Gadfly in Russia Read online

  Signposts to places I had first seen on maps during the war – Dneipropetrovsk, Kremenchug, Cherkassy, Sevastopol – resonated after so much repetition on the Home Service news. The police stopped us again at Lubny for no plain reason I could see, and took our names and the number of the car, a short delay this time. ‘If this happens to every tourist motoring through Russia and the Ukraine I can’t imagine anybody wanting to come back, what with the hold ups at the frontier as well.’

  George was calm again. ‘They always do. Perhaps it makes their trip more interesting, and they don’t get so angry about it as you.’

  ‘That’s because they’ve led sheltered lives, and think the police are their servants protecting them from the lower orders, but if ever such harassment became serious in England, with the police trying all the time to crush your spirit, people would unite and take up arms – at least I hope they would. But the world’s full of little Hitlers.’

  Ever-gallant George made an effort to change my state of mind, by retailing the sexual antics of young Russians during summer vacations on the Black Sea. There was a game, he said, that began by enlisting whatever willing girls could be found. In the largest room they stripped and formed themselves into a ‘daisy circle’ on the floor, with legs pointing outwards, and made themselves available to the stalwarts who moved, until they couldn’t any longer, from one to another.

  ‘I suppose everyone was tanked up with vodka.’

  ‘Oh no, such lovely fun-loving girls wouldn’t do it for less than the best Georgian champagne. But I assure you that a good time was had by all.’

  ‘You included?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ he laughed.

  The car, from going smoothly, slowed down so much that it would obviously stop, possibly in the middle of the road, though I was able to get sufficiently to the right and free from danger. We were out of petrol. ‘Now settle the problem, Mr English writer,’ said George.

  There was suddenly more traffic behind, a black tanker so close to my arse that the driver’s mate grinned on overtaking, though before they clipped my tailgate the remaining impetus of the engine got us unscathed on to the muddy verge. ‘It’s no disaster,’ I said, having taken the AA’s advice, ‘there’s a full ten-litre jerrycan behind.’

  We disembarked, drank coffee from the flask filled at the hotel in Poltava, and snacked on sandwiches from the same place, standing by the opened back of the car that was beginning to look like the counter of a hotdog stand on Battersea Bridge.

  There was, nevertheless, a bereft feeling on being by the roadside with an immobilised car sixty miles from the nearest pump, but I took out the can, and the funnel which I found wouldn’t fit unless I could make it go around corners. Petrol, nowhere near the entrance to the tank, went splashing on to the ground. But English fumbling, and Soviet improvisation, finally coaxed most of the fuel in, and off we went.

  At the next filling station near Piryatin, I joined the queue, while George went to the office and got a ticket for forty litres. A tall, pink-faced, middle-aged man in baggy shorts stomped from a German car in front. He put out his hand, so we shook, though I didn’t know him from Adam, but he greeted me like a brother, and asked in French about my jouney so far, for he was going to Moscow. Seeing the GB sign, he then went over everything again, in English.

  A gypsy woman with a baby jabbed me in the ribs, wanting money. George frowned, hoping she would go away. ‘They’re only gypsies,’ I said. My soul delighted at this manifestation of a real live beggar in communist Russia.

  An extended family was in temporary occupation of the area, and I hoped they would make a killing before the militiaman came and took their names – or asked for their bloody passports. Swarthy, and beautifully dressed, they came from Bessarabia, mothers, children and one old man, the only bright sparks in this otherwise squalid petrol station. Communism had washed its hands of them, I supposed, but hadn’t killed them off as inferior beings as the Germans had tried to do. Here they were left more or less to themselves, though the rapidity of their frequent glances in the direction of the office showed that trouble from the overseer might erupt at any moment. It was like being in Spain rather than on the road to Kiev. I’d heard, mostly from those who had more than enough money to live on, that it was antisocial to give them anything, but I handed over a few of the roubles that couldn’t be taken beyond the frontier.

  It was pay first then serve yourself. George expertly set the gauge to the amount ordered and pressed the handle. It was as well to know what the tank would take because if you asked for any more a litre or so might splash over your boots, the shine dulled off them forever. But George always got it right.

  Seven hundred kilometres out of Kursk, we were approaching the Great Gates of Kiev, at dusk and from the east. Occasional gaps through trees lining the road gave distant views of wooded heights, golden cupolas of churches and monasteries above the vegetation, but no evidence yet as to where the inhabitants lived.

  The high right bank of rivers in Russia is always on the western side, meaning that when the invader reaches it there is great difficulty defending the opposite low bank – though at Stalingrad it had to be possible. Such rivers favour the transgressor also when he retreats, the upper ground again on his side. Not that this did the Germans much good in the end, though it was hard luck for the Russians having the natural features against them.

  Driving over the handsome new bridge of the grey-green Dneiper, a pinkish sun flushed the golden domes of the churches and coloured the water upstream. It felt as if I had driven well over two thousand miles, and halfway across the Ukraine, for the sake of this astonishing picture. Coming by the back door and into the fading light of Kiev, all other landscapes were forgotten. Beyond the bridge we wondered where the hotel could be, but George did his usual talking act, and we turned right along the treelined road, to the Intourist Hotel on Lenin Street, just off Kreschatchik Boulevard.

  Wednesday, 28 June

  Well rested by morning, after a breakfast in my room of jellied sturgeon, caviar and boiled eggs, I went to send a few wires at the post office: three to those who had been so helpful in Moscow and Leningrad, and a letter-telegram to London which had been out of my mind since entering Russia.

  A previously arranged event was a ten-mile trip by hydrofoil up the Dneiper to its confluence with the Desna. Baedeker’s Russia of 1914 said you could also steam downriver to the Black Sea, or take a boat northwest via Kalinkovichi to Pinsk and a train to Warsaw. Not any more.

  I relaxed on deck, relishing the vistas through binoculars as we moved away from Kiev. Land was flat to starboard, but wooded hills surfed gently west. Our vessel roared its way to the division of the rivers at which, all too soon, it must turn around. A single family in bathing suits gathered for a picnic at a beach of glistening sand.

  No need of jackets in the summer warmth, we strolled, along wide avenues under the sheltering foliage of great chestnut trees – a magnificent southern city. Young women in their light clothing were a pleasure to observe, though in winter they would be well bundled up, when the temperature went down to minus six centigrade for four months.

  George and I called at the bookshops on Lenin Street, and of course I looked for maps. A transport plan of the city showed the layout clearly but, as usual, had no scale. I had dreamlike visions of coming across well-drawn accurate topographical maps, but didn’t think I ever would in my lifetime. In another shop I bought Ukrainian silk shirts with embroidered collars.

  We had lunch at the Dynamo Restaurant on Kirov Street, starting with borscht and blobs of sour cream. Then came what else but ‘chicken à la Kiev’ – cutlets of rolled white meat dripping butter. The dish was more delicately cooked than in Russia proper. After cakes and coffee we voted with our feet – or eyelids – for the hotel. More tired than we knew, I slept for several hours.

  The most prominent statue in Kiev, after Lenin of course, was of the Cossack hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky who, from 1648–54 led a war of libe
ration against Polish rule. He afterwards demanded that Ukraine be annexed to Russia, so was regarded by the tsarist and now the Soviet authorities as a great hero. The town of Proskurov was renamed in his honour in 1954, but as well as slaughtering any Poles he came across, his horde laid waste dozens of Jewish towns and villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their innocent inhabitants. His name was therefore anathema to me, whatever he did for Russia.

  A more deserved monument was erected to General Vatutin, in command at the Battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Kharkov, but mortally wounded at the recapture of Kiev. On the sixteen-foot sculpture of grey granite the simple inscription reads: ‘To General Vatutin, from the Ukrainian people.’

  In 1941–3 the Germans burned down Kiev University, razed nearly all the buildings around the main boulevards, destroyed the town hall, and dynamited the precious Church of the Dormition. A hundred thousand people were sent to forced labour in Germany, and two hundred thousand others murdered, including over a hundred thousand Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine on the city’s outskirts. The massacre was the subject of a poem by Yevtushenko, and described in a novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov.

  In the evening I read poetry at the Palace of Culture, and had dinner with other writers and several local officials. The poet Mark Pinchevsky asked about recent writing in England, and told me that David Storey’s This Sporting Life had recently come out in a Ukrainian translation. The large printing sold in a day, and it was now hard to obtain a copy. The royalties, Mark said, would provide sufficient for Storey to spend a couple of interesting weeks in Kiev, if he got in touch with the Writers’ Union.

  I said I would pass the information, and did, though I don’t think David took advantage of it. Pinchevsky asked if I would send him a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I agreed to do so.

  I don’t recall getting to bed that night, but felt no insupportable effects next morning.

  Thursday, 29 June

  We joined a conducted tour of the Perchersky Lavra and the Monastery of the Caves. Founded on its wooded hill slope above the river in the 11th century, part of its inner acres were set aside for the accommodation of the 150,000 pilgrims up to 1914 who were said to come there every year to the most highly revered convent in Russia.

  I had often noted, in a Baedeker bought in a Nottingham bookshop for five shillings twenty years before, the Catacombs of St Anthony in Kiev, and now I could see them. Excavated in clay soil, and supported by masonry, they honeycombed the ground under the cathedral.

  Just above six feet in height, only one person at a time could pass along the claustrophobic tunnels. Our serpentine group, provided with candles, was led by a monk, who pointed out the seventy-three saints at peace in their niches, bodies in open coffins mummified due to the benign temperature and chemical properties of the soil. The holy air was stifling, possibly from candle fumes, and in half an hour I was glad to see open sky, and hear the great bell of the Lavra tolling its sombre notes.

  After a nap I walked with Mark Pinchevsky to a balustrade overlooking the river, where we talked further about writers and writing. Asking about censorship in the Soviet Union, he said that at present things were much better than they had been, though he wasn’t optimistic, because the lid could come down any moment.

  He handed me some of his poems, with English versions, and asked if I could get them published in London. I told him about Modern Poetry in Translation, a magazine started by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes. I was on the editorial board, and promised to see what could be done. He said I shouldn’t say anything about taking his manuscripts out of the Soviet Union, nor let them be seen at the frontier.

  At supper in the Intourist Hotel I was presented with a rare and beautiful edition of Shevchenko’s poems, the script of his handwriting reproduced on light blue paper, and translated into Russian.

  Shevchenko (1814–61) was regarded as ‘the father of Ukrainian literature’, and his writings were so feared by the tsarist authorities that he was sent to Siberia, and forbidden to write or paint – though he did small drawings whenever his guards were out of sight.

  Also at the table was a bald stocky middle-aged man, the only one wearing a suit and tie, who almost pleaded with me to write him a letter soon after my return to London. Shy and introverted, he spoke no English, but at every official gathering he had been so solicitous regarding my well-being that it felt as if he thought he had met me somewhere before but couldn’t recall at what place or why, yet was hoping he would have enough time during my stay to find out. We talked as much as was possible with my limited Russian, but I couldn’t gather anything about him except that he had some position in the Kiev Writers’ Union. I did, however, tell him I would write the letter he wanted.

  Friday, 30 June

  At half past eight I stood among my hosts outside the hotel so that George and others could take a photograph, the Peugeot waiting impatiently by the pavement. I was fourth from the right, and Igor Petrovich Kasimirov, the man who had been so curious about me the evening before, was on the extreme left.

  Done with the handshakes and embraces, among what had come to seem an extended family, George and I located the relevant chaussée and were soon free of Kiev. The road to Zhitomir made for easy driving, in clear visibility but under low cloud. After an interesting stay by the Dneiper we nevertheless agreed that being on the road was the life for us. Just before Zhitomir we tanked up with petrol and were then signposted from the town centre, along streets of detached and comfortable houses set in flowered gardens.

  Heading south, we lit a forty each, chatting away the miles. George said that his greatest wish was to come to London, though he daren’t imagine that it would ever be possible. He had gathered so much information about the place for his essays on Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde that he already knew the layout, and what it would be like.

  ‘It might not be quite what you think,’ I said, ‘but when you do get there’ – such firm friends had we become – ‘you must contact me immediately and come to see us in Clapham, where Wilberforce lived who abolished slavery. I promise there’ll be lots of good food, and vodka to drink. The sky will be the limit, and I’ll even put a few forties in storage so that we can puff away and talk about old times.’

  In Chekhov’s Three Sisters Chebutykin read from a newspaper, to one of the sisters who deplored the boredom of provincial life, that ‘Balzac was happy in Berdichev’, so I wanted to see that place.

  Balzac spent the whole of 1849 at nearby Verkhovnya, on the estate belonging to Countess Evelyne Hanska. He had been in love with her for sixteen years, and she with him, but they weren’t able to marry until her husband had died, when they tied the knot in St Barbara’s Roman Catholic church in Berdichev on 14 March 1850.

  I also wanted to see the town because it had been ‘the religious capital’ of Judaism with, by the late nineteenth century, seven synagogues and numerous houses of prayer. Jewish bankers and merchants had invested in the nascent sugar industry, which still thrived under Soviet control.

  The place had also been an important trading centre, with four annual fairs for cattle and country produce. By 1939 more than half its population of 62,000 was Jewish, but then the Germans came. I was interested to see what remained of the historic parts, though knew that the main synagogue had been turned into a textile factory.

  I explained all this to George. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘so we’ll find the middle, and after looking around have coffee.’ When a road on the outskirts forked off for the town, and he indicated that we should go to the right, a resplendent policeman came out of his box and, perhaps guessing our intention, made perfectly understandable motions with his stick that we must stay on the main route. To go through the town, he said when I pulled in, was not on the Intourist itinerary. Nothing had been said in Moscow about it being out of bounds, and George told him so.

  ‘Well it is now,’ the policeman smiled. ‘So get going.’

  I only wished that hi
s box had been horizontal with the ground, and that he was lying in it as dead as dead could be, with a golden rouble weighing down each shuttered eye. I hoped his wife, children, and half a dozen pallbearers would come, hammer the lid of the box firmly into place, and take it away for a long delayed burial at the cemetery.

  ‘He must have been lying. He could easily have let us through,’ I said, not even trying to think up more curses for George’s list, which in any case was already brimming over. We motored on in silence, I knowing that neither did he think much of unco-operative coppers by now.

  We vetoed stopping at Vinnitsa to see the ruins of Hitler’s wartime headquarters, but a few miles beyond it seemed time to eat our packed lunch from the hotel. I parked close to a marshy ditch and, remembering the camera, took photos of George scoffing by the car, he then reciprocating with a shot of me, while denying that scoffing, at least in his case, could ever be the appropriate description of his way of eating.

  Beyond trees across the road a high official-looking fence was visible, maybe of an airfield at Ivcha, near Litin, I decided, looking at the relevant sheet of my secret map. George was dubious but said nothing, having seen me do it a few times before, when I told him we needed to check the navigation.

  A covered lorry went by at cruising speed. Well, they sometimes did. Even the aerial on top seemed no strange thing, but a few minutes later – as I was searching for the overseas frequency on my radio to get the news – the same vehicle came slowly back, and parked a couple of hundred yards beyond. ‘Perhaps we’d better get going,’ George said.

  The BBC wouldn’t come through, for the batteries were all but run down, so we packed up just as the lorry came trawling back.

  Our feckless selves again, we calculated how many roubles we’d be to the good if some benign authority presented us with one after every mile done. Totting them up since Leningrad, we changed the amount into pounds, then dollars, and switched the whole sum back into roubles while smoking another forty. A variant on the game was that when I overtook a car we awarded ourselves ten roubles, and fifty for a lorry. ‘How can we not make money, smoking such cigars?’ George laughed, acting the plutocrat with delight.