Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  15

  Now and again one comes across streetcars painted all over with pictures of factories, mass meetings, red regiments, Communist agitators. These are gifts from the personnel of a factory to the Moscow Soviet. These vehicles carry the only political posters still to be seen in Moscow, but they are by far the most interesting. For nowhere are more naive commercial posters to be seen than here. The wretched level of pictorial advertising is the only similarity between Paris and Moscow. Countless walls around churches and monasteries offer on all sides the finest surfaces for posters. But the constructivists, suprematists, abstractivists who under wartime Communism put their graphic propaganda at the service of the Revolution have long since been dismissed. Today only banal clarity is demanded. Most of these posters repel the Westerner. But Moscow shops are inviting; they have something of the tavern about them. The shop signs point at right angles into the street, as otherwise only old inn signs do, or golden barbers’ basins, or a top hat before a hatter’s. Also, the last charming, unspoiled motifs that remain are most likely to be found here. Shoes falling out of a basket; a Pomeranian running away with a sandal in his mouth. Pendants before the entrance of a Turkish kitchen: gentlemen, each with a fez adorning his head and each at his own little table. Catering to a primitive taste, advertising is still tied to narrative, example, or anecdote. In contrast, the Western advertisement convinces first and foremost by the expense of which it shows the firm capable. Here almost every ad also specifies the commodity in question. The grand, showy device is alien to commerce. The city, so inventive in abbreviations of all kinds, does not yet possess the simplest—brand names. Often Moscow’s evening sky glows in frightening blue: one has unwittingly looked at it through one of the gigantic pairs of blue spectacles that project from opticians’ shops like signposts. From the gateways, on the frames of front doors, in black, blue, yellow, and red letters of varying sizes—as an arrow, a picture of boots or freshly-ironed washing, a worn step or a solid staircase—a silently determined, contentious life accosts the passer-by. One must ride through the streets on the streetcar to perceive how this struggle is continued upward through the various stories, finally to reach its decisive phase on the roof. That height only the strongest, youngest slogans and signs attain. Only from an airplane does one have a view of the industrial élite of the city, the film and automobile industries. Mostly, however, the roofs of Moscow are a lifeless wasteland, having neither the dazzling electric signs of Berlin, nor the forest of chimneys of Paris, nor the sunny solitude of the rooftops of great cities in the South.

  16

  Anyone entering a Russian classroom for the first time will stop short in surprise. The walls are crammed with pictures, drawings, and pasteboard models. They are temple walls to which the children daily donate their own work as gifts to the collective. Red predominates; they are pervaded by Soviet emblems and heads of Lenin. Something similar is to be seen in many clubs. Wall newspapers are for grownups schemata of the same collective form of expression. They came into being under the pressure of the civil war, when in many places neither newspaper nor printing ink was available. Today they are an obligatory part of the public life of factories. Every Lenin niche has its wall newspaper, which varies its style among factories and authors. The only thing common to all is the naive cheerfulness: colorful pictures interspersed with prose and verses. The newspaper is the chronicle of the collective. It gives statistical reports but also jocular criticism of comrades mingled with suggestions for improving the factory or appeals for communal aid. Notices, warning signs, and didactic pictures cover the walls of the Lenin niche elsewhere, too. Even inside a factory everyone is as if surrounded by colored posters all exorcising the terrors of the machine. One worker is portrayed with his arm forced between the spokes of a driving wheel, another, drunk, causing an explosion with a short circuit, a third with his knee caught between two pistons. In the lending room of the Red Army bookshop hangs a notice, its short text clarified by many charming drawings, showing how many ways there are of ruining a book. In hundreds of thousands of copies a poster introducing the weights and measures normal in Europe is disseminated throughout the whole of Russia. Meters, liters, kilograms, etc., must be stuck up in every pub. In the reading room of the peasant club on Trubnaia Square the walls are covered with visual aids. The village chronicle, agricultural development, production technique, cultural institutions are graphically recorded in lines of development, along with components of tools, machine parts, retorts containing chemicals displayed everywhere on the walls. Out of curiosity I went up to a shelf from which two Negro faces grimaced at me. But as I came nearer, they turned out to be gas masks. Earlier, the building occupied by this club was one of the leading restaurants in Moscow. The erstwhile séparées are today bedrooms for the peasants of both sexes who have received a komandirovka to visit the city. There they are conducted through collections and barracks, and attend courses and educational evenings. From time to time there is also pedagogical theater in the form of “legal proceedings.” About three hundred people, sitting and standing, fill the red-draped room to its farthest corners. In a niche a bust of Lenin. The proceedings take place on a stage in front of which, on the right and the left, painted proletarian types—a peasant and an industrial worker—symbolize the smychka, the clasping together of town and country. The hearing of evidence has just finished, an expert is called on to speak. He and his assistant have one table, opposite him is the table of the defense, both facing sideways to the public. In the background, frontally, the judge’s table. Before it, dressed in black, with a thick branch in her hand, sits the defendant, a peasant woman. She is accused of medical incompetence with fatal results. Through incorrect treatment she caused the death of a woman in childbirth. The argumentation now circles around this case in monotonous, simple trains of thought. The expert gives his report: to blame for the mother’s death was the incorrect treatment. The defense counsel, however, pleads against harshness; in the country there is a lack of sanitary aid and hygienic instruction. The final word of the defendant: nichevo, people have always died in childbirth. The prosecution demands the death penalty. Then the presiding judge turns to the assembly: Are there any questions? But only a Komsomol appears on the stage, to demand severe punishment. The court retires to deliberate. After a short pause comes the judgment, for which everyone stands up: two years’ imprisonment with recognition of mitigating circumstances. Solitary confinement is thus ruled out. In conclusion, the president points to the necessity of establishing centers of hygiene and instruction in rural areas. Such demonstrations are carefully prepared; there can be no question of improvisation. For mobilizing the public on questions of Bolshevik morality in accordance with Party wishes there can be no more effective means. On one occasion, alcoholism will be disposed of in this way, on others fraud, prostitution, hooliganism. The austere forms of such educational work are entirely appropriate to Soviet life, being precipitates of an existence that requires that a stand be taken a hundred times each day.

  17

  In the streets of Moscow there is a curious state of affairs: the Russian village is playing hide-and-seek in them. If you step through one of the high gateways—they often have wrought-iron gates, but I never found them closed—you stand on the threshold of a spacious settlement. Opening before you, broad and expansive, is a farmyard or a village, the ground is uneven, children ride about in sleighs, sheds for wood and tools fill the corners, trees stand here and there, wooden staircases give the backs of houses, which look like city buildings from the front, the appearance of Russian farmhouses. Frequently churches stand in these yards, just as on a large village green. So the street is augmented by the dimension of landscape. Nor is there any Western city that, in its vast squares, looks so rurally formless and perpetually sodden from bad weather, thawing snow or rain. Scarcely one of these broad spaces bears a monument. (In contrast, there is hardly one in Europe whose secret structure was not profaned and destroyed by a monument in the n
ineteenth century.) Like every other city, Moscow builds up with names a little world within itself. There is a casino called Alcazar, a hotel named Liverpool, a Tirol boardinghouse. From there it still takes half an hour to reach the centers of urban winter sport. True, skaters and skiers are encountered throughout the city, but the toboggan track is closer to the center. There sleighs of the most diverse construction are used: from a board that runs at the front on sleigh rails and at the back drags in the snow, to the most comfortable bobsleds. Nowhere does Moscow look like the city itself; at the most it resembles its outskirts. The wet ground, the wooden booths, long convoys carrying raw materials, cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse, and indigent taverns are found in the busiest parts. The city is still interspersed with little wooden buildings in exactly the same Slavonic style as those found everywhere in the surroundings of Berlin. What looks so desolate in Brandenburg stone attracts here with the lovely colors of warm wood. In the suburban streets leading off the broad avenues, peasant huts alternate with art-nouveau villas or with the sober façades of eight-story blocks. Snow lies deep, and if all of a sudden silence falls, one can believe oneself in a village in midwinter, deep in the Russian interior. Nostalgia for Moscow is engendered not only by the snow, with its starry luster by night and its flowerlike crystals by day, but also by the sky. For between low roofs the horizon of the broad plains is constantly entering the city. Only toward evening does it become invisible. But then the shortage of housing in Moscow produces its most astonishing effect. If you wander the streets in the dusk you see in the large and small houses almost every window brightly lit. If the light coming from them were not so unsteady, you would believe you had a festive illumination before your eyes.

  18

  The churches are almost mute. The city is as good as free of the chimes that on Sundays spread such deep melancholy over our cities. But there is still perhaps not a single spot in Moscow from which at least one church is not visible. More exactly: at which one is not watched by at least one church. The subject of the tsars was surrounded in this city by more than four hundred chapels and churches, which is to say by two thousand domes, which hide in the corners everywhere, cover one another, spy over walls. An architectural okhrana was around him. All these churches preserve their incognito. Nowhere do high towers jut into the sky. Only with time does one become accustomed to putting together the long walls and crowds of low domes into complexes of monastery churches. It then also becomes clear why in many places Moscow looks as tightly sealed as a fortress. The monasteries still bear traces today of their old defensive purpose. Here Byzantium with its thousand domes is not the wonder that the European dreams it to be. Most of the churches are built on an insipid, sickly-sweet pattern: their blue, green, and golden domes are a candied Orient. If you enter one of these churches you first find a spacious anteroom with a few sparse portraits of saints. It is gloomy, the half-light lending itself to conspiracy. In such rooms one can discuss the most dubious business, even pogroms if the occasion demands. Adjoining the anteroom is the only room for worship. In the background it has a few small steps leading to a narrow, low platform along which one advances past pictures of saints to the iconostasis. At short intervals, altar succeeds altar, a glimmering red light denoting each. The side walls are occupied by large pictures of saints. All parts of the wall that are not thus covered with pictures are lined with shining gold-colored tin plate. From the trashily painted ceiling hangs a crystal chandelier. Nevertheless the room is always lit only by candles, a drawing room with sanctified walls against which the ceremony unrolls. The large pictures are greeted by making the sign of the cross and kneeling down to touch the ground with the forehead; then, with renewed signs of the cross, the worshiper, praying or doing penance, goes on to the next. Before small, glass-covered pictures lying in rows or singly on desks the genuflection is omitted. One bends over them and kisses the glass. On such desks, beside the most precious old icons, series of the gaudiest oil paintings are displayed. Many pictures of saints have taken up positions outside on the façade and look down from the highest cornices under the tinny eaves like birds sheltering there. From their inclined, retort-shaped heads affliction speaks. Byzantium seems to have no church-window form of its own. A magical but uncanny impression: the profane, drab windows looking out onto the street from the assembly rooms and towers of the church as if from a living room. Behind them the Orthodox priest is ensconced like the Buddhist monk in his pagoda. The lower part of the Basilius Cathedral might be the ground floor of a fine boyar house. However, if you enter Red Square from the west, its domes gradually rise into the sky like a pack of fiery suns. This building always holds something back, and could only be surprised by a gaze coming from an airplane, against which the builders forgot to take precautions. The inside has been not just emptied but eviscerated like a shot deer. (And it could hardly have turned out differently, for even in 1920 people still prayed here with fanatical fervor.) With the removal of all the furniture, the colorful vegetal convolutions that proliferate as murals in all the corridors and vaults are hopelessly exposed, distorting with a sad rococo playfulness the much older decoration that sparingly preserves in the interior the memory of the colorful spirals of the domes. The vaulted passageways are narrow, suddenly broadening into altar niches or circular chapels into which so little light falls from the high windows above that isolated devotional objects that have been left standing are scarcely discernible. Many churches remain as untended and as empty. But the glow that now shines only occasionally from the altars into the snow has been well preserved in the wooden cities of booths. In their snow-covered, narrow alleyways it is quiet. One hears only the soft jargon of the Jewish clothiers in their stalls next to the junk of the paper dealer, who, enthroned in concealment behind silver chains, has drawn tinsel and cotton-wool-tufted Father Christmases across her face like an oriental veil.

  19

  Even the most laborious Moscow weekday has two coordinates that define each of its moments sensuously as expectation and fulfillment. One is the vertical coordinate of mealtimes, crossed by the evening horizontal of the theater. One is never very far from either. Moscow is crammed with pubs and theaters. Sentries with sweets patrol the street, many of the large grocery stores do not close until about eleven at night, and on the corners tearooms and beerhouses open. Chainaia, pivnaia—but usually both are painted on a background where a dull green from the upper edge gradually and sullenly merges into a dirty yellow. Beer is served with curious condiments: tiny pieces of dried white and black bread baked over with a salt crust, and dried peas in salt water. In certain taverns one can dine in this way and enjoy in addition a primitive intsenirovka. This is the term for an epic or lyrical subject that has been adapted for the theater. It is often a folk song crudely divided for a choir. In the orchestra of such folk music, alongside accordions and violins, abacuses used as instruments are sometimes to be heard. (They can be found in every shop and office. The smallest calculation is unthinkable without them.) The intoxicating warmth that overcomes the guest on entering these taverns, on drinking the hot tea and enjoying the sharp zakuska, is Moscow’s most secret winter lust. Therefore no one knows the city who has not known it in snow. Or each district must be visited during the season in which its climatic extreme falls, for to this it is primarily adapted, and it can be understood only through this adaptation. In Moscow, life in winter is richer by a dimension. Space literally changes according to whether it is hot or cold. People live on the street as if in a frosty chamber of mirrors, each pause to think is unbelievably difficult. It needs half a day’s resolution even to mail an already addressed letter, and despite the severe cold it is a feat of will power to go into a shop and buy something. Yet when you have finally found a restaurant, no matter what is put on the table—vodka (which is here spiced with herbs), cakes, or a cup of tea—warmth makes the passing time itself an intoxicant. It flows into the weary guest like honey.

  20

  On the anniversary
of Lenin’s death many wear black arm bands. For at least three days, flags throughout the city are at half-mast. Many of the black-veiled pennants, however, once hanging, are left out for a few weeks. Russia’s mourning for a dead leader is certainly not comparable to the attitudes adopted by other peoples on such days. The generation that was active in the civil wars is growing old in vitality if not in years. It is as if stabilization had admitted to their lives the calm, sometimes even the apathy, that is usually brought only by old age. The halt the Party one day called to wartime Communism with the NEP had a terrible backlash, which felled many of the movement’s fighters. At that time many returned their membership books to the Party. Cases are known of such total demoralization that trusty pillars of the Party became defrauders within a few weeks. The mourning for Lenin is, for Bolsheviks, also mourning for heroic Communism. The few years since its passing are for Russian consciousness a long time. Lenin’s activity so accelerated the course of events in his era that he recedes swiftly into the past, his image grows quickly remote. Nevertheless, in the optic of history—opposite in this to that of space—movement in the distance means enlargement. Today other orders are in force than those of Lenin’s time, admittedly slogans that he himself suggested. Now it is made clear to every Communist that the revolutionary work of this hour is not conflict, not civil war, but canal construction, electrification, and factory building. The revolutionary nature of true technology is emphasized ever more clearly. Like everything else, this (with reason) is done in Lenin’s name. His name grows and grows. It is significant that the report of the English trade-union delegation, a sober document sparing with prognoses, thought it worth mentioning the possibility “that, when the memory of Lenin has found its place in history, this great Russian revolutionary reformer will even be pronounced a saint.” Even today the cult of his picture has assumed immeasurable proportions. It hangs in the vestibule of the armory in the Kremlin, as in formerly godless places the cross was erected by converted heathens. It is also gradually establishing its canonical forms. The well-known picture of the orator is the most common, yet another speaks perhaps more intensely and directly: Lenin at a table bent over a copy of Pravda. When he is thus immersed in an ephemeral newspaper, the dialectical tension of his nature appears: his gaze turned, certainly, to the far horizon, but the tireless care of his heart to the moment.