St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and a series of bad harvests, the Politburo lost confidence in their leader and Khrushchev was suddenly removed from power in 1964. The lacklustre Stalin protégé, Leonid Brezhnev, became Soviet leader and presided over eighteen years of gathering stagnation. It was a period during which, quipped Russians, ‘the difficulty of growth turned into the growth of difficulties’.33 People old enough to remember the siege persisted in mopping crumbs from the table with a moistened finger. In 1970, there were still 200,000 people living in nearly 1,000 hostels scattered about Leningrad. Although the majority were in their twenties and their tenancy lasted no more than a few years, they endured a cramped, unhealthy environment, and tensions resulted in hard drinking and fighting. As for kommunalki, in 1970 40 per cent of Leningrad’s population still suffered the irritations and indignities of living in one room with paper-thin walls and sharing limited facilities with many other people. The percentage continued to fall, but by the time the regime collapsed twenty years later, nearly a quarter of the city’s population still lived in kommunalki. For those who were lucky enough to move into their own apartments, life was far from idyllic. As in Britain during the 1960s, Soviet housing of the period was often cheaply or badly built. Apartment blocks and prefabs of between five and fourteen floors were low-ceilinged constructions of numbing monotony, surrounded by untouched scrubland. Attempts at landscaping – such as occurred in London’s Robin Hood Gardens – were unknown. In response to the inevitable public disregard for such unfriendly environments, the party set up committees of parents and neighbourhood foot patrols. The tensions in kommunalki, the emptiness of the new neighbourhoods void of recreational facilities, pushed teenagers out onto the street where the boys acted tough and the girls were provocative.34

  Ground floors of new buildings were noisy, the top floors leaked, and undecorated brutalist stairwells invited littering and syringes. If a flat came with a telephone – bugged, of course – that was fine. If you wanted to obtain one, forget it. But a private apartment was a blessed release from communal living. The kitchen became the place to welcome friends. Over vodka and zakuski — nibbles concocted from ingredients often stored for a special occasion – people talked. And talked. And talked. If you put a pillow over the telephone or jammed it by turning the dial to the last hole, then trapped it with a pencil and took the precaution of speaking at least two metres from the receiver, you could speak freely. At the end of the 1960s the KGB employed 166,000 people to tap, bug and perlustrate, in order to amass huge amounts of often-useless information about their comrades.35

  The New Family Code of 1968 made it illegal for a man to divorce his wife without her consent during pregnancy. It also defined forced intercourse in the home as rape, yet society remained riddled with strong sexism – one repulsive pearl maintained that ‘A wife isn’t a jug, she won’t crack if you hit her a few.’36 Abortion remained high, as barrier contraception and intrauterine devices were scarce and Soviet condoms were as thick as the Iron Curtain. From 1960, terminations outnumbered births, and as many as six abortions were performed in a single room at the same time. Messy and humiliating – but cheap.37

  The first supermarkets opened in Leningrad in 1954, but much of the available food was basic and unappetising. In the 1960S and ’70s many Leningraders were able to grow vegetables on small allotments in vast garden settlements. In summer and early autumn the diet was augmented by mushroom-picking, berry-gathering and fishing – all activities associated with the gentle, simple pleasures of the dacha. Otherwise, a tedious system of queuing remained a part of everyday life. In shops, customers would join different queues for different items. Then they would queue to pay, before joining a queue to retrieve their purchases.38 Diminishing into the distance, the queue became an image for ever-receding improvement. In Petrograd, bread queues had provoked revolution. The revolution delivered yet more queues. Something was wrong. People could wait up to ninety minutes to buy a pineapple, and would queue overnight to get on a list to buy a car that would not be delivered for eighteen months – perhaps a Zhiguli 1 or 2, Soviet imitations of the Fiat 124 and 125.39 Different-coloured passes helped people from the higher echelons of the party or those with valued jobs beat the queues but, for most people, the procedure was inescapable. During the Seventies the Soviet press estimated that the nation spent thirty million hours queuing each year. Customers avoided items produced in the last ten days of any month – they were worse than usual, as factories rushed to complete quotas. Products from the satellite countries were preferred to Soviet goods: Polish bras, East German electrical fittings, Bulgarian toothpaste or Hungarian shampoo.40 Why could a country the size of the Soviet Union, with such resources, not do better? And still can’t. As President Obama remarked, in his final press conference of 2016, Russia ‘doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.’41

  Dining out in Leningrad was often marred by long queues to obtain a table, and by rude staff who overcharged. Slowly the number of restaurants grew from about forty at the beginning of the Brezhnev era to more than eighty at the time of perestroika in the late 1980s,42 when Georgian restaurants began to offer diners new tastes – spinach and pomegranate timbales instead of the inevitable herring; coriander-flavoured lobio instead of the standard meat in aspic; char-grilled lamb instead of the ubiquitous kotletta. Hard on sweet-tooths, Leningrad cafés in the late Seventies still offered a negligible selection of cakes and pastries. Milk bars, clubs and cafés where guitar poets performed became the haunt of young people. Earlier, in the Sixties, youth and student clubs had been places where films were shown, poetry read and photographs exhibited. At that time, students only dared to talk politics outdoors and were denied what their revolutionary forebears had – to a limited extent – enjoyed under the tsars. They were not permitted to demonstrate.43’

  In the late Sixties and Seventies, thousands of young people became what the authorities defined as ‘inner immigrants’. They listened to Radio Luxembourg and struggled to buy or copy Western records. ‘Inner immigrants’ lived in the Soviet Union, but mentally and emotionally inhabited the unfamiliar world of what they knew of Western pop. They listened to The Beatles and learned English from their lyrics. Photos of the pop group were difficult to come by, and young Leningraders couldn’t tell a Lennon from a McCartney. In the late 1970s, disco invaded Russia with films such as Saturday Night Fever and groups including Abba and Boney M followed. Imported LPs cost one-third of a monthly wage, so they were rare and home-grown singers filled the gap. At the commercial end, on the frontiers of variety, there were figures like Valery Leontov and the publicity-hungry, redhaired celebrity Alla Pugacheva. Yet Leningrad was not, at the time, a late-night city. Gone were the after-theatre revelries of the Diaghilev era. The city was pretty quiet by 11 p.m. Ownership of televisions stood at more than forty million nationwide in 1970, so people stayed in and watched Pugacheva on TV. The Russian band Mashina Vremeni – Time Machine – likewise enjoyed a huge following, with a sound veering from folk to hard rock.44 The group started in the late Sixties and has exhibited, like many of Russia’s top groups and singers, great staying power. Deep Purple fan and Russian president Dmitri Medvedev saw Time Machine in concert in Washington DC in 2010. ‘Russia’s Bob Dylan’, Boris Grebenshchikov, sang in the short 1982 university film Ivanov. It celebrated a kommunalka on the Petrograd Side where friends drank wine, made music and dreamed of imported cigarettes. Ivanov became a beacon for the youth counter-culture of which Grebenshchikov, rightly, became a star. One of Grebenshchikov’s recent songs – his voice gravelled by imported ciggies – was prompted by the violence in the Ukraine in 2014.

  Exhibitions from abroad continued to weaken cultural isolation. In 1974, the highly successful Tutankhamen exhibition from London and New York was presented at the Hermitage, followed by ‘100 Paintings from the Metropolitan’ in 1975 and treasures from the Louvre and the Prado in subsequent years.4
5 The increased number of foreign visitors carefully shepherded by Intourist guides, checked by hotel tea-ladies and quizzed by KGB plants contributed to the cultural thaw. Leningraders may not have had much chance to speak with the visitors, but they could see what they were wearing and how they behaved. Tourist guides had a loaded cultural agenda and a certain amount of contempt for the Western obsession with Fabergé and the riches of the tsars. In the Hermitage, groups were swiftly marched through the centuries and civilisations. Guides hurried past the Cézannes and Matisses and lingered in front of earlier examples of Western decadence. Instructions were brusque: ‘Hurry up, please, we’ve got another floor to get through,’ adding under the breath, ‘I’ve got a lot more – uh – fairy tales to tell you.’46 At the Kirov, tourists were amused by the gold, blue and white hammer and sickle placed tastefully above the proscenium amid the sumptuous nineteenth-century decor. Gently interrogated by their KGB plant, posing as a member of the group, tourists were asked to offer opinions on whether the Kirov productions were tatty, compared with those they saw at home. They were. What did they feel about the Russian Melodiya record label, the food, the hotel comfort? Almost every answer confirmed that the USSR was unable to satisfy the average expectations of a Westerner.

  During the Sixties a spirited version of Christian Dior’s 1950s New Look was produced by Soviet designers, but everyday clothing remained drab. Nevertheless, people in Leningrad tended to be fashion-conscious, and jeans soon became the ultimate fashion statement. Dmitri Medvedev – the son of university teachers who lived in the far-flung suburb of Kupchino – coveted a Pink Floyd album and jeans.47 Meanwhile, the Russian language slowly kitted itself out with Western conveniences, concepts and fads that had no equivalent in Russian: kredit, press relis, kheppening and mass mediya. 48 Russia was on a crash course with the tail-chasing earn-and-spend of capitalism.

  By the late 1970s, half of Soviet families had a refrigerator and more than 60 per cent owned a washing machine, and yet the technology gap between East and West was not closing. The frames and lenses of Soviet glasses were heavier than their Western counterparts. The electrical consumption of appliances was seven times that of European models. Two-fifths of the hard currency earned was spent on importing food.49 Leningrad leaders were so concerned with the city’s industrial and military supremacy, and with its heritage, that healthcare and infrastructure suffered. Corruption was rife. Violence resulting from alcoholism was pandemic. Writing in 1979, Joseph Brodsky observed that at 9 a.m. ‘a drunk is more frequently seen than a taxi’. But, as he went on to point out, vodka was a huge source of state revenue: ‘its cost is five kopecks and it’s sold to the population for five roubles. Which means a profit of 9.900%.’50 Alcoholism accompanied widespread demoralisation among the male population in the late Brezhnev era. It fell to women to hold house and home together.51 They would earn all day, queue for food or shoes in every spare moment, look after their children and cook for a husband, if they still had one. Not unlike in the West – just worse.

  Yet some Leningrad institutions functioned successfully, as they had done for years. At the Leningrad Choreographic Academy the number of pupils grew from 170 to 500. The school, which considered seven – the age at which children had started at the Imperial Ballet School – too young for developing bones, accepted pupils from the age of nine.52 They ate well on a vitamin-and-protein diet of fruit, vegetables, eggs and meat. Training was long and arduous, and the institute tried to involve parents to enable them to understand what their child was going through. There were academic subjects beside ballet, and training included historical dance from the first year, character dance from the third, pas de deux from the sixth, and piano right through to their penultimate year. Very few pupils were taken into the Kirov and most would look for work elsewhere. Still, the system was working well, although by 1990 Kirov dancers would be complaining about low wages and malnutrition.

  A class at the Vaganova Academy given by the legendary Natalya Dudinskaya.

  Perhaps the most impressive addition in the 1970s was the monument to the 900-day siege at Moskovsky in the south of the city. The memorial is flanked on either side by statues of people who endured the siege. They are remarkable by the standards of the figurative sculpture of the period. City leaders, some of whom mismanaged the siege, are notably absent and the ensemble celebrates the female workers, barricade-makers, snipers, guards, soldiers and sailors whose fortitude helped the city to survive. A vast forty-eight-metre-high central obelisk, standing as tall as the Alexander Column in Palace Square, has ‘the victors’ – again, anonymous citizens – standing near its base. The visitor then descends through a broken ring, representing the blockade, to an underground chamber of sombre polished granite in which 900 dim lamps symbolise the days and nights of the siege. In a deliberately muted exhibit, the visitor chances upon a fragment representing the bread ration, a violin played in the performance of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, a few simple tools that constructed trenches, buckets that fought fires and carried water: the ensemble adding up to a powerful, dignified and stirring tribute to the city under siege.53

  The monument to the siege looking towards Moskovsky Prospekt and Soviet-era building complexes.

  Towards the end of the Brezhnev era, social equality still seemed remote. Information continued to be rationed – telephone directories, for instance were only available at information kiosks. Hard-line communist devotees were increasingly ashamed of the empty shops: no milk, no meat.54 They were fed up with the stale leadership jangling their endless rows of medals. Brezhnev himself – chest ablaze with decorations – was overweight and ailing. He smoked too much, drank to excess and was addicted to downers. By the time he died in November 1982, the resources of the USSR were being severely stretched by the government’s support for the communist regime in Afghanistan, fighting against the mujahideen. The Soviet Union passed through the brief rule of the ageing ex-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and the even briefer leadership of Konstantin Chernenko, to Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Shortly after becoming leader, Gorbachev visited Leningrad in May 1985. During his visit, he did something unusual. He broke away from the official party paying its respects at a war memorial and started talking to the crowd. By that gesture, made in a city of uncertainty and perpetual change, Gorbachev demonstrated his desire for a novel approach. The malaise of the early 1980s resulted from a paucity of new ideas. At the XXVth Party Congress in February 1986 – thirty years exactly after Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin – Gorbachev put forward some ideas which determined perestroika, or ‘restructuring’.55 This was to be accomplished by glasnost: greater openness of discussion, out of which new ideas would emerge. In April 1986, after the Chernobyl disaster, there was a degree of openness hitherto unknown in the USSR. Gorbachev campaigned against corruption and alcoholism, but many people used to rigour and hardship were suspicious, rather than welcoming. Subservience to the state had been a staple for decades, and now there were hints that entrepreneurial self-advancement was not wrong.

  The lively underground Leningrad art scene of the 1970s grew and spilled out into the open. Private exhibitions and concerts in people’s homes went public. Young people were less afraid of the KGB than their parents.56 In the 1986 underground jazz film Dialogues there was obvious criticism of the party. Songs were sung with American accents, the lyrics – Fats Domino-style – being slurred so as not to be entirely clear. It was a useful way to criticise. To be and not to be heard. There was a pounding beat, wild dress and a new sense of freedom. David Goloshchekin ran the popular Leningrad Jazz Club, packing the house five nights a week.57 Akhmatova was read openly, yet the new freedoms were not uncontested. In 1987, when students protested against plans to destroy Leningrad’s historic Angleterre hotel, some were arrested.58 At the time Yuri Shevchuk was a restaurant cleaner by day and a protest rock-singer by night. Looking a little like John Lennon during his spell of Indian meditation, Shevchuk and his group, DDT, used a mix of ele
ctric and traditional instruments to pump out ‘anti-Soviet’ songs. He was summoned to sign a paper agreeing not to sing or write. The authorities called him an ‘enemy of the people’, a mouthpiece for America and – of all things – for ‘the Vatican’.59 Demonstrations were not tolerated, but his fans went out onto the streets to petition support for the band. Shevchuk is another survivor on the Petersburg music scene, despite being highly critical of Vladimir Putin’s Russia – one of his lyrics suggesting that the president will die when the oil runs dry.

  On 14 February 1988, the library of the Academy of Sciences was ravaged by a major fire in its main stack room. Some of the books destroyed belonged to Peter the Great, and many volumes and manuscripts were hurled into the courtyard and bulldozed into rubbish heaps. The official response merely noted that an insignificant portion of the deposits had been lost. But that kind of party cover-up was, in the future, going to prove more difficult. There was a new kid on the block. In 1987, ex-stuntman-turned-investigative-journalist and shit-stirrer Alexander Nevzorov exploded onto Soviet television screens with his inflammatory programme 600 Seconds. He went around Leningrad seeking out, or making, trouble. Contacts with the police got Nevzorov to crime scenes with an immediacy that enabled his TV cameras to reveal the underbelly of city life with a frankness never seen before. With an audience of sixty million viewers, he changed the Soviet population’s perception of what was going on. Nevzorov had a cocksure, cheeky approach. On one occasion, holding up a radiated chicken for his audience to see, he stated in a deadpan voice that the good news was that ‘levels of radiation vary through its body’. Whether he was covering violence between emerging gangs, between prison inmates or between rival lovers, Nevzorov was there barging into the ugliness of people’s lives. At first a fresh-faced advocate of glasnost, he hardened into an ardent champion of the old KGB. He filmed shootings with gruesome intimacy, catalogued the inadequacy of the police with disturbing frequency, and gaily paraded the malfunctioning of every department of the state with such zest and enthusiasm that it seemed as if his programme was nothing other than a self-serving personal pitch for public office. When, in May 1990, the foundations of Trinity Cathedral flooded and paintings were lost, Nevzorov was on the scene to inform sixty million people – in complete contrast to the Academy of Sciences cover-up two years earlier.60"