Gadfly in Russia : A Story of Travel, History, People, and Places

Part Two Gadfly 1967

Friday, 1 September

The four-engined Tupolev was some way from touchdown, but my popping eardrums suggested we were slowly descending. A flashing light on the horizon — as I looked up from another reading of Moby Dick — turned out to be a navigation indicator.

A couple of months after the motoring trip I was going back to Moscow, with plane tickets and accommodation vouchers prepaid in hard currency. The visa classed me as a tourist, so I could not expect favours from the Writers’ Union. The treasury in London allowed me to take out the limit of fifty pounds in traveller’s cheques — a mean amount — but a few fivers smuggled in a back pocket were there to take care of any overspending.

On previous visits I’d said little of what had been in my mind about the political situation, but this time, because of my independent status, I could come out with what I liked. Friends, such as George Andjaparidze, my companion of the summer drive, would I felt sure remain staunch.

The track of the crowded aircraft followed the radio beam, until a grating under the fuselage, and the placid unwinking lights of rural Russia, told me we were close to landing.

Oksana met me at the terminal — out of courtesy I had told only her of my visit — her friendly face as if to keep me from feeling bored or beleaguered during my stay, though I had no worries about that.

After dinner in the hotel I went to the foreign currency bar, and met a group of men from Finland who were in Moscow to see a textile exhibition. One told me how happy he was that trade between England and his country was in such a thriving state. He was impressed by my recent automobile travels, and another Finn, curious to know whether I’d had any problems, said he wouldn’t imagine so because English cars, being the best in the world, were made for the rough roads in Russia. I thought he must be joking, in his tall deadpan way, though he seemed not to be.

My first car had been English, I said, and while still brand new, during a trip to Morocco, the clutch went. When I wrote to the manufacturers, hoping to claim compensation on the guarantee due to careless workmanship in the factory, they huffily replied that whatever had gone wrong had been my fault and not theirs. It was up to me to have the matter put right — which I did.

Going on with my story to the surprised Finn, I told how, while driving out of Tangier one day after heavy rain, the same car stalled in a sheet of water from an overflowing stream. A Frenchman, seeing my plight, locked the front bumper of his sturdy Peugeot 403 on to my vehicle and pushed it all the way up the winding road to where I lived. I offered him a drink in the house but he called with a friendly wave that he hadn’t time, though I’d taken him well out of his way. In England a couple of years later I bought the reliable Peugeot 404 that had taken me through Russia that summer.

Talk spun on to other topics, and one of the Finns said that spending the night with a lovely Russian girl cost only ten pounds. After a second vodka — he and his friends were drinking the finest malt whisky — I left them chatting to two young beauties who came into the room like queens.

In Moscow’s top-class hotels the oldest trade is a way of extracting hard currency from foreign pockets, and the women also seemed to be enjoying their status at the bar. I thought good luck to them, because it was all part of the black economy that kept the Soviet system running.

At midnight I lay in bed listening to a melancholy performance of the Kinks on my tape recorder, relishing a further period of mindlessness in Moscow. How far out could one get? Further than that, I hoped, at the sound of giant street-washing vehicles growling by outside. Moscow must be the cleanest city in the world, washed, shampooed and set every night.

Saturday, 2 September

Breakfast came punctually to my room, avoiding half an hour’s wait in the restaurant. The first swig of lemon tea seemed to improve my eyesight, as if I had put on glasses.

I met George at ten by the Gorki Street post office. After the embrace and backslapping we lit up cigars and talked all the way to Red Square, recalling the highlights of our motor trip. He asked about the latest interesting novels in London, and all I could do was mention again Smallcreep’s Day by Peter Currell Brown, a sort of Kafkalike incursion into the anonymous world of a vast factory.

We lunched at the Writers’ Union, where Oksana joined us. George enthused about Gagra on the Black Sea, how delightfully sub-tropical it was, summer the whole year round, and full of lovely girls. ‘It’s far better than your Riviera on the Mediterranean,’ he said to me. ‘When it gets too warm you can go for a walk in the mountains. It’s the most beautiful spot, even better than the Crimea.’

‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll see whether you’re right or not. A few days there would fit me up nicely. How much do the air tickets cost? We could go today.’

‘Not much. About 400 roubles.’ He knew that my luftmensch mind had no intention of clicking out of zero and and lighting off, but Oksana, as if to discourage me from doing so, asked what I had done after she had seen me to my hotel the previous evening.

Wanting to shake her Soviet complacency I told her that after supper I had gone into the foreign currency bar, but instead of paying ten pounds and waltzing off with a beautiful woman for the night, I decided to go for a walk, needing some exercise after more than three hours in the plane. ‘There weren’t many people in the streets by then, so it was pleasant. Turning off the boulevard I came to a block of flats that looked a bit run down, but out of curiosity I wandered into the courtyard, and saw a dim bulb over a doorway, where steps led down into a basement.

‘At the bottom I, pushed my way through a curtain made of what looked like sackcloth, and saw half a dozen men and a couple of women around a table, playing cards for money. It was like a scene out of Dostoevsky, but they were all quite jolly, and invited me to sit down. I needed no second telling, and in spite of my monkey Russian I managed to get through a couple of games. I seemed to amuse them very much, and one of the laughing women — a perfect Grushenka with exquisite grey Kirghiz eyes — poured me a glass of vodka. I was getting in touch with the real Russia at last. A man with a scar on his cheek, in an oilskin jacket even though the place was warm, said he was a train driver who made a lot of money smuggling people across the frontier — though he may have been joking. He gave me a piece of bread and some salty herring, and filled my glass again. I’d got my tape recorder with me, so switched it on and played them the Kinks, which they loved, and tried to dance to.

‘I lost a few roubles at cards, but when I offered to settle the debt with a couple of five-pound notes they took them gladly. The women loved the picture of Queen Elizabeth. After a couple of hours — it must have been midnight — I shook hands with them all and left. I pushed the curtain aside and walked back to the street. Half cut by then, I was just able to find my way back to the hotel.’

What I had intended to be an amusing anecdote for Oksana’s benefit put a look of alarm and disapproval on her face. She was convinced that all I had said was true. She was flushed and fearful: ‘There are such people in the city, or so I’ve heard, but you shouldn’t have gone there. It’s very dangerous to mix with types like that. You were lucky not to have been robbed. The police catch them sometimes, and send them away from Moscow.’

I regretted the tale, but hadn’t thought she’d believe it, while George was more familiar with my spiralling imagination. ‘It sounds a real cock-and-bull story to me.’

I admitted that it was, though could never be sure Oksana finally believed me.

In the evening we taxied to a party at Valentina Ivasheva’s. The vestibule of the block of flats was gloomy, a low wattage bulb showing broken bottles and a few tins underfoot. When I mentioned this to Valentina on getting upstairs she said anxiously: ‘Hurry inside. I know all about that. Hooligans come from the next block and throw bottles in the entrance. They don’t like us because we’re only writers and journalists in this building.’

I was amused. ‘But if the housing authorities mixed everyone up a bit more you’d get to know each other and become friendly. Then it might not happen,’ I suggested.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t want that sort of person in here.’

Talk at the party was mostly about Ilya Ehrenberg, who had died and was to be buried on Monday. After telling Oksana I’d read his masterpiece The Fall of Paris, and very much admired other works of his, she promised to wangle a permit from the Writers’ Union, so that we could go to the funeral.

On the boulevard at past midnight it seemed we’d never get a taxi. Even those showing vacancy lights went by as if with wings and about to achieve lift off. Whether set for home after the day’s work, or on call to special customers, I didn’t know, but damned them nevertheless, George solved the problem, by muttering into my ear: ‘Hold some foreign money up, and see what happens.’

Rain was falling so heavily that few people were on the streets. Oksana said it was typical Moscow weather for the time of year. I took a few pound notes from my wallet, stepped into the road, and wiggled them high. Within minutes a car skidded to a stop. The cash was taken, we climbed in, and off we went, enough currency for the driver to deliver George and Oksana to their homes, and me to the hotel.

From the window of my room I watched streaks of blue lightning tearing holes in the paperbag sky. Thunder rolled around the squares and boulevards as if Kremlin guns were celebrating another town taken from the Germans.

Sunday, 3 September

A pleasant time touring the town with Oksana’s daughter, who has the good looks of a Persian princess. We picnicked by the banks of the river, talking of many things.

Monday, 4 September

Grey street-cleaning wagons parked nose to tail, not an inch between, barricaded the road so that those going into the Writers’ Union to pay their respects would not be disturbed. Inside, ushers with black armbands slashed with red pointed me to the visitors’ book so that I could leave my simple message of condolence before following the file into the main hall where the dead writer lay. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ played through loudspeakers.

Ehrenberg was receiving honours that might have been more muted had Stalin been alive. He was born in 1891, into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Kiev. Because of his youthful revolutionary activities he had to leave Russia, and lived in Paris until the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917. Four years later he left again, and only went back when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. During the war — the Great Patriotic War — he put his journalistic skills into encouraging hatred of Nazi Germany.

His articles made him popular with the soldiers of the Red Army, and later kept him safe from Stalin. Always a writer of independent views, his novel A Prayer for Russia (1921) described the miseries of Bolshevik rule, while Julio Jurenito (1922) dealt with the dislike of intellectuals in both capitalist society and over-disciplined communism.

His loyalty to the Soviet regime was always conditional. People and Life, his last book, gave a true account of the opinions of Russian and Western writers during the 1920s and 1930s. He had always done his best to steer a humane course through dangerous times, and was in the vanguard of liberalisation after Stalin’s death in 1952. So it was obvious that none of the crowd endeavouring to pay their respects held it against him for managing to stay out of the tyrant’s clutches.

The face in the coffin, surrounded by flowers as white as snow, didn’t appear fully dead, as if he might impetuously sit up and wonder what was going on. Some who looked at his corpse seemed in a state of shock, as if not knowing what would happen in society now that he was dead, their sideways expressions followed by a glance at the huge framed photograph suspended above — before they drifted on.

Officials from Czechoslovakia said their tributes, then Montague, the delegate from Great Britain, gave a short speech. I had been asked to, but preferred to be an anonymous mourner. A man from France commented on Ehrenberg’s years in Paris, and mentioned the prejudice he had always faced because of being Jewish.

At the Novodyevichi Cemetery Oksana realised she had forgotten our passes for the graveside ceremony. Not wanting her to be upset at the mistake I told her it would be far more interesting to stay with the crowd held at barriers across the road by the entrance. Lorries of standing people cruised by, the sides crêped with red and black banners, while all the windows of neighbouring flats had their silent spectators.

Young soldiers linked arms to prevent a rush for the gate, until shouts from the crowd deepened in tone, as if they could be angry now that the rain had stopped. With their wreaths and flowers they were tired of being kept in place, and determined to show their will this time. A sudden unrehearsed surge took them forward, and the line was broken. They ran across the space and scuffled with the militia as the coffin was going through, and I was pleased that scores made their way in behind.

Tuesday, 5 Septenber

After talking to people from Intourist about how much I was enjoying my holiday in the USSR, George took me to a showing of Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. I had been interested in his work since seeing The Fate of a Man, based on a story by Sholokhov, which I came across in a Tangier cinema. Though subtitled and hardly a good print it was obviously a great film. A Red Army soldier is knocked out in battle, and before he can recover his senses and flee he is taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war many such returning men were packed off to camps in Siberia, though this soldier escapes at least that fate. Bondarchuk’s handling of someone who was regarded almost as a traitor for having, apparently, surrendered to the enemy, was humane and understanding.

Back in Russia the soldier wanders about the country trying to make sense of what has happened to him. There’s a hint of some kind of future when he befriends an obviously abandoned child found pottering around in the squalor. He extends a hand to the orphan — no words necessary — and takes him away, presumably to bring him up.

The film wasn’t much liked by the authorities, though it had after all been made. Some didn’t agree with my unqualified praise when talking about it, and I did not know enough Russian to ask an ordinary man in the street what he thought of it, but felt sure he would have been sympathetic to the soldier’s plight.

Wednesday, 6 September

A young woman from Intourist, Irena, who was to be my companion and guide, took me to an office where we booked seats on the train for Vladimir, 200 kilometres to the east. After nearly a week in Moscow I was glad to spend a couple of days somewhere else.

The carriage was comfortable, with seating of similar style to those in an aircraft, though more spacious, and the electrified line gave a smooth ride. Shortly after departure, when a man leaned across the gangway and enquired if I was an Estonian, I recalled the old woman in Novgorod who had asked the same. This time also I had to say no.

When pressed as to why the man thought so he merely said I looked like one, and went back to his newspaper. Could it be there was Estonian blood in me from way back? Perhaps some ancestral member of a Baltic Brotherhood had in olden days been shipwrecked at the mouth of the Humber and, losing his bearings from anguish and homesickness had, instead of making northeast, staggered along the banks of the Trent to Nottingham. If so, the thinning blood of his berserker spirit must have been much watered down by intermarrying with the civilised English — though it wasn’t a likely story.

Telling Irena about my motor travels in the summer she was preternaturally interested in the crossing of Transylvania, because of its association with vampires. What did I know about them?

‘Nothing. I never met one. I was wearing a bulb of garlic around my neck, so they left me alone!’

‘Vampirism is a perversion,’ she informed me, and I wondered whether she was referring to the sexual proclivities of the bat itself, or using the word to indicate a psychological or psychopathic condition. If the latter, perhaps the reason people became vampirish had to do with the deprivation of milk at the mother’s breast during the first months of life.

It was hard to know how I’d picked up such assumptions, but I went on to say that some children are emotionally underdeveloped, and unable to become normal on growing up, for quite mysterious reasons, which results in them taking on the protection of a ‘Vampire complex’. On the other hand it could be that those who show serious symptoms of underdevelopment one day, and alarming maturity the next (for I suppose there must be such people) turn into writers and artists.

This supposition brought a strange expression on to her pale and rounded face, but what more could I think of to amuse or horrify her — and pass the time? On more solid ground I told her about the 1930s film with Bela Lugosi, Vampire Bat which I’d seen at eleven.

‘As a child?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could someone so young be permitted to see it?’

‘We just lied to the doorman that we were fourteen, and held out our money.’ I then set her cheeks aglow by relating the plot of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, which may have been treading on very unSoviet ground, though I couldn’t be sure, because the topic kept us talking to the end of our journey.

There were many churches and monasteries in Vladimir, most with views of the surrounding plain. The Gothic and baroque ecclesiastical monuments of Spain had usually brought on a feeling of wariness and even dread, but in Russia the graceful curves and domes of grandiose buildings calmed and enchanted. In gold, blue, white and green, they were invariably set in spectacular situations, and the holy Russian architecture of Vladimir matched if it did not exceed that of Kiev, Novgorod and Zagorsk.

Clusters of evening lights on the plain were like islands on a dark sea. Though train whistles and the hooters of shunting diesels sounded all night, and a noisy open-air dancing place close to one of the nearby cathedrals pumped away, I nevertheless slept long and well, agreeably woken by the cloth-footed musical bells of Old Russia.

Thursday, 7 September

Behind a cluster of church domes bushes of grey smoke from a factory chimney flattened along the underbelly of the sky. Vladimir was also an industrial city.

On the chilly morning below slowly whitening clouds we went forty kilometres by Intourist car to Suzdal. The Cathedral of the Nativity inside the Kremlin walls was built in 1528, but not being a student of churches I walked by the wonders quickly, a glance at icons and other details in passing, and hoping something would stay in the mind. It rarely did. I wanted vistas rather than close-up work.

Outside the Pokrovsky Convent a bow-legged black cockerel strutted like a formidable bulldog, so fiercely jealous of its territory that even a cat ran away in terror. We explored churches and monasteries at Bogolyubovo and Pokrov-on-the-Neri, till my eyes were almost blinded by the dazzle of so many icons.

The past closed itself off, so that all senses could as firmly as possible take in the present. I relished not feeling any responsibility for either past or present, for myself or others. On mentioning the mood to Irena she declared that it was against life to be that way. It was self-indulgence, she said, and would have to be atoned for when back in the real world. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I admitted, though dazzled more and more by such aesthetic products of the art of painting, but knowing that if I did have to pay for how I felt at the moment it would be by writing, in which the novelty of invented people would be my judges and hear me out.

With so many masterpieces of Byzantine architecture it became impossible to separate one church from another, in spite of taking notes, and I didn’t seem capable of wielding a camera any more. From the main highway we followed a lane between wooden houses, and went under a railway bridge to a gently humped pasture where a few dozen cows grazed. Tracks multiplied, so we drove over open fields towards a small white church standing before a line of dark woods.

We left the car by a copse of birch trees, and from the opposite side of a broad lake the entire reflection of a white church shimmered in the water. Nearby, behind another church, a one-storey building had been divided into apartments. ‘For architectural students to stay in the summer,’ Irena said.

An elderly kerchiefed woman looking after a boy playing with a large ginger cat (its ears seriously lopsided) was the caretaker. Cats have as much personality as people, and who can say why, unless it’s the way they look at us, or as we perceive them. The boy turned the animal this way and that in his arms, and the cat, endeavouring to settle on the direction it was required to look, while disconcerted by an anxiety it could well have done without, was only waiting for a lack of alertness on the boy’s part to leap away to the woods, till hunger struck and it had to come home.

Friday, 8 September

On the 07.50 train back to Moscow I made up a story for Irena, which was what she may have expected from a writer, of two foreign couples who planned a joint visit to Vladimir. At the last moment the wife of one man didn’t feel like leaving Moscow, and the husband of the other couple also decided to stay behind. Thus the pair who went became familiar with each other on the train, an intimacy that intensified in their romantic strolls from one church to another. ‘What about the couple left behind?’ Irena asked. ‘Did something similar happen to them?’

‘Not much. That’s the main part of the story, though I suppose something could be made to happen.’ She finally thought the plot too mechanical, and so did I, though most plots have to be, I said, which is why I can’t always be bothered with them, certainly not the most obvious ones. ‘I shan’t write it, in any case.’

Taking the Metro, I was soon back at the hotel. In my room the telephone rang, and an interview was set up. A few minutes later it sounded again, and I was asked to do another. Magazines and publishers wanted to see me. Should I be flattered, or tell them to get lost? Unable to decide one way or the other, but knowing it was unrealistic to imagine I could come to Russia and not be asked to do such chores, I agreed to what was possible in the time available. To spend the days alone was much desired, but what would I have done beyond some unprofitable walking? So I decided to accept whatever was wanted with as good a grace as could be mustered.

On being wakened from an afternoon sleep, by a photographer requesting pictures of me in Red Square for the Moscow News, I went out to meet her.

She was young, with a perfectly shaped pretty face in that doll-like pink cheeked Russian way, and tried her charms on a well-scarfed grandmother and her two charges into cosily posing by my side. Was I to pick the kids up and give them a kiss? Or splodge one on the old woman? The children were well enough dressed to belong to a wealthy official family, and looked at me as dourly as did the woman, who said something to the girl which I imagined to be the Russian equivalent of fuck off.

I didn’t blame her, and drew the line at the experiment anyway, but the girl wasn’t discouraged, and suggested a shot of me eating an ice cream. I told her I wasn’t hungry, and that I would only be photographed without such accompaniments, recalling a cameraman from a London newspaper who, asking me to ride into an Arab market in Tangier on a donkey, got an abusive refusal.

I was more annoyed with my nonco-operation than at the girl’s request, so kept my sense of humour and, not wanting her to get into trouble with her editor, knowing she had a living to make, and was ambitious (though I didn’t see what she would get out of her appointment with me) I agreed to have photographs taken against the background of Lenin’s tomb.

I was later telephoned by someone from Novy Mir magazine asking if I would give a lecture on modern writing at the university-style Gorki Institute of Literature, a prestigious training ground for young Soviet writers. That sort of thing was what I had been waiting for, and though I was by now somewhat fed up with so many requests, I tried not to sound too abrupt on agreeing to do it.

So instead of walking the streets as intended it was necessary to sit at my desk, while smoking a cigar and waiting to hear from George, and make notes on what to talk about.

Many young Russians had hinted about the lack of freedom in intellectual matters. They had little faith in the messages put out by their newspapers and journals, and imagined publications from the West to be far more free and interesting. The only newspaper available in English was the communist Daily Worker, and though it was often far less rigid when it came to the party line, they didn’t trust that, either.

They also distrusted critics and academics who told them what it was healthy under the system to believe. Translated novels by foreign writers always had an introduction telling them how to interpret what they were about to read. The hatches of censorship seemed more onerous than I had thought they were in the summer. Yet the young, always hopeful, only wanted their country to allow greater freedom in the arts and humanities, assuming that when this came about real civilisation would exist.

I had mentioned to various editors the case of Daniel and Sinyavsky, as well as that of the student who had received three years in prison for organising a demonstration, but had no success in drawing them out.

In my luggage were books by myself and other writers, to give away, yet I couldn’t help wondering why the authorities were so tightfisted in not buying them for their students, and other members of the public. I supposed they didn’t want their readers to become influenced by liberal ideas but also, if such books were imported, they were afraid of the murderous rush to get at them in the shops.

At dinner in the Writers’ Union George introduced me to the poet Alexei Zaurikh, with the words: ‘Meet a famous foreign writer.’

We’d drunk a good deal, and Zaurikh exclaimed: ‘Hey, he can’t be a foreign writer. He looks just like one of us, who belong to the Moscow hooligans.’ As he came forward to give the usual bear hug George said: ‘No, he’s not. He’s one of the Nottingham hooligans,’ at which everyone, including me, had a good laugh, and went back to the bottle.

Saturday, 9 September

I had always thought that aspiring writers would be much better off teaching themselves by trial and error, if need be, rather than listening to professors and already successful authors telling them how it should be done, and yet here I was, about to do the same.

I was shown on to a dais, wondering what those hundreds of young people expected me to say on opening my mouth. Two officials of the establishment bracketed me, and since I also wore a tie I didn’t suppose the audience of mostly students thought there was much to choose between us, and that I would bring out the same old party line. I was expected to sit but preferred to stand, at which a flunky immediately levered the microphone to my level.

After the usual hesitations I launched into what I was clearly not expected to mention, to the obvious unease of the dean and his sidekick. How much the audience understood was hard to say, though I’d been told that many would know English.

After taking a few minutes to inform them of my origins and how I became a writer — establishing my ‘working-class’ credentials, though on this occasion I decided not to be bashful about that — I went on to say that writers should have the freedom to write what they felt inspired to say, in other words whatever they liked. It was futile and certainly unnecessary to clothe them in straitjacket theories of social realism. Demanding literature of that or any kind was a barrier to creativity. A writer should be left to develop his own personal idiosyncratic style, and tackle any subject that came to mind, without having to consider what an audience might want. Complete liberty in these matters would eventually give birth to a literature that in the end would be of more value, and even more patriotic, if you like, but certainly more credit to his country than if any obstacles had been placed in his way.

Young writers should be permitted to experiment with form and style if they wanted, and have a chance at least of getting published. If the worst came to the worst, and no editor wanted it — as often happens of course in the West, where my work went around for ten years before anything was taken — he can always put it away for a year or two, and wait his chance, meanwhile writing something else. But whatever transpired he should keep on writing, and hope that one day he would get into print somehow. Did not the great Tolstoy say to Maxim Gorki (who would surely have agreed with what I am saying) ‘Don’t let anyone influence you, fear no one, and then you’ll be all right’?

Before going on to mention the writer’s justifiable dissatisfaction with any forms of censorship I said something about theatrical and cinematic censorship in England. I told them of the fight with the British Board of Film Censors, when Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson had been forced to show them every draft of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. We had been compelled to make amendments through every turn of the script, which were unjustified and unnecessary, but there had been no other way to get the films made.

Such information now seemed to be received with approval by the men at my side, who no doubt told themselves what else could you expect in the capitalist West? But then I went onto the offensive on censorship in all countries, including the one in which I was speaking. Having asked me to talk during my pre-paid hard-currency holiday they could hardly hold it against me for not talking like a specially invited all-found guest.

What I want for myself, I informed them, I not unnaturally desire for all writers everywhere. We must stand united in that if nothing else. In conclusion I praised the poems of Andrei Voznesensky, since he was in trouble with the authorities at the moment.

I wasn’t disappointed by the decibels of applause at the end. George gave his usual louche wink, and discreet thumbs up, which was good enough for me as we went out. He later said that my speech had been much appreciated, and that the gist of it was all over Moscow by evening — among those to whom it mattered.

Sunday, 10 September

On my way to visit a Russian family, whose address had been given me in London, I turned a corner and saw a man, wearing a blanketlike overcoat — his fur hat nearby — spreadeagled between the pavement and the gutter. Deader than a dead man could ever have looked, he might have hit the deck from twenty floors up, and landed in such a posture that had he performed a similar collapse of all faculties in a ballet at the Bolshoi the whole audience would have been on their feet in a fever of applause and appreciation. As it was he had merely taken refuge in a little death from the too great strain of modern life — unless it was only to soothe the turbulence of his soul as in the old days.

In other words, he was blind drunk, and to go by his features he was one of the sub-proletariat. I could only say good luck to him in his blacked-out condition. In tsarist times he would have been thought of by the intelligentsia as one of the ‘dark people’ they were trying to save, though I supposed there to be marginally less of such nowadays, and that whoever fitted into that category had a love-hate relationship with the Soviet system — love because of indisputable benefits, and hate for having been dragged into an existence of stricter discipline. I assumed he would totter off sooner or later, and went on my way.

Walking up the steps to the flat I found the correct nameplate and rang the bell. After some wait I buzzed whoever was inside several more times. The block was cleanly kept, with no sign of broken bottles.

No one was in, the place so quiet I didn’t think there could be anyone in the other flats either. They were all out for the weekend maybe, or the people I had come to see thought it unwise to open the door and receive the small gift in my haversack I had been asked to deliver.

On my way back to the centre of town, annoyed at not having accomplished my mission, I saw that the drunken man was no longer where he had been, though the curving river of urine still mapped the pavement. The militia must have bundled him into a van and taken him away for deintoxication which, I had been told, was the usual procedure.

Moscow wasn’t built to a scale for walking, like Paris, London, or Madrid. On the other hand a unique and efficient Metro served all areas. The grand and sombre city impressed rather than welcomed, and it was easier to give oneself up to it more than feel much affection. I supposed it inspired loyalty and even love for those who lived there and had overcome its sense of intimidation, and their own insignificance. St Isaac’s Cathedral in the distance would have seemed more pleasant to reach if the space in front of me was covered by a maze of streets.

I went with Oksana to a peasant market near the Moscow River, where people with string bags and briefcases were scooping up much that was on offer. I wanted to buy a couple of Orenburg shawls for Ruth which were made from goat’s hair, said to be so fine they could be drawn through the space of a wedding ring. The woman with battered teeth showed how this could be done, then wrapped them up as if not too happy to let them go. We left her trying to get the ring back on her finger.

Oksana wondered if I wanted any souvenirs to take home, but I said I already had enough matrioshka dolls to cover a table. Back in Red Square she asked if I would like to go inside Lenin’s tomb. ‘Everyone does.’

‘Look at that long queue, though. I wouldn’t get in till tomorrow.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you can walk in straightaway, as a special guest.’

I didn’t care to see the embalmed Lenin. What could his body mean to me? He was dead already, wasn’t he? ‘Perhaps we’ll see it some other time,’ I said, to her disappointment, as if she might have liked another look at it.

Monday, 11 September

Russia is a difficult country if you don’t speak the language, or want to send a telegram, or travel on the Underground, or dine at a place where the menu is printed or written by hand only in Cyrillic, but no problems are insurmountable, or so I supposed when, to save time, I went alone to draw 500 roubles from my savings.

The huge building housing the bank was on Gorki Street, and the more I looked at its palatial structure the less sure was I of being able to make the transaction. Dozens of counters in the grand though somewhat intimidating hall were each for a different sort of business, and I walked behind people filling in forms trying not to appear as if casing the place for a robbery, looking at my passbook in the hope of finding a word corresponding to one above a particular counter. I felt foolishly conspicuous, though no one took any notice. The atmosphere was stuffy and hot, and I had to be back at the hotel soon and meet George, who would take me to explore the Kolomenskoye district.

Coming to what seemed a possible place, I was told to fill in a white form from a pile by the opening. Setting my briefcase down, and pulling out my fountain pen, I inscribed name, address, serial number of bankbook, the date of issue, and the amount to be extracted, then sent the completed form through the pigeonhole to the woman clerk. I stood by to await results.

Such simple business should have been as easy as in any other country, but I was wrong. She eased the book back, jabbed her finger at the form on top of my passport, and said something I didn’t understand. She smiled at least, pointed further along the hall, and went back to shifting her beads from side to side of an abacus frame.

I guided my briefcase to the next guichet with my feet, and was given a blue form from the pile and told to fill in that as well. The last place must have been for depositing money, and now I was at the right one. Sweating with concentration I picked out the salient words, and did a tolerable job on that chit also, even managing my name in Russian script under the English version. Proud of my accomplishment I wondered whether it shouldn’t have been written above, a minor infringement, but it might have been sufficient reason for the woman banishing me to another position. Too late now. I handed the form through as if giving my first novel to a publisher, because back it came, I didn’t know why but, keeping the two forms in my hand I went to the next place along, by now fully engrossed in their dour game of ‘pass the tourist’. A woman with a briefcase and shopping bag stood before me and, without my asking, paused from filling in her own form and handed me another to complete. I set to work, weary from having to deal with so much bullshit, and hoping that matters would now accelerate.

A hopeful sign was that actual money was being counted for the woman in front. Meanwhile I wondered about her status or profession, but didn’t get many clues before she went away. Grateful that she did so without taking time to check her cash, I pushed the blue form, plus the others filled in, as well as my bankbook, passport, and driving licence for good measure across the wood.

A motherly figure, wearing steel spectacles, her grey hair in a bun — much like the other women clerks — she flattened the bankbook, after a glance at my passport, fingered through a file box to her left, and lifted out a card which must have had my details on it. She stamped other entries in the book, which I later discovered took care of interest. I admitted to myself that things were now going well. ‘I’ve read your novel,’ she said. ‘How much money would you like to take out?’

I had written the amount three times, but supposed she wanted a chat during her monotonous work. I wedged the money into my wallet and wished her farewell. Worn out, though the day had hardly begun, I went off to find George.

I was asked to lunch by an American from the Associated Press who, having his ear sufficiently to the ground, had heard something of what I had said in my lecture, so wanted to interview me. He was good at his job, and knowledgeable about goings-on in Moscow. We talked awhile, correctly assuming that I needed him as much as he needed me.

In any case I invariably got on well with Americans, being old enough to appreciate what their nation had done for the rest of us during the Second World War. It was true of course that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the fighting, but I had never, as with the majority of other left-wing people, uttered the infantile cry of ‘Yanks Go Home’.

Over the excellent meal he asked if I agreed with Graham Greene, who recently said that royalties from his books, which could not be taken out of Russia, should be given to Daniel and Sinyavsky who were now in prison, and their works banned.

I recalled that before leaving London the BBC Russian service asked me to say a few words about the matter, but I turned them down knowing I would shortly be able to make my views known on native ground. At the same time I wondered why no one from the BBC had phoned me a few years before to talk about Christopher Logue and Bertrand Russell who had also been sent to prison for their beliefs.

I had no hesitation in telling the American that I would be only too glad to donate whatever was available of my royalties to the two writers behind bars for the wrong reasons, and hoped they would soon be released. As we ate and drank I came out with much more, but nothing I didn’t want to be recorded.

Tuesday, 12 September

An article in the Daily Worker gave an undistorted account of what I had said to the American. This was much to its credit. Other Western newspapers carried reports, but they didn’t concern the authorities since they weren’t on sale for people to read.

The Daily Worker was a different matter, and from then I was pestered — there’s no other word for it — to write an article for Pravda: only a short one. ‘Just say something about not believing in what you said, or that you were misquoted, or your words were maliciously taken out of context, or even that you hadn’t said such things at all.’

I played innocent and naïve, as if not knowing what they were getting at, and denied nothing. I was my own man. I was on holiday.

Wednesday, 13 September

In the evening I was invited for drinks at Valentina Ivasheva’s. We toasted Russia — as who would not? — Uncle Dima joining in with a smile hard to describe, though he was no fool, and knew what I had done. Valentina gave a few leery and almost pleading looks, but maybe she was afraid to tax me directly in case I showed my true proletarian colours and broke a few bottles in the vestibule on leaving. I knew what was troubling her, but had no intention of getting into a discussion.

Later, at Tanya Kudraevzeva’s — who worked for Foreign Literature Magazine — I got on well with the young people, all of us relishing the food and drink of the party. One or two who realised I would be leaving for London in the morning still badgered me to recant.

About midnight I stood in a group by the lift door waiting to go down to street level, and though more people could fit comfortably inside, a young writer was pushed in so that we two could descend together. When the door closed he said: ‘Please don’t deny anything in the article about Daniel and Sinyavsky.’

I patted him on the shoulder. We may have been slightly drunk, and I was surprised he felt the need to ask. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Nobody will get anything out of me.’

Thursday, 14 September

Even at the airport terminal Oksana wanted me to hurry off a short piece before boarding the plane. It was obvious why we had arrived an hour or so early. I looked sorry at disappointing her, and said I couldn’t.

When the plane lifted from the runway the prospect of getting home and resuming work on my novel A Tree on Fire began to absorb me, so the problems of Russia could be forgotten for a while. At the same time I was both happy and sad for a country that had so many good people in it, and wondered when I would be able to go there again.