Another student told me that Chingiz recently spoke at a Komsomol meeting for the first time. The discussion concerned
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an unruly troublemaker whom the Presidium had recommended for expulsion. The activists were startled, then angered, at Chingiz's extemporaneous speech in his defense: such challenge to the leadership at an open meeting was insolent. (Not quite unprecedented, however: similar democratic gropings had been ventured during the heady days of Khrushchev's liberalization.) When the vote was taken and the recommendation defeated, several kingpins succumbed to rage. Chingiz quietly left, reappearing with a large Lenin emblem pinned to his black turtleneck.
His father's reverence for Lenin is clearly sire to his own assumption that a return to genuinely revolutionary principles would set the country straight. In other words, his "opposition" is uncorruptedly Leninist. Students of Leonid's sophistication, by contrast, have come to feel that just this Leninism—its dogmatism, intolerance and repression of dissent, born of the narrow-minded ruthlessness of the man himself, who discarded centuries of wisdom for his Marxist "answers" to everything—was Russia's greatest tragedy. Is it a law of nature that Leonid knows more yet does less to ameliorate present wrongs? That his greater understanding only inhibits him in comparison to the strong-willed Chingiz?
Is it in keeping with some other law that the one student I know who has actually participated in a form of organized political dissent is among the least likable personally? Long-legged Pyotr has never said precisely what he does and I don't ask, of course; but to an American, he's willing to hint that he once helped collect samizdat materials documenting political persecution. In other words, he was an authentic member of the now almost-extinct "democratic movement": one of the handful of "underground" fighters for civic rights whose persecution, as reported in the Western press, has brought them awesome international admiration.
And Pyotr obviously is brave; his political principles—for which labor camp and a mangled life are the most probable rewards— are exemplary. But the question of why he and his fellows attract so little sympathy from the Russian people for whom they volunteer to sacrifice themselves is complicated by matters of personality. For all his social high-mindedness, Pyotr
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is a self-righteous petty tyrant, not unlike some American salon revolutionaries. Russians' perverse resistance to enlightened efforts to improve their condition is hardly new; but in this case at least, there is good reason why few are moved to clasp hands with Pyotr the Prig. I must not reveal more about him. But if there is more to say about Soviet villains than fits into newspaper accounts, there is also more to examine about those I once accepted, ipso facto, as saintly heroes.
When Chingiz is in a talkative mood, he sometimes alludes to goings-on in the University and city which I hear about nowhere else, although I'm supposedly deep in native life, sharing the authentic Russian experience. Students expelled from the University and exiled from Moscow for challenging some of the more fatuous The Party Saved Russia myths of the (obligatory) History of the Communist Party course; several professors dismissed from their jobs—with confiscation of manuscripts on which they'd been working many years—for having signed petitions about the twelve-year sentence awarded Vladimir Bukovsky; assorted intellectuals demoted or blacklisted for having befriended Westerners who later published articles "slandering Soviet reality." (In some cases, prior authorization to invite the Westerners to their apartments had been quietly obtained, but the police officers resented their misuse of the privilege: the hosts obviously failed to exercise proper control of their guests.) Chingiz says the KGB network in the University is almost as active, and its control almost as strong, as in the armed forces and the Party itself One of his closest friends, a rebellious history student, was expelled for challenging a lecturer to admit Trotsky was the father of the Red Army.
"Why don't I hear about these things from anyone else?" I ask.
"Who'll tell you? Dissenters are cut down soundlessly, to avoid publicity. People who do learn about specific cases know that they can expect the same if they talk. It's a protection racket: victims' lips sealed by fear. Outsiders like you are hard put to learn how things really work."
Chingiz is almost as disgusted with foreigners who misinterpret Soviet life as with the KGB apparatchiks who, as he sometimes says, are the country's real government. He considers the naivete of Western leftists as boundless as the dictatorship's hypocrisy:
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"the two feed on each other." When he was at sea, roughly a third of the crew was permitted ashore in capitahst ports; the others were not trustworthy enough—that is, not ideologically resolute and genealogically pure. (No one with a relative anywhere in the West or connections with foreigners in Russia was even considered.) Those with the coveted permission could leave the ship for no more than four hours at a time, only in a group, solely on central streets, always shepherded by a KGB overseer. The watchdogs too were watched by a secret informer in the group, as well as by KGB personnel in Soviet trade missions in the ports themselves.
"Much of our free time went to receptions by friendship societies. Gentlemen in tweeds would shake our hands, pleased with themselves. Happy to pretend that everything was normal —simply some Soviet lads abroad, you see, just like ordinary sailors, only better, of course. They'd talk about Soviet culture and achievements. If you tried to tell them two-thirds of the crew couldn't set foot in their city, they wouldn't believe you. But the point is, nobody did try. Goons with sharp ears were busy mixing in that merry hall—a word from them and you'd join the stay-aboards."
But Chingiz too must be seen in the Russian, rather than the Western-liberal, context. To start with, he's suspicious of liberalism and the societies that nourish it. "Russia is subjected to enormous Western influences," he says. "Unfortunately, most are harmful. Ninety per cent of what our people want is the cheapest, most vulgar of capitalist glitter. This applies to our high-school generation in particular, whose ideals are down to chrome and bubble gum. And artists too: the blind imitation of phony Western trends can make you sick. So many 'smart' people fawning, posing, plagiarizing; passing off their worthless copies as art because they'd sell in San Francisco. . . . The paradox is that our campaigns against Western commercialism encourage more empty imitation. Prohibitions only weaken us for more debasement and demoralization by the tawdriest Western junk."
In short, Chingiz is a neo-Slavophile, convinced that Russia must develop along its own lines, avoiding Western excesses. He doesn't realize that just this attitude, with its unrealistic idealism
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and unwillingness to take freedom's bad with its good, is itself a reflection of Russia's enduring troubles. Like Solzhenitsyn, he's far better at diagnosing ills than at concocting home remedies.
Still, all this is secondary. It is the condition of the country's peasantry that disturbs Chingiz most strongly. Twice a year he visits his mother, who moved to a collective farm north of Moscow after the war. Unable to exist for more than a week on her infinitesimal pension, she returned to work—for a monthly sack of flour and a few rubles in cash—at the age of seventy-three. This provides sufficient bread to fill her stomach, but she doesn't see potatoes for months (except for her own fowl, there is no question of meat), until Chingiz appears. "/ take a sack of potatoes to her on the farm; that's what country life is like. Hardly any able-bodied men are left on her farm: they've all escaped, even without papers. Women, children, pensioners do the work. Animals should get better feed."