I watch the program dedicated to Stalin wondering how on earth his inclusion in this list could be justified. After all, we are dealing with the country’s mainstream institutions – Russia’s major television channel and its most eminent academic body – not some lunatic fringe à la Zhirinovsky. (In a comparable contest in Germany, no Third Reich figures were allowed to be nominated because they had long since been recognised as criminals. Not so in Russia.) The program presents Stalin as a flawed and ambiguous character ( flawed must be the euphemism of choice for the early twenty-first century). Yes, viewers are told, the man was known for occasionally pillaging and plundering, but let us not forget that he also turned a backward, agrarian and deeply dysfunctional country into an industrialised superpower. He was making an enormous omelette, so can we please stop counting the broken eggs? Then, of course, the extra-heavy weaponry is wheeled out – the Stalinled Soviet victory in World War II. As achievements go, you can’t beat stopping Hitler from enslaving Europe and wiping the Soviet nation off the surface of the earth.
I am back in Australia by the time the results of the competition are announced – Alexander Nevsky, Russia’s legendary medieval political and military leader is officially ‘The Name of Russia’. He stands for a ‘strong’ and ‘victorious’ country, feared by its neighbours, intent on consolidation, but he belongs safely in the distant past. Stalin comes third. (Strong rumours suggest that the organisers had resorted to tampering with the votes to avoid the scandalous possibility that the Soviet leader would finish at the top of the list.) You could argue that such contests unleash the lowest common denominator – of course they do – but they also cannot fail but capture the Zeitgeist. In Britain, 100 Greatest Britons was won – predictably enough – by Winston Churchill, who beat out William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin and Princess Diana, among other candidates. But the millions of votes Russians cast for Stalin would have simply been inconceivable in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By 2008, seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, things had clearly changed.
In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda Mandelstam tells a story about her Western friend who after the death of Stalin said, ‘Any one of our poets would agree to be one of your poets.’ ‘With all that it entails?’ Mandelstam asked in return. ‘Yes,’ the friend replied, ‘poetry is serious business where you are.’ Oh how Mandelstam deplored these words. How angry they made her feel. How on earth could the ordeal her contemporaries had to go through be enviable? ‘I do not envy a dog run over by a truck or a cat thrown from the tenth floor by a thug.’ The suffering did not elevate, it stripped humanity right off people. I do not envy Marina Gustavovna, God forbid, though I admire her intensely. I do not envy Valeriya Mikhaylovna Gerlin. Between them, these two women have seen and heard just about everything possible – one met her husband in a psychiatric hospital, the other sat next to her father on a sledge that was carrying him from one place of exile to another where ultimately he would be shot. I do not want to claim their stories, what happened to them and their families, what happened to millions in the country where I was born, as stories of redemption. They are not and never will be.
I write for a different reason: after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, two decades after the death of Stalin, one of my favourite poets Joseph Brodsky was never able to see his father and mother again. Alexander Brodsky and his wife, Maria, died in Leningrad, banned from travelling to the West to see their son. In his 1986 essay dedicated to their memory, Brodsky wrote:
I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under ‘a foreign code of conscience’, I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won’t resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route than the Russian from the chimneys of the State crematorium.
I too want English verbs, English adjectives and nouns to describe Marina Gustavovna and others like her (although there are no others like her). I too want English words and phrases to express out loud, for myself, for Billie and her brother, Miguel, and for those who may read these pages, my wonderment at how it can be that after everything she has been through, everything she has seen, Marina Gustavovna remains one of the least cynical people I have ever met. ‘Human freedom,’ Yuri Aikhenvald once wrote, ‘does not consist in the choice of an action, but first and foremost, in the choice of a reality.’ I read these words and I cannot think of anything I could possibly add to them.
5
MOSCOW METRO
THERE IS A BLIND woman in the Metro. When I say Metro, I want you to read between the lines. Don’t worry so much about the magisterial architecture and the famous Art Deco embellishments. Don’t think about Stalin in 1941, as the German Army was getting dangerously close, gathering his generals at Mayakovskaya Station to commemorate the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. What you should imagine is a collection of people in an enclosed space, who by virtue of their sheer numbers, their intersecting trajectories, and their readiness to squash and be squashed, have merged into a cyclonic wave, Category 5 or higher. Sometimes the wave just throbs, sometimes it crashes and breaks, but only one thing happens to those in its way.
The Moscow Times tells us that the city has some thirty-five thousand residents for every kilometre of rail track, a figure equalled only in Tokyo. This is three times the number of people per kilometre of track in Paris and close to double the figures for London and New York. In Tokyo attendants have to push people onto the trains. In Moscow people do it for themselves. It is amazing just how quickly you abandon your genteel manners and start throwing your elbows and chest around. I thought I might have to give Billie a talk about how there is no shame in pushing, how in fact the whole system is held together by everyone agreeing tacitly to push and, yes, there is a certain etiquette to it, like asking, ‘Are you getting off at the next?’ before forcing your way to the doors, but how, in the end, it is all OK. But Billie has no need of this little motherly chat or for my permission. She just does it like a pro, totally unperturbed, and she has a natural advantage – that teenage facial expression in which boredom wrestles with contempt, and, by God, it makes her look right at home.
The blind woman wears dark sunglasses and has a stick in her hands. She is standing on the opposite platform to us, perilously close to the edge. How did she get inside the station past the violently flapping doors that slap you, the seeing one, straight in the face unless your outstretched arm is travelling well ahead of your body? Was she helped through the size-eight gap between the turnstiles by one of those invariably female attendants deep in middle age, the ones I have never seen do anything but emit shrill cries at the sight of young men jumping over the barriers? And what about those escalator journeys, the length of an average act of intercourse, how did she make it through one of them?
Our train departs; the last we see of the woman is her back turned towards the track. She is standing quite still; no one comes near her. It seems almost suicidal for her to be there all alone, as if she were standing at the edge of a cliff. There is a village not far from Moscow, purpose-built for the blind in the glory days of the USSR, but now in total decay, along with the great Socialist dream of engineering self-sufficiency for the disabled. Living in the ruins of the Empire is hard enough for people with eyes, legs or arms intact, but for those whose bodies have failed them in some way, recent history must feel like one day’s journey into night. A few stops later, a legless veteran of some no longer identifiable war is pushing his way through the crowd of legs on something resembling a cheap skateboard, his stumps wrapped tightly in layers of plastic. In keeping with its survival of the fittest philosophy, Moscow Metro has virtually no lifts and no ramps for the disabled. This man, who was once a warrior – or at least a hired gun – is now a beggar, although no one is giving him anything, not on our watch anyway. Able-bodied Russia pretends she does not see the second Russia, even though the population of the latter is probably close to seventeen million. ‘The disabled are citizens of Russia,’ says writer Anton Borisov (paralysed since childhood, he knows what he is talking about), ‘but not of the majestic oil-gas-nuclear-cosmic nation like the rest of the Russian population. No, the Russian disabled are citizens of another Russia – impoverished, worn-out, tear-stained and humiliated.’