Such inconveniences and deprivations did not square with the party vision offered in Leningradskaya Pravda in 1961, which bragged that ‘mutual assistance and friendship have strengthened . . . apartment squabbles have disappeared’.15 Yet it was true that conditions in the city were improving. The Leningrad metro – driven deep because of the soft clays – became operational in October 1955. The late Fifties welcomed enterprise-based housing cooperatives. As there was nothing much to buy, workers had cash surpluses. These could be used to place a deposit of 40 per cent to help fund new building, which – after a while-delivered the investor a flat of up to sixty square metres.16 Crash building programmes began in 1957, the year of preparations for the overdue 250th anniversary celebrations for the foundation of the city. Chocolate factories went into overdrive. Resembling sludge dredged from the Neva, over-sweet fillings oozed from their huge mixers. Chocolate medallions were struck with the image of The Bronze Horseman. Special packaging with kitsch ballerinas, or a united nations of ethnic costumes, was produced. The anniversary was going to satisfy Leningrad’s sweet tooth.17
Despite the city’s political marginalisation under the Soviets, many people felt that Leningrad was the true capital. Russian literature and music had developed in the city, and its constellation of distinguished buildings and collections of art were magnificent. There was continued determination to repair and maintain historical buildings. Vallin de la Mothe’s gostiny dvor on the Nevsky Prospekt needed attention, and Oleg Lialin, the architect in charge of restoration, scrutinised the city archives in order to renovate the exterior faithfully, while restructuring the interior to suit modern-day demands. In the event, the gostiny dvor was divided into unattractive stalls resembling those sad perimeter kiosks in stadiums. The wish to turn the lower reaches of the Nevsky into a kind of architectural museum, where commerce was forbidden, was prompted by the desire to rid it of such tattiness and hide the fact that small shops – so many of which seemed to have sunk into the ground for shame – were empty. On the fringes of the city centre there was no such drive for preservation: modern buildings were thrown up amid eighteenth- and nineteenth-century edifices. Starkly visible structures, such as the new Finland Station and the Maltsevsky Market, appeared either outrageous or misconceived among their elderly neighbours.18
Much of the artistic activity of these years was not so visible. When Vasily Grossman submitted his long novel Life and Fate to a literary magazine, the KGB seized copies and notebooks from his apartment and tore the ribbon from his typewriter. Comparisons between Stalinism and fascism, such as those made by Grossman, were unacceptable. Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago was read in samizdat – or secretly circulated – copies. Perhaps the most interesting forbidden copy of this novel was the one printed in Holland for the CIA, who had obtained the Russian text on film supplied by British intelligence. They produced an edition that could be slipped secretly to Russian visitors to the Vatican Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. As for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s terrifying portrait of the camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, that only made it into the literary journal Novy Mir because Khrushchev agreed. Five years later, its author was under attack as an ideological enemy of the state and, in 1974, he was deported.19 Truth – or, at least, a version of events that did not toe the party line – was doomed to remain a murmur from the underground.
In painting, the ‘Potempkinising’ Social Realist par excellence, Alexander Gerasimov, was Chairman of the Artists’ Union of the USSR from 1958 to 1963. No friend to modernism, he broke into fits of laughter when he unrolled Matisse’s Dance to amuse apparatchiks. As for non-representative art, it was ‘individualistic’ and frowned upon. When, in 1964, the Hermitage celebrated its 200th anniversary, Mikhail Artamonov – the museum’s director since 1951 – was sacked for tolerating abstraction in an exhibition. But despite Khrushchev’s celebrated assessment of abstract art – ‘dog shit’ – there were signs of an artistic thaw. The Sixties began with the British Council’s exhibition ‘Painting in Great Britain 1700-1960’, which went on view at the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. In 1963, American graphic art was presented at the Russian Museum, and examples of American architecture went on display two years later at the Academy of Arts. The decade also witnessed important retrospectives of early twentieth-century Russian revolutionary artists. Meanwhile, Leningrad painters, who tended to be more mystical and gloomy than their card-carrying Moscow counterparts, were having a frustrating time. Cut off from art in the West – a tradition to which Russian painting had been yoked, from the eighteenth century to the revolution – they were thrown back on old notions or compromising attempts to gain official approval.20
Contemporary theatre was likewise moribund. Audiences in the 1950s and early 1960s were treated to plays like Rural Evenings, a 1954 lyrical comedy about life on a collective farm, or Dmitri Gordunov’s It Was Once So. Unloading the coal that the protagonists have been waiting for is the play’s central drama, and the arguments that are raised sound like the tedious ‘demarcation disputes’ of late-Sixties Britain. But when a wise comrade begins, ‘Listen to what Lenin told me over a cup of tea,’ the entire cast kneels in awe. The play ends with the declaration that ‘It may be hard at first . . . but nobody will help us unless we help ourselves.’ To thunderous applause from the audience, the characters rush off to unload the coal.21
Music and dance often focused on Leningrad’s past. In Vano Muradelli’s October- which stands somewhere between an epic musical and Aïda – misty-eyed Kronstadt mariners sing about the revolution. The 1949 Kirov ballet The Bronze Horseman was choreographed to music by Reinhold Glière and the Stalin Prize-winning score was resurrected for a new production of the ballet at the Mariinsky in 2016. In 1961, tribute was paid to the fortitude of Leningraders at war when Igor Belsky – later artistic director of the Kirov – choreographed Sedmaya Sinfoniya to the first movement of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony.
By 1958 times were changing: Shostakovich was going Broadway. His capacity to function as a popular composer had been in evidence since Tahiti Trot of 1927 – an exuberant variation on the Vincent Youmans hit ‘Tea for Two’ from the show No, No, Nanette. Begun in 1957, the year that West Side Story premiered in New York, Shostakovich’s Cheryomushki bridges the gap between Soviet operetta and the American musical. Satirical and full of self-quotation, it is an absurdly delightful tale of love, set among the sub-Le Corbusier dream-blocks of an ambitious Soviet housing project. Inevitably, the enterprise is plagued by corruption, but it promises to change the lives of people used to disappointment. One character sings excitedly of at last – ‘having his own window’, until neighbours, mistaken for cohabitants in what will be a new and tiny kommunalka, arrive for a house-warming. The musical is endlessly playful: another new tenant introduces himself with a parody of that fateful moment in Tchaikovsky’s opera – ‘Your neighbour, Onegin.’ It is understandable why Cheryomushki is often dismissed, but it stands as a more evocative reminder of the guarded optimism of an era of mass building than today’s decaying relics of the many ‘cherry towns’ that ring Moscow and St Petersburg.-22
As part of a cautious opening up to the West, the individualistic twenty-four-year-old Canadian pianist Glenn Gould performed in Moscow, and then in Leningrad on 13 May 1957. Playing works unheard in Russia, by composers of the Viennese school, Gould was considered a visitor from Mars by the more conservative members of the audience. But the excitement of his playing was infectious, and news travelled fast. A concert that was half empty in the first half subsequently filled to overflowing in the second. Gould played Leningrad’s Philharmonic Hall and then the Maly, where the regulation 1,400 capacity was augmented by a further 1,100 enthusiasts crushed in the aisles.23 In the audience on 13 May was a young Tartar who had arrived in September 1955 to study at the Leningrad State Academic Vaganova Choreographic Institute. Training as a dancer, he was soaking up every drop of culture in the capital. As his piano-playing improved, he tested scor
es on the piano in the sheet-music shop next to Dom Knigi on Nevsky Prospekt. He would often start an evening by watching the first act of a ballet at the Kirov, then dash to the Philharmonic to catch the second part of a concert. Rudolf Nureyev and his fellow students absconded from their dormitory during the White Nights in order to claim the expansive, theatrical spaces of the city for exuberant declarations of their art. On one occasion he and his pals circled the Alexander Column in Palace Square with grands jetés en tournant. Nureyev later remembered that he found Gould’s performance ‘weird’, ‘upsetting’, but dynamic. He could almost have been describing his own Leningrad debut in Giselle two years later. Nureyev’s Albrecht was not an idle aristocrat toying with the emotions of a delightful peasant girl. The ballerina, Irina Kolpakova, noted that when he came onstage in Giselle, Nureyev was like a ‘hooligan boy’ with ragged hair. Although he showed no interest in contemporary rock’n’roll, he caught the mood of the times. Offered a place in Moscow’s brasher Bolshoi company, he opted to stay with the Kirov, after the star of the company, Natalia Dudinskaya, invited him to partner her in Laurentia in November 1958. The success of this partnership created a precedent for his electrifying work with the much older Margot Fonteyn.
Rossi’s ‘Theatre Street’ in the late Soviet period. The Vaganova is towards the end on the right.
Touring Russia with a production of My Fair Lady, American actress Lola Fisher was bowled over by Nureyev’s performance in Giselle. When she invited the dancer to breakfast, the entire cast of the musical rose to welcome Nureyev with a standing ovation as he arrived at the restaurant in the Grand Hotel Europe. Soon he would enjoy such acclaim in the West, where he became the essential ‘Russian’ – wild and unpredictable.
As a young Kirov dancer, he was in competition with Yuri Soloviev who was already famous for his tremendous elevation. ‘Cosmic Yuri’ was Nureyev’s roommate on the Kirov Ballet’s 1961 tour to Paris. The grace and opulence of the French capital made a huge impression on Nureyev, who sensed that the Soviet authorities had begun to cramp his style. When the KGB agent who posed as deputy director of the Kirov asked him why he had not joined the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation, Nureyev snapped back, ‘I’ve far more important things to do with my time than waste it on that kind of rubbish!’24 He decided to defect. In Leningrad, that left the field clear for Soloviev at least until he suffered a serious injury; the dancer struggled on, but his frozen body was found shot in his dacha in January 1977, in what appeared to have been suicide.
Despite the continued presence of state-sponsored mass song, traditional dance and balalaika orchestras, there was no way that ballads like ‘My little Water Meadow, where have you been?’ could hold the attention of young people, who listened to records smuggled from the West and made copies for their friends on the sound-carrying emulsion of X-ray plates – roentgenizdat, or ‘discs on the bones’. The Soviet leadership, however, remained deaf to Western music. Waddling Nikita Khrushchev, in his clownish baggy pants, declared that jazz made him feel as if he ‘had gas on the stomach’. As for the dances imported with rock’n’roll, the First Secretary observed with distaste that they involved an indecent wiggling ‘of a certain section of the anatomy’.25
Although many youngsters still dreamed of joining the Young Pioneers and Komsomol and of marching together singing spirited Soviet anthems, at the 1957 Youth Festival, when foreign rock was played, the teenagers went wild. The authorities dismissed it as a waste of energy, which could – in the words of one MVD agent – ‘be put into the building of a hydro-electric power station’.26 Nonetheless, children of the Soviet elite clamoured for Camel cigarettes, Coca-Cola and ‘Love Potion No. 9’. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end – or the beginning of a new beginning. Guitar poetry became a potent force among students and intellectuals, circulated by magnitizdat-songs that were privately tape-recorded. Singers like Alexander Galich and Bulat Okudzhava, whose work was not unlike the French chansons à texte of George Brassens and Barbara, became popular, as a counter-culture developed to urge change.
Competitive sport was becoming glamorous. Soccer became enormously popular with factory workers, and players were given pride of place in Physical Culture Day parades. Skilled sportsmen began to be treated to the same privileges as the artistic elite. Sport was also developing into a weapon in the propaganda war. In ice hockey, the Russians reigned supreme by playing with consummate grace. When they were in North America, musical or balletic images were applied to the ease and elegance with which they continually passed the puck to and fro: the Russians were playing a ‘Soviet symphony’. North America’s beaten and dejected hockey fans were confused – they were not at a game ‘to see the Bolshoi’, remarked one commentator. But Red Army ice-hockey team trainers studied dancers in rehearsal and turned a potentially brutal sport into something deft. Ice skaters likewise made use of dance in their long and often punishing training, and children as young as four would begin lessons in the small rink of Leningrad’s Palace of Sport. Meanwhile, in the early Sixties, Vladimir Putin a pupil at Leningrad High School 281 – spent a good deal of his time perfecting the art of judo.27
In the late Fifties and early Sixties the Russian economy was booming. Natural gas had been discovered in Siberia, technology for industry developed, and great strides were temporarily made in agricultural production, under ever-larger collectives. Sputnik was launched in 1957 and then, in April 1961, another ‘Cosmic Yuri’ became the world’s first astronaut. Not surprisingly, after Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, rocket fins suddenly vanished from new designs for American Cadillacs and, in Leningrad, a song club opened called Vostok, named after Gagarin’s spaceship, Vostok I. By the middle of the 1960s robots were being shown on TV, helping in the home: rousing a comrade from sleep and pouring his morning glass of milk.28 Clever, early-rising robot shops ran out of milk and other basics soon after opening.
While the Soviet scientific future looked bright, people were complaining that new housing estates on the outskirts of Leningrad mocked the idea of a city famed for its ‘theatres, museums, gardens and parks’,29 for they had no such facilities. Inhabitants had nothing else to do but sit at home, watching the endless outpouring of party rhetoric. On screen, an over-rehearsed Comrade Shulpin pledged that his team would deliver an exceptional eighty tonnes of steel by election day, while Comrade Kirsanov pledged a tonne of steel a day above his shift target. Similarly, when a particularly heavy goods train arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule, a local newspaper reported the event as a triumph of Soviet will.30 Museums were set up to record and glorify transport, utilities and production, although industrial discipline was weak and workmanship was often shoddy.
Yet, for the ordinary citizen, the years 1955-75 were arguably the most congenial period under communism. There was peace. The state offered educational sessions on ‘social behaviour’ in which they promoted weak aromatic aperitifs, instead of marriage and liver-destroying vodka. As cars were seen increasingly on the streets – more than 27,000 in Leningrad in 1963 – loudspeakers were mounted on mobile traffic-control units, urging pedestrians to take care. Offices remained austere, without personal decoration or family snaps, but living standards rose. It didn’t matter that pensions and wages were low; what counted was access and influence, or blat – the connections necessary to obtain scarce goods or elusive services. Presents, not money, were useful, in order to obtain things ‘under the table’. A ‘little something’ might persuade an official to take a little extra care. ’31
By 1964 Khrushchev was losing support. His erratic buffoonery was beginning to wear thin. When he was invited to stay at Camp David during his American visit, the First Secretary and his team were so ignorant on the subject of presidential dwellings that they thought it a snub. In the States, Khrushchev’s playing to the gallery went down well, but the celebrated shoe-banging episode at the United Nations – exploited by Khrushchev, although probably apocryphal – did little for his reputation among dour colle
agues at home. It also reinforced the vision of barbaric Russianness that was cultivated in the West. Insight into the impression that Khrushchev created, and the way in which communism was perceived in America, comes in a comic sketch on Vaughn Meader’s best-selling 1962 LP satirising the Kennedy White House, The First Family. When Kennedy proposes an everyday, office-style takeout lunch to the assembled heads of state and asks Khrushchev what he would like to eat, the First Secretary replies, ‘Oh, you don’t have to order a special for me, I’ll have a bite of everybody else’s.’ When the West German Chancellor orders a ‘Western Sandwich’, Khrushchev interjects, ‘If Adenauer has a Western Sandwich, then I’ll have an Eastern Sandwich.’ When Kennedy informs him that there is no such thing, Khrushchev tells Adenauer, ‘Then I’ll have the eastern portion of your Western Sandwich.”32
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