A Gentleman in Moscow

An Announcement

At 6:45 on the eleventh of June, Count Alexander Rostov stood in suite 417 dressed in the white jacket of the Boyarsky, ensuring that the place settings were properly arranged and his men properly attired before opening the doors for the 1954 combined dinner of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers.

Eleven days earlier, as we know, the Count had been excused from this duty rather unceremoniously. But early on the afternoon of the tenth of June, Maître d’ Duras arrived at the Boyarsky’s daily meeting with distressing news. For some time, he said, he had been experiencing a tremor of the hands consistent with the onset of palsy. After a troubled night’s sleep, he had awakened to discover that the condition had grown considerably worse. By way of illustration, he held his right hand over the table where it trembled like a leaf.

Emile looked on with an expression of shock. What sort of Divinity, he seemed to be thinking, would devise a world in which an aging man’s malady afflicts the very attribute that has set him apart from his fellow men and elevated him in the eyes of all?

What sort of Divinity, Emile? The very same who rendered Beethoven deaf and Monet blind. For what the Lord giveth, is precisely what he cometh later to taketh away.

But if Emile’s face expressed an almost sacrilegious indignation at his friend’s condition, the Bishop’s expressed the grimace of the inconvenienced.

Noting the manager’s annoyance, Andrey sought to set his mind at ease.

“You needn’t worry, Manager Leplevsky. I have already contacted comrade Propp at the Kremlin and assured him that while I cannot oversee tomorrow night’s event, Headwaiter Rostov will be assuming my responsibilities. Needless to say,” the maître d’ added, “comrade Propp was greatly relieved by the news.”

“Of course,” said the Bishop.

In reporting that comrade Propp was greatly relieved to have Headwaiter Rostov at the helm of this dinner of state, Andrey was not exaggerating. Born ten years after the Revolution, comrade Propp didn’t know that Headwaiter Rostov was under house arrest at the Metropol; he didn’t even know that Headwaiter Rostov was a Former Person. What he did know—and from personal experience—was that Headwaiter Rostov could be counted upon to attend to every detail on the table and respond immediately to the slightest hint of a customer’s dissatisfaction. And though comrade Propp was still relatively inexperienced in the ways of the Kremlin, he was experienced enough to know that any shortcomings in the evening would be laid at his door as surely as if he had set the table, cooked the meal, and poured the wine himself.

Comrade Propp personally communicated his relief to the Count during a brief meeting on the morning of the event. At a table for two in the Boyarsky, the young liaison reviewed with the Count, quite unnecessarily, all the details of the evening: the timing (the doors were to be opened promptly at 9:00); the layout of the tables (a long U with twenty seats on either side and six at the head); the menu (Chef Zhukovsky’s interpretation of a traditional Russian feast); the wine (a Ukrainian white); and the necessity of dousing the candles at exactly 10:59. Then, perhaps to emphasize the evening’s importance, comrade Propp gave the Count a glimpse of the guest list.

While it’s true that the Count generally hadn’t concerned himself with the inner workings of the Kremlin, that is not to suggest that he was unfamiliar with the names on that piece of paper—for he had served them all. Certainly, he had served them at formal functions in the Red and Yellow Rooms, but he had also served them at the more intimate and less guarded tables of the Boyarsky when they had dined with wives or mistresses, friends or enemies, patrons or protégés. He knew the boorish from the abrupt and the bitter from the boastful. He had seen all of them sober and most of them drunk.

“All will be seen to,” said the Count as the young apparatchik stood to go. “But, comrade Propp . . .”

Comrade Propp paused.

“Yes, Headwaiter Rostov? Have I forgotten something?”

“You haven’t given me the seating arrangement.”

“Ah. Not to worry. Tonight there is to be no seating arrangement.”

“Then rest assured,” the Count replied with a smile, “the evening is bound to be a success.”

Why was the Count so pleased to hear that this dinner of state would have no seating arrangement?

For a thousand years, civilizations the world over have recognized the head of the table as a privileged spot. Upon seeing a formally set table, one knows instinctively that the seat at the head is more desirable than those along the sides—because it inevitably confers upon its occupant an appearance of power, importance, and legitimacy. By extension, one also knows that the farther one sits from the head, the less powerful, important, and legitimate one is likely to be perceived. So, to invite forty-six leaders of a political party to dine around the periphery of an extended U without a seating arrangement was to risk a certain amount of disorder. . . .

Thomas Hobbes, no doubt, would have likened the situation to “Man in a State of Nature” and would have counseled one to expect a scuffle. Born with similar faculties and driven by similar desires, the forty-six men in attendance had equal right to any seat at the table. As such, what was most likely to ensue was a scrum for the head, animated by accusations, recriminations, fisticuffs, and possibly gunfire.

John Locke, on the other hand, would argue that once the dining room’s doors were opened, after a brief moment of confusion the better natures of the forty-six men would prevail, and their predisposition to reason would lead them to a fair and orderly process of seat taking. Thus, in all likelihood, the attendees would draw lots to decide their placement, or simply reconfigure the tables into a circle—just as King Arthur had, to ensure the equity of his knights.

Chiming in from the mid-eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau would inform Messrs. Locke and Hobbes that the forty-six guests—freed at long last from the tyranny of social conventions—would shove the tables aside, gather the fruits of the earth in hand, and share them freely in a state of natural bliss!

But the Communist Party was not a “State of Nature.” Quite to the contrary, it was one of the most intricate and purposeful constructions ever manufactured by man. In essence: the hierarchy of all hierarchies.

So, when the guests arrived, the Count was fairly certain that there would be no raising of fists, drawing of lots, or free-spirited sharing of fruits. Rather, with only the slightest jostling and jockeying, each of the forty-six attendees would find their proper place at the table; and this “spontaneous” arrangement would tell the studious observer all he needed to know about the governance of Russia for the next twenty years.

At the Count’s signal, the doors to suite 417 were opened at precisely 9:00 P.M. By 9:15, forty-six men of various rank and seniority were taking the seats appropriate to their station. Without a word of orchestration, the head of the table was left to Bulganin, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Molotov, and Voroshilov—the six most eminent members of the Party—with the two center seats reserved for Premier Malenkov and General Secretary Khrushchev.*

In fact, as if to make the point, when Khrushchev entered the room he didn’t even walk in the direction of the table’s head. Rather, he exchanged a few remarks with Vyacheslav Malyshev, the rather mundane Minister of Medium Machine Building who was sitting near the table’s end. Only when everyone else was comfortable did the former mayor of Moscow pat Malyshev on the shoulder and casually work his way to the seat beside Malenkov—the last empty chair in the room.

Over the next two hours, the men in attendance ate heartily, drank freely, and gave toasts that ranged in tone from the high-minded to the humorous, but always in the most patriotic of spirits. And in between toasts, as the Count presented courses, refilled glasses, replaced utensils, whisked away plates, and swept crumbs from the linens, the attendees made asides to the men on their left, conferred with the men on their right, or muttered to themselves under the hum of the festivities.

Upon reading this, you may be tempted to ask a little sardonically whether Count Rostov—this self-proclaimed man of propriety—allowed himself to overhear any of the private exchanges around the table? But your question and your cynicism would be entirely misplaced. For as with the best manservants, it is the business of capable waiters to overhear.

Consider the example of Grand Duke Demidov’s butler. In his day, Kemp could stand for hours at the edge of the library as silent and stiff as a statue. But should one of the Grand Duke’s guests even mention that he was thirsty, Kemp was there with an offer of a drink. Should someone complain quietly of a chill, Kemp was at the fireside stirring the coals. And when the Grand Duke observed to a friend that while the Countess Shermatova was “a delight,” her son was “unreliable,” Kemp would know without being told that should either of the Shermatovas appear at the door unannounced, the Grand Duke was available to the one and indisposed to the other.

So, did the Count overhear any of the private exchanges of the attendees? Did he hear any of the sly observations, pointed asides, or dismissive remarks uttered sotto voce?

He heard every single word.

Every man has his own personality at table, and one needn’t have waited upon members of the Communist Party for twenty-eight years to know that while comrade Malenkov only toasted upon occasion and then with a glass of white wine, comrade Khrushchev would give four toasts in an evening and always with vodka. Thus, it did not escape the Count’s notice that during the course of the meal, the former mayor of Moscow never once rose to his feet. But at ten minutes to eleven, when the meal was nearly over, the General Secretary rapped on his glass with the blade of his knife.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “the Metropol is no stranger to historic events. In fact, in 1918 comrade Sverdlov locked the members of the constitutional drafting committee in the suite two floors below us—informing them that they would not be let out until their work was done.”

Laughter and applause.

“To Sverdlov!” someone called and, as Khrushchev emptied his glass with a self-assured grin, all around the table followed suit.

“Tonight,” continued Khrushchev, “we have the honor of witnessing another historic event at the Metropol. If you will join me at the windows, comrades, I believe that Minister Malyshev has an announcement. . . .”

With expressions ranging from curious to bemused, the forty-four other attendees pushed back their chairs and approached the great windows overlooking Theatre Square, where Malyshev was already standing.

“Thank you, General Secretary,” Malyshev said with a bow toward Khrushchev, followed by a weighty pause: “Comrades, as most of you know, three and a half years ago we began construction of our new power plant in the city of Obninsk. I am proud to announce that on Monday afternoon the Obninsk facility became fully operational—six months ahead of schedule.”

Appropriate commendations and the nodding of heads.

“Furthermore,” Malyshev continued, “at exactly eleven o’clock tonight—in less than two minutes—the plant will begin providing power to half the city of Moscow. . . .”

With that, Malyshev turned and faced the windows (as the Count and Martyn quietly snuffed the candles on the table). Outside, the lights of Moscow glimmered in the same old fashion, such that as the seconds ticked by, the men in the room began shifting on their feet and exchanging remarks. But suddenly, in the far northwestern corner of the city, the lights in a neighborhood ten blocks square went out all at once. A moment later, the lights went out in the adjacent quarter. Then the darkness began moving across the city like a shadow across a plain, growing closer and closer, until at roughly 11:02, the eternally lit windows of the Kremlin went black, followed a few seconds later by those of the Metropol Hotel.

In the darkness, the mutterings of a moment before rose in volume and shifted in tone, expressing some combination of surprise and consternation. But the attentive observer could see from Malyshev’s silhouette that when the darkness fell, he neither spoke nor moved. He continued to stare out the window. Suddenly, in the far northwest corner of the capital, the lights of those initially darkened blocks flickered back on. Now it was luminescence that was moving across the city, growing closer and closer, until the windows of the Kremlin flashed on followed by the chandelier overhead—and the combined dinner of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers erupted into justified applause. For, in fact, the lights of the city seemed to burn brighter with the electricity from the first nuclear power plant in the world.

Without a doubt, the finale to this dinner of state was as fine a piece of political theater as Moscow had ever seen. But when the lights went out, were any of the city’s citizens inconvenienced?

Luckily, in 1954 Moscow was not the world capital of electrical appliances. But in the brief course of the outage, at least three hundred thousand clocks stopped, forty thousand radios went silent, and five thousand televisions went black. Dogs howled and cats meowed. Standing lamps were toppled, children cried, parents banged their shins into coffee tables, and more than a few drivers—looking up through their windshields at the suddenly darkened buildings—ran into the fenders of the automobiles in front of them.

In that little gray building on the corner of Dzerzhinsky Street, the little gray fellow who was charged with taking down the eavesdroppings of waitresses kept right on typing. For like any good bureaucrat, he knew how to type with his eyes closed. Although, when a few moments after the lights went out someone stumbled in the hallway and our startled typist looked up, his fingers inadvertently shifted one column of keys to the right, such that the second half of his report was either unintelligible, or in code, depending upon your point of view.

Meanwhile, at the Maly Theatre, where Anna Urbanova—in a wig tinged with gray—was appearing as Irina Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, the audience let out muted exclamations of concern. Though Anna and her fellow actors were well practiced at leaving the stage in the dark, they made no move to do so. For having been trained in the methods of Stanislavsky, they immediately began acting exactly as their characters would have acted had they suddenly found themselves in a blackout:

ARKADINA: [Alarmed] The lights have gone out!

TRIGORIN: Stay where you are, my dear. I’ll look for a candle. [The sound of cautious movement as TRIGORIN exits right, followed by a moment of silence]

ARKADINA: Oh, Konstantin. I’m frightened.

KONSTANTIN: It is only darkness, Mother—that from which we have come and to which we shall return.

ARKADINA: [As if she hasn’t listened to her son] Do you think the lights have gone out all over Russia?

KONSTANTIN: No, Mother. They have gone out all over the world. . . .

And at the Metropol? Two waiters in the Piazza carrying trays to their tables collided; four customers in the Shalyapin spilled their drinks and one was pinched; trapped in the elevator between the second and third floors, the American, Pudgy Webster, shared chocolate bars and cigarettes with his fellow passengers; while alone in his office, the hotel’s manager vowed “to get to the bottom of this.”

But in the dining room of the Boyarsky, where for almost fifty years the ambience had been defined by candlelight, the customers were served without interruption.