More guests arrived, dressed as Pioneers in crisp white shirts and red neckties. The women wore no make-up and the men’s hair was greased. No one kissed, instead they shook hands with serious demeanour.
To kick off the party, the host – the film’s producer – sang ‘Whirlwinds of Danger’ (‘Whirlwinds of danger are raging around us…’). Others joined in for a spirited rendition of ‘May There Always Be Sunshine’, raising their right arms in salute. A chant followed, ‘Glory! Glory! Glory!’ We all took up the cry. ‘Glory! Glory! Glory!’ Outside, astonished passers-by stopped and stared from the pavement.
When the wardrobe woman giggled, she was hushed into silence. Levity did not befit the seriousness of the occasion. Someone – I think it was one of the scriptwriters – started to sing, her voice crackling with emotion:
But the partygoers were not as one in their love for Comrade Stalin. A clutching couple – sunk in the battered sofa – stopped spilling secrets to throw pickled mushrooms at the singer. Others retaliated from the kitchen with a barrage of sprouting onions. The film’s composer braved the hail of projectiles to reach the piano and play ‘Where Begins Our Motherland?’, the theme from The Shield and the Sword. In response someone started banging pots and slamming cupboards out of time with the music.
As our tea glasses were refilled with vodka for the third or fourth time, the party split into two camps. Some of the crew members put their hearts into the play-acting, roaring across the room ‘Red banners advance!’ Others pulled off their Pioneer kerchiefs and taunted their colleagues with ‘Bury your Lenin’. The sound recordist and his boom man shoved at each other, only half in jest. Ill-advised alliances began to fall apart. The script girl burst into tears. A couple of performers tried to bridge the gap by starting to dance but they only managed to mash crisps and discarded articles of clothing into the avocado rug.
The evening had an uncanny resonance for me, taking me back to a similar party on my original journey. Then, as now, I started to feel quite mad. Where was I? What year was it? Was that an actor dressed as Vladimir Putin at the door?
Thirty years ago in Warsaw, London and Washington, we had danced on the grave of communism, in an act of defiance, in celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. Europe – especially Eastern Europe – had survived the rages of the demigods and their hateful executioners. The continent had emerged, scarred but whole, into a better world, or so it had seemed.
But with the passing decades the old grew older, the young stopped listening and new demigods stepped forward, twisting the past to suit their present. Perhaps it was ever thus, perhaps our common desire to better ourselves had always been hobbled by individual greed and arrogance, and the thought of it wrenched my heart.
To recharge my spirits and glass, I retreated into the kitchen where the film’s young camera assistant – who had been born after the fall of the Wall – told me in slurred and broken English that he didn’t want to eat socialist salami but he did want to live in a country where, in his own words, ‘people are treated like human beings’.
In time the wrap party was wrapped and guests went home to their beds and overdue bills. Tobin and I walked away along streets slick and shiny with rain.
In Alexandrovskiy Park, near to the Gorkovskaya metro station, we paused to stare at a pre-revolution monument. At the centre of a massive bronze cross, two Russian sailors opened the sea cocks to flood and scuttle their ship so as to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. The sculpture commemorated the 1904 sinking of the torpedo boat Steregushchiy (Valiant) during the Russo-Japanese War. But its heroic story – like the ones that had shaped Putin – was a fiction. In reality a Japanese naval squadron had captured the Steregushchiy. Almost all the Russian officers and crew had been killed in the battle. Sometime later the torpedo boat sank, due to human error. But the tsar wanted to propagate another version of history, and so the truth was twisted, and the monument erected in honour of the sailors’ imagined bravery and sacrifice.
Glory. Glory to the victorious people.
15
Beauty and the Beast
Beauty can even save the world, wrote Dostoevsky, and I wondered if spending four years in a Siberian gulag had done in his head. Beauty never closed a single prison nor halted the Blitzkrieg. Beauty stopped neither assassins nor suicide bombers. How on earth could beauty save the world?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – who had also been banished to the camps, poisoned by the KGB and deported from the Soviet Union – knew the answer. In the essence of beauty, he said, was a certain peculiarity, a peculiarity in the status of art. He believed that art ‘scoops up the truth’ and presents it to us as a living force. Such true works take hold of us, compel us and ennoble us. Their convincingness (his word) ‘forces even an opposing heart to surrender’ so that ‘nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them’.
‘A work of art bears within itself its own verification,’ he said. ‘Conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one.’
Every one of us has an ear for a false note, a nose for a lie. We are innately wary of artifice and quacks. We know that true beauty is not skin deep. But as a mass, as a collective, we can lose our common sense.
Hence despots and their like want as little as possible to do with the individual. In both communist and fascist ideology – as in modern populism – a leader rises out of the masses as if by the force of nature. He is portrayed as a visionary who binds individuals together, making them capable of deeds that they could not otherwise achieve. He offers them an ideal, and to grasp it they – we – surrender to him. Our emotions are manipulated. We stop thinking critically. We are coerced into accepting his truth as our own. Nothing can stand in his way, or save the world, except the individual, and beauty.
‘Here lived Lydia Evgenevna Bogdanova, homemaker, born in 1911, arrested 02.06.1937, executed 15.09.1937,’ read the text on the passport-sized, rectangular steel plaque. On its left-hand side was an open square, a hole symbolising a missing photograph.
‘To me the physical effort is important,’ Alexa called to me from the top of the stepladder, shifting her weight to drive the drill bit deeper into the building’s brick wall. ‘I want to sweat – not just talk – to return our nation’s memory.’
Ten years ago the political journalist and civic campaigner Sergey Parkhomenko set out to remember the victims of Soviet treachery. His project ‘Last Address’ aimed to commemorate individuals at their last place of residence.[9] Almost immediately the authorities in St Petersburg and Moscow set about crippling his work. Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov even designated Memorial – the civil rights society that administered ‘Last Address’ – a ‘foreign agent’ which ‘undermines the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation’. He called for its liquidation.
‘I think I know every plaque in St Petersburg,’ Alexa said while descending the ladder. She was in her early twenties, dressed in denim dungarees with her hair tied back in a ponytail. She had intense brown eyes, their seriousness lightened by the softness of youth. She was studying psychology at university. ‘There are three at Pushkinskaya ulitsa 19, five at Fontanka Embankment 129, two at the Fountain House, and these on Bolshaya Pushkarskaya,’ she told me, taking each one to heart. ‘In 1937 Lydia Bogdanova and her husband were arrested here as Polish spies,’ she explained, tilting her head towards the front door of the building, climbing back up the ladder with hammer and rawl plugs. ‘Why? Because they’d received a package of children’s clothes from a relative in Warsaw. Their six-year-old son was dressed in them when his parents were taken away. He never saw them again.’
9
Parkhomenko was inspired by