Next morning, her black coat buttoned tightly round her in spite of the weather, with Vufi and the plants travelling as usual in the oilcloth bag, Lotte waddled away out of our lives, followed by FIX and FAX, carrying her tin box and some oddments rolled up in the crocheted counterpane.
The bundle of Lats was accepted, as promised, by the Consulate and many months later, in London, we received a cheque for £200.
Once more we were homeless. For the second time we had seen a country invaded and disrupted, and the suffering that this brought. But whereas in Vienna the Jews had born the brunt of the German annexation and the tenure of daily life continued more or less the same, in Latvia there was a total downgrading of the environment. For most people it was the end of the pleasant life they had struggled to build up and the death of their hopes.
The effect of the two takeovers might be compared with that of a man attacking a meadow with a scythe, or one flattening it with a bulldozer.
We now settled in to a strange spartan life in the Hobsons’ empty flat. Each of us had a camp bed, a kitchen plate, cup, glass, spoon, knife and fork. Tom pinned a Union Jack on the front door and a notice saying that the flat was the property of the British Consulate and enjoyed extra-territoriality. His Russian was excellent as, before joining the Foreign Service as a probationary vice-consul in Danzig, he had taken his interpretership with distinction after only nine months’ study.
Food was becoming scarce, partly as a result of the depredations of the Russians and partly due to the disruption caused by the nationalization of the land. An anti-kulak campaign was under way, bringing a chilling reminder of the great famine in Russia. The word kulak originally meant a dishonest middle man who lived by battening on the labour of others. Having been used as a term of abuse in the early post-Revolution days it gradually broadened its meaning to cover all those peasants who were capable and independent enough to be a threat to the Communist way of life. The extermination of the best of the peasant stock was now under way in the Baltic States.
Supremely indifferent to logic and intent on collectivization, the authorities drove home, through the media, the fact that the small farming units which they themselves had created were not large enough to be viable. At the same time, an intensive propaganda campaign on behalf of the kolkhozes or collective farms began to appear in the press. Collective farming was contrary to the deepest instincts of the Latvian peasants, who had yearned for generations to possess the land which was to be theirs for so short a time. Apathy set in and the peasants began to slaughter their livestock.
The supply of food was further hindered by the shortage of transport. Spare parts and tyres were almost unobtainable, so the number of vehicles in service decreased steadily, while the needs of industry and the towns were given priority over the countryside. In an attempt to fill the gap, those car owners in the rural areas whose vehicles had not yet been nationalized were obliged to act as public carriers. Cars were commandeered and used without bothering to inform the owners. They, on the other hand, were obliged to keep the vehicles road worthy in order to avoid a charge of sabotage, and received in return arbitrary payments which were usually quite inadequate.
‘Transport’s always been a headache in Russia,’ said Glyn Hall. ‘Thornton, the Metropolitan Vickers man who spent years in Russia, told me that the Nizhni Novgorod car factory had turned out too many right-handed mudguards, but rather than hold up production they fitted only one to each vehicle and sent them off to remote parts of Russia.’
In fact, there had been a self-criticism piece in Pravda a few days before about vehicles with missing parts.
The Russians were now requisitioning the houses in the Elizabetes iela. Next morning we were startled by a thunderous knock on the front door. A corporal and half a dozen men were standing outside. ‘Tom,’ we called.
‘You have one hour in which to leave,’ said the corporal. He clearly expected no argument. Tom pointed to the Union Jack and the notice beside it.
‘This flat is extra-territorial,’ he said firmly. ‘You may not enter.’ His assured manner and fluent Russian made up for his youthful appearance.
The corporal was nonplussed. Here was something not covered by his orders and it might be wiser to act cautiously. He turned to the men. ‘Up to the fourth floor,’ he said sharply. The sound of a pistol butt battering the panels of the door above echoed down the stair well.
We had now settled, with Tom, into a simple domestic rhythm. Each morning we drew up our hard wooden chairs round the folding card table and drank our ‘coffee’. Regularly, before we left the office, the requisitioning squad, headed now by a captain, would knock on the door and demand entry.
Bravely faced by Tom, they would argue the extra-territorial question and finally go away to report the failure of their mission. Soldiers were being billeted all through the block at a ratio of ten men to one room, sleeping on the floor. At this rate we were depriving about sixty men of a hard bed, while we three enjoyed the lUxury of a whole empty flat. Clearly we were behaving like bloated capitalists, even though our domestic equipment conformed to the Soviet socialist norm. At any moment the requisitioning squad might have orders to evict us, so we were careful to keep nothing compromising in the flat. When the cleaning woman hung torn up strips of Russkaya Gazeta in the loo, we prudently replaced it with Briva Zeme.
News of the Battle of Britain had been coming over the radio. In the Rigascher Rundschau we had read horrible descriptions of the bombardment of Poland, France, Belgium and Holland by the Luftwaffe. Seen from outside, and to judge from my mother’s brave but ill-founded certainties, England was tiny and alone, and unaware of the odds against her. Anxiously, we decided to let the arrangements for the boys’ journey to America go ahead.
Though the burden of visa work was reaching its climax, ciphering at least was eased. Now that the balloon had gone up and sovietization was taking its predictable course, there seemed less point in sending telegrams to London, especially since, in view of the continued silence as to our future movements, we felt some doubt whether our messages were being read. Our Friend had long abandoned his natty suits and now slipped into the back door of the office in a variety of scruffy clothing, sometimes carrying a bag of tools.
‘We’re cutting down on telegrams,’ I told him, ‘and we’ll only report anything of very special interest.’ So we scanned the papers carefully and spent the rest of the time chatting.
Our Friend’s brother, who worked in the Latvian Intourist office, had made frequent trips to Russia in the past and brought back all sorts of reports.
‘People become very ingenious when they’re hard-pressed,’ Our Friend told me one day. ‘When my brother was in Moscow he heard about a clandestine queue club. Some bright person had the idea of organizing a shopping intelligence service. Members were given tip-offs about where some foodstuff or other would be for sale. In return, they had to hand over ten per cent of what they had been able to buy. They then got the password for the following day, in exchange for which they would get further information. But the authorities got wind of it and made an example of the organizers. Twenty years in a labour camp, I think it was. You’ll see queues everywhere in Russia, sometimes forming in space, probably because of a rumour, true or false. There was a useful reservation system too.’
‘What was that?’
‘Just a number chalked on your back, so that you could hurry from one queue to another and find your place reserved when you returned.’
‘What about the easy divorce one heard so much about?’
‘That’s not quite so popular now. A husband has to give his ex-wife one-third of his salary. One chap my brother knew had been married three times. When he took a fourth wife he was obliged to live on her alimony as the whole of his salary was already forfeit.’
‘And supposing the husband was unemployed?’
‘When my brother was last there unemployment was officially non-existent. This avoided th
e need for unemployment pay—a considerable economy. It also looked good on paper.’
I asked if this was still going on.
‘I can’t say, but in any case you won’t see any unemployed or undesirables in a first-class zone like Moscow. You can’t even spend a night there without having your internal passport stamped by the police.’
‘And is it true that the 1923 famine and the famines in the ‘30s were deliberately engineered?’
‘A certain amount was due to mismanagement and the hatred of the peasants for the collective farm system, but the Soviet leaders set out quite deliberately to crush the opposition of the peasants by mass arrests and deportation, and the commandeering of their remaining foodstuffs. There are no official figures but an estimate of five million deaths in the famine of 1933 is not denied by the authorities. As Lenin said, “With a population of a hundred and forty millions, a few million more or less make no difference at all.” The deaths may not have worried them, but the resulting chronic food shortage in the whole of Russia certainly did, though it was too late by then to find an easy remedy.’
‘Did the news get through to the outside world?’
‘Journalists were excluded from the famine areas, but of course it couldn’t be completely hushed up. The American Relief Association, in 1923, sent enough grain to Russia to feed several million people. At the same time the Russians were cynically exporting grain. I myself saw American grain coming in through the port of Ventspils and being loaded into empty trucks which had just taken Russian grain to the harbour for shipment to the Ruhr. You see, it’s hard for decent people to credit such callous inhumanity. In fact, they don’t want to, and that suits the Russians. Do you think that when the same thing happens here the West will attempt to take action?’
The problem of the British colony and its future was becoming acute. Anyone without roots in Riga had already left, but there was a group of people, independent business men or families, like the Whishaws, who had lived in the region for generations. They had weathered the 1918 Revolution by moving to the Baltic States, and in some cases their entire worldly possessions were now concentrated in Latvia and they had no ties in England. Somehow, they hoped, they could cling on.
HMG advised very strongly against any British subject attempting to remain, and a scheme had been proposed to send all the men to Palestine where, presumably, they would join the British forces, and the women to Murmansk for a problematical onward journey by sea. It was not clear whether the Russians had agreed to this idea.
One evening, feeling tired and depressed, we decided to leave the office at nine and go to a cinema. Only Soviet films were now on show and the choice lay between ‘Lenin and the October Revolution’ which we had already seen; ‘The Mannerheim Line’, which would be far too painful; ‘Life on a Kolkhoz’, and the achievements of a Stakhanovite worker in a textile mill, which was showing in a nearby flea pit. We chose the textile worker, knowing from experience that the sound would be blurred by the rustling of sunflower seed husks. The seeds were very popular with the more modest audiences, who split them with their front teeth, swallowed the kernel and spat the husk neatly onto the floor, to form a carpet which crunched at every movement. The noise was apt to mar love scenes and dramatic moments, but would pleasantly dim the drone of propaganda which was bound to take up a large proportion of the film.
For two hours we watched the heroine running from loom to loom in order to beat the quota. By the end of the film she was running so fast that even the audience felt tired and breathless. Her reward, after an endless harangue by a commissar from Moscow, was a firm handshake and a very frizzy perm, which puzzled the audience, as a permanent wave had not yet become an unattainable luxury in Riga.
Our shadows, who seemed as thick mentally as their boots, stuck glumly to their brief and to the bench opposite the Consulate front door, and apparently took no interest in what went on at the back of the office.
There were moments when the presence of these heavy-footed fellows became almost intolerable. We were too busy to lose time in a serious attempt to free ourselves of their surveillance so, being stuck with them, we began to take a mild interest in their welfare. Hobson’s flat was nearer the office than the Ausekla iela, just a walk through the leafy Vermana Park and the length of a block, so our shadows spent more time than ever on the bench.
‘Just imagine sitting there for thirteen or fourteen hours with nothing to do,’ I said to Kenneth. ‘It must be terribly boring for them. Don’t you think we might say “Good morning” and “Good evening”? Perhaps we could offer them a cigarette.’
Finally, like shy bovine creatures, they approached and accepted an occasional fag, provided no one else was in sight.
Chapter 19
There were now only five days to go until we were supposed to leave the country, and still no word from London. It was clear that our official activities were at an end, so we posted a notice on the Consulate door that after August 20th the Passport Control Office would be closed to the public.
With a successful sale behind us we decided that HMG should also have the chance of profiting from our commercial activities, so once more we put up a notice announcing, this time, the sale of our office effects.
On Tuesday, 20th the outer office was full of despairing visa applicants whose hopes of escaping from Latvia were vanishing. The next day the same office was crowded with people of a different sort, bundles of notes in their hands, grasping at chairs, desks, stationery, typewriters, the office clock, a battered map of Riga and the Russian and Latvian dictionaries. From the depths of our cupboards the strangest things emerged—an abacus with one row of beads missing, a dented samovar, a Mazzawattee tea tin. Everything found a buyer, including our show piece, an old typewriter which, if one wedged it skilfully with an india rubber and depressed the return lever, would send the whole carriage whizzing into a waste-paper basket, strategically placed, below. This we had used to divert our colleagues in the days when the pace of life had been easier.
In mid-morning there was a startled hush as a Russian officer, in uniform, strode in at the door. It seemed however that he too was a purchaser and, by implication, not out to chase speculators. After fingering a round ebony ruler and running his eye over the roll-top desk, he made for an archaic typewriter which we had found on the top shelf of a cupboard. This machine was so old-fashioned that it had no shift key, but eight rows of Russian characters, with capital and ordinary letters on separate keys. This gave it an impressive appearance, apparently superior in his eyes to the four rows of keys on a modern machine. Just for a lark we named a stiff price and, without comment, he counted out the notes, gathered up the machine and went off with it. An hour later all we had left was essential equipment, the codes and the office armoury.
Having done our duty by the government and raised enough money to pay the office light and telephone bills, we could concentrate on our arrangements for the journey.
Paul would be leaving Riga with his parents and the rest of the British colony. His work had come to an end, so we had a farewell party in the office with vodka and fruit juice and some sticky cakes made by his mother.
We had now to reach a decision about our route. The journey to Odessa was straightforward and would take us comparatively quickly out of Russia, but the onward connections to Bombay and Durban and round the Cape were impossible to ascertain.
The Trans-Siberian Express normally ran from Moscow to Dairen, but the route lay through Manchukuo, and the nearest visa-issuing authority for that country was in Berlin. Charles Orde’s passport had been sent to Berlin eleven months after we were at war with Germany and returned duly visaed, but this had taken time, and that was something we didn’t have.
Our Friend, helpful as usual, put us in touch with his brother in the Latvian Intourist office who came up, next morning, with the good news that there was an outbreak of plague in Manchukuo, causing the Trans-Siberian Express to be diverted to Vladivostok. Bu
t Vladivostok was a naval base and had been closed to unauthorized persons for the last twenty years. It remained to be seen whether the Russians would allow us to go there.
Our Intourist contact also produced the unwelcome information that we should not be allowed to take any roubles with us on the journey and that every requirement, including fares, the cost of hotel accommodation, meals, drinks, porters at each stage of the journey, transport to and from the hotels in Moscow and Vladivostok and any amenities we might hope to secure, must be listed in triplicate and paid in advance in gold dollars. This arbitrary gold dollar would more than treble the bill. He said also that we would not be allowed a choice of hotels, but must specify whether we wanted first-, second- or third-class accommodation.
‘I thought classes had been abolished in Russia,’ I protested, ‘and that on the train one travelled “hard” or “soft”.’
‘Not since 1937,’ he replied and, lowering his voice, ‘you will find much more emphasis on class in Russia than here. You’d better apply for a first-class hotel in Moscow, but ask for third-class in Vladivostok. There’s only one hotel in Vladivostok, and it’s terrible. Why payout twenty-two gold dollars a day for first-class accommodation when all you will get is no better than third-class, costing twelve?’
Friends in the American Embassy who had made the east–west journey the year before had told us that the food on the train was uneatable and the water positively dangerous. ‘We took two crates of gin bottles filled with boiled water,” they said, ‘and tins and cartons of food for the whole journey.’ It seemed that we would be wise to do the same.
So we made out our .applications, including such trivia as the cost of some picture postcards and newspapers, but excluding any food on the train. The final bill would include a compulsory charge of one gold dollar a head per day for ‘sightseeing’, though why they should charge for the view from the train windows we could not imagine.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 14
