By day this narrow space is shamefully noisy and unfit for occupation. At night, though, a kind of respect blows through it. That’s how holy poverty looks sleeping. All the faces have on them the real pathos of naïveté. All the faces look like open gates through which one can see into clear white souls. Confused hands try to chase away the painful lights like so many pesky flies. Men bury their faces in the hair of their wives, farmers hug their flails, children their tawdry dolls. The lamps swing in time to the stamping engines. Red-cheeked girls smilingly show their white, strong teeth. A great peace is over the poor world, and man — asleep, anyway — suggests he is a thoroughly peace-loving creature.
But the separation on the Volga steamer is not the simple separation of rich and poor. Among the fourth-class passengers are rich farmers, among the first-class passengers are traders who aren’t invariably rich. The Russian farmer prefers fourth. It’s cheaper and that’s not all. A farmer feels more at home there. The Revolution may have freed him of deference towards the master, but not yet of respect for the object. The farmer cannot tuck into his pumpkin with gusto in a restaurant with a bad piano. For a few months, everyone travelled in all different classes. Then they went their own ways, almost willingly.
“You see,” an American said to me on the boat, “what has the Revolution achieved? The poor folks huddle in steerage, and the rich play cards on deck.”
“But that’s the only thing they can do without apprehension,” I replied. “The poorest shoe-shine boy in fourth class has the confidence he could come up and be among us if he wanted. The rich NEP-men are afraid of precisely that. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are not symbolic any more on this steamer, they are purely technical. Maybe they’ll be symbolic again in the future.”
“You reckon?” said the American.
The sky over the Volga is close and flat and painted with unmoving clouds. On either side, beyond the banks, you can see every single tree, every soaring bird, every grazing animal for miles and miles. A wood here has the effect of an artificial formation. Everything tends to spread out and to scatter. Villages, towns and peoples are far apart. Farms, huts, tents of nomadic people stand there, surrounded by isolation. The many tribes do not mix. Even the person who has settled somewhere remains on the move all his life. This earth gives the feeling of freedom that we ordinarily only get from air and water. If birds could walk here, they wouldn’t bother flying. Man skims over the land as if it were sky, cheerful and aimless, a bird of the earth.
The river is like the land: wide, endlessly long (it is over fifteen hundred miles from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan) and very slow. On its banks it takes a long time for the “Volga hills” to appear, little low cubes. Their bare rocky insides face the river. They are only there for the sake of variety, a playful caprice of God’s created them. Behind them the flat land goes on for ever, pushing the horizon further and further back into the steppe.
It sends its great breath out over the hills and the river. You can taste the bitterness of infinity on your tongue. In sight of great hills and shoreless seas you feel threatened and lost. Facing the great plains, man is lost but somehow comforted. He may be little more than a blade of grass, but he won’t go under: he is like a child waking up very early on a summer morning when everyone else is still asleep. You feel lost and at the same time privileged in the endless silence. When a fly buzzes, or a muffled pendulum gongs, it has the same effect of mingled sorrow and consolation as this endless plain.
We stop at villages built of wood and clay, roofed with straw and shingles. Sometimes the broad, motherly dome of a church sits in the middle of the huts, her children. Sometimes the church stands at the head of a long row of huts and has a thin, sharp, pointed tower like a four-sided French bayonet. It’s a church under arms, leading a wandering village.
Kazan, the Tartar capital, stands before us. Colourful noisy tents throng the shore. Open windows beckon like glass flags. We hear the drumming of its droshkies. We see the green and golden evening shimmer of its cupolas.
A road leads from the harbour to Kazan. The road is a stream, it rained yesterday. In the town quiet pools. Leftovers of plaster occasionally stick up into the air. The street signs and shop names are mud-spattered and illegible. Doubly illegible, because they are partly written in an old Turkic-Tartar script. The Tartars prefer to sit outside their shops and tell passers-by of their wares. They are canny traders, as is their reputation. They wear black brush chin beards. Since the Revolution, illiteracy has fallen by twenty-five per cent. Now many of them can read and write. The bookshops stock Tartar publications, the paper boys sell Tartar newspapers. Tartar officials sit behind post office counters. One official told me the Tartars were the bravest people there are. “But they’re mixed with Finns,” I countered maliciously. The official was offended. With the exception of pub landlords and traders, everyone is happy with the government. The Tartar farmers sided now with the Reds, now with the Whites. Often they didn’t understand what it was about. Today all the villages in Kazan province are politicized. Young people are members of various Komsomol organizations. As with most of the Muslim nationalities in Russia, religion is more a matter of habit than faith. The Revolution has disrupted a habit more than suppressed a need. The poor peasants here are happy as they are all over the Volga province. Having lost much, the rich farmers are as unhappy as they are everywhere else, as the Germans in Pokrovsk, or the farmers of Stalingrad and Saratov.
The Volga villages — with the exception of the German ones — supply the Party with its most enthusiastic young supporters. In the Volga districts, political enthusiasm comes more from the countryside than the urban proletariat. Many of the villages here were at a great remove from culture. The Chuvaish for instance are still secretly “heathen” today. They worship idols. For the naïve person grown up in a Volga village, communism is civilization. For the young Chuvaish the Red Army barracks in town is a palace, and the palace — into which he gains admission — is seven hundred heavens. Electricity, newspaper, wireless, book, ink, typewriter, cinema, theatre — all those things we find so wearisome, to the primitive person are refreshing and enlivening. All laid on by the Party. It not only put the masters in their places, it invented the telephone and the alphabet. It taught a man to be proud of his people, his smallness, even his poverty. Faced by the onrush of so many wonders, his instinctive peasant mistrust is vanquished. His critical sense is still a long way from being awakened. So he becomes a fanatic of this new faith. The “collectivist sense” that the peasant lacks he makes up for twice and threefold by simple ecstasy.
The towns on the Volga are the saddest I have ever seen. They remind me of the destroyed towns on the French front. The buildings burned in the Civil War; and then their ruins saw the White hunger galloping through the streets.
People died a hundred deaths, a thousand deaths. They ate cats, dogs, crows, rats and their own starving children. They bit themselves and drank the blood. They scratched the earth for fat earthworms and lumps of white chalk which looked to the eye like cheese. Two hours after they had eaten they died in torments. How could these towns even be alive still! How could people haggle and carry suitcases and sell apples and have children! Already a generation is growing up that does not know the Terror, already there are scaffoldings, with carpenters and masons busily building anew.