by John Pilger
His uncle was a member of the Philharmonic Orchestra which on the night of August 9, 1942, played Shostakovich’s Seventh (or Leningrad) Symphony. Like orchestral artillery, this was broadcast on all wavelengths and heard in London and Berlin. ‘That,’ he says, ‘was our last glory.’
Later, at Piskarevskoye cemetery Sam and I are much moved as both Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky are played across a landscape of graves and trees bound with red scarves. People come and go with single red flowers; many are young. I can think of no other city where the pain of war remains such a lasting presence.
‘Good day,’ says a young man. ‘I have complete Soviet uniforms for you to buy. I have a soldier’s suit and a sailor’s suit. I have a Red Army belt and I have many Red Army watches. Everything in the Soviet military I have – a big bargain for you. You pay me in Marlboro.’
Monday. Today, the first anniversary of my mother’s death, reminds me of my first visit to the Soviet Union. She wrote to me here, describing the excitement in the mining town of Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, where she grew up, on the day in 1917 they heard about the revolution in Russia.
‘The miners were in the middle of a long strike,’ she wrote. ‘Families were hungry. But that morning, when red flags were hoisted over the lodges, people were cheered up and couldn’t give a damn about the war [against Germany].’ I replied in a different mood, that people in the Soviet Union seemed ‘furtive and frightened’. ‘They look through you,’ I wrote. ‘1917 might have happened somewhere else.’
‘Mr Gorbachev’, says the Intourist guide, ‘has done good things. But we’ve had too many icons and saints in this country and we’re fed up . . .’ This anti-establishment tirade is delivered in front of the Winter Palace, whose storming she denounces as ‘no more than a coup d’état’. Would a tourist guide in London mount such an onslaught on the national mythology? ‘We don’t have a history any more,’ she says. ‘We had to throw it away when glasnost showed up the lies.’
She describes how the Soviet education system is being decentralised, and is intrigued when told that education in Britain is going the other way. ‘A national curriculum?’ she says. ‘That’s how you order minds, not educate them. Are you objecting to this?’
Tuesday. In the shops on Nevsky Prospekt the leaves of cabbages lie on bare shelves. People do not shop, they forage, and the foragers are mostly women. A dozen of them are asleep in our Underground carriage, gripping their bags of bruised apples and plastic sandals. A survey published the other day says that two-thirds of girls aged sixteen and seventeen would rather consider prostitution than face a life as hard as their mothers’.
Of course, if you have the right sort of money you do not queue. At the restaurant in our hotel, the head waiter’s greeting is: ‘What money you got, Mister? You got dollars, marks pounds . . .?’ When I reply that we have Russian money we are almost thrown out. Sam says I must not play that joke again if we are to eat.
Money power, never before known in the Soviet Union, is the other side of perestroika. Western propaganda, that money power equals democracy, has become Soviet propaganda. The new economic order has made the rouble the currency of the poor and people will do almost anything to get hard currency. There are hard-currency prostitutes, who are said to be ‘safe’, and soft-currency prostitutes, with whom you take your chances.
Wednesday. The train to Moscow bounces along, with the passengers contriving an adventurous spirit. The restaurant car is Fawlty Towers transferred to rolling stock, run by a local Manuel. ‘Pssst,’ he says, ‘Russian champagne, only five funts . . .’
‘What’s a funt?’
‘You know, funts . . . English funts. Also caviar. Only ten funts.’
‘Excuse me,’ he is asked by an elderly Englishwoman, ‘where is the toilet?’
‘Next carriage, Madam.’
‘You’d better hang on, dear,’ whispers her husband. ‘It’s full of Russians.’
Thursday. Moscow is warm and not at all as I remember it, a wan city seen through a curtain of rain. Tanya, the Moscow Intourist guide, is another subversive, funny and dry. ‘This week,’ she announces, ‘Moscow has run out of umbrellas, even though there’s no rain. When we ran out of alcohol, people started making moonshine. But they needed sugar; then sugar ran out . . . Over there is the statue of Uri the Long Armed. God knows why they call him that.
‘Now condoms are running out . . . and soap. You try living without condoms and soap! Of course, it’s not too bad if you have five children. Then they make you a Hero of the Motherland and give you free cream . . .
‘Over there is the Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s where a Big Mac costs half a day’s wages and you stand for an hour waiting to get it. In the West you call this fast food. In front of us is the new American Embassy, which is empty because the Americans refuse to move in. They say it’s full of bugs. What do they expect?
‘Over there is where they’re showing Rambo . . . And that’s where Gorbachev works. You call him Gorby. I call him . . .’ She puts her hand over the microphone. Gorby is everyone’s target, though there is grudging respect for him, perhaps even pride. In the museums there are ‘Gorbachev rooms’ which apply glasnost to the displays and tableaux. The independence movements in the Baltic states are described almost objectively; ethnic problems are not minimised. ‘We are correcting the mistakes of the past,’ says a curator in a monotone that gives rise to the suspicion that only the ‘line’ has changed. This is a suspicion widely shared: that ‘the centre’ is merely protecting itself by painting on a new face while, say the cynics, ‘the old heart beats unerringly’.
Friday. Today the front page of the Moscow News has sensational news: the lifting of state censorship on the press for the first time since the revolution. ‘Human thought and word have at last been liberated,’ says the paper, ‘so why aren’t we celebrating? Why don’t we journalists congratulate each other? The answer is simple: the manager has been sacked, but the master has remained in place . . .’
‘No, they haven’t repented’, says a headline over a fine, angry piece by Lev Razgon, who asks: ‘Why is it so difficult to believe them – both the government and the KGB? To this day there has been no state recognition of the fact that the eviction of millions of peasants to meet their death . . . were criminal acts. Oh, how moving are the short items in newspapers to the effect that the surviving “victims of unlawful repression” can now use municipal transport free of charge and receive a few tins of canned food in special food parcels.’
Sitting in the sun in Pushkin Square, I find it difficult to believe I am reading this. I recall the comment of the Pravda editor thirteen years earlier, implying that as long as state laws were ignored, they did not exist. When I repeated this to Valentyn Turchin, he said, ‘We are the society of the Two Truths. When we embrace only one of them, we shall be free.’ This ‘embracing’, now well under way, is an achievement that is difficult to overstate.
Saturday. On the fringe of Red Square an old man holds up a placard which reads: ‘All power to the Soviets.’ After seventy-three years the irony is almost indigestible. This was Lenin’s call: the original ideal. In devolving power, is the new Soviet Union seeking the original ideal? Power in Moscow and Leningrad no longer belongs to ‘the centre’ but to ‘Soviets’ headed by democratically elected mayors, Gavril Popov and Anatoly Sobchak, who are not members of the Communist Party. In Britain ‘the centre’ has long abolished popular local government.
Today is brides’ day. There are brides on every street and dozens of them in Red Square. They flock from the Palace of Weddings, a McDonald’s of marriage, to lay flowers at Lenin’s mausoleum and the eternal flame. They then range Moscow looking for a party, sitting in the vestibules of vast Gothic, smoky restaurants renowned for their knees-ups. There are brides in the Kremlin Armoury, gazing upon Catherine the Great’s wedding gown, woven with gold and silver thread. And there are brides in Gorky Park pedalling pedaloes, their lace veils trailing in the water. And th
ere are brides listening to jazz bands in the subways and catching the Underground to the football.
Today’s match is at Dynamo, Moscow’s premier club. Six of us pay the equivalent of sixty pence. There are no FA-approved urinal conditions, no terraced cages. The stadium is modern and spacious and only a quarter full. But there seem to be almost as many militia as fans, and whenever a goal is scored an officer stands, almost ceremoniously, and orders his men to face the crowd. This has a comforting familiarity for the English. We leave through lines of troops, trailing a Dynamo supporter, happily drunk and conducting a conversation with his one English word: ‘Liverpool’.
The sun has moved to the other side of Pushkin Square. I wait for Sam, who is in the McDonald’s queue. He has been made more offers for his Levis and trainers and says he can make a good profit. I point out that the original capital investment was mine.
As we set out for Moscow airport the impression I have is of a society taking remarkable risks, and vulnerable. The apocalyptic reporting of events here did not prepare me for the extent of the changes, and their creative force. In Britain there is no hint of an equivalent departure from the ‘established order’, whose accelerating concentration of executive power, secrecy and supine parliamentary opposition demand, at the very least, a ‘Gorbachev solution’.
Of course, the vulnerability here derives from within, and from those who cannot wait to get their hands on this resource-rich giant. There was always a synthesis between both sides in the Cold War. Nixon and many of America’s leading capitalists recognised this. Both sides knew that ‘communism’ was a myth in the Soviet empire and that state capitalism was a not so distant relative of monopoly capitalism. Both sides knew that a move across the divide required no serious ideological loss. At the same time both sides used – in very different ways, of course – the notion of ‘communism’ as a propaganda ploy against the rise of genuine democratic socialism.
When Ralph Nader, the American consumer protector, was here recently he expressed shock at the naive Soviet view of ‘the market’. ‘They are moving’, he said, ‘from being hypercritical of everything Western to hypersycophantic towards everything Western . . . They will create an internal corps of minions for the multinationals and an imitative economy. It’s the Third World all over again.’
As the East Germans realised, ‘naivety’ is a passing phase. One of McDonald’s Moscow managers resigned recently, saying she did not see the point of yet another treadwheel turned by cheap labour. How the Soviet people deal with their brave new illusions may prove to be their greatest challenge since the Aurora fired its blank shot that shook the world.
June 1977 to August 18, 1990
TERMINATOR IN BIFOCALS
WHEN I LIVED in America I would drive from New Orleans through the night to Florida. In those days, the Deep South could be menacing to a nosey outsider; and reaching Florida, just as a flamingo-pink sky burst over ragged silhouettes of telegraph poles and palms, was a joy.
I have an affection for Florida, partly because of the weather, but also because Florida is the state that doesn’t quite fit. It is not Dixie; if anything, it is an extension of Bolivar’s America, certainly of Cuba. It also has remarkable tribes: poor whites who missed the turning to California, including those from New York’s huddled mass who live as if Ellis Island was yesterday, in faded art deco hotels converted to nursing homes.
The most opulent ghetto on the east coast of America is also here, at Palm Beach. But Palm Beach, dripping with diamonds and scandal, is in the same county as Belle Glade, the heart of the sugar-cane fields where the newest, mostly illegal immigrants do arguably the dirtiest and hardest job in America. They live in compounds run by the American Sugar Corporation, and little has changed since Edward Murrow’s documentary, Harvest of Shame, exposed ‘the middle of hell’. Many of the workers suffer from a disease spread by rats that breed in the cane; and if they complain they are likely to be packed off back to the West Indies. The State Department used to send its fresh-out-of-college diplomats down to Belle Glade to get a taste of the underdeveloped world, though anywhere within a few blocks of the White House would have sufficed.
I would drive down the Gulf of Mexico road which, in the Sixties, was barely two lanes. A seam of ash-white sand and gentle breakers was interrupted by tackle kiosks and fishing villages: from Pensacola to Indian Rocks. A town called St Petersburg was motels and white clapboard houses, a Rotary and a square dance club. That’s where Zoë and I are now; she’s my six-year-old, who is also a swimmer and a beachcomber, though she can’t wait to get to Disneyworld.
There are still fishermen on the beach, but now they compete for space with lobster-red Brummies and massive couples from Middle America under sail in puce shellsuits. ‘Where you all from?’ almost everyone says; the answer is unimportant. I was once asked this on a Florida beach, having just emerged from the surf where a hovering police helicopter had teargassed me: part of the festivities to celebrate the renomination in Miami of President Nixon. For me, America has always been a blend of the lovable and the lethal.
The Knights of Lithuania arrived this week. They are poolside and Sam, the guitarist at the bar, says to them: ‘You people are the Now Generation. You did it over there: you showed the world what freedom is.’ He adds, ‘Say, any of you knights been to Lithuania? . . . no? . . . Any of you know where it is?’ Giggles poolside, though the question is not unreasonable.
On the large screen in the Activities Room, a television commentator announces the first anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with the suggestion that, a year ago, the Now Generation did not know where in the world Iraq and Kuwait were. ‘Eggsactly one year ago today,’ says the television man in his regulation voice-of-history baritone, ‘the world’s status quo took a direct hit . . . America was poised for war, but praying for a diplomatic breakthrough. But it was not to be . . . Sure, it wasn’t much of a contest, but America found itself.’
Cue on the big screen Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, speaking for the Now Generation. ‘Mr Secretary,’ says Mr Baritone. ‘I’d like to ask you a personal reflection. What’s going through your heart on this anniversary day?’
‘Pride, sir, real pride.’
‘Thank you so much, Mr Secretary.’ Now back to Barbie in the studio.
The victory parades have been run again, in between the Alka Seltzer ads and the child abuse hot lines. ‘We could have easily done it without the British and French,’ wrote the foreign editor of the St Petersburg Times. ‘ . . . You can call this America assuming its God-given role as leader of the forces of light and right. You can even call it America as Head Honcho. Big Kahuna. Numero Uno . . .’1
The fluent inanities are now virtually unopposed. Power is unabashed, and celebrated with all the ignorant certainties that echo the totalitarianism over which the Now Generation claims to have triumphed.
Forty million Americans have no medical care; yet power triumphant has been reason enough for the Congress to approve $2 billion for a weapon called a Superconducting Supercollider. And the Pentagon confidently expects much more: $500 billion for weapons for which an enemy is still pending, including $24 billion for Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy.
The Now Generation’s very own will be a C17 military transport aircraft, so huge, wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times, that it will make ‘it easier to carry US troops here and there, to police up those little wars that may be part of the new world order’.2 Ironically, although this is a society whose economy is based largely on war industry, there is no concept of war on its own soil; the consciousness of war remains the preserve of Hollywood.
The continuing obsession with soldiers ‘missing in action’ in South-east Asia is a variant of this. In striking, silent contrast, there is nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who are ‘missing’ and the devastation done to their country, both during the American war and the current American-led embargo.
Here on the beach, at St Petersburg, the
lovable side is exemplified in the boundless grace and enthusiasm of the college youngsters who look after Zoë and her friends in the hotel’s ‘kids’ club’. The lethal side is, as ever, on the omnipresent news. So far this year, more than 23,000 people have been murdered in America, the highest number ever.
In the St Petersburg Times, Jacquin Sanders writes a column called ‘Faces’. ‘All right,’ he tells us, ‘maybe I’d never fired a trendy assault weapon before. But Clearwater Firearms and Indoor Gun Range was making an offer I couldn’t refuse: rent an Uzi and fire two clips for $19.75 . . .
I took off my bifocals. Terminators don’t wear bifocals . . . I fired a few single shots [and] shifted to automatic and cut loose three or four barrages. They were noisy and jerky and satisfied the soul . . . ‘Killed him dead,’ I said with satisfaction.
Tom Falone, the former police officer who has owned the place for 15 years, is a big man with a belly and untrusting eyes. His son and daughter are in college. Each has a handgun and a rifle. ‘They aren’t flag-waving nuts,’ said Tom, ‘but neither would hesitate to use their weapons if they had to.’ The rent-an-Uzi special is advertised on a board across the street from Clearwater High School . . . but this is Florida in the 1990s.3
August 9, 1991
THE MAGIC OF DISNEY
AMONG THE FUNNIEST American movies of recent years is a series called National Lampoon’s Vacation. They include black farce that is rare for Hollywood. Actually, I have long identified with the central character, one Clark W. Griswald, played to bemused perfection by Chevy Chase.
Clark Griswald’s manic enthusiasm for pleasing his kids will be familiar to many fathers at this time of year. In his first escapade, Griswald takes his offspring to Wallyworld. (Dare they call it Disneyworld, lest the heirs of kindly old Walt sue them to death?)