What Am I Doing Here? (23 page)

Back at the boat station, another Winter Palace in miniature, the guardian had caught a small, sad-faced sturgeon, and our deckhands were tremendously excited at the prospect of fish stew. One carried a cauldron, another a knife and, while the cauldron was boiling, the fishermen and an officer played billiards in the lower-deck saloon. Osip Mandelstam says, ‘The hard-headed knocking together of billiard balls is just as pleasant to men as the clicking of ivory knitting needles to women.' I, for one, could think of worse places to be holed up in – a routine of Russian novels, fishing, chess, and billiards – interrupted by an occasional visit from the
Maxim Gorky
to remind one that this was 1982, not 1882.

Monday, 27 September, was a blustery morning that began with a lecture on the inland waterways of the Soviet Union. Two nights earlier, I had seen a small sailing yacht beating upstream. If only one could get permission, how adventurous it would be to sail from the Black to the White Sea! In Kazan, which we had left only four days earlier at the height of an Indian summer, it was now four degrees below.

Next day, we stayed on the boat. From time to time a smudge of smokestacks and apartment blocks moved across the horizon. One of the towns was Marxstadt, formerly Baronsk, and capital of the Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans. ‘And where are those Germans now?' asked a lady from Bonn, her neck reddening with indignation as she gazed at the thin line of shore. ‘Gone,' I said. ‘Dead!' she said. ‘Or in Central Asia. That is what I heard.' Later in the afternoon we cruised close inshore along cliffs whose strata were striped in layers of black and white. Over the loudspeaker, a deep bass voice sang the song of the Cossack rebel Stenka Razin. We saw a flock of black and white sheep on a bare hill. Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, there was a MiG fighter perched on a pedestal.

Stepan (or Stenka) Razin, the son of a landowner on the Lower Don, believed that the Cossack custom of sharing plunder should form the basis of all government. He believed that these levelling practices should be applied to the Tsardom of Russia itself. The Tsar, at the time, happened to be Peter the Great. At Astrakhan, Razin captured a Persian princess who became his mistress and whom he dumped in the Volga to thank her, the river, for the gold and jewels she had given him. At Tsaritsyn, he murdered the governor, one Turgenev, possibly a forebear of the novelist. Abandoned by his followers, he was defeated at Simbirsk and beheaded in Moscow. In Soviet hagiography he is a ‘proto-communist'.

 

We arrived at dawn at Volgograd. The city once known as Stalingrad is a city of stucco and marble where Soviet veterans are forever photographing one another in front of war memorials. Rebuilt in the ‘Third Roman' style of the Forties and Fifties, it rises in layers along the European bank of the Volga; and from the flight of monumental steps leading down to the port, you can look back, past a pair of Doric propylaea, past another Doric temple which serves as an ice-cream shop, across some sandy islands, to a scrubby Asiatic waste with the promise of deserts beyond.

At ten, to the sound of spine-tingling music, we, the passengers of the
Maxim Gorky,
assembled in Fallen Heroes Square as a delegation of penitent Germans to add a basket of gladioli and carnations to the heaps of red flowers already piled up that morning around the Eternal Flame. On the side of the red granite obelisk were reflected the Christmas trees of the garden, and the façade of the Intourist Hotel, built on the site of Field-Marshal Paulus's bunker. A squad of cadets came forward at a slow march, the boys in khaki, the girls in white plastic sandals with white tulle pompoms behind their ears. Everyone stood to attention. The rum merchant and the schoolmaster, both survivors of the battle, performed the ceremony. Their cheeks were wet with tears; and the war widows, who, for days, had been bracing themselves for this ordeal, tightened their fingers round their handbags, sniffed into handkerchiefs, or simply looked lost and miserable.

Suddenly, there was a minor uproar. Behind us was a party of ex-soldiers from the Soviet 62nd Army, who had come from the Asiatic Republics. Their guide was showing them a photo of Paulus's surrender; and they, hearing German spoken nearby, seeing the ‘enemy' inadvertently trampling on a grass verge, and thinking this some kind of sacrilege, began to murmur among themselves. Then a bull-faced man shoved forward and told them to clear off. The ladies, looking now more miserable than ever, shifted hastily back on to the concrete path. ‘
Most
interesting,' said Von F, as he swept past on his way to the bus.

Once the war was over, someone suggested leaving the ruins of Stalingrad
as they were —
a perpetual memorial to the defeat of Fascism. But Stalin took exception to the idea that ‘his' city should remain a pile of rubble, and ordered it to be rebuilt the way it was, and more so. He did, however, leave one ruin intact – a shell-shattered mill-building on the downward slope to the river. Now marooned in acres of concrete plaza, the mill lies between a model bayonet, some two hundred feet high and still in scaffolding, and a structure the shape and size of a cooling-tower where visitors (by previous appointment) can view a mosaic panorama of the battle. I stood on the plaza and felt I could almost chuck a stone into the river – yet, despite Hitler's hysterical screaming, despite the tanks and planes and men, the Germans could never reach it. The Russians fought to the slogan, ‘There is no place for us behind!' It was probably as simple as that.

All around were elderly men and women, some missing an arm or a leg, and all aglow with medals in the sunshine. Then I . caught sight of Von F, striding furiously around a selection of Soviet armaments lined up on display. ‘No thanks to the Americans!' he said, lowering his voice. ‘It was American tanks, not these, that saved them . . . and, of course, Paulus!'

‘How?'

‘Good Prussian soldier!' he said. ‘Continued to obey orders . . . even when those orders were mad!'

In an earlier discussion, I asked Von F why Hitler hadn't gone straight for Moscow in the summer of '41. ‘Fault of Mussolini,' he answered flatly. ‘The invasion of Russia was planned for the spring. Then Mussolini made a mess in Greece and Germany had to help. It was too late in the year for Moscow. Hitler refused to make the mistake of Napoleon in 1812.'

Mamayev Kurgan is a hill in a northern suburb where the Tartar Khan Mamay once pitched his royal yurt and where, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stalingrad, the Soviets have built a monumental complex to the Fallen Dead. During the battle, whoever held the hill held Stalingrad; and though the Germans took the water-tower on the summit, Marshal Zhukhov's men hung on to the eastern flank. When they cleared the site, an average of 825 bullets and bits of shrapnel were found on each square metre. Leonid Brezhnev opened Mamayev Kurgan with the words, ‘Stones have longer lives than people . . . The monuments, however, were made of ferro-concrete – and Von F, as an expert on ferro-concrete, didn't rate their chances of longevity all that high.

The first thing we saw from the bus was the gigantic statue of The Motherland, striding into the haze and waving a sword instead of the Tricolour – for plainly, she owes her inspiration to Delacroix's
Liberty Leading the People
. From Lenin Avenue we then set off for the hilltop – but what an obstacle course lay in between! Like pilgrims to, say, Rome or Mecca or Benares, visitors to Mamayev Kurgan are obliged to progress round a sequence of shrines - Fallen Heroes Square, the Hall of Valour and many more – before arriving at the feet of
The Motherland
. And there are no short cuts! ‘Kurgan' is a Turko-Tartar word meaning ‘hill', ‘mound' or ‘grave' – and Mamayev Kurgan, with its grave, its temples and the ‘sacred way', reminded me of the great temple complexes of ancient Asia. In this same steppe region a Turkic tribe, known as the Polovsty, used to set stone statues over their burial kurgans – and these, known as
kameneye babas
, served as a memorial for the dead, and a warning to tomb robbers.

I could hardly help feeling that
The Motherland
represented Asia, warning the West never to try and cross the Volga, never to set foot in the heartland. The atmosphere was eerie, and religious: all too easy to scoff at; but the crowds, with their rapt and reverential expressions, were no scoffing matter. I followed a lame old woman into the Pantheon. Her down-at-heel shoes had been slit at the toes to relieve the pressure on her bunions. She shuffled forward, in a raincoat, on the arm of a younger companion. She had tried to make herself a little festive by wearing a red scarf shot with tinsel. Her cheeks were caked with white powder, and streaming with tears. As she crossed the Court of Sorrows, her raincoat flapped open – to show a white blouse covered in medals.

At three, in the city planetarium, we watched a film of the battle, put together from German and Soviet newsreels (and adorned with cosmic overtones). The film was supposed to be violently anti-German, and the Germans had been warned not to attend if they felt squeamish. It could have been much worse. It never once stooped to mockery or satire; and in the heart-rending shots of wounded German prisoners, you felt that the film-makers, at least, were not glorifying the Soviet victory, rather showing the utter futility of war. That night, as we headed for the Volga-Don Canal, I sat at the bar beside one of the Panzer officers who sadly contemplated a double Georgian brandy and said: ‘For us Germans this has been a hard day.'

 

The journey was ending. It was a sunny, silvery morning as we sailed into Rostov-on-Don. In the shallows a team of fishermen were drawing in a seine net. An old man sunned himself in an inflatable rubber dinghy. Tugboats tooted, and a crane unloaded crates from an ocean-going ship. There were old brick warehouses on the waterfront; and, behind, the city rising in terraces to the onion-domed cathedral on the hill. Along the esplanade, beds of Soviet-coloured salvias were waiting to be nipped by the first autumn frost. The ship's band played ‘Shortenin' Bread' as we docked. Meanwhile, onshore, a troupe of Cossack dancers, none older than twelve, had tumbled out of a bus and were putting on a rival entertainment. Two boys held up a banner which said ‘Friendship' in any number of languages from Latvian to Portuguese; and the girls, like drum-majorettes in their shakos and scarlet jackets, flicked their legs about amid the flurrying leaves. A hundred yards away there was a statue of Maxim Gorky.

Rostov was a city of shady, tree-lined avenues shamelessly given over to private commerce. Policemen and policewomen sauntered round the street markets with an air of amused condescension while Armenians haggled with Russians, Cossacks haggled with Armenians, and wallets bulged with roubles as the piles of aubergines, persimmons and secondhand furniture, little by little, diminished. An old babushka gave me a bunch of bergamot and I went away sniffing it.

Someone pointed to a slit-eyed woman with a shopping bag and asked, ‘What are all these North Vietnamese doing here?' ‘They're not Vietnamese,' I said. ‘They're Kalmucks. They're the locals.' The Kalmucks live across the river in their own republic. They were the last Mongolian people to ride over into Europe and they settled there. Even now, they are Lamaists. One Kalmuck boy looked very racy, with a sweep of shiny black hair, and a monkey chained to the pillion of his motor-bike.

I went to the museum and caught a whiff or goat's grease floating off the churns and ladles in a reconstructed Cossack cottage. In the section devoted to 1812 hung a portrait of V.F. Orlov Denisov, the regimental commander whom Tolstoy fictionalised, with a lisp, in
War and Peace.
There was also an English print, entitled ‘Foxy Napoleon – Tally Ho!' and the following verse:

After dark on our last night in Russia, I strolled downhill, through the old merchants' quarters, and saw a crystal chandelier alight in an upstairs room. The walls were covered with faded red plush and there was a gilt-framed canvas, of mountains and a river. I stood under a street lamp, and tried to imagine the tenant of the room. On the pavement, little girls in white socks were playing hopscotch. Two sailors, their caps thrust back on their heads, came out of a shooting-alley and sat down on the kerb to share their last cigarette. Then an old lady, in a grey headscarf, came to the window. She looked at me. I waved. She smiled, waved back, and drew the curtain.

At the foot of the steps I passed Maxim Gorky, staring from his pedestal, across the gently flowing Don, towards the plains of Asia.

 

T
he Emperor Wu-ti (145-87 BC) was the most spectacular horse-rustler in history. He craved the possession of a few mares and stallions which belonged to an obscure ruler at the end of the known world, and in getting them he nearly engineered the collapse of China.

Of all the Sovereigns who claimed the Mandate of Heaven, Wu-ti was among the least modest. Other emperors would settle into a round of colorful ritual and harmless pleasures. Whatever they did was known to be perfect, in that their most insignificant actions mirrored the unchanging movements of the heavenly bodies. The ideal emperor, they said, should divorce himself from practical affairs and ‘ride on the perfection of his counsellors'.

But Wu-ti knew at heart the dangers of taking advice from eunuchs, magicians and members of the old families. He was a monopolist. He believed it his right to order the everyday existence of all of sixty million subjects, to tax the rich out of existence and divert all money towards himself. Since, by the fact of his divinity, he controlled the seasons, his moods of love and hate merely reflected changes in the weather. When he castrated his Grand Historian, for venturing to put in a word for a disgraced general, it was no more significant, morally, than a hoar-frost.