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By Root 3190 0

for Religious Affairs (sic) who accompanied me, I insisted on getting out of the car to speak to them. Then I got back in and we were taken into the grounds of the monastery itself. I had never attended an Orthodox liturgy. I was struck by the richness of the singing, the clouds of incense, the gorgeous vestments, the sensuousness of the total experience. It was a far cry from the Sunday service at Finkin Street Methodist Church in Grantham. I was also moved by the devotion of the worshippers — it would be too much to say ‘the congregation’, for so much of what was going on was evidently a matter of private prayer, with people coming in and out to attend a part of the apparently endless ritual. I stayed for forty minutes or so and then lit one of the long, thin unbleached Orthodox candles, placing it in the sandbox which contained so many others. I reflected that it would take more than limited reforms of the communist system to contain the power of this Christian revival.

The best that can be said of most of the Russian Orthodox leaders was that they probably had little choice other than to collaborate so closely with the communists. The worst that can be said was that they were active KGB agents. Certainly, the speech which was given by the Deputy Patriarch over lunch could have been drafted by Agitprop: it concentrated heavily on the need to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Discarding my own prepared text, I answered by stressing instead the need to release prisoners of conscience. In the car, on the way back to Moscow, I asked the Minister for Religious Affairs whether there were still people in gaol for their religious beliefs. He said, ‘No, unless they are in for something else.’ Such as possessing a Bible, I thought.

That afternoon it had been arranged, at my suggestion, that I should do a ‘walkabout’ of the sort which comes so easily to western politicians but which the Soviets typically — and perhaps for good reason — avoided. (Mr Gorbachev, though, was in this, as in other matters, a western-style politician.) As I walked around a large housing estate in a bleak suburb of Moscow in the slushy snow and bitter wind, more and more people gathered to meet me. Soon they poured in from everywhere, a huge crowd cheering, smiling, wanting to shake hands. As in Hungary I was being received rapturously as an anti-communist by those who knew the system even better than I did.

That evening I attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre with the Gorbachevs. We shared a box. Like all good Russians, they were both clearly enthusiasts for the ballet. I too enjoy the ballet, almost as much as the opera, so we found this in common. During the interval the Gorbachevs held a small supper party for me in a private room. It was a relaxed occasion. For some reason the conversation turned from the story of Swan Lake to the subject of bread-making in the Soviet Union. Mr Gorbachev said that, partly as a result of help which the Soviet Union had received from ICI, the quality of Soviet bread was now much better than it had been. But it was difficult to please people. When the quality had been lower, it had been necessary to add salt. Now that the quality had improved, so that salt was no longer necessary for the bread, the people still preferred salty bread. He had told the Soviet minister responsible for bread-making to go on television to explain to the people that they were now getting better bread, even though it was not what they were familiar with. Ironically, a similar point had recently been made by the great dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. He remarked that whenever the Soviet media reported that scientists had found that some food — sausage, say — was bad for your health, the ordinary Russians reacted immediately by telling each other: ‘So they’re running out of sausage.’ Such are the unanticipated consequences of collectivism.

We drank some excellent Georgian wine. I was encouraged to have another glass when Mr Gorbachev assured me that it helped some Georgians to live to be a hundred. He was very conscious of the