Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [115]
In short, as intellectual VIPs – an unfamiliar role – we almost certainly were treated to more culture than other visiting foreigners, as well as an embarrassing share of products and privileges in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for instance, be whisked straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow–Leningrad overnight train, to a matinée children’s performance of Swan Lake at the Kirov, installed in the directors’ box, to which, after the performance, the prima ballerina – I think it was Alla Shelest – was brought straight from the stage and still sweating, to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular importance who found themselves momentarily in the location of power. Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at the memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad prepared to go home and the – overwhelmingly Jewish – musicians filed out of the orchestra pit. It was not a good advertisement for communism. But of Russia and Russian life we saw little except the middle-aged women, presumably war widows, hauling stones and clearing rubble from the wintry streets.
What is more, even the intellectuals’ basic resource, ‘looking it up’, was not available. There were no telephone directories, no maps, no public timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be learned about Russia by visiting it in 1954 that could not have been learned outside.
Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing achievement of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s under one of the legendary ‘hard men’ of Stalinism, Lazar Kaganovich, a dream of a future city of palaces for a hungry and pauperized present, but a modern underground which worked – and, I am told, still does – like clockwork. There was the basic difference between the Russians who took decisions and the ones who did not – as we joked among ourselves, they could be recognized by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads, or had fallen out with the effort, the ones who didn’t could be recognized by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year’s Eve party at the Scientists’ Club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone suggested a contest in remembering proverbs – not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases about sharp things, such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ (needles) or ‘burying the hatchet’. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village wisdom about knives, axes, sickles and sharp or cutting implements and their operations until the contest had to be stopped. That, after all, was what they brought with them from the illiterate villages in which so many of them had been born.
It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves. Unlike the ‘peoples’ democracies’ and ‘really existing socialisms’ of the rest of Europe, where communists fighting oppression came from persecution to power at the end of the war, in the USSR we found ourselves in a country long governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which having a career implied being a member of that Party, or at least conforming to its requirements and official statements.