I was surprised to discover, is wintergreen (a mnemonic device in the making for anyone who has difficulty remembering what buildings were stormed in the Revolution). The low line of harmonious rooftops was interrupted here and there by a church spire or a gold dome. One such dome, in the distance, belongs to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose columns still bear some scars from the war. It is located across the square from the Astoria Hotel, which Hitler vowed to make into a museum of the conquest of Leningrad. Some chicken, some neck. The pockmarks on St. Isaac’s are retained as a reminder, like a sign on a building in Nevsky Prospekt, the principal commercial street, requesting pedestrians to walk on the other side of the avenue during periods of bombardment.
The damage done during the war went beyond what would be suggested by the word extensive; it was heartbreaking. But the Soviets were the world’s champion restorers and rebuilders, and neither the antiquarian symmetry of the riverfront nor the open-handed bustle of Nevsky Prospekt, with its often magnificent pre-Revolutionary shops, showed Leningrad for the tragic and violent place it had so often been. Granted that by now there should be no way of recalling that three-quarters of the buildings were destroyed in the war against Napoleon. What is implausible—and it flies in the face of all sensory logic, too—is that it is not easy to connect the place with its revolutionary past—Leningrad, where the Decembrists rose up, where the men of the cruiser Aurora, which is now a floating museum, fired some of the first shots of the Revolution, where Lenin disembarked at the Finland Station, his exile ended. But it is so. I found it much easier to conceive of Moscow, where intellectual and artistic ferment go together with a gritty workaday existence, as the epicentre of past political earthquakes than Leningrad, which was merely the hub of government, the aristocracy, and the capitalist business culture that were being overthrown. Not that it was remote from the present political turmoil. On the contrary. Only weeks earlier a crowd of 100,000 had gathered outside the Winter Palace to protest the possibility that the two former prosecutors whose stories of corruption had been printed in the Moscow News might lose their immunity. I saw graffiti such as FUCKEN POLICE and the letter A in a circle, the international sign for anarchism. Yet despite all that, Leningrad was definitely the quieter place, with both a deeper level of culture and a sense of inferiority, perhaps equally profound, about having become the second city. The comparisons are inexact enough to be odious, but Leningrad is to Moscow as Montreal is to Toronto, San Francisco is to Los Angeles, and Melbourne is to Sydney.
As befits a city that in tsarist times gave pride of place to its magnificent classical Stock Exchange (by now a naval museum), it was also, or so I found, a greedier place than Moscow in terms of the poor Soviets’ eternal quest for the magical American dollars—greedier and so ruder, because the mission was clear and the time to accomplish it so brief. My experience of Intourist employees I dealt with in Moscow, for example, was that they were uniformly helpful and efficient and usually friendly to boot; but the ones in Leningrad wore renfrogné expressions that were matched by their voices. One or two of the foreigners’ hotels in Moscow had a few discreet slot machines in the lobby to extract yet a few more dollars or pounds per year, but in Leningrad they were more numerous and not at all hidden; in one instance, there was a sort of miniature casino, gaudily lit. May be that kind of thing is to be expected in any city whose museums and treasures make it a place where tourism is disproportionately important to the economy (20,000 people per day visit the Hermitage museum, 40,000 per day in the summer and during holidays). One incident for me crystallized Leningrad’s position in this matter.
Wherever I went, I found, as so many Western visitors do, that people were forever approaching me to change dollars into rubles at the best black-market valuta (you would have had to be crazy to run the risk of accepting) or to try to sell me wristwatches or vodka. Leningrad exceeded all the boundaries. Spotting me as a foreigner (it is my fate always to look like a foreigner wherever I am, even when I stay home), young men would enquire in whispers whether I might wish Soviet flags or icons or caviar (three jars for $10—“special price”). The most original was a chap not far from the main entrance of the Admiralty. He was in civilian attire, but I took him to be a sailor by his distinctive haircut—and because Leningrad has been full of sailors since it was established originally to be the country’s Baltic seaport. He was carrying a bag of some rough cloth, bigger than a large pillow slip. I thought I saw it move, leading me to suppose that it contained a chicken or perhaps a litter of kittens. But what he wanted was to sell his—or somebody’s—dress uniform, complete with braided cap and epaulets. I declined, and we each scurried off in stoic embarrassment like two people whose stomachs had been rumbling in public. Naval discipline, I gathered, was not what it once was.
I stayed in Leningrad a couple of days, looking at paintings and buildings and talking to as many people as I could, including bathers sunning themselves on the sand beneath the walls of Peter and Paul Fortress, the old political prison. I marvelled at the brevity of their costume, given that I found it cold enough to warrant something midway between a mackintosh and an overcoat. They’re a hardy mob, those Leningraders.
I wish I could report that my return journey to Moscow was as rewarding as the trip up had been, but it was merely memorable. My roommate this time was a merchant seaman who kept addressing me as Englander. I had all the more reason to not split hairs, but simply accept this as the generous compliment it was, given that he was as drunk as a—well, as a sailor. He couldn’t move more than a few steps without banging his head into something, and he kept dropping the sheaf of roses that he told me were for his wife in Moscow. He also confessed, rather needlessly, that he had been out with his friends and had consumed quite a lot of vodka. He told me that he knew my country well, and rhymed off the landmarks: Tilbury Docks, Tower Bridge, Big Ben.… By the end of the list he was singing rather than reciting them.
I confessed my fatigue and asked whether I might put out the light. But when I did he would simply turn it on again. And my plan of going to the Soviet Union with the intention of ignoring my own shyness and talking with as many different citizens as possible was put to the test by the fact that, after an hour or so, I still couldn’t get him to shut the bloody hell up. So I was relieved when he announced that he was leaving our compartment in search of more vodka. When he found some, though, he returned to shake me awake and insist that I share it with him. I sent him away and fell asleep again. He then sent as an emissary to reawaken me the woman whose vodka it was. I told her to get out. Some while later the sailor barged back into the room to retrieve his wife’s roses, presumably for redistribution among women elsewhere in the carriage. That must have been 3:00 a.m. or so. When we pulled into the station at seven, he was asleep, slouched over like a big sack of onions, snoring a deafening snore. I left him there and went in search of a taxi driver I could bribe.
For all the reverence I saw in people’s behaviour at the Lenin Mausoleum, I also heard, throughout my stay, a lot of condemnation of his shade or maybe of the Lenin cuit. Much of it was expressed at the level of satire or humour, however seriously it was felt. One person told me that in his life-time he had seen 50 coats or suits that once belonged to Lenin hanging in various museums—“and they’re all different sizes.” At another exhibit I heard a woman argue quite seriously and cogently that Leningrad should be given back its old name; this surprised me, but soon a powerful movement would spring up around the idea. But of Stalin who betrayed the Revolution and commenced not only the Era of Stagnation but the long reign of terror, I heard much less derision. I couldn’t quite tell to what extent this was because his statue had been kicked over long ago and to what extent it was because the plinth was still warm. Maybe hatred of Stalin was simply taken for granted. Taking a poke at Lenin was certainly a different matter, a safe novelty, part of the new freedom, the changes in change itself, the liberal counter-revolution.
The joyous assumptions of Americans to the contrary, this new revolution was not necessarily a purblind rush to embrace America or the right. No one was advocating turning the Soviet Union into another United States; surely Gorbachev, faced with a deepening national emergency, was only making socialism far more flexible, as Franklin Roosevelt, when in a similar corner, made capitalism more flexible. The point wasn’t the Cold War except to the extent that the Cold War was too expensive for either side to continue fighting, most of all the Soviets, who had