The Spectator
Jul. 2nd, 2004 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
favorovIn St Petersburg I glimpsed the hope and decency of Soviet communism
Matthew Parris
Äll at once I realised that if I were a
50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be
a communist.
It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly.
Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St
Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a
50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be
a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the
overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow.
In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my
mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist
ideal.
My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight. Around this time
there is a tight cluster of departures from St Petersburg to Moscow.
Along an almost ruler-straight railroad across flat marshes and forests,
the journey of some 500 miles can be accomplished without hurry by
overnight trains taking about eight hours — time to get a good night’s
sleep — and the sleeper services on Russian railways are clean,
comfortable and cheap. So a clutch of trains leave within a short time of
one another and chase each other down the track, arriving in Moscow in
time for breakfast.
Railwaymen the world over are conservative. Probably some of the last
and most recalcitrant of the shattered communist bureaucracy of the
Soviet Union are still in post across the network, working for the Russian
railways as if glasnost and perestroika had never happened; and at the
station in St Petersburg it showed. The Soviet architecture had been
treated with re spect. The decor remained pristine Marxist-Heroic. The
undisciplined tide of cheap billboarding, commercial fly-posting and
Tannoyed advertising messages which is engulfing the once ordered
streetscapes of Russian cities as glum austerity yields to glum anarchy —
Russia is becoming a sort of gloomy Brazil — seemed to have been held
back at this station’s gates. An atmosphere of calm control reigned.
Many Russian towns and cities have changed their names since the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and some of the new names have been in
place for a decade, but my Russian-speaking companion pointed out that
on the massive, fine old departures board, the stationmaster at St
Petersburg had made only one concession to glasnost pc. All destinations
retained their Soviet names. Only the point of departure was — no doubt
reluctantly — allowed to be Leningrad no more, but St Petersburg. I
think if I were a Russian I would still be pointedly calling the place
Leningrad, in the way grumpy old conservatives in Britain used to refuse
to accept the arrival of Avon, Humberside or countless Mandela
Squares.
Grumpiness, however, is not the only prompt. I visited St Petersb urg
when it was Leningrad, 33 years ago, at the age of 21. Capitalism has not
improved it. A vast amount of restoring, reconstructing and general
t arting-up is going on — for tourists’ benefit no doubt, tourists bring
dollars — but the city has lost some of the integrity which in 1971 it still
kept. Tsar Peter the Great, whose vision and creation this city is, would
not have been a neocon. Laissez-faire would have appalled him. The
choking of St Petersburg’s wide, straight boulevards with automotive
junk, the covering-over of 18th-century windows with advertising
billboards and the clutterin g of the pavements with barrows vending
tourist tat would neve r have been allowed. This city was designed as a
visible expression of enlightened central design. Every vista speaks o f a
plan. Every perspective whispers authority. Every cobble breathes
control. I preferred Leningrad as it was in 1971: somewhat drab, a little
grey, showing its age and fraying at the seams, but massive, calm,
dignified, a great echo in stone of human intelligence and human
authority, just as Peter intended.
At 23.45, ten minutes before my train was due to depart (and having
established myself in my comfortable sleeping compartment), I decided to
alight for a few minute s, walk the length of the train and inspect the
locomotive. This, as it happened, was the moment for the departure of
the night express running ahead of us, waiting over on the next platform.
Each of its carriages had a uniformed attendant. Each attendant stood
smartly at the door of his or her carriage, ready to close the doors once
the last passengers had scuttled in. Departure was announced. Right
across the station, from every loudspeaker, came a tremendous burst of
swelling music — rich, orchestral, triumphal, horribly moving. On cue,
every attendant boarded his res pective carriage and shut the doors. As
the music died, the train moved slowly off, gathering speed, bound for
Moscow.
And I thought of that great departures board with all the day’s trains,
against each journey the times of departure and arrival and the number o f
hours’ travel: some to places as far as Kiev and the Black Sea,
Archangel and Murmansk, many taking 30, 40, 50 hours or more, part of
a system spr eading out in a huge yet simple network across the
immensity of Europe, Central Asia and the East that is Russia and her
satellites. For each departure a fanfare of stirring music, timed to the
minute. Every passenger, every orderly, every samovar in place beneath
the eyes of the statues and mosaics — images of commitment: brave
soldiers, handsome women, proud peasants, enthusiastic workers — full
of heroic intensity, faces beaming with idealism for the collective cause,
brows chiselled by love of country and countrymen, all steeled by belief
in a common creed: science, knowledge, doctrine, the greatest good of
the greatest number and the advancement of all mankind. And I thought
that there was something good about this; and that in its failure somet hing
has been lost.
Here is something I never expected to write. As the music swelled and
died, I felt the force, I understood the nobility of socialism. I felt its claims
to moral superiority over other more selfish, more pessimistic systems of
economics and government. I saw the appeal of socialist theory to what
is best, most virtuous and most optimistic in human nature. Yes I know
— you do not need to t ell me — that it wouldn’t work, and didn’t work. I
spent my polit ical youth arguing and working against collectivism, I would
do it all again, I know the score. I know those brave soldiers were
betrayed; I know the credulous peasants starved; I know the enthusiastic
workers were exploited in stupidly run industries. I know that a corrupt
elite traded on these beliefs to gather for itself the very privileges and
luxuries which socialism had been meant to strip. I remember the last
scene in Animal Farm. It’s just that, for a moment, I glimpsed what it had
been meant to be, and felt uplifted by all the hope and intelligence in that
vision, and by a feeling of shame at having all my life felt only derision,
only anger, only fear in the face of the sociali st prospectus.
The next musical fanfare was about to begin, and it was for my train. I
boarded. ˇee
Matthew Parris
Äll at once I realised that if I were a
50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be
a communist.
It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly.
Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St
Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a
50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be
a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the
overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow.
In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my
mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist
ideal.
My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight. Around this time
there is a tight cluster of departures from St Petersburg to Moscow.
Along an almost ruler-straight railroad across flat marshes and forests,
the journey of some 500 miles can be accomplished without hurry by
overnight trains taking about eight hours — time to get a good night’s
sleep — and the sleeper services on Russian railways are clean,
comfortable and cheap. So a clutch of trains leave within a short time of
one another and chase each other down the track, arriving in Moscow in
time for breakfast.
Railwaymen the world over are conservative. Probably some of the last
and most recalcitrant of the shattered communist bureaucracy of the
Soviet Union are still in post across the network, working for the Russian
railways as if glasnost and perestroika had never happened; and at the
station in St Petersburg it showed. The Soviet architecture had been
treated with re spect. The decor remained pristine Marxist-Heroic. The
undisciplined tide of cheap billboarding, commercial fly-posting and
Tannoyed advertising messages which is engulfing the once ordered
streetscapes of Russian cities as glum austerity yields to glum anarchy —
Russia is becoming a sort of gloomy Brazil — seemed to have been held
back at this station’s gates. An atmosphere of calm control reigned.
Many Russian towns and cities have changed their names since the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and some of the new names have been in
place for a decade, but my Russian-speaking companion pointed out that
on the massive, fine old departures board, the stationmaster at St
Petersburg had made only one concession to glasnost pc. All destinations
retained their Soviet names. Only the point of departure was — no doubt
reluctantly — allowed to be Leningrad no more, but St Petersburg. I
think if I were a Russian I would still be pointedly calling the place
Leningrad, in the way grumpy old conservatives in Britain used to refuse
to accept the arrival of Avon, Humberside or countless Mandela
Squares.
Grumpiness, however, is not the only prompt. I visited St Petersb urg
when it was Leningrad, 33 years ago, at the age of 21. Capitalism has not
improved it. A vast amount of restoring, reconstructing and general
t arting-up is going on — for tourists’ benefit no doubt, tourists bring
dollars — but the city has lost some of the integrity which in 1971 it still
kept. Tsar Peter the Great, whose vision and creation this city is, would
not have been a neocon. Laissez-faire would have appalled him. The
choking of St Petersburg’s wide, straight boulevards with automotive
junk, the covering-over of 18th-century windows with advertising
billboards and the clutterin g of the pavements with barrows vending
tourist tat would neve r have been allowed. This city was designed as a
visible expression of enlightened central design. Every vista speaks o f a
plan. Every perspective whispers authority. Every cobble breathes
control. I preferred Leningrad as it was in 1971: somewhat drab, a little
grey, showing its age and fraying at the seams, but massive, calm,
dignified, a great echo in stone of human intelligence and human
authority, just as Peter intended.
At 23.45, ten minutes before my train was due to depart (and having
established myself in my comfortable sleeping compartment), I decided to
alight for a few minute s, walk the length of the train and inspect the
locomotive. This, as it happened, was the moment for the departure of
the night express running ahead of us, waiting over on the next platform.
Each of its carriages had a uniformed attendant. Each attendant stood
smartly at the door of his or her carriage, ready to close the doors once
the last passengers had scuttled in. Departure was announced. Right
across the station, from every loudspeaker, came a tremendous burst of
swelling music — rich, orchestral, triumphal, horribly moving. On cue,
every attendant boarded his res pective carriage and shut the doors. As
the music died, the train moved slowly off, gathering speed, bound for
Moscow.
And I thought of that great departures board with all the day’s trains,
against each journey the times of departure and arrival and the number o f
hours’ travel: some to places as far as Kiev and the Black Sea,
Archangel and Murmansk, many taking 30, 40, 50 hours or more, part of
a system spr eading out in a huge yet simple network across the
immensity of Europe, Central Asia and the East that is Russia and her
satellites. For each departure a fanfare of stirring music, timed to the
minute. Every passenger, every orderly, every samovar in place beneath
the eyes of the statues and mosaics — images of commitment: brave
soldiers, handsome women, proud peasants, enthusiastic workers — full
of heroic intensity, faces beaming with idealism for the collective cause,
brows chiselled by love of country and countrymen, all steeled by belief
in a common creed: science, knowledge, doctrine, the greatest good of
the greatest number and the advancement of all mankind. And I thought
that there was something good about this; and that in its failure somet hing
has been lost.
Here is something I never expected to write. As the music swelled and
died, I felt the force, I understood the nobility of socialism. I felt its claims
to moral superiority over other more selfish, more pessimistic systems of
economics and government. I saw the appeal of socialist theory to what
is best, most virtuous and most optimistic in human nature. Yes I know
— you do not need to t ell me — that it wouldn’t work, and didn’t work. I
spent my polit ical youth arguing and working against collectivism, I would
do it all again, I know the score. I know those brave soldiers were
betrayed; I know the credulous peasants starved; I know the enthusiastic
workers were exploited in stupidly run industries. I know that a corrupt
elite traded on these beliefs to gather for itself the very privileges and
luxuries which socialism had been meant to strip. I remember the last
scene in Animal Farm. It’s just that, for a moment, I glimpsed what it had
been meant to be, and felt uplifted by all the hope and intelligence in that
vision, and by a feeling of shame at having all my life felt only derision,
only anger, only fear in the face of the sociali st prospectus.
The next musical fanfare was about to begin, and it was for my train. I
boarded. ˇee
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-07-02 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-02 06:00 am (UTC)Был такой англ. хронист 13 века, его у нас еще (неправильно) называли Матфеем Парижским
no subject
Date: 2004-07-02 08:02 am (UTC)Забавно, однако: человек запомнил, что _каждый_ поезд провожали музыкой, хотя музыка была положена только _его_ Красной Стреле.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-09 02:08 pm (UTC)