T mean, was it really just platonic all those years when they were hatching the Revolution? Or did they respond to things better as man and mistress, because that way it was marvelously thrilling?’
The guide’s mouth went slack. He backed towards a mammoth painting - Our Leader Inspiring the Workers of Petrograd - and gazed up at Lenin’s sunlit face, imploring forgiveness for the stunning disgrace. The peasants, by contrast, wanted not forgiveness but revenge. After a moment of stupefied silence, they advanced on Oktyabrina with a collective growl, and her big eyes narrowed with the approaching danger. ‘Excuse me, I have an engagement now,’ she spluttered. She dashed from the room, through the corridor, down the stairs, and out.
I overtook her in the cobblestoned expanse of Red Square, where she was alternately trembling and laughing. We hurried into GUM for warmth, and drifted among the surging crowds for the tranquilising effect. After an icecream and more dalliance, I returned to the museum’s cloakroom for our coats.
After that, we confined ourselves to the landmarks of Old Russia. Oktyabrina missed the child Volodya, but begged me not to worry since ‘actually I’m beginning to see the whole country’s a kind of Lenin Museum’.
The building in which I saw the Minister again is not strictly speaking a landmark, but ought to be - all the more because of its present sorry function. It is a fine eighteenth-
century mansion near the Kremlin that once belonged to Prince Volkonsky, Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather, who figures prominently in War and Peace. There is a charming Renaissance courtyard, a handsome entrance, a splendid staircase crowned by a lavish mirror - all in perfect proportion and suffering from a chronic malaise. For the building is now a Foreign Ministry 'reception hall’, used for the elaborately staged and totally un-newsworthy press conferences to which foreign reporters are invited six or seven times a year.
The conference that morning was devoted to tractors and fertilizer production: a 'new’ campaign to cure the country’s ailing agriculture. Its strategy was apparently devised after the full damage wrecked by the deposed Mr Khrushchev had become clear. Nevertheless, production targets were again being raised to those of his discredited campaigns several years before. This glaring inconsistency was concealed under a torrent of statistics, sophistry, soaring harvest predictions, promises for 1980, comparisons with Tsarist misery and hosannas for socialist achievements that managed not to mention the Khrushchev plans at all. Or the fact that eggs had again disappeared from Moscow and the countryside was returning to a diet of bread and potatoes. It was not a press conference as known anywhere else but a succession of punctilious re-statements of an official declaration in the morning’s Pravda.
I gazed at the filigree moulding on the wall behind the official table and imagined how the Volkonskys, not to speak of Tolstoy himself, would have blanched at hearing this bastardized tongue, Sovietese, spoken in their drawingroom. At the table sat the Minister of Agriculture and a brigade of serge-suited subordinates, all arranged in a row at the front table behind microphones, a Chaplinesque parody of mediocrity, self-importance and stocky bureaucratism. Oktyabrina’s Minister was behind a pile of charts near the far end of the table, roughly twenty places from the dais.
As the leading officials droned on, I debated whether to speak to him. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't have considered it seriously. The rules for foreign journalists are explicit and categoricaclass="underline" no interview may be attempted with any Soviet citizen except with the express approval of the Foreign Ministry’s Press Department. Of course it’s easy enough, and only marginally risky, to ask questions of someone on a street. But no one would dream of approaching even the lowest official without permission - which, after an interval of many weeks is customarily denied, without explanation.
But in the Minister’s case, curiosity was again undermining my caution. And something about his expression, as he stared towards the ceiling, made him seem approachable. He was wearing a clip-on tie that had come unsnapped, and drawing heavily on Bulgarian cigarettes. His eyes were as dark as his hair and had a soulful glow, from the reflection of the chandeliers. From time to time, he snapped out of his reverie and gossiped with his neighbors at the table - who were paying as little attention to the speeches as was the audience. Finally the last peroration dragged to its end, someone announced the press conference was over, and the Minister and his fifty-odd colleagues got up happily and shook hands all around, while the journalists closed their pads on a quarter of a page of useless notes. The Minister gathered his unused charts and left the room with a look of slight puzzlement. I gathered my courage and stopped him in the corridor, on his way to the toilet.
My hunch proved right. He had to rush off immediately to deliver a report about the press conference at an agricultural institute, but promptly agreed to meet me that very afternoon. He was surprised, naturally enough, by the way I introduced myself, but more than anything, he seemed flattered. I think I understood what Oktyabrina saw in him: the painful shyness of a confirmed introvert. And the pain of waiting while he forced forth his words was equally embarrassing. He had a wracking, eye-fluttering stutter.
‘F-f-f-fine. Ill p-p-pick y-you up a-a-at.. / and distressing seconds passed before he named a place to meet.
Outside, the mansion's courtyard was jammed with pompous Chaika and Zim limousines, the drivers waiting in the cold for their bosses, the Ministry's upper strata. The Minister's Volga wasn't there, nor in the hierarchical line of cars belonging to the next-to-upper strata parked at the curb outside the building. But just as I entered my own car a block away, I happened to see the driver. He drove up swiftly in the Volga, screeched to a stop, and pocketed a ruble from a passenger whom he'd been taxi-ing ‘on the left', as the Russians say, while supposedly waiting for the Minister.
7
There is a certain kind of Russian who is unable not to bare his soul to a stranger on the slightest provocation. Spend twenty minutes with him and you are more than his friend; you are his long-lost brother, a fellow member of the human family, oppressed by the world's burdens and your own propensity to sin. He is revealing himself, flaying himself, confessing his secret fears, intimate desires and darkest thoughts. No matter how weak and tainted his inner self, he knows you will understand.
It is not always an agreeable quality: however endearing their artlessness, Russians, like anyone else, can have dreary intimate thoughts and wearisome souls. In any case, these observations do not apply precisely to the Minister because he was not Russian but Armenian: bom and raised in the ancient, sacred capital of Yerevan. And the solvent that dissolved his inhibitions to expose his soul was not vodka but cognac: five-star ‘Jubilee', the best Armenian brand,
His report at the institute had gone badly; he was tired and depressed. He greeted me like an old friend and 58
plunged quickly into confession. His tone was matter-of-fact, his principal themes incompetence and irresolution. We started drinking in his car, which was parked in an alleyway so the driver could join in. The first bottle was downed from a cloudy water glass kept in the glove compartment for that purpose; the second went down direct. When it was dark, a band of urchins began pelting the car with snowballs, but none of us managed to get out and repulse them. By that time, we were tearfully maudlin, hopelessly drunk.
I remember a few things about the evening. The driver climbed into the back seat and seized every opportunity for solemn handshaking with the Minister, whacking me rather painfully in the stomach, for I was sitting in the middle. The Minister talked about his cousin in Los Angeles, an Armenian boy who had become a millionaire in the dry-cleaning business, a success. Someone turned the radio on somehow and following upon some searingly patriotic hymns, there was a melodrama about the birth of the first Soviet tank. While stretching over the seat in an attempt to shut it off, the Minister spilled a large pool of cognac on the upholstery. The car reeked of sweet grapes. The driver was extremely annoyed, and it took him some time to re-establish his pose of admiring deference towards his superior.