The Hotel Years

28. The Czarist Émigrés

Long before we thought of visiting the new Russia, the old one came to us. The émigrés brought with them the wild aroma of their homeland, of dispossession, of blood and poverty, of their singular romantic destiny. It suited our clichéd European notions of Russians that they had experienced such things, that they found themselves expelled from their warm hearths, were aimless wanderers through the world, were derailed. We were armed with the old literary formula reflexively applied for every transgression and excess: “the Russian soul”. Europe was familiar with music-hall Cossacks, the operatic excesses of Russian peasant weddings, Russian singers and their balalaikas. It never understood (not even after the Russians turned up on our doorstep) how French romanciers—the most conservative in the world — and sentimental Dostoyevsky readers had deformed the Russian to a kitschy figure compounded of divinity and bestiality, alcohol and philosophy, samovar cosiness and the barren steppes of Asia. As for the Russian woman! A kind of human animal endowed with remorse and adulterous passion, wasteful and rebellious, a writer’s wife and a bomb-maker. The longer the emigration went on, the more our Russians resembled the notion we had of them. They flattered us by assimilating themselves to it. Their feeling of playing a part maybe soothed their misery. They bore it more easily once it was appreciated as literature. The Russian count as Paris cabbie takes his fares straight into a storybook. His fate itself may be ghastly. But it is at least literary.

The anonymous life of the émigrés became a public production. And then they began to make an exhibition of themselves. Hundreds of them founded theatres, choirs, dance groups, balalaika orchestras. For two years they were all new, authentic, stupefying. After a while they became boring and redundant. They lost their connection to their native soil. They grew ever further away from Russia — and Russia from them. Europe had heard of Meyerhold — meanwhile they were still retailing Stanislavsky. The “blue birds” started to sing in French, English and German. Finally they flew to America and started to moult.

The émigrés saw themselves as the only rightful representatives of Russia. What grew to significance in Russia following the Revolution was decried as “un-Russian” or “Jewish” or “cosmopolitan”. Europe had long since got used to seeing Lenin as a representative of Russia. The émigrés were back with Nicholas II. They clung to the past with moving fealty, but they transgressed against history. And they took away from their own tragedy as well.

Oh, but they had to live. That’s why they appeared in staged Cossack gallops in the Paris Hippodrome with alien horses, dressed with crooked Turkish scimitars that they bought at the fair in Clignancourt, took empty bandoliers and blunt daggers out in Montmartre, stuffed catskin bearskins on their heads and inspired awe as Don chieftains outside the doors of tacky establishments, even if they had been born in Volhynia. Some erased their trails with stateless Nansen passports and became archdukes. No one cared anyway. They were all equally good at plucking their homesickness and their melancholy on their balalaikas, putting on red morocco leather boots with silver spurs and spinning round on one heel kicking up their legs. I saw a duchess performing a Russian wedding in a Parisian variété. She was the blushing bride; night-watchmen from the Rue Pigalle, dressed as boyars, stood either side, ranked like flowerpots; a cardboard cathedral sparkled in the background; from it emerged the priest with a candy-floss beard; glass jewels shone in the Russian sun, which emerged from a spotlight; and the band dribbled the song of the Volga into the hearts of the audience from pizzicato violins. The other noblewomen were played by waitresses in various bars, notepads hung from Tula silver chains on their aprons. Their heads sat proudly atop their necks, models of rigid émigré tragedy.

Others, broken, sat slumped on the benches of the Tuileries, the Jardins du Luxembourg, the Viennese Prater, the Berlin Tiergarten, the banks of the Danube in Budapest, and the cafés of Constantinople. They were in touch with the reactionaries of their respective host nations. They sat there and mourned their fallen sons and daughters, their missing wives — but also the gold watch, a present from Alexander III. Many had left Russia because they couldn’t stand “the wretchedness of the country” any more. I know Russian Jews expropriated only a few years before by Denikin and Petljura, who now hate nothing in the world so much as Trotsky, who hasn’t lifted a finger to hurt them. They want the return of their false baptismal certificate with which they once humbly, unworthily sneaked their way into the great forbidden Russian cities.

In the little hotel in the Quartier Latin where I stayed, lived one of the well-known Russian “counts”, along with his father, wife, children and a “bonne”. The old count was still the genuine article. He heated his soup on a spirit burner, and even though I knew him to be a leading anti-Semite and a figure in the exploitation of the peasantry, there was still something moving about him. He would crawl shivering through the damp evenings of autumn, a symbol, no longer a human being, a leaf, dissevered from the tree of life. But his son, brought up abroad, elegantly clad by Parisian tailors, kept by better-off noblemen — the difference! In the telephone exchange he conferred with former life guards, sent birthday greetings to genuine and fake Romanovs, and left kitschy pink billets-doux in the mailboxes of ladies staying in the hotel. He drove to czarist congresses, and he lived like a little émigré god in France. Soothsayers, priests, fortune tellers and theosophists beat a path to his door, all those who knew what the future held for Russia, namely the return of Catherine the Great and the troika, bear-hunts and katorga, Rasputin and the serf system.

They all lost their way. They lost their Russianness and their nobility. And because that was all they had ever been — Russian noblemen — they lost everything. They fell out of the bottom of their own tragedy. The great drama was left without heroes. History bitterly and implacably took its course. Our eyes grew tired of watching a misery they had revelled in. We stood before the last of them, the ones that couldn’t understand their own catastrophe, we knew more about them than they could tell us, and arm in arm with Time, at once cruel and sad, we left these lost souls behind.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1926

29. The Border at Niegoreloye

The border at Niegoreloye is a large wood-panelled room we all have to pass through. Kindly porters have fetched our luggage off the train. The night is very dark, it’s cold, and it’s raining. That’s why the porters seemed so kindly. With their white aprons and their strong arms, they came to our aid, when we visitors encountered the frontier. An authorized official had taken my passport off me in the train, leaving me with no identity. So, myself and not myself, I crossed the frontier. I might have been mixed up with any other traveller. Later, though, it transpired that the Russian customs inspectors were incapable of any confusion. More intelligent than their colleagues in the service of other nations, they already knew the purpose of my visit.

We were expected. Warm yellow electric lights had been lit in the wood-panelled hall. At the desk where the chief inspector sat, there burned — like a friendly greeting from other times — a smiling oil-lamp. The clock on the wall showed the Eastern European time. The travellers, in their eagerness to get where they were going, promptly adjusted their watches. It wasn’t ten any more, it was eleven. Our train was leaving at midnight.

We were few, but our suitcases were many. Most of them belonged to a diplomat. According to international law, these remained untouched. As virginal as they had been when they left, they would also have to arrive. They contained so-called secrets of state. That didn’t mean that careful note couldn’t be made of each and every one of them. It took a long time. The most efficient inspectors had their hands full with the diplomat. And in the meantime, Eastern European time ticked on.

Outside, in the damp black night, the Russian train was being made ready. Russian locomotives don’t whistle, they howl like ship’s sirens, wide, cheerful and oceanic. Looking through the window and hearing the locomotive, you feel you are by the sea. The hall starts to feel cosy. Suitcases throw open their lids and spread out, as though they felt the heat. Wooden toys clamber out of the stout trunks of a merchant from Tehran, snakes and chickens and rocking horses. Little skipjacks rock from side to side on their lead-weighted bellies. Their bright ridiculous faces, garishly lit by the oil lamp, and darkened by the swift shadows of hands, come to life, change their expressions, laugh, grin and cry. The toys climb up on a set of kitchen scales, are weighed, tumble down onto the desk again, and wrap themselves in rustling crepe paper. The suitcase of a young, pretty and rather desperate woman yields lengths of coloured silk, pieces of a cut-up rainbow. There follows wool which breathes, expands, consciously inflates after so many days of an airless constricted existence. Slender grey shoes slip out of the newspaper designed to keep them hidden, page four of Le Matin. Gloves with ornamented cuffs climb out of a little coffin of cardboard. Underwear, handkerchiefs, evening gowns float up, all barely of a size to dress the hand of an inspector. All the playful accoutrements of a rich world, all the satiny, polished little riens lie there strange and trebly useless in this hard brown nocturnal hall, under the heavy oak beams, under the admonitory posters with jagged letters like sharpened hatchets, in the aroma of resin, leather and petrol. There are the trim and corpulent bottles of emerald green and amber yellow liquids, leather manicure sets open their wings like holy shrines, little ladies’ slippers sashay across the desk.

Never have I witnessed such a detailed inspection, not even in the years immediately after the War, in the golden age of inspectors. It seems this isn’t a border between one country and another, but one between one world and another. The proletarian customs inspector — the most expert in the world: how often he has had to conceal something himself and get away with it! — examines what are citizens of neutral and allied states, but people of an enemy class. They are traders and specialists, ambassadors of capital. They come to Russia, called by the state, but at war with the proletariat. The official knows that these merchants are here to sow order forms in the shops which will flower into wonderful, expensive, unaffordable wares. He checks first the faces and then the suitcases. He can tell the homecomers, despite their new Polish, Serbian or Persian passports.

Late at night, the travellers are still standing in the train corridor unable to get over the customs inspection. They tell each other everything, what they brought, what they paid, what they smuggled. Material there for long Russian winter evenings. Their grandchildren will have to listen to their stories.

The grandchildren will listen, and the strange, confusing aspect of our time will loom before them, time at its own frontiers, time with its perplexed children, with Red customs officials and White travellers, false Persians, Red Army types in long sand-coloured greatcoats, their hems brushing the ground, the damp night at Niegoreloye, the loud wheezing of heavily laden porters. No question, this frontier has a historic dimension. I feel it the moment the siren wails loud and hoarse, and we bob out into the dark, calm expanse ahead.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 September 1926

30. Down the Volga to Astrakhan

The Volga steamer that goes from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan lies at anchor white and festive, like a Sunday. A man shakes a small, surprisingly noisy bell. The porters come running through the wooden departure hall, dressed only in track suit bottoms and a leather carrying strap. They look like so many wrestlers. Hundreds of them stand by the counter. It’s nine o’clock on a bright morning. A happy wind is blowing. It feels as if a circus has just put up its tents outside the town.

The Volga steamer bears the name of a famous hero of the Revolution and has four classes of passenger. In the first are the new citizens of Russia, the NEP-men on their way to holidays in the Caucasus and the Crimean peninsula. They eat in the dining room, in the scrawny shade of a palm tree, facing the portrait of the famous hero of the Revolution, which is nailed up over the door. The young daughters of the comrades play on the harsh piano. It sounds like metal spoons being struck on glasses of tea. Their fathers play cards and complain about the government. A few of their mothers manifest a predilection for orange scarves. The waiter is not class-conscious. He was already a waiter back in the days when the steamers were named for archdukes. A tip brings so much submissiveness into his face, you forget the Revolution.

Fourth class is in the belly of the ship. Those passengers lug heavy bundles, rickety baskets, musical instruments and agricultural equipment. All nations, those on the Volga and beyond, are represented among them: Chuvaish, Chuvans, gypsies, Jews, Germans, Poles, Russians, Kazakhs, Kirghiz. There are Catholics here, Russian Orthodox, Muslims, Tibetans, heathens, Protestants. Here are old people, fathers, mothers, girls, infants. Here are small-farm workers, poor artisans, wandering musicians, blind buccaneers, travelling merchants, half-grown shoe-shine boys, and homeless children, so-called bezprizorniy who live off wretchedness and fresh air. They all sleep in wooden drawers, two storeys one above the other. They eat pumpkins, hunt for lice in the children’s hair, still their infants, wash nappies, brew tea, and play the balalaika and the mouth organ.

By day this narrow space is shamefully noisy and unfit for occupation. At night, though, a kind of respect blows through it. That’s how holy poverty looks sleeping. All the faces have on them the real pathos of naïveté. All the faces look like open gates through which one can see into clear white souls. Confused hands try to chase away the painful lights like so many pesky flies. Men bury their faces in the hair of their wives, farmers hug their flails, children their tawdry dolls. The lamps swing in time to the stamping engines. Red-cheeked girls smilingly show their white, strong teeth. A great peace is over the poor world, and man — asleep, anyway — suggests he is a thoroughly peace-loving creature.

But the separation on the Volga steamer is not the simple separation of rich and poor. Among the fourth-class passengers are rich farmers, among the first-class passengers are traders who aren’t invariably rich. The Russian farmer prefers fourth. It’s cheaper and that’s not all. A farmer feels more at home there. The Revolution may have freed him of deference towards the master, but not yet of respect for the object. The farmer cannot tuck into his pumpkin with gusto in a restaurant with a bad piano. For a few months, everyone travelled in all different classes. Then they went their own ways, almost willingly.

“You see,” an American said to me on the boat, “what has the Revolution achieved? The poor folks huddle in steerage, and the rich play cards on deck.”

“But that’s the only thing they can do without apprehension,” I replied. “The poorest shoe-shine boy in fourth class has the confidence he could come up and be among us if he wanted. The rich NEP-men are afraid of precisely that. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are not symbolic any more on this steamer, they are purely technical. Maybe they’ll be symbolic again in the future.”

“You reckon?” said the American.

The sky over the Volga is close and flat and painted with unmoving clouds. On either side, beyond the banks, you can see every single tree, every soaring bird, every grazing animal for miles and miles. A wood here has the effect of an artificial formation. Everything tends to spread out and to scatter. Villages, towns and peoples are far apart. Farms, huts, tents of nomadic people stand there, surrounded by isolation. The many tribes do not mix. Even the person who has settled somewhere remains on the move all his life. This earth gives the feeling of freedom that we ordinarily only get from air and water. If birds could walk here, they wouldn’t bother flying. Man skims over the land as if it were sky, cheerful and aimless, a bird of the earth.

The river is like the land: wide, endlessly long (it is over fifteen hundred miles from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan) and very slow. On its banks it takes a long time for the “Volga hills” to appear, little low cubes. Their bare rocky insides face the river. They are only there for the sake of variety, a playful caprice of God’s created them. Behind them the flat land goes on for ever, pushing the horizon further and further back into the steppe.

It sends its great breath out over the hills and the river. You can taste the bitterness of infinity on your tongue. In sight of great hills and shoreless seas you feel threatened and lost. Facing the great plains, man is lost but somehow comforted. He may be little more than a blade of grass, but he won’t go under: he is like a child waking up very early on a summer morning when everyone else is still asleep. You feel lost and at the same time privileged in the endless silence. When a fly buzzes, or a muffled pendulum gongs, it has the same effect of mingled sorrow and consolation as this endless plain.

We stop at villages built of wood and clay, roofed with straw and shingles. Sometimes the broad, motherly dome of a church sits in the middle of the huts, her children. Sometimes the church stands at the head of a long row of huts and has a thin, sharp, pointed tower like a four-sided French bayonet. It’s a church under arms, leading a wandering village.

Kazan, the Tartar capital, stands before us. Colourful noisy tents throng the shore. Open windows beckon like glass flags. We hear the drumming of its droshkies. We see the green and golden evening shimmer of its cupolas.

A road leads from the harbour to Kazan. The road is a stream, it rained yesterday. In the town quiet pools. Leftovers of plaster occasionally stick up into the air. The street signs and shop names are mud-spattered and illegible. Doubly illegible, because they are partly written in an old Turkic-Tartar script. The Tartars prefer to sit outside their shops and tell passers-by of their wares. They are canny traders, as is their reputation. They wear black brush chin beards. Since the Revolution, illiteracy has fallen by twenty-five per cent. Now many of them can read and write. The bookshops stock Tartar publications, the paper boys sell Tartar newspapers. Tartar officials sit behind post office counters. One official told me the Tartars were the bravest people there are. “But they’re mixed with Finns,” I countered maliciously. The official was offended. With the exception of pub landlords and traders, everyone is happy with the government. The Tartar farmers sided now with the Reds, now with the Whites. Often they didn’t understand what it was about. Today all the villages in Kazan province are politicized. Young people are members of various Komsomol organizations. As with most of the Muslim nationalities in Russia, religion is more a matter of habit than faith. The Revolution has disrupted a habit more than suppressed a need. The poor peasants here are happy as they are all over the Volga province. Having lost much, the rich farmers are as unhappy as they are everywhere else, as the Germans in Pokrovsk, or the farmers of Stalingrad and Saratov.

The Volga villages — with the exception of the German ones — supply the Party with its most enthusiastic young supporters. In the Volga districts, political enthusiasm comes more from the countryside than the urban proletariat. Many of the villages here were at a great remove from culture. The Chuvaish for instance are still secretly “heathen” today. They worship idols. For the naïve person grown up in a Volga village, communism is civilization. For the young Chuvaish the Red Army barracks in town is a palace, and the palace — into which he gains admission — is seven hundred heavens. Electricity, newspaper, wireless, book, ink, typewriter, cinema, theatre — all those things we find so wearisome, to the primitive person are refreshing and enlivening. All laid on by the Party. It not only put the masters in their places, it invented the telephone and the alphabet. It taught a man to be proud of his people, his smallness, even his poverty. Faced by the onrush of so many wonders, his instinctive peasant mistrust is vanquished. His critical sense is still a long way from being awakened. So he becomes a fanatic of this new faith. The “collectivist sense” that the peasant lacks he makes up for twice and threefold by simple ecstasy.

The towns on the Volga are the saddest I have ever seen. They remind me of the destroyed towns on the French front. The buildings burned in the Civil War; and then their ruins saw the White hunger galloping through the streets.

People died a hundred deaths, a thousand deaths. They ate cats, dogs, crows, rats and their own starving children. They bit themselves and drank the blood. They scratched the earth for fat earthworms and lumps of white chalk which looked to the eye like cheese. Two hours after they had eaten they died in torments. How could these towns even be alive still! How could people haggle and carry suitcases and sell apples and have children! Already a generation is growing up that does not know the Terror, already there are scaffoldings, with carpenters and masons busily building anew.

I am not surprised that these towns are only beautiful from a distance or from above; that in Samara a goat refused to let me enter my hotel; that a downpour drenched me in my room in Stalingrad; that the napkins are coloured packing paper. If only one could walk over the nice roofs instead of the bumpy cobbles.

In all of the Volga towns you come across the same things: the traders are unhappy, the workers are hopeful, but tired, the waiters respectful and unreliable, the porters humble, the shoeshine boys submissive. And everywhere young people are revolutionary — half the middle-class youth is enrolled in pioneer and Komsomol organizations.

People respond to the way I dress: if I put on a pair of top-boots and go without a tie, life suddenly becomes incredibly cheap. Fruit costs a few kopecks, a ride in a droshky half a rouble. I am taken for a foreign political refugee residing in Russia and they call me “comrade”. The waiters have proletarian consciousness and expect no tip, the shoeshine boys are happy with ten kopecks, the traders are happy with their lot, and in the post office the peasants ask me to address a letter for them, “with tidy writing”. But how expensive the world becomes when I put on a tie! I am addressed as “Grashdanin” (citizen) or sometimes, shyly, “Gospodin” (sir). The German beggars address me as “Herr Landsmann” (compatriot). The traders start to complain about the taxes. The conductor expects a rouble. The waiter in the dining car tells me he studied at trade school and is “a bit of an intellectual”. He proves it by charging me an extra twenty kopecks. An anti-Semite grumbles that the only people who did well out of the Revolution are the Jews. They were even allowed to live in Moscow now. He tells me he was an officer in the war, and had been taken prisoner in Magdeburg. A NEP-man threatens me: “Don’t think you’ll be able to see everything that goes on here.”

And it seems to me that I see just as much and just as little in Russia as I do anywhere else. I was never so generously, naturally invited by strangers as here. I am allowed to go into offices, law-courts, hospitals, schools, barracks, police stations, prisons, to police commanders and university professors. The middle classes are more loudly and forthrightly critical than is agreeable for a stranger. I can talk to Red Army privates and commanders in pubs about war, pacifism, literature and weaponry. In other countries this is more dangerous. The secret police are probably so discreet that I am not even aware of them.

The famous barge haulers on the Volga still go singing their famous song. In the Russian cabarets of the West, the “Burlaki” are portrayed with purple lighting and pizzicato violins. But the real Burlaki are sadder than their representatives can have any idea. Even though they are so burdened with traditional romance, their song slips deep and painfully into the hearer.

They may well be the strongest men alive. Every one of them can carry two hundred and forty kilogrammes on his back, snatch a hundred kilos off the ground, crush a nut between index and middle fingers, balance an oar on two fingers, eat three pumpkins in three-quarters of an hour. They look like bronze statues covered with human skin and given a carrying strap. They are relatively well paid, between four and six roubles. They are strong, healthy, they live on the river, free. But I have never seen them laugh. They have no capacity for joy. They drink. Alcohol does for these giants. Ever since freight has been carried on the Volga the strongest porters live here, and they all drink. Today more than 200 steamers and 1200 barges sail on the Volga, a total tonnage of almost 2 million. But the haulers still do the work of mechanical cranes just as they did two hundred years ago.

Their song doesn’t come from their throats, but from the unknown depths of their hearts where destiny and song are woven together. They sing like people sentenced to death. They sing like prisoners on the galleys. Never will a singer be free of his towing rope, or from alcohol. Work is a blessing! A man is a crane!

It’s rare to hear a whole song, only the odd verse, or a few bars. Music is a mechanical support, it works like a lever. There are songs you sing when you pull on a rope together, when you lift, when you unload, when you lower. The words are ancient and primitive. I have heard different words sung to the same tunes. Some of them are about a hard life, an easy death, a thousand pud, and girls and love. As soon as the load is lifted onto your back, the song is over. Then man is a crane.

I can’t go back to the glass piano and the card games. I leave the steamer. I am sitting on a tiny boat. Two burlaki beside me sleep gently on hawsers. In four or five days we will be in Astrakhan. The captain has sent his wife to bed. He is his own crew. Now he is preparing his shashlik. I expect it will be fatty and gristly, and I will have to share it with him.

Before I got off, the American drew a big arc with his index finger, pointing at the chalky, clayey soil and the sandy banks, and said:

“See all the raw materials lying here unused! What a beach this would be for invalids and people needing a rest! That sand! If only all this whole Volga were in some civilized part of the world!”

“If it was in some civilized part of the world, there would be factory chimneys, nippy motor boats, black cranes swinging back and forth, people would fall ill so that they could recover two miles away in the sand, and it wouldn’t be a desert. At a certain, hygienically determined distance from the cranes, there would be restaurants and cafés, with ozone terraces. Bands would play the song of the Volga, and there would be a dapper Volga Charleston, with words by Arthur Rebner and Fritz Grünbaum… ”

“Ah, Charleston,” cried my friend, and he cheered up.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 October 1926

31. The Wonders of Astrakhan

In Astrakhan people fish and deal in caviar. The smells of these activities are spread throughout the town. Whoever isn’t obliged to go to Astrakhan is advised to give it a miss. Whoever has come to Astrakhan will not stay there for very long. Among the specialities of this town are the famed Astrakhan furs: the lambskin hats, the silver-grey “Persian fur”. The furriers are kept busy. In summer and winter alike (winters are warm here too) Russians, Kalmucks and Kirghiz all wear fur.

I am told that before the Revolution rich people used to live in Astrakhan. I am shown their houses, though many were destroyed in the Civil War. From their ruins you can tell they were boastful and had no taste. Of all the qualities of a building, boastfulness survives longest, the least brick thumps itself on the chest. The builders have fled, they are living abroad. It stands to reason they will have dealt in caviar. But what possessed them to live here where (black, blue, white) caviar grows, and where the fishes stink so mercilessly?

In Astrakhan there is a little park with a pavilion in the middle and a rotunda in the corner. In the evening you pay a small fee and you go in the park and sniff the fish. It is dark, so you picture them dangling from the trees. There are cinema performances in the open air, and primitive cabaret likewise. The bands play cheerful tunes from old times. People drink beer and eat cheap pink langoustines. Not one hour passes in which one doesn’t pine for Baku. Unfortunately, the boat there goes only three times a week.

In order to lend plausibility to my dreams of the steamer, I go down to the harbour. No. 18 is the quay for the boat to Baku. The day after tomorrow. — My Lord, how remote is that! Kalmucks row, Kirghiz lead their camels on halters into town, caviar sellers shout in their offices, clueless peasants sleep out, two days and two nights, waiting for the boat, gypsies play cards. Because it is so evident that the steamship isn’t coming, the mood in the harbour is sadder than in town. To get a faint sense of departure I treat myself to a droshky ride. The seats are narrow and backless, perilous, no roof, and the horses are in white Ku Klux Klan robes against the dust — as if they were going to a three-day event. The cabbies speak hardly any Russian, and hate the cobbles. They go down sandy streets, seeing as the horse is dressed for it. The passenger, having got on in a dark suit, gets off in a silver one. If I had set off in a white one, it would be dove-grey now. To be dressed for Astrakhan means wearing long hooded dust coats, like the horses. In the dimly illuminated night you can see ghosts being driven around by ghostly horses.

And for all that, Astrakhan has a technical college, libraries, clubs and theatres. Ice cream under a swaying arc lamp, fruit and marzipan behind bridal gauze. I pray for an end to the dust plague. The next day God sent a cloudburst. The ceiling of my hotel room, pampered by so much dust, wind and drought, promptly fell to the floor with shock. I hadn’t asked for as much rain as all that. It thundered and lightened. The streets could not be made out. The droshkies groaned along, up to their axles in mud, the spokes dropped soft, grey, heavy clumps of it. The ghosts threw back their hoods and put up familiar human gear. Two couldn’t pass each other on the cobbled main street. One had to turn round and go back at least twenty feet to let the other pass. You triple-jumped to cross the street. I was lucky in that everything I needed was on one block: hotel, writing paper, post office, and café.

In those days in Astrakhan the most important institution was the café. It was run by a Polish family brought here from Cęstochowa by an implacable fate. I had to tell the women all about what they were wearing in Warsaw. I showed extensive knowledge of Polish politics. Doubts people in Astrakhan had about a war involving Poland, Russia and Germany I was able to allay at length. When I am in Astrakhan I am a witty conversationalist.

Without this café, I would have been unable to work, the most important means of production being coffee. There is no role for flies. And yet there they were, morning, noon and night. It is flies not fishes that make up ninety-eight per cent of the fauna of Astrakhan. They are perfectly useless, not a trading commodity, no one lives off them, they live off everyone. Thick black swarms of them sit on dishes, sugar, windows, china plates, leftovers, on bushes and trees, on dung heaps and excreta, and even on clean tablecloths where a human eye discerns nothing of nutritional value. A spilled drop of soup, long since absorbed into the cloth, these flies are capable of eating molecule by molecule, as though with a spoon. On the white tunics that most men here wear sit thousands of flies. Secure and contemplative, they don’t fly up when their host moves, they are capable of sitting for hours at a time on his shoulders. The flies of Astrakhan are nerveless, they have the tranquillity of great mammals, like cats, or their enemies from the insect world, the spiders… I am surprised and sad that these intelligent and humane creatures do not come to Astrakhan in numbers where they could be of great benefit to the human race. I have eight garden-spiders in my room, quiet, clever animals, friendly associates of my sleepless nights. By day they sleep in their apartments. At dusk they move into position — two, the most prominent and gifted, to the proximity of the light. Long and patiently they watch the clueless flies, with their fine, hair-thin legs they clamber up ropes spun from nothing and spittle, carry out repairs and stay on the alert, surround their quarry on wide, wide detours, deftly make themselves fast to grains of sand on the wall, work hard and cleverly — but how poorly they are recompensed. A thousand flies buzz about my room, I wish I had twenty thousand poisonous spiders, a whole army of them! If I stay longer in Astrakhan, I would breed them and show them more attention than caviar.

But the people of Astrakhan are only interested in caviar. They are oblivious to the flies. They watch these murderous insects gnaw at their meat, their bread, their fruit, and they don’t raise a finger. Yes, the flies stroll about on their beards, their noses and foreheads, and the people talk and laugh. In the café, they have given up the fight against the flies, they don’t even bother to shut the glass vitrine, they let them gorge themselves on sugar and chocolate, they veritably spoil them. Fly-paper, invented by an American, the thing I most detest among all civilization’s blessings, strikes me as a work of noble idealism when I am in Astrakhan. But the whole of Astrakhan has not one scrap of that precious yellow stuff. I ask them in the café: “Why don’t you have any fly-paper?” They answer evasively and say: “Oh, if only you’d been in Astrakhan before the war, even a couple of months before!” The landlord says it, and the trader. They lend passive support to the reactionary flies. One day these little beasts will eat up the whole of Astrakhan, fishes and caviar and all.

I prefer the beggars to the flies of Astrakhan, more numerous here than anywhere else. They wander slowly through the streets, wailing or singing at the tops of their voices, crying their woes as though following their own corpse, pouring into every beer hall. I give them a kopeck — and on that kopeck they manage to live! Of all the wonders of Astrakhan they are really the most astonishing…

Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 October 1926

32. Saint Petroleum

There is an electric railway from Baku to Sabunchi, where vast quantities of petroleum are extracted. It wasn’t built till last year, and is still unfinished. (The trams in Baku are also the work of the Soviet government.) The people are proud of this railway. The Soviet government views it as a local, but highly effective propaganda success. It seems likely that earlier enterprises extracted petroleum more cheaply and used it more efficiently than the present nationalized enterprise. But it is also true that neither the Nobels nor the Rothschilds ever built a tramline for their workforce. All of them were made to cover great distances on foot, in dog-carts, or on primitive farm wagons. Now a spacious, hygienic, modern train leaves Baku every half hour. The Western European is not surprised to see it. But to a Soviet citizen, this railway is not only an acclaimed, long-missed conveyance; it is almost, it is in fact, a symbol. It is the only railway of its kind in the whole of Russia. What to us would be an unsurprising technical innovation in this corner of Eurasia carries political weight. The line preserves and encourages the optimism of the oil workers, many of whom earn comparatively high wages (up to three hundred roubles a month), who have an old revolutionary tradition, and are therefore predisposed to believe in the new state. So rails and carriages, bricks and cement, are capable of political and historical significance. The old entrepreneurs seem not to have considered this as a possibility.

Long before the train moves off the carriages are all full. It’s hot, and a slothful wind seems for once to have taken the place of the prevailing breeze. The sun pierces the windows and heats up walls, floor and ceiling. All the passengers are complaining about the heat — a welcome pretext for conversation. I see Turkish workers with the Red Flag, many of them with Party badges — beside them Turkish women, ritually covered features, an old sheikh for whom people move aside, maybe not reverently but with that degree of tolerance that is not yet a matter of course, and resembles politeness. An Armenian priest is reading a book, a holy book I had thought; but not at all, it is one of the many brochures produced from the new camp. A vendor comes by with Oriental sweets, halvah and baklava, sticky, sugar-powdered, sometimes garish and yet bland things, chewing gum you gulp down if you can get it clear of your teeth. The homeless children or bezprizorniy hunker down on the steps, wangle their way through the feet of the passengers, are picked up, thrown out, and creep miraculously back in through cracks and openings. There are a lot of proles and semi-proles — all drawn by petroleum — it looks menacing, but it’s harmless and hungry. Many people have stunningly beautiful eyes, shining and still haunted. I think of the heavy, tired blink of the Armenian, the veiled, tragic expression of Jewish […] Turko-Tartars, the large moist pupils of the Muslim woman looking out between dense cloth wrappings like an animal between stout bars. The conductor begs to be let through. He wears a yellow tunic with tasteful badges, and looks like a British conductor in the colonies. This is a modern, technical Russia with American ambitions. Not a real Russia any more.

These towers suddenly popping up, black, dense, iron — these towers are no longer Russia. They are drilling towers, triumphs, symbols and revelations of the great power called petroleum; “nyeft” in Russian. The word expresses all the sweating fluidity of the substance. A historical sound and a historical sight. An atmosphere of capital, adventure, sensation and novelty. The greatest colonial power looks to these towers, and the greatest continental power holds on to them. This region alone produces at least half a million tonnes a day, the Caucasian earth is very liberal. Thousands of square miles are still unexplored and promising, volcanoes that issue fire signals every few months, betraying subterranean billions. (How barren and petty by comparison is the Galician soil of Drohobycz and Boryslav!) Give us money, money, money! chant the towers. We are ten thousand, twenty thousand — we want to be a hundred thousand, we want to be millions!

Outside Sabunchi’s little station is a blue-green lake, and beyond it a wild, shambolic, steep, treacherous, shitty, dusty path. It leads to the wells and into the town, up a small hill, with a church on its peak, lost, eccentric, puzzled, a feeble competitor to the towers, all alone among twenty thousand foes, cheek by jowl with the Soviet authorities. Left and right of the lake wait endless swarms of dusty droshkies. The coachmen stand upright like Roman charioteers, all of them shouting for custom. Around Sabunchi there are some quiet, distinguished dachas, or summerhouses. Sometimes — not often — a few passengers turn up to go out to the dachas. But there are a hundred times more “phaetons”. All the coachmen call out “Barin!” (Sir!) at once. Each one thinks twenty times a day the fare will choose him, and twenty times he is disappointed, and a thousand times he calls out. Here there are no probabilities, here a profession is a lottery. That’s what people are like: for the sake of tiny odds they will waste an entire day. Coachmen are gamblers.

The traders outside their sad Oriental booths shout themselves hoarse. Their quiet Oriental souls are agitated. Petroleum changes human nature. It ignites people even before it has left the ground. Here its aspect is more Asiatic than Russian. This is the gold-rush town from an American movie.

On the left is the market place. Extremely, preternaturally big green pumpkins litter the ground with their ovals and spheres. Fruits like a race of giants, the succulent diet of the people. Who eats so many pumpkins? More than twenty thousand workers live in Sabunchi; here are at least three times that number of pumpkins. These fruits of a lavish nature almost completely eclipse the grapes, the dates, the figs, the pears. There are a hundred stalls selling fruit, bread, meat, fat pigs, big, black-spotted, heavy, but nimble as dogs, pigs in a hurry: another whim of this southern nature. On the right, on the hilly ground are dwellings, sad, naked, reddish: they look flayed. The corridors are deep and black, the flats are open, the rooms give off a dull warmth, the dense aroma of a constricted life that is not unlike the smell of death. All round no horizon, only towers, towers, towers, black, cross-hatched, clustered together — as though they couldn’t stand unaided. They are so numerous and frail that they flicker and move. You turn away, oppressed by their grotesque numbers. When you turn back, it’s as though there were somehow more of them, they press and spawn and make more, they will eat up the big marketplace, the giant pumpkins, the mouldy, diseased houses.

The houses are temporary. The workers who live in them today will drift off to the settlements in a couple of years. For model working settlements are under construction in Azerbaijan. I go to look at one, not quite finished, already two-thirds inhabited. It’s called “Stenka Razin” after the Russian folk hero, the first farmer revolutionary who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, the lord of the Volga delta and the Caspian Sea, still revered today by the people with a tender affection that is far removed from hero-worship.

A deep gorge cuts through a mountain; people tell me it opens onto the sea. Stenka Razin dug it. Here he hid his stolen goods, from here he could run away. In the workers’ settlement there will be a monument to him, in the middle of a lawn: he never dreamed it would come to that. An alien doctrine adopted him after the fact. It would have struck him as odd. But it’s well-intentioned, and maybe he’d have come round to it. There is a playground for children, a club, a theatre, a cinema, a library. The buildings are ground level. Later they will grow up to be bungalows, because that’s the cheapest way. Moscow architects have devised more than a score of styles. Animatedness, difference, variety are the aim; no uniformity.

Only two years ago the earth was still bald, hostile, swampy, stiff. It breathed out death. The fact that it is now alive confirms the wonder-working force of socialism. How modest they are. In our capitalist Ruhrgebiet, which I visited in spring, they use the same means to turn the workers into little bourgeois. Here, they turn them into revolutionaries. Here as there: tin baths, electric sockets, space for a flowerpot, functional and practical furniture screwed to the floor, waxed boards you don’t have to scrub, a quiet gleam, a short sofa. How much that is already! And how little! The needs of the proletariat remain modest, whether he rules or is ruled. I think it’s to do with labour. There it’s coalmines, here the drilling towers. What a delight to man is a drill! How much more do you require of life if you spend eight hours, or six, or four, drilling for petroleum, for Saint Petroleum!?

Oh, I fear work is only a blessing because it stands in for joy.

Written in October 1926 for

the Russian series, but never printed