by Les Weil
Only slowly does the newcomer learn to think in contradictions; to distinguish, underneath a chaotic surface, the shape of things to come; to realise that in Sovietland the present is a fiction, a quivering membrane stretched between the past and the future....
The chapter from which I have quoted was suppressed by the censor. The book appeared two years later in a mutilated version, with half of its contents cut out, under the title Red Days and White Nights (the `White Nights' referred to the Arctic regions). But writing it was occupational therapy: it helped me to overcome my doubts and to rearrange my impressions in the desired form. I learnt to classify automatically everything that shocked me as the `heritage of the past' and everything I liked as the `seeds of the future'. By setting up this automatic sorting machine in his mind, it was still possible in 1932 for a European to live in Russia and yet to remain a Communist.
All foreigners whom I knew, and also the more mentally alert among the Russians, had that automatic sorting machine in their heads. They knew that official propaganda was a pack of lies, but justified this by referring to the `backward masses'. They knew that the standard of living in the capitalist world was much higher than in Russia, but justified this by saying that the Russians had been even worse off under the Czar. They were nauseated by the adulation of Stalin, but justified it by explaining that the mushik needed a new idol to replace the ikon on the wall.
When conditions become insupportable, men react according to their temperament in roughly three ways: by rebellion, apathy or self-deception. The Soviet citizen knows that rebellion against the largest and most perfect police machinery in history amounts to suicide. So the majority lives in a state of outward apathy and inner cynicism; while the minority lives by selfdeception.
I belonged to this minority. The Communist mind has perfected the techniques of self-deception in the same manner as its techniques of mass propaganda. The 'inner censor' in the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorises his own conscience into submission.
The Weissbergs occupied a small but, by Russian standards, luxurious flat attached to the Institute where Alex worked. It was the Ukrainian Institute for Physics and Technology (UFTI)--one of the largest experimental laboratories in Europe. The new factories, universities and research centres all had their own housing developments, and many also their own farms or vegetable plots; their personnel thus became even more directly dependent on their jobs. The flat consisted of three rooms, shared by Alex, Eva and Eva's mother; frequently they also had visiting physicists from abroad billeted on them.
I stayed with the Weissbergs for about a fortnight. Then I set out on my travels, but later on returned on several occasions to that haven of friendship and comfort. The appalling fate that was in store for them we did not guess. I also met a number of Alex's colleagues, among them some of the leading physicists of the Soviet Union. Again, had a prophet whispered to us that the same men would denounce Alex as a Gestapo agent and a terrorist, we would have thought him crazy.
During that first fortnight I visited Kharkov's factories and workers' clubs. My Russian was ungrammatical, but fairly fluent. I had acquired it during my last four months in Berlin by the same pressure-cooker method by which I had learnt modern Hebrew before setting out for Palestine. My vocabulary consisted of about a thousand words which I juggled around in the manner of hotel porters and tourist guides, without paying attention to grammar and syntax. Thus I was able to get around alone, to travel by tram instead of in official cars, to do my own shopping and talk with everybody with whom I came into contact.
The only public conveyances in Kharkov were old-fashioned electric tramcars which ran at intervals of twenty to thirty minutes. Inside, they were crammed to three times their normal capacity, and on the outside they were covered with grapes of people clinging in acrobatic postures to bumpers, fenders, running boards, windows and roof. On my first journey on a tram not only my wallet was stolen from my hip pocket, but also my fountain pen from my breast pocket and my cigarettes from my trouser pockets; the squeeze and pressure in the tram was such that they could have cut off my trouserlegs without my feeling it. The chronic overcrowding of public conveyances, offices and places of entertainment made Russia into a paradise of pickpockets who displayed a virtuosity as nowhere else. They were mostly
besprisornys, the notorious waifs and strays who had been roaming about the country like a plague of locusts ever since the Civil War.
The only goods easily obtainable in Kharkov in 1932 were fly-paper, contraceptives and postage stamps. The co-operative stores, Which were supposed to supply the population with the necessities of life, were empty. Misled by the relatively lavish supplies in my own privileged foreigners' co-operative, I did not realise the extent of the Ukrainian famine until much later; but the lack of consumer goods struck me from the first day. There were no boots and no clothes to be bought anywhere; no typewriting paper, or carbon paper, or combs, hairpins, nails, or pots or pans, or even primusneedles--those indispensable instruments for cleaning the nozzle of the primus cooker, operated by paraffin, that all Russian households use. Later on, when the Kharkov Power Station broke down and the town remained without electricity for several winter months, the supply of paraffin ran out too.
If it became known that any kind of goods had turned up in a store, the news spread immediately and everybody rushed to buy--whether the goods in question were toothbrushes, acid drops, soap, cigarettes, oil wicks, or frying pans. Wherever the people in the street saw a queue, they hurried to join it. Often, when the queue formed an angle round a street corner, the people in the rear had no idea `what they were selling', and amused themselves by passing on rumours and guesses. I soon became addicted to this sport, and, on my second day in the Soviet Union, brought home as trophies a mouth organ and a bottle of stain-removing liquid which burnt a hole in Alex's best suit.
Less amusing, because difficult to contemplate without a feeling of constriction in the throat, was the bazaar. This was a permanent market held in a huge, empty square. Those who had something to sell squatted in the dust with their goods spread out before them on a handkerchief or scarf. The goods ranged from a handful of rusty nails to a tattered quilt, or a pot of sour milk sold by the spoon, flies included. You could see an old woman sitting for hours with one painted Easter egg or one small piece of dried-up goat's cheese before her. Or an old man, his bare feet covered with sores, trying to barter his torn boots for a kilo of black bread and a packet of mahorka tobacco. Hemp slippers, and even soles and heels torn off from boots and replaced by a bandage of rags, were frequent items for barter. Some old men had nothing to sell; they sang Ukrainian ballads and were rewarded by an occasional kopeck. Some of the women had babies lying beside them on the pavement or in their laps, feeding; the fly-ridden infant's lips were fastened to the leathery udder from which it seemed to suck bile instead of milk. A surprising number of men had something wrong with their eyes: a squint, or one pupil gone opaque and milky, or one entire eyeball missing. Most of them had swollen hands and feet; their faces, too, were puffed rather than emaciated, and of that peculiar colour which Tolstoy, talking of a prisoner, describes as `the hue of shoots sprouting from potatoes in a cellar'.
The bazaar of Kharkov was one of those scenes one imagines one could paint from memory, even after twenty years. Officially, these men and women were all kulaks who had been expropriated as a punitive measure. In reality, as I was gradually to find out, they were ordinary peasants who had been forced to abandon their villages in the famine-stricken regions. In last year's harvest-collecting campaign the local Party officials, anxious to deliver their quota, had confiscated not only the harvest but also the seed reserves, and the newly established collective farms had nothing to sow with. Their cattle and poultry they had killed rather than surrender it to the kolkhoz; so when the last grain of the secret hoard was eaten, they left the land
which no longer was theirs. Entire villages had been abandoned, whole districts depopulated; in addition to the five million kulaks officially deported to Siberia, several million more were on the move. They choked the railway stations, crammed the freight trains, squatted in the markets and public squares, and died in the streets; I have never seen so many and such hurried funerals as during that winter in Kharkov. The exact number of these `nomadised' people was never disclosed and probably never counted; in order of magnitude it must have exceeded the modest numbers involved in the Migrations after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Officially the famine did not exist. It was only mentioned in the terms of veiled allusions to `difficulties on the collectivisation front'. Trudnesty-difficulties--is one of the most frequent words in Soviet parlance; it serves to minimise disasters in the same proportion as achievements are magnified. The Soviet citizen automatically understands that a 'gigantic, victory of the revolutionary forces in Britain' means that the Communist Party has increased its vote by one half per cent, whereas `certain difficulties in the health situation in Birobidjan' means that the cholera is raging in that province.
After a week, I had incorporated into my vocabulary some of the essential household words of Soviet life such as pyatiletka (the five year plan), komandirovka (official journey), propusk (permit), nachalnik (chief), reniont (`in repair'). I learnt that valuta (foreign currency) could buy one any otherwise unobtainable goods; that si-chass meant literally `at once' but was in fact the equivalent of the Spanish manana; that a kulturny choloveik, a 'cultured person' was one who did not spit and swear, who used a handkerchief, and could do sums without an abacus. I learnt that Soviet watches, gadgets and machines had to `go to remont' every three months; I learnt to write on the coarse, grey sheets which served as writing paper, and to wash under a kind of samovar with a drip-tap, fixed to the wall. I learnt that no map or policeman could help you to find an address because all streets had new names but were called by their old ones; and that officials and employees were permanently being moved about the country as in a game of musical chairs. All this I learnt eagerly and with a great sense of exhilaration, for I knew that cverything that annoyed me was the heritage of the past and everything that I liked a token of the future. Besides, I have always had a deep longing for the primeval chaos, a nostalgia for the apocalypse; and here I found myself in the middle of both.
One of my favourite pastimes was to walk through the streets trying to guess the meaning of the mysterious abbreviations by which every institution, office or shop, was called. Thus my co-operative store was called INSNAB; the organisation that looked after me, MORP; the Institute for which Alex worked, UFTI, which was a branch of NARKOMTASHPROM (People's Commissariat for Heavy industries), which depended on SOVNARKOM (the Government, and was controlled by GOSPLAN (the Government Planning Committee) jointly with the CKSP(B)CS (Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party, Bolshevist Fraction, of the Soviet Union). Most difficult to remember were the initials of my publishers in Kharkov because they were not in Russian but in Ukrainian. The abbreviation ran: URKDERSHNAZMENWYDAW, and meant: Ukrainian State Publishing Trust for National Minorities. The reason for this epidemic of initials was that enterprises could no longer be called after their proprietor or trade-name; it was a symptom of the de-personalisation so typical of Soviet life.
In trying to understand everyday life in a totalitarian state, one should beware of over-simplifications. In the period preceding the murder of Kirov in 1934, which started the Terror, people in Russia did not live in permanent fear, but rather in a world of diffuse insecurity, of floating apprehension. An uncautious remark did not, as a rule, entail immediate retribution. The citizen merely knew that his remark would remain on the record, and that the day might come, perhaps in a year, perhaps in ten years, when he would slip up on his job or get involved with a jealous woman or a neighbour coveting his tlat, and on that day the G.P.U. would hold against him every dubious conversation and encounter of his past. In other words, the Soviet citizen was no more acutely frightened than a Catholic is of the Last judgment--except that the G.P.U. operate this side of death, and that he had nowhere to turn for confession and absolution.
In 1932, it was still possible among intimate friends to pass on a joke that was politically off colour. To understand the sample that follows, one must know that before he was exiled, Trotsky had advocated a harsh policy towards the peasants for the benefit of the industrial workers, whereas Bukharui had advocated concessions to the peasants at the expense of the workers. The story purports to list questions put to candidates for Party membership, and the correct answers thereto:
Question: What does it mean when there is food in the town but no food in the country?
Answer: A Left, Trotskyite deviation.
Question: What does it mean when there is food in the country but no food in the town?
Answer: A Right, Bukharinite deviation.
Question: What does it mean when there is no food in the country and no food in the town?
Answer: The correct application of the general line.
Question: And what does it mean when there is food both in the country and in the town?
Answer: The horrors of Capitalism.
One of the Soviet citizen's permanent apprehensions was that he might be sent on a kvmandirovka to some remote part of the country--the Urals, or Eastern Siberia, or Kazakstan. This was not necessarily a punitive measure; it could happen to practically anybody, in any job, any day. A komandirovka is an official mission, and in a State-owned economy everybody is a State official.
A komandirovka may be a permanent or a temporary one. A considerable proportion of the higher officials in any branch of activity--administration, industry, education, publishing, etc.--seemed to be constantly travelling about on urgent komandirovkas. One of the reasons for this was the slowness and unreliability of communications by mail, telegram or telephone. Important or complicated matters could only be settled by personal contact. In a completely centralised State no local executive could make any important decision without consulting his superiors in the hierarchy. As a result, if you tried to see a person of consequence outside Moscow, the answer would be as often as not that he was away on a komandirovka, and would be back maybe next week, maybe the week after.
All this may give the impression that travelling in Russia was an easy matter. It was not. In theory, at that time the Soviet citizen still had the right to travel anywhere he liked inside the country. But in practice the unbelievable overcrowd:ng of all means of transport made travelling only possible for those in possession of an official priority order called a broni. People without bronis had to queue up at the ticket counter for several hours or several days, according to circumstances; and, when in possession of a ticket, they had to camp at the station, again for hours, and sometimes for days, until their turn came to be crammed into a freight train or a local train that took them to the next junction. There were millions of campers, choking all the railway stations in Russia, squatting amongst their bundles of bedding and other baggage, on the grimy floors of platforms and waiting-rooms, patient and resigned to their fate. It was the period of the great upheaval officially referred to as 'nomadism in agriculture and industry'. The famine had turned a considerable percentage of the population into railway-nomads who were travelling thousands of miles, attracted by vague rumours of better conditions in some other region.
Among citizens of the privileged categories who travelled armed with bronis, the speed with which they obtained a train reservation depended on the `strength' of their organizacia--meaning the administrative department, trust, factory, state-farm or other body for which they worked. The G.P.U. had absolute priority; next to it came the Party, then the government administration, army, heavy industry, light metal industry, consumer industries, trade unions, research centres, etc., approximately in that order. The same system of hierarchic priorities was applied to the allocation of flats, rooms, or a share in
a room, through the City Soviet's Housing Department, and to the allocation of a bed in a hotel room, for travellers arriving in a town, by the Central Hotel Management Trust. The same system of priorities determined to which food co-operative you belonged; the same system decided whether you gained access to an official parade or theatre performance. The first question one was asked when applying for any commodity or facility, from railway tickets to ration cards, was always `What is your organizacia? The rights and privileges of the individual were entirely dependent on the rank which his `organisation' occupied in the social pyramid, and on the rank which he occupied inside that organisation. There has never perhaps been a society in which a rigid hierarchical order so completely determined every citizen's station in fife and governed all his activities.
We all remember from pre-revolutionary Russian novels descriptions of the kind: 'Ivan Ivanovich Golupchine, an official of the 13th Grade.' This traditional hierarchic system, formerly confined to the civil service, now embraces the entire nation. Though he has no official number to grade him, cvery citizen knows his exact place on the pyramid.
The standing of a political leader, for instance, which in other countries is dependent on achievements, election results and popular favour, is in the Soviet Union defined by (a) the place allotted to him on the official platform at the annual parades on May Day and at the October Celebration; and (b) the place which his name occupies on the official list of those present at a meeting or ceremony. Foreign diplomats and journalists have learnt to take their cues from this Byzantine ritual.