who are so starved for books, are so obsess

ed with literature. I'm told that in the last year or so it has become fashionable to own books, and especially foreign books. There is a department selling second-hand Western books at amazing prices, sixteen roubles (£10) for an Agatha Christie paperback, a hundred roubles for a Fontana paperback of art reproductions.

I say goodbye to Ivan, who is going back to Dubna, and go to the Tretyakov Gallery. There is a superb collection of icons, including some magnificent Rublyovs, austere and spiritual, yet humane. But then nothing but room after boring room of nineteenthcentury portraits and genre pictures, twentieth-century socialist realism. At the time of Chagall's recent visit they had put on display just one of his paintings, and it is still there, tucked away in a corner. In his home-town of Vitebsk there is no mention of him or his work at the local art museum. And here in the Tretyakov, the museum of Russian Painting, there is no Kandinsky, no Malevitch, none of the great revolutionary Painters, the constructivists who made such a distinctive Soviet contribution to painting in the 'twenties.

When the museum closes, I phone Mischa, and he invites me to his flat where we have a meal. From what I had seen, the Russians are not short of food. But fresh fruit and vegetables, even in the height of summer, lack variety. Potatoes are hard to Come by; the official price is about three Pence a pound when you can find them, but on the open market they sell for ten times that Mischa joked that onions were so scarce that it was rumoured that they would be selling them in the Beriozka shops. We'd been to one of these shops after leaving the cemetery, as I'd wanted to buy a wateo. The quality there is high, the prices low, but one may only pay in convertible currency. There's a story that Sakharov went to a Beriozka shop and insisted on paying in roubles on the grounds that it says on rouble bills that they are legal tender for all payments in all institutions in all territories of the USSR—and that, rather than have him arrested as a hooligan and trouble-maker, they let him get away with it when they found that he was an Academician.

We talk a little of these things, but spend most of our time looking through a handsome book of photos of old Moscow, of the Mansions and churches and houses built between 1750 and 1825, many of which are still standing. And again we talk of writing and writers. Who are the novelists in Britain, who the poets? What are the new Plays? What are the movements in literature, in art, in music? As he takes me to the station and sees me on to the night sleeper for Leningrad, I ask him why so many People go to the cemetery, why so many People from so many walks of life study the tombstones, why they are so interested in the graves of academicians and poets, Politicians and writers. Ah, Mischa tells me, it is in the cemetery that we can find out about our history and the truth about our present.