TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.016

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 19KB | 354 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 129

WOULD I MOVE BACK?


By Andrei Sinyavsky


    Look at Gorbachev's Soviet Union through the eyes of Andrei
Sinyavsky, and prepare to be astonished. As a literary critic
in Moscow, Sinyavsky for years secretly published bitter, moving
short stories in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. When
Soviet officials discovered Tertz's real identity in 1965, they
arrested Sinyavsky, along with his friend Yuli Daniel, another
underground writer. Convicted of "anti-Soviet acts" in a
celebrated trial that for the first time drew the world's
attention to Moscow's dissident movement, Sinyavsky spent almost
six years in a labor camp, Daniel five. Sinyavsky emigrated to
Paris in 1973, and Soviet authorities reluctantly permitted him
to return last January to attend the funeral of his great friend
Daniel. In the following pages, Sinyavsky reflects on those
remarkable five days in Moscow, on Gorbachev, on the Soviet
character and on whether his beloved country has indeed changed
for good.

    Recently a lot of people have asked me, Wouldn't you like
to go back and live again in the Soviet Union? After all, now
they're rebuilding the society, they've published Doctor
Zhivago, they don't arrest people anymore under Article 70 (for
"anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation"), and the conscience of
Russia, academician Sakharov, is practically a member of the
government...

    Yes, I agree, things have changed. I tell my questioner
that they've also published dissident writers such as Vladimir
Voinovich and Georgi Vladimov, they've begun little by little
to publish me, and they're even allowing some limited criticism
of the General Secretary. If things go any further . . .

    But that's just the question. Will things go further?

    The Soviet system has aroused the interest and attention of
the whole world as, perhaps, the most unusual and frightening
phenomenon of the 20th century. It is frightening because it
lays claim to the future of all humanity and seizes more and
more countries and spheres of influence, considering itself the
ideal and ordained end of the historical development of the
entire world. It is so new, strong and extraordinary that at
times even people nurtured in her womb, her children so to
speak, perceive it as if it were some sort of monstrosity or
invasion from Mars, to which we ourselves, however, still
belong. We cannot have the calm perspective provided by
distance, inasmuch as we are not simply historians but
contemporaries and witnesses (and sometimes even participants)
in this process.

    Working on a book about Soviet civilization, I have come to
the conclusion that the Soviet system is made up of massive,
heavy blocks. It is well suited to the suppression of human
freedom, but not to revealing, nourishing and stimulating it.
On the whole, it resembles an Egyptian pyramid built out of
colossal stones, carefully assembled and ground to fit together.
A mass of dead stone, an impressive monumentality of
construction, which once served majestic ends now beyond our
reach, a huge structure with such a modicum of useful space
inside. Inside -- the mummy, Lenin. Outside -- the wind of the
desert. Sand. That's the image.

    And so we must ask, Can you rebuild a pyramid into the
Parthenon? The ancient Egyptian pyramids are rightly considered
the most enduring of architectural forms -- much more durable
and solid than the Parthenon. And the legitimate question
arises: Do pyramids lend themselves to perestroika? It would be
possible, of course, to adorn them with decorative colonnades,
to cover them with molding, to suspend Greek porticoes on them.
But would these changes enhance them? Wouldn't they spoil the
fundamental style and profile?

    I'm trying to use this transparent metaphor to explain why
-- despite all my sympathy for the works of perestroika -- I
share the doubts of many about the reforms that are being called
forth to rejuvenate the Soviet system in the democratic manner.

    When perestroika began, I asked myself if perhaps I hadn't
been mistaken about the pyramid. But not long ago, I had the
sad occasion to spend some time in Moscow. On the evening of
Dec. 30, my friend Yuli Daniel died. If it had not been for his
death, they would not have let me into Moscow. Moscow had been
denying my wife Maria a visa for a year and a half. The Soviet
consulate in Paris had informed us by telephone on the morning
of Dec. 30 of the latest denial. Then, after two days of
negotiations, they had to give us a visa. If they had not, a
scandal would have broken out in the press. After all, for many
years -- since our arrest -- my name has been inextricably
linked with that of Daniel's (Sinyavsky-Daniel, Daniel-Sinyavsky
. . .).

    We didn't arrive in time for the funeral. We flew in the
day after, and we spent the five days that Moscow gave us at the
home of Daniel's widow Irina Uvarova.

    Perhaps Daniel's death colored my impressions. Moscow
seemed incredibly dreary. I hadn't been there for 15 years. The
darkness was striking. From the first moment, while we were
still at the airport, it seemed as if the electricity had burned
out and that the meager light was being supplied by a weak
portable generator. The sense of abandonment and homelessness
was aggravated by the piles of dirty, blackened snow along the
sides of the dark streets. It hadn't been like that before.
Where were the streetlights? Where had the stately yard keepers,
who used to clean Moscow, disappeared to?

    It's good that at least they're writing about all this in
the newspapers. Glasnost provides salvation from psychological
destitution. But it's still a long way from physical evidence
of perestroika. The gypsy cabdriver who drove us from the
airport remarked in a melancholy tone of voice on the neglected
roads, filled with potholes, over which we, swearing, were
bouncing: "So have ended many great empires!" I was amazed at
the daring and aesthetic exactness of his maxims. In my time,
people didn't talk so freely . . .

    At the market near the cemetery, where we were buying
flowers, someone tried to photograph our group. A watchwoman
objected, "It's forbidden to photograph the market! The director
doesn't allow it!" Why? Wasn't it because the market was
catastrophically empty?

    If the neglected appearance of the city inspired pity and
bitterness, the people who lived in it aroused joy by their
calm dignity and the maturity of their judgments. It seemed as
if the electric light, which was so dim on the streets, had
moved into their hearts and souls and had been rekindled in
their illuminated faces. During the time allotted to us in
Moscow, we encountered a mass of people, many of whom we had
never met before as well as old friends. Mostly they were part
of the constant stream of people who flowed through Daniel's
apartment from morning until late at night. As a result, I can
judge the striking change in the minds and moods of Muscovites.

    The Soviet intelligentsia, particularly the young
intelligentsia, these days are experiencing the enthusiasm and
the happiness of speaking freely on a scale never before allowed
them -- in their entire history. All anyone can think of is how
to find time to read something new or to publish something new
while glasnost still exists! Never before, I admit, have I read
so many contemporary, current works of Soviet literature and
journalism. And never with such intense interest. It seems as
if the very foundations of the Soviet system must be on the
point of reeling just from the change in the tone and language
of today's literature. Of course, this is an illusion. But it's
amusing to note in passing the extent to which the whole iron
structure of the Soviet state rests on language, on trite
bureaucratic phrases. Just blow on it, and it will fall! We are
witnessing, for the umpteenth time, that magical attitude toward
the word peculiar to Russians, to Russian literature and to all
Soviet society.

    But most important, the fear that is characteristic of
Soviet people has disappeared. And this despite the obvious,
although not always visible, presence of the KGB, which
accompanied us. Sometimes it seemed almost indecent: after all,
this shadowing and spying were transpiring over a fresh grave.
Or should the death of an old camp inmate and scapegrace writer
be arranged just as he had lived?

    At times I think that thanks to glasnost, the organs of the
KGB are growing out of all proportion. After all, now they have
to spy on so many suspicious people, to listen in on the voice
of the crowd and to keep a hand on the pulse, on the throat of
public opinion! Perestroika is not profitable for the KGB, which
is hostile to the natural condition of freedom, into which
society is trying to move. If the society becomes free, who will
pay for this whole swollen staff of dependents -- specialists
in the suppression of freedom?

    The KGB tried in every way possible to hamper and restrict
my contacts, and intentionally created a flagrant show of
vigilant shadowing, as if trying to force me out of my native
city. Observers stood tramping their feet outside the building
the whole time. Maria swore at them: "How can they stand there
like that without doing anything! Give them each a shovel. At
least they could clear the sidewalk in front of the building."

    When we stopped for an hour or so at the dacha (twelve
miles outside Moscow) where Daniel spent the last years of his
life, the police turned up unexpectedly and announced in
embarrassment that as foreigners we were "violating a forbidden
zone." The good-natured policemen did little to hide the fact
that they were being forced to draw up a report on the orders
of the KGB. The quiet snowfall beyond the window, reminding us
of an old-style Russian winter, was our reward for this
"violation."

    But in Moscow I was a welcome guest. I had not experienced
such a surge of love and warmth in a long time. Perhaps only
once before in my life had I been accorded a similar welcome --
when they brought me to the camp. But that was given to me by
those zeks, who, like myself, were classified as "particularly
dangerous state criminals." They greeted me as a brother, and
the more furiously the newspapers stigmatized and the
authorities pressured Daniel and me, the better they treated me
. . .

    A protracted ideological civil war is being waged in our
homeland. Not long before our departure from Paris for Moscow
we received a letter from a well-known Moscow poet:

    "Today everything is gloomy and vacillating, a lot of
people are hoping for a bloodletting, for atrocities and
cruelties with all the `ancient attributes': tyranny, the iron
fist, a threatening master, army order. Already from every
quarter appeals are heard to curtail Ogonyok editor Vitali
Korotich; he irritates them more than anything else, and now the
hosts of the `loyal and prudent' are marching on him . . . No
matter what those who are optimistic about perestroika say to
you -- the situation is very grave, and it's a dreadful time to
live, an enormous stock of malice has accumulated, oceans of
worthless money, the fury of poverty, hunger and homelessness,
of ethnic hostility and contempt -- all this is bursting forth
from the depths and is being channeled against the
intelligentsia, which have ungratefully forgotten that under
the Genius of All Times and Peoples prices went down every year,
there was order and every national group knew its place."

    If the magazine New Times publishes an interview with Lev
Kopelev, a well-known Russian dissident who today supports
perestroika from his home in Cologne, then the newspaper
Sovetskaya Rossiya attacks Kopelev in the best traditions of
Stalinist phraseology, explaining in the same breath that
Kopelev is a Jew. This recalls the old Russian round-dance game
in which one group of dancers sings, "And we the millet have
sown and sown . . ." And the other answers, "And we the millet
shall trample, trample. . ."

    The Russian intellectual, by his very nature a liberal and
a democrat, is arrayed against the Russian nationalist, who is
always trying to trample into the ground what the democrats try
to sow.

    The verbal tempest testifies, among other things, to the
steadfast conservatism of this society, which wrings its hands
and craves its perestroika but simply doesn't budge. It has
turned out to be a lot easier to print Boris Pasternak's novel
Doctor Zhivago than to produce salami. And if there's no salami,
little by little glasnost will die away as well. Besides the
bureaucracy, the huge army, the KGB, the necessity of holding
on to the republics and other countries in "socialist
cooperation," the inertia of the masses, who have forgotten how
to display individual initiative after being deprived of it for
so many years -- all hang like weights on the legs of the
country . . .

    I am far from saying that glasnost and perestroika are
nothing but a smoke screen released by a clever hand to deceive
the population of Russia and the West about impending
"liberating reforms." I rejoice in glasnost, proclaimed by
"General Dissident" Gorbachev, who has translated some of
Sakharov's ideas into the language of the party. Still, it's
hard to shake off the expectation, born of experience, that one
fine day all this perestroika will turn back on itself along the
tried-and-true path to new "stagnations" and "freezes," as has
happened so many times before. In the Soviet Union it is easier
to forbid fragile "freedoms" than to grant them and inculcate
them.

    We find that attempts at democratization are possible only
with the collusion of a leadership that has the courage to
introduce freedom in carefully prescribed doses. Democracy is
being introduced by order of the authorities, who at any moment
can expand it or restrict it at will. Coercion is a condition
of "freedom." Hence the inconsistency and timidity of
perestroika, which seems to be afraid of its own shadow,
constantly glancing back over its shoulder at its own "stagnant"
past.

    We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Gorbachev's
good beginnings and intentions. All the same, the final foothold
of Soviet liberalism and of Russian sovereignty remains the
goodwill of the Little Father Czar and his faithful courtiers.
We are experiencing a period of enlightened absolutism, and God
grant that it continue. As always, tyranny serves as the only
guarantor of progress and enlightenment in Russia.

    Having called Gorbachev, according to the standards of the
Brezhnev era, "Dissident No. 1" (for which I've already been
harshly criticized in the ever vigilant emigre press), I am not
at all inclined to idealize him. Gorbachev, like many in the
Soviet leadership, passed through long bureaucratic training
before he became a leader. The burden of those same traditions
with which he is struggling so selflessly lies on him as well.
He is not, I think, by nature a liberal but a pragmatist.

    All the same, the only alternative to Gorbachev's
perestroika remains war. The Pamyat society, with its
anti-Semitic, pogrom-promoting sentiments, is the alternative
to glasnost.

    We felt the slanting, deadly shadow of the KGB, which falls
over Moscow, for the last time at the border and in customs
when we were leaving for Paris. I've never seen such a crowd of
border guards, nor have I ever seen such a surplus of personnel
work so slowly and take so long, examining our passports and
luggage. What were they guarding? Our despoiled homeland?

    They threw themselves on manuscripts, telephone numbers,
addresses, receipts from Parisian dry cleaners. My wife,
corrupted by Western notions about personal inviolability,
couldn't understand for the life of her what business CUSTOMS
had with her intimate correspondence and assorted panties and
bras. She told the customs officers in some detail what she
thought of them, and they, huffing dolefully, continued to read
our personal papers: "Call Zhenya in the morning . . . don't
forget about Yura . . . Sima . . . Sonya . . . Lyusya . . . In
the evening -- 157-29-09 . . ." My wife didn't let up. I was
bored. Why were they doing all this? After all, they didn't
confiscate anything . . . Were they just trying to spoil the
mood? Were they sniffing out bits and pieces now to remember for
the future? Are they just waiting for the present freedom to
end, and everything they find now will be usable then as
operational material? Or perhaps it's simpler and cruder -- they
don't want us to forget ourselves and give way to euphoria. "We,
the KGB, are the masters here. We can do anything here, we can
peep into any hole -- either from above or from below, and you
have no business coming here." So we knew whom we were dealing
with!

    At passport control, Maria asked a severe and inaccessible
young border guard, "Why are you so serious? Please smile!" The
border guard loudly stamped her passport -- and suddenly he
smiled. My wife said, "Try to smile more often. Then your life
will be more interesting and easier to live . . ." Thus we bade
farewell to Moscow.

    "Well, even so," the correspondent persists, "aren't you
thinking of returning to the Soviet Union?" The very posing of
the question seems incorrect to me. As long as we a-re asked
such questions, it's clear that we can't talk about any serious
perestroika. Why, for example, when the English writer Graham
Greene moved to France, didn't anyone ask him whether or not he
was planning to return to England? Who cares where Graham Greene
lives -- in England or in France? And Hemingway, he lived quite
peacefully in Cuba (can you imagine! on an island!) and didn't
hurry back to his Great Homeland. But Russia, it seems,
possesses particular advantages (borders, the KGB, internal
passports, patriotism, perestroika, nostalgia) that for some
reason must be satisfied. The whole world begs you: Since you're
a Russian writer, live in Russia. Especially since there's
perestroika!

    Seventeen years before my own (physical) emigration, I
emigrated from Russia in my books, and I don't regret it. In
the final analysis, isn't it all the same where the body of a
writer dwells, if his books belong to Russia?