Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  But peering at the strange land from a distance was not enough. In 1957, the opportunity to visit Russia, unimaginable for anyone but accredited diplomats or the occasional journalist for the previous two decades, suddenly arose. Khrushchev had ordained a great Festival of Students and Youth in Moscow, with young guests from all over the great community of socialist nations (which Battista-controlled Cuba had yet to join) and also, stunningly, from among the ‘progressive elements’ of degenerate capitalist countries too. Mervyn signed up. Much to his surprise, he was granted that rarest of official favours, a Soviet visa.

  The festival was a carefully scripted and tightly controlled affair, but to Mervyn and the six hundred Western students who attended it was an intoxicating immersion in the world they had studied for so long. Mervyn was so thrilled he barely slept, even though he found himself instinctively disliking the communal sing-songs and flag-brandishing parades through stadiums full of cheering young Communists. Muscovites were no less intoxicated. Young Westerners were as exotic as mythical beasts, all the more so because for the past two decades any contact with foreigners had been easy grounds for a spell in the Gulag. Some of the African comrades present took fuller advantage of the opportunities for fraternization than the authorities had anticipated, fathering a whole generation of mixed-race babies for ever known as Children of the Festival.

  Mervyn fell in with a couple of bold spirits who had taken advantage of the atmosphere of licence the festival had created to chat to foreigners. One was a devilishly handsome young Jewish theatre student called Valery Shein, who wore jaunty caps and striped shirts, and his quieter cousin Valery Golovitser, an intense balletomane a couple of years Shein’s junior. The three young men walked down Gogolevsky Boulevard, locked in intense and earnest conversation about their respective lives. When Mervyn’s all-too-brief week in Moscow ended, they swapped addresses. It seemed unlikely, to all concerned, that the miracle of the festival would ever repeat itself, or that Mervyn would ever be allowed back. The prospect of the two Valerys ever having the opportunity to visit Britain was so remote as to be laughable. In a sense, they were right. Moscow was not open to a mass influx of foreigners again until the 1980 Olympics.

  But the following year, 1958, Mervyn heard of a job opportunity in Moscow. True, it was in the British embassy, and he would have to live the hermetic life of a diplomat, sealed off from the real Russian life that he had tasted during the festival. But the job, a humble one in the research department, would at least get him to Russia.

  The post was applied for, arrangements were made for a sabbatical from St Antony’s, and in due course a formal letter of acceptance on Foreign Office notepaper arrived in Mervyn’s college pigeon-hole. He bought an extremely heavy dark blue overcoat in the Oxford Co-op in anticipation of the hard Moscow winters, which I still wear to this day. And some time in late summer Mervyn took a can of black oil paint and sat down to mark his handsome new steamer trunk with the neatly printed words ‘W.H.M. Matthews, St Antony’s College, Oxford, АНГЛИЯ’, the last word in bold Cyrillic letters, leaving no doubt as to the trunk’s destination.

  People, detached from their homes and set loose in the world, drift till they find the places that fit them. By the end of my first week in Moscow in April 1995, I knew that I had found my place in the city’s rampant, filthy raucousness. I thought: either this is the real world, or there is no real world.

  The Russia I knew had caught a viral dose of the century’s chaos. It was long in incubating, but suddenly, almost without warning, the whole rotten edifice collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy and dysfunction. For Russians the shock of the implosion of the system which had sustained their every physical, spiritual and intellectual need was far more profound than anything the Soviet system had ever thrown at them even the Purges, even the Second World War. Both those horrors, at least, had easy-to-understand narratives. But now they were hit by something entirely inexplicable – not an enemy, but a vacuum. They had nothing but their Russianness to fall back on, the intense experience of being Russian which pulled them together like straggling soldiers in a blizzard.

  People reacted in different ways. Blinking like earthquake survivors, some quickly found their new God in money, sex, drugs, nationalist fantasies, mysticism, charismatic religious sects. Others rediscovered the stern and ancient Orthodox God of All the Russias. Some, possessed by aimless frenzy, thrived on looting trinkets and scraps from the ruins. Others, who would soon become the country’s new masters, ignored the scraps and went for the treasures.

  And yet, with so many jeopardies inwardly stalking them, most Russians still lived their outward lives on spec, on spiritual credit. In other countries a trauma of this magnitude has ripped society apart and plunged it into decades of soulsearching. But in Russia the twin forces of fatalism and apathy meant that the country reacted with little more than a collective, resigned shrug and slogged on with the painful business of staying alive.

  I came to Moscow desperate. After graduating from Oxford, I had spent two years of hapless wandering in the generation expat hinterlands of Prague and Budapest, drinking strong coffee by day and cadging pints of beer from American girls by night. I was trying, though not very hard, to write, which brought me eventually to besieged Sarajevo on a freelance reporting trip with a borrowed flak jacket and a rucksack full of blank notebooks. I found the thrill I had been seeking by riding UN armoured personnel carriers past piles of shattered concrete and the beautiful, boyish debris of my first war. I walked down unlit streets filled with people strolling on a summer’s night like the damned in a Gustave Doré engraving. I read The Brothers Karamazov during a bout of shelling, imagining myself in communion with the darkest forces of the world. But then I saw a child shot dead by a sniper as he ran across a road, picked up off his feet by the impact of the bullet and thrown down lifeless like laundry tossed from a basket, and felt a surge of revulsion at my own voyeurism. On my return to Budapest I decided I could no longer face the Bohemian folly of café society, and began to seek something bleaker and more hard-bitten.

  A few months later I found myself standing on the rainwashed pavement outside a McDonald’s in downtown Belgrade counting change for a hamburger and chips. I was unsuccessfully stalking a man called Željko Ražnjatović, aka Arkan, one of the most notorious warlords of the Bosnian war, who had retired from his career of marauding into a soap-star lifestyle of unrestrained kitsch, football fanaticism and mafia violence which I thought would make a good magazine piece. I stalked him at the Red Star Belgrade football matches, I stalked him at his home and his office, I visited his former pet tiger cub mascot, now grown huge and morose in a cage in Belgrade Zoo. Good material it may have been, but I was finally out of money, and there was no sign that Arkan was willing to talk to me.

  I called my mother in London from the Belgrade Press Club (whence I discovered one could make international calls for free). She told me that a local English-language paper in Moscow, to which she had encouraged me to apply during one of my periodic bouts of jobless idling in London, had offered me a post as a staff reporter. It was time to get a job. Time to go to Russia.

  I had visited Moscow several times before: as a small child with my mother, and later as a teenager with my father when he was allowed back into the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. I’d never liked it much. I always hated the lack of privacy in my aunt Lenina’s two-room apartment and I was constantly irritated by the stream of self-righteous advice and correction which Russian old women consider their right to mete out to youngsters. I found the hospitality overwhelming, and the effusiveness of everyone I met embarrassing. Elderly friends of my aunt’s were recruited to troop me round museums and theatres, and their teenage grandchildren tasked with taking me to dilapidated Soviet amusement parks and to listen to street singers on the Arbat. I was shy and fogeyish, and found my young companions’ open adoration for all things Western uncomfortable – all the more so because I hated pop music and discos, which seemed
to be their idea of nirvana. Above all I found the place impossibly claustrophobic, not least because my Western clothes made me the object of unabashed stares wherever I went – or so it seemed to my selfconscious sixteen-year-old self.

  In the summer of 1990, after finishing school, I was finally allowed to go to Moscow alone. I found a summer job as a translator at the British embassy thanks to former students of my mother’s who worked there. Like my father four decades before, I found myself employed in an office in the former stable block behind the old Kharitonenko mansion, ferrying piles of visa application forms and occasionally being trotted out to pose as the vice-consul whenever angry visa applicants demanded to speak to a real, live Englishman. I was eighteen years old. I learned croquet from the sons of the chargé d’affaires on the immaculate lawn of their residence just off the old Arbat, and hired an official black Volga sedan to pick me up at my aunt’s apartment and transport me to work in the mornings.

  Moscow had changed almost unrecognizably since I had last visited; there was a palpable sense that the old order, which had once seemed so permanent, was disintegrating. Traffic police seemed powerless to stop motorists from executing illegal U-turns; everyone roundly ignored the official prohibition on using private cars as taxis. The black-market exchange rate was ten times the official one, making me rich overnight. True, there wasn’t much to buy, but I did clean out the Melodiya record shop on the new Arbat of every classical disc they had for a total of twenty pounds, and staggered home with parcels of art books bought for pennies at the Tretyakov gallery shop. The newly opened McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, the first in the Soviet Union, had sent the embassy some vouchers for free Big Macs, so one lunchtime some British colleagues and I commandeered the ambassador’s Rolls-Royce and trundled over to get some lunch. The line of Russians waiting patiently for their first taste of the West snaked down the street. Stepping out of the Rolls we marched straight in, waving our vouchers and our foreignness as selfevident marks of privilege. I’m not proud of it now, but Moscow made me feel, for the first time in my life, flushed with cash, cool and ineffably superior.

  Everything about Moscow still seemed dilapidated and terminally shoddy: people’s clothes and shoes were shoddy; so were the cars and the electrical goods and the bus tickets and the buses. But there was a new hope for the future in anyone who was young and intelligent. Friends took me to a history lecture by Yury Afanasiyev, my mother’s old classmate, who spoke about Stalinism for two hours to a huge hall packed to bursting. The fact that he was addressing a taboo subject so openly seemed intoxicating. The audience wrote questions on slips of paper and passed them to the speaker in a constant stream after the lecture, in approved Soviet style, and the meeting broke up only when someone came to warn them that it was nearly time for the last bus. There was a hunger for truth among these people which impressed me profoundly supported by a powerful faith that somehow the truth would make them free. I found my new Soviet friends sentimental and naïve, but there was no mistaking their earnestness, and their conviction that, as Solzhenitsyn had exhorted, they should not live by lies any longer.

  Five years later I passed once again through the mirror into Russia via the infinitely depressing half-gloom of Sheremetyevo Airport – this time not as a visitor but to start a new life. The old smell of Soviet detergent and mouldy heating was still there, remembered from childhood trips. But much else had changed. Instead of empty, echoing corridors and stern-faced border guards, I found myself in the middle of a throng of hustling taxi-drivers. Garish hoardings advertised imported beer and More cigarettes. Beefy female shuttle traders pushed past me, hauling massive bags full of coats and boots bought on shopping sprees in Dubai and Istanbul. I was picked out from the serum by Viktor, a Moscow Times driver, who bundled me into his ageing Lada and steered it through the weaving traffic of Leningradsky Prospekt.

  The overcast sky was the colour of smoke, and the watery late-winter light washed the city in pale grey. On either side of the road lines of apartment blocks marched out towards a horizon of billowing chimneys and haze. Heavy-set buses trundled along, cowlings flapping, belching black exhaust. At the edges of the road huddles of pedestrians waited to cross the Prospekt’s forbidding sixteen lanes. Even as we approached the centre of the city, there was still something of the steppe in these great windblown spaces.

  It must have been very different when my father first arrived in Russia. The city’s soul was swelling with victory and pride, not deflating in exhaustion. The Moscow he knew was spick and span, the carefully planned capital of an expanding empire. It was a controlled, oppressive place, not the teeming mayhem into which it was to descend after the Soviet Union collapsed. And emotionally, for my father, the distance was greater. For a generation unused to travel, Russia might as well have been on a different planet. But Mervyn could not have been happier. He had finally loosed himself from his home and was drifting towards a place which would fit him.

  The time and city were pregnant with pitfalls for a young man in love with Russia and blessed, or cursed, with a strong wayward streak. The Cold War was approaching its height. Soviet tanks had recently crushed the Hungarian Rising and there was no doubt in the minds of many in the West that it was the ambition of Socialism to conquer the earth. It was a time when the world was cleanly divided according to moral absolutes, when the opposing teams wore different coloured jerseys and the nuclear handicaps were listed on the programme.

  It’s hard, now, to imagine the thrill and the mystery of living in the secretive capital of a parallel, hostile world. The Moscow my father knew is separated from the Russia in which I lived not just by half a lifetime but by a seismic shift of history. My father’s generation was defined by a bitter ideological divide which ran across the world, and he, for reasons that I only began to understand when I went to live in Russia myself thirty years later, did everything in his power to live on the other side of that divide. To the embassy cold warriors with whom he worked, if not to Mervyn himself, Moscow was the heart of all the darkness in the world.

  There is a photograph of my father I had never seen until he handed me a copy of his memoirs, without comment, on the stairs of our London house late in 1999, before turning away with an embarrassed smile and retreating back into his study. It is a photograph of a surprisingly handsome young man, his tie and collar slightly askew, looking dreamily and slightly selfconsciously over the photographer’s shoulder as he stands on the balcony of the diplomatic block of flats on Sadovaya Samotechnaya Street – known to its inmates then, as now, as ‘Sad-Sam’ – some time in the early autumn of 1958. He is staring into the middle distance over the Garden Ring – not yet a choking artery of solid traffic – and he seems a serious fellow, eager to please, a little unsure of himself. The photo was taken shortly after he arrived in Moscow. He was twentyseven years old, had a promising academic career ahead of him, and was delighted to be in the Soviet Union. The great adventure of his life was beginning.

  Mervyn’s life was comfortable – or, by Soviet standards, positively luxurious. He shared the three-room apartment at Sad-Sam with another young embassy staffer, Robert Longmire. The power plugs and appliances were imported from England, and the telephone was marked ‘Speech on this line is NOT SECURE’. They had a lackadaisical cleaning lady called Lena and a Siberian cat called Shura, and stocked up on home comforts like whisky and digestive biscuits at the embassy’s little commissariat shop. The dinner suit Mervyn had bought when he went up to Oxford was in constant use for diplomatic cocktail parties, which he found insufferably dreary.

  My father may have been physically in Moscow, but he quickly found that he and his fellow foreigners were forced to live separate lives from the Russians who surrounded them. His foreign accent and clothes would raise frank alarm and wonder among shop cashiers and tram passengers. Contacting his old friends from the festival was unthinkably dangerous, not for Mervyn but for them. His every move was monitored by gangs of KGB plain-clothes officers – dubbed ‘g
oons’ by the young diplomats, after the thugs of contemporary American gangster films – who trailed him on his nocturnal wanderings around the Boulevard ring. Mervyn invented games to play with his minders. One of his favourites was to break into a run on a crowded street, and glance backwards to see who also started running. On the Metro, Mervyn, in a flippant mood, once went up to a KGB watcher he recognized and said, ‘How many summers, how many winters?’, the standard greeting for those one has not seen for a long time. The man remained absolutely expressionless and said nothing. The KGB, to Mervyn, was no more than a slightly menacing prop in his young man’s world of adventure.

  Luckily for Mervyn’s sanity, a saviour soon appeared in the diminutive form of Vadim Popov. Popov was a junior official from the Ministry of Education, who became my father’s first real Russian mend. They met when Mervyn visited the ministry to begin his official duties, which consisted of compiling a paper on the Soviet university system. Vadim was slightly older than Mervyn, strong and squat with a square Slavic face. He was a drinker, and fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and at times could be bluff and even abrasive. But Mervyn found himself warming quickly to his new comrade’s rough charm.

  Vadim appointed himself Mervyn’s guide to what my father fondly imagined was the ‘real’ Russia – a Russia of smoky restaurants, animated conversations and body-odorous embraces. Over months, and in gradual degrees, Vadim drew Mervyn out of his shyness, and led him into a glamorous world of flirtatious women and sentimental, vodka-induced confidences.