Lyudmila was popular. Her passion – or one of her many passions – was ballet. Lenina had introduced her to the Bolshoi theatre after Sasha had insisted that his young sister-in-law be given ‘a start in life’, and they would go as often as they could.
Lyudmila’s love affair with the great nineteenth-century theatre on Okhotny Ryad burgeoned during her student days. She and her friends would go several times a week to the Bolshoi, applauding wildly from the cheap seats at the end of every act and then keeping a cold vigil on the street outside Door 17 to greet the dancers as they came out with huge bunches of flowers. Valery Golovister, a thin and sensitive young man, the brother of Lyudmila’s best girlfriend, Galya, was her closest male friend. They were both fervent balletomanes. He seemed to have no interest in girls, despite his good looks, but those were innocent times and no one, at least not Lyudmila and her not-very-worldly girlfriends, thought to suspect him of the homosexuality he carefully concealed.
For Lyudmila and her friends, it was not enough just to seethey had to throw themselves into the performance, to adore the actors and dancers and weep over the libretto. They stood in shifts for tickets to the touring Comédie Française, the first foreign company to play in Moscow since before the war, and went to almost every one of the forty performances of the repertoire, which ranged from Molière’s Tartuffe to Corneille’s Le Cid. They whooped ‘Vive la France!’ from the gallery, and threw flowers every night. Outside the theatre on the last night of the season, they were in the cheering crowd which followed the actors from Theatre Square to the National Hotel. KGB men in the crowd kicked Lyudmila viciously from behind with heavy boots, trying to subdue the girls’ unseemly adulation of the visiting foreigners.
When Gérard Philippe, the greatest French actor of his generation, came to Moscow the next year for a film festival, Lyudmila’s gang mobbed him. He chatted politely to his Russian fans and promised to return. After Philippe had returned to France, Mila and her friends had a whip-round and collected money for a present for their hero. One of the girls took the train to Palekh, a village famous for its miniatures on lacquer boxes, and commissioned a portrait of Philippe as Julien Sorel in the film Le Rougeet le Noir. When the French Communists Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon visited Moscow a few months later Lyudmila and four of her friends marched into the Hotel Moskva – a bold move, since the place housed foreigners and was crawling with KGB officers – and called Triolet from the lobby, explaining that they had a present they wanted her to take to Gerard Philippe in Paris. Mystified but impressed, Triolet came down to collect it and duly delivered the gift to Philippe when she returned. Madness, unthinkable madness to do such a thing just five years before. But the Khrushchev thaw had changed the rules, and Lyudmila and her friends tested the limits of the new world as far as they dared.
In L’Humanité, the French-language Communist daily which was the only French paper available to the Soviet public, a friend of Lyudmila’s read that Gérard Philippe was in Peking on a cultural trip. For a lark – a dangerous lark – the girls went to the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street and booked an international phone call to China. They had no idea which hotel he was staying at, so the operator, a young woman who appreciated the audacity of the thing, told her Chinese counterpart to put them through to the biggest hotel in town. Half an hour later, Lyudmila’s friend Olga was talking to Gerard Philippe, who told her he would be stopping over in Moscow on his way back to Paris.
At Vnukovo Airport the police tried to stop them, but the twenty girls rushed past on to the tarmac and crowded round the steps. Philippe was by then terminally ill with hepatitis picked up in South America. He was ashen and looked far older than his thirty-seven years. He recognized Lyudmila and greeted her warmly. She asked him to sign her copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir.
’Pour I.yudmila, en souvenir du soleil de Moscou,’ Philippe wrote. It is still on a shelf in my mother’s bedroom.
Mila graduated from Moscow State University with a Gold Medal, one of the ablest students of her year. On leaving, Lyudmila took the risky option of turning down a universityassigned position and instead looked for a job on her own. She rented a room from a middle-aged couple near Lermontovskaya Metro, where she slept on a camp bed. Her landlord was an aviation engineer, and Lyudmila tutored their son in return for board and lodging. The engineer didn’t have any official work, except for odd jobs among his neighbours, and Lyudmila suspected he was in disgrace of some sort and lying low. The family ekedouta living in the cracks of the Soviet system, where a man without ajob was a non-person with no money, no access to school for his children, to work canteens or holidays. The family lived on carrot and bone soup; Lyudmila would bring sausages when she found them and had time to wait in line.
Yekaterina Ivanovna Markitan, the wife of an old Party colleague of Boris Bibikov from the Kharkov Tractor Factory days, came from South Russia on a shopping trip and stayed at Lenina’s. She told Luydmila that an old friend was now director of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, dedicated to the study and preservation of the legacy of Communism’s founders. Her name was Yevgeniya Stepanova, and when Mila contacted her she immediately offered Mila a job as a junior researcher. Lyudmila had no great personal enthusiasm for Marxism or Leninism, but the job was in Moscow, and it was intellectual, so she jumped at it. Her work was to help in the giant task of collating and copy-editing the collected works of Karl Marx and his friend and sponsor, Friedrich Engels. She found the voluminous outpourings of the two men tedious. But the Institute had an outstanding library, her job gave her ample opportunity to practise her French, and she found her colleagues intelligent and lively. Foreign Communists and senior academic practitioners of the almost theological science of Communist doctrine would visit often, with Lyudmila being called upon to translate and accompany them. And then there was the excellently stocked staff canteen, on the ground floor of the small neoclassical palace which housed the Institute, which had formerly belonged to the Princess Dolgoruky and served as the headquarters of the Nobles’ Assembly before being put to a more egalitarian use.
In 1995 I stumbled on the old Institute of Marxism and Leninism by chance. With the demise of the Institute and indeed of Marxism and Leninism in general, the old palace had come down in the world. A group of descendants of Russia’s nobility had somehow managed to reclaim the building, but had no funds to restore it. So it sat mouldering in its overgrown garden, lonely and irrelevant.
The newly re-formed Nobles’ Assembly threw a fundraising ball in a disused gym which occupied one wing. I went in my father’s old dinner suit, which he had worn when he met Nikita Khrushchev as a young diplomat in 1959. The vestiges of Russia’s noble houses, those who had not emigrated and yet managed to escape the Revolution, the Civil War and the Purges, were out in force, inexpertly dancing as a Russian army band played mazurkas and Viennese waltzes. But the organizers were groping for a past no one remembered, and striving to revive traditions which lived on only in their imaginations. Prince Golitsyn, in grey plastic shoes, chatted to Count Lopukhin, in a worn polyester suit, as their heavily made-up wives fluttered plastic Souvenir of Venice fans.
The palace had once been magnificent, but decades of aggressive Soviet philistinism had reduced it to a soulless warren of cheap chipboard partitions and corridors lined with curling linoleum. The high, heavy windows overlooking the courtyard had long ago been painted shut. Everything which could be stolen had been, including the door handles and light switches.