In some books, traces of domestic life were still more intimate and cryptic: a scrap of paper with a fir tree, with boxed gifts under it (it was Molotov’s idea to bring back the banned tradition of the fir tree – to celebrate New Year rather than Christmas), and the words ‘C-R-I-S-I-S O-F F-A-S-C-I-S-M’ blocked out in squares like a solution in a crossword puzzle; a torn-off bookmark bearing the single word ‘borscht’ (in later life, Zhemchuzhina always chopped garlic into the beetroot soup, the way Stalin had liked it); and pencilled on the back page of his comrade Vyshinsky’s 1952 speech to the UN General Assembly on how to avert the threat of a thermonuclear world war, the words, ‘door handles, shelf with mirror, pegs for the bathroom’.
After my first hours with Molotov’s books, I went into the street, to take a little of what passes for air in this city. A cheery cleaning lady named Lena had broken in on my solitude in the late morning. She waned to vacuum the parquet in the corridor, the bookdust-soultrace from which Fyodorov would have hoped to resurrect the dead, so I put the books carefully back in their shelves. I stood at the corner of Romanov and Vozdvizhenka, outside the Corner House, and looked up at the windows of the study in the Molotov apartment, my throat full of dust, my head full of catalogue numbers marked in purple ink above the names of men who had begged Molotov for their lives. Cars surged up around the Kremlin wall from the Stone Bridge, powerful German cars built for the dramatic acceleration that this turn in the rising road invites.
I looked across at the Lenin Library. It is said that a large fragment of the skull of Adolf Hitler, carried back to Moscow from the Führer’s bunker in Berlin in 1945, is still hidden somewhere inside. In May 1939, Stalin, who had been preparing him for the role for two years, appointed Molotov Commissar of Foreign Affairs, replacing the cosmopolitan Jew Litvinov. Litvinov learned of his dismissal when NKVD troops surrounded his office at No. 24 Kuznetsky Most, and Beria, Malenkov and Molotov arrived together to take over. Following Stalin’s orders, Molotov’s first move was to purge the commissariat of the many sophisticated Jews, practised at diplomacy and good at languages, who worked there, and replace them with monoglot Russians who knew nothing of the diplomatic arts and had never dealt with foreigners. In his fruitless negotiations with the Triple Alliance, Molotov received the ambassadors of Britain and France seated at a vast desk on a dais, his interlocutors far below him, balancing their papers on their knees. By the end of August, Molotov and his German counterpart Ribbentrop had signed (in Stalin’s presence) a non-aggression pact. The pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR contained a ‘secret protocol’ (whose existence Molotov denied to the end of his life), demarcating ‘spheres of influence’ for the two powers over the Baltic states and Poland. In September, the USSR invaded Poland, and, the following March, Molotov (with the rest of the Politburo) approved a request from Beria to execute the entire Polish officer corps – approximately 22,000 men – in the Katyn forest.
Later that year, Molotov dined with Hitler in Berlin. Well, ‘the state is not pure spirit’. Toasting Hitler? ‘That’s diplomacy,’ said Molotov. Hitler proposed to Molotov that they ‘divide the whole world’. He ranted about England (‘some miserable island, owns half the world and wants to grab it all … it’s unjust!’), and took no meat or coffee or alcohol. ‘It seemed to me a rabbit was sitting next to me eating grass’, Molotov remarked, ‘an idealistic man’. He formed his own opinion of what was going on inside the skull that would within a few years end up inside a box in the great library across the street. Like Napoleon, Hitler had dreamed of destroying Moscow, and entering its ruins as conqueror. ‘Movies and books portray him as a madman, a maniac, but that’s not true,’ Molotov reflected, ‘he was very clever, though narrow-minded and obtuse at the same time because of his egotism and the absurdity of his primordial idea.’
THREE
The Banya
‘With light steam!’
RUSSIAN GOOD WISH, TO BE SAID AFTER THE BANYA
It was in a spirit of dedicated scholarship that, in my first years in Moscow, I would end my Fridays among the odalisques at the Sandunovskaya Bathhouse. In the scented dark, the accumulated book-grime of a week’s research in the library of the Institute of Oriental Studies steamed gratefully from the pores. And after all, since the time of Muscovy, English travellers have relished uncovering in the recondite rituals of the Russian bathhouse a cultural gravitation towards the sensual, unhistorical and easeful East of Western imagination. In time, my purposes in that library faded. My research into Russian orientalism had taken me into a mirrored hall with infinite regressions leading in every direction. I was no longer borne up on what Mandelstam called the ‘ambassadorial winds of Persian poetry’. I let go of my dream of reading the ghazals of Hafiz in the original like some nineteenth-century scholar-traveller, but my bathing habits lingered on.
It was likewise a kind of scholarly déformation professionelle that led me to peep, one Friday evening, at the jacket of the thick red book that the beauty opposite me was reading as she reclined between steamings on a leather divan, legs waving languidly in the air, in nothing but a pair of plastic beach slippers and a turban. She had a Barbie-doll figure, a sunbed tan and a butterfly tattooed on one hip. She was reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. And why not? The dust-jacket on the hardback edition of the same work that I had recently bought from a makeshift bookstand in the Kuznetsky Most metro station did advertise its appeal to a wide circle of readers.
While Europe immolated herself in the First World War, Spengler, the autodidact son of a postal worker, laboured at his writing with a burning sense of destiny in a cramped apartment in Munich. As the survivors returned and Russia collapsed into revolution, his work of historiographical prophecy, The Decline of the West, captured the zeitgeist and a wide readership. In Russia, the book was received with public enthusiasm and scholarly solemnity, and immediately translated as The Sunset of Europe. Spengler’s vision of Russia was drawn from Dostoevsky and a poetic apprehension of the role of the steppe in the formation of the Russian soul. His ‘morphology of history’, which hinged on a distinction between organic, religious ‘culture’ and mechanical, international ‘civilisation’, gave Russian messianism a shining new edge. The decline of the West is an inevitable part of its organic historical life-cycle. The primitive soul of Old Russia was never capable of adapting to Western civilisation with its individualistic notions of justice and personal fulfilment, its materialistic world cities. Russian love grows out of the boundless plain; it is the mystical love of brothers ‘under equal pressure all along the earth’, self-oblivious, sharing in collective guilt and redemption. Capitalism and parliamentarism are alien to the national organism: ‘the primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even today appropriate to the Russian world’. From Russia, European culture demands only the reverence due to the beloved dead. The next thousand years will belong to Dostoevsky’s Christianity, Spengler promised.
Early in my time here, in a fever of acquisitiveness, I purchased in cheap popular editions the works of many prominent Russian cultural thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who, like the ‘reactionary and Nietzschean’ Spengler (as he was labelled in Soviet times), went unpublished for seventy years. In Russian intellectual life, a conversation that was cut off and redirected after the Bolshevik Revolution had resumed its course. Its theme: East, West, whence, and whither Russia?