I am not surprised that these towns are only beautiful from a distance or from above; that in Samara a goat refused to let me enter my hotel; that a downpour drenched me in my room in Stalingrad; that the napkins are coloured packing paper. If only one could walk over the nice roofs instead of the bumpy cobbles.
In all of the Volga towns you come across the same things: the traders are unhappy, the workers are hopeful, but tired, the waiters respectful and unreliable, the porters humble, the shoeshine boys submissive. And everywhere young people are revolutionary — half the middle-class youth is enrolled in pioneer and Komsomol organizations.
People respond to the way I dress: if I put on a pair of top-boots and go without a tie, life suddenly becomes incredibly cheap. Fruit costs a few kopecks, a ride in a droshky half a rouble. I am taken for a foreign political refugee residing in Russia and they call me “comrade”. The waiters have proletarian consciousness and expect no tip, the shoeshine boys are happy with ten kopecks, the traders are happy with their lot, and in the post office the peasants ask me to address a letter for them, “with tidy writing”. But how expensive the world becomes when I put on a tie! I am addressed as “Grashdanin” (citizen) or sometimes, shyly, “Gospodin” (sir). The German beggars address me as “Herr Landsmann” (compatriot). The traders start to complain about the taxes. The conductor expects a rouble. The waiter in the dining car tells me he studied at trade school and is “a bit of an intellectual”. He proves it by charging me an extra twenty kopecks. An anti-Semite grumbles that the only people who did well out of the Revolution are the Jews. They were even allowed to live in Moscow now. He tells me he was an officer in the war, and had been taken prisoner in Magdeburg. A NEP-man threatens me: “Don’t think you’ll be able to see everything that goes on here.”
And it seems to me that I see just as much and just as little in Russia as I do anywhere else. I was never so generously, naturally invited by strangers as here. I am allowed to go into offices, law-courts, hospitals, schools, barracks, police stations, prisons, to police commanders and university professors. The middle classes are more loudly and forthrightly critical than is agreeable for a stranger. I can talk to Red Army privates and commanders in pubs about war, pacifism, literature and weaponry. In other countries this is more dangerous. The secret police are probably so discreet that I am not even aware of them.
The famous barge haulers on the Volga still go singing their famous song. In the Russian cabarets of the West, the “Burlaki” are portrayed with purple lighting and pizzicato violins. But the real Burlaki are sadder than their representatives can have any idea. Even though they are so burdened with traditional romance, their song slips deep and painfully into the hearer.
They may well be the strongest men alive. Every one of them can carry two hundred and forty kilogrammes on his back, snatch a hundred kilos off the ground, crush a nut between index and middle fingers, balance an oar on two fingers, eat three pumpkins in three-quarters of an hour. They look like bronze statues covered with human skin and given a carrying strap. They are relatively well paid, between four and six roubles. They are strong, healthy, they live on the river, free. But I have never seen them laugh. They have no capacity for joy. They drink. Alcohol does for these giants. Ever since freight has been carried on the Volga the strongest porters live here, and they all drink. Today more than 200 steamers and 1200 barges sail on the Volga, a total tonnage of almost 2 million. But the haulers still do the work of mechanical cranes just as they did two hundred years ago.
Their song doesn’t come from their throats, but from the unknown depths of their hearts where destiny and song are woven together. They sing like people sentenced to death. They sing like prisoners on the galleys. Never will a singer be free of his towing rope, or from alcohol. Work is a blessing! A man is a crane!
It’s rare to hear a whole song, only the odd verse, or a few bars. Music is a mechanical support, it works like a lever. There are songs you sing when you pull on a rope together, when you lift, when you unload, when you lower. The words are ancient and primitive. I have heard different words sung to the same tunes. Some of them are about a hard life, an easy death, a thousand pud, and girls and love. As soon as the load is lifted onto your back, the song is over. Then man is a crane.
I can’t go back to the glass piano and the card games. I leave the steamer. I am sitting on a tiny boat. Two burlaki beside me sleep gently on hawsers. In four or five days we will be in Astrakhan. The captain has sent his wife to bed. He is his own crew. Now he is preparing his shashlik. I expect it will be fatty and gristly, and I will have to share it with him.
Before I got off, the American drew a big arc with his index finger, pointing at the chalky, clayey soil and the sandy banks, and said:
“See all the raw materials lying here unused! What a beach this would be for invalids and people needing a rest! That sand! If only all this whole Volga were in some civilized part of the world!”
“If it was in some civilized part of the world, there would be factory chimneys, nippy motor boats, black cranes swinging back and forth, people would fall ill so that they could recover two miles away in the sand, and it wouldn’t be a desert. At a certain, hygienically determined distance from the cranes, there would be restaurants and cafés, with ozone terraces. Bands would play the song of the Volga, and there would be a dapper Volga Charleston, with words by Arthur Rebner and Fritz Grünbaum… ”
“Ah, Charleston,” cried my friend, and he cheered up.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 October 1926
31. The Wonders of Astrakhan
In Astrakhan people fish and deal in caviar. The smells of these activities are spread throughout the town. Whoever isn’t obliged to go to Astrakhan is advised to give it a miss. Whoever has come to Astrakhan will not stay there for very long. Among the specialities of this town are the famed Astrakhan furs: the lambskin hats, the silver-grey “Persian fur”. The furriers are kept busy. In summer and winter alike (winters are warm here too) Russians, Kalmucks and Kirghiz all wear fur.
I am told that before the Revolution rich people used to live in Astrakhan. I am shown their houses, though many were destroyed in the Civil War. From their ruins you can tell they were boastful and had no taste. Of all the qualities of a building, boastfulness survives longest, the least brick thumps itself on the chest. The builders have fled, they are living abroad. It stands to reason they will have dealt in caviar. But what possessed them to live here where (black, blue, white) caviar grows, and where the fishes stink so mercilessly?
In Astrakhan there is a little park with a pavilion in the middle and a rotunda in the corner. In the evening you pay a small fee and you go in the park and sniff the fish. It is dark, so you picture them dangling from the trees. There are cinema performances in the open air, and primitive cabaret likewise. The bands play cheerful tunes from old times. People drink beer and eat cheap pink langoustines. Not one hour passes in which one doesn’t pine for Baku. Unfortunately, the boat there goes only three times a week.
In order to lend plausibility to my dreams of the steamer, I go down to the harbour. No. 18 is the quay for the boat to Baku. The day after tomorrow. — My Lord, how remote is that! Kalmucks row, Kirghiz lead their camels on halters into town, caviar sellers shout in their offices, clueless peasants sleep out, two days and two nights, waiting for the boat, gypsies play cards. Because it is so evident that the steamship isn’t coming, the mood in the harbour is sadder than in town. To get a faint sense of departure I treat myself to a droshky ride. The seats are narrow and backless, perilous, no roof, and the horses are in white Ku Klux Klan robes against the dust — as if they were going to a three-day event. The cabbies speak hardly any Russian, and hate the cobbles. They go down sandy streets, seeing as the horse is dressed for it. The passenger, having got on in a dark suit, gets off in a silver one. If I had set off in a white one, it would be dove-grey now. To be dressed for Astrakhan means wearing long hooded dust coats, like the horses. In the dimly illuminated night you can see ghosts being driven around by ghostly horses.