Gadfly in Russia

by Alan Sillitoe

  Part Five

  Consequences

  From then on I was persona non grata not only with the KGB (of course) but with many others in the Soviet Union. A Russian writer visiting London a year or so after the Kuznetsov affair, said that at the time a Soviet publishing house was bringing out a translation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, something I’d been told before might one day happen, though I never much cared whether it did or not.

  Karel Reisz, in the early 1960s, took a copy of the film version to a festival in Moscow. Madame Furtseva, the cultural minister of the time who was present at the showing, said to him afterwards that it would not be at all suitable for cinema audiences in the Soviet Union. Karel and I laughed, when he got back to London and told me about it. Who in Russia could take to a book about Arthur Seaton, who mouthed the slogan: ‘All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda!’

  When I met Yevtushenko for the first time in London he showed interest in seeing the film, so I arranged a performance at a small trade cinema in Soho. He presumably didn’t much like it, saying only that he had seen too many factory films already in his life.

  So I’d had no illusions about the book coming out in Russia, but my informant told me that it had already been printed and bound for distribution, possibly with many cuts, I imagined, and the usual introduction as to how it should be understood.

  The edition was destroyed on orders from the KGB, which organisation had much power in literary matters. I supposed the action to be a small price for Kuznetsov’s freedom, and good also if some rancour at having lost their man was taken out on me instead of George. It may have had influence on his relatively civilised handling when he got home. In any case the book was, after that time, brought out in the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and China.

  Details of what happened to George in London, and his reception afterwards in Moscow, were related by him on our meeting in 2005. He had published a book of essays, some of them autobiographical. One dealt with our trip through Russia and the Ukraine, and another described his experiences with – and without – Kuznetsov. He gave me a copy, in Russian which I couldn’t read, but the inscription said: ‘To Alan Sillitoe, who once upon a time called the author of this book a brother-in-arms – with old love and all the best wishes, George Andjaparidze.’

  People at dinner parties in London said that Kuznetsov had done well to escape Soviet repression. He would be able to work in peace, write what he liked. That might or might not be so, I said, then reminded them of what Kuznetsov’s freedom had cost George.

  Yet I felt it too interesting a story not to offer more comments on the fiasco when among friends. Sometimes, without prompting and when talk flagged, I would tell about the long car journey with George, and mention how concerned his mother had been when finding him in bed with an upset stomach, after we’d eaten in a common canteen on the road from Leningrad, and she told him he ought to have had more sense than to eat in those filthy proletarian places – always good for a laugh and to lighten the atmosphere at dinner parties I rarely liked going to. I soon realised however that it wasn’t right to use George in this way. The story belonged to him alone. He had earned it the hard way, and certainly wouldn’t be dining out on it in Moscow – or wherever he was. He would want to forget the experience with Kuznetsov, if ever he could, and hope others would do the same, until the matter became history and he might again be able to enjoy some foreign travel.

  In the years before our next meeting – a long way off – I became interested in the plight of Jews in Russia, and also said and wrote positive words about Israel and its inalienable right to exist, which divorced me from most of the left-wing people I had been friendly with before. The radical Black Dwarf newspaper published an article in December 1969 lauding – indeed gloating about – a Palestinian bomb attack on the offices of the El Al airline in Athens, in which an Israeli child was killed. I was enraged enough to send a letter to the editor:

  Dear Sir, I originally welcomed a journal such as yours promised to be, seeing it at the time as having a useful purpose, but what worries me is your attitude to Israel, and the depradations of the so-called Palestine Liberation Movement.

  I am in favour of Israel and its right to exist, and do not approve of Jewish or Israeli people being blown up while travelling in buses or sleeping in their flats.

  El Fatah are tools of Arab imperialism, and its members would seem more genuinely revolutionary if they attacked those despotic medieval regimes which are only too happy to set them against Israel. I see the conflict with Israel as a frontier war between one small country and many others. If the Arabs have a right to take Israel then the Germans and others have equal claims to go after their ‘Lost Territories’.

  The Israel–Palestine question is one that no British workers are interested in, but should the left-wing so-called intellectuals of the Black Dwarf succeed in getting them to take up the matter it might in the end make them not only anti-Zionist but also anti-Semitic. Perhaps your socialist readers are dismayed by the refusal of the Israeli and Jewish people to accept their historic role as scapegoats. You are aiding a movement that wants to make a mass Jewish grave in the sea, thus creating a solution which would be more final than any other.

  My shortening of the letter still comes out as something of a screed, too vitriolic perhaps, but I wrote it in the style of the magazine in the hope that it would be better understood. When it was published in the next issue the editor stated that he disagreed with all I had said, adding that anyone who could write such trash was nothing but a racist – a common slur, then as now. I was glad when the scurrilous rag expired not long afterwards.

  In 1971 I was ordered to court in Ashford for having refused to fill in the census form. My grounds were that too much was asked about people’s ethnic origins and what part of the world they had came from. I didn’t relish the idea of information being available to a future right-wing government which might decide to send immigrants back to their country of birth.

  I paid the fine, but still didn’t fill in the form, even though I could one day be provided with a free trip to Ireland, from where some of my forebears came.

  I wondered how many on the Black Dwarf had refused to comply with the form for that reason. In June 1974 I wrote an article for The Times which wouldn’t have been much liked by the subscribers to that paper either.

  The point was that a frail middle-aged woman in Russia had, since 1962, struggled for permission to emigrate to Israel and join members of her family. A group of ladies in London had taken up her case and asked for my sympathy. Who could have refused it?

  The woman’s name was Ida Nudel, and in the article I compared her situation to that of a Geordie coal miner who had saved money by working double shifts and, in 1910, paid eight golden sovereigns for a passage to Canada. He had no need to ask permission, needed neither applications nor even a passport, but only wanted a better life. He went, and didn’t cease to appreciate and even love his own country. When the war began in 1914 he enlisted in the Canadian Army and fought for almost four years in the worst battles on the Western Front. His country gave him liberty, and he responded with responsibility, an impossible treaty in a communist dictatorship.

  After the first request to vote with her feet Ida Nudel lost her job in economic engineering, and had to do manual work for which she was in no way suited. She signed letters and petitions with others asking for the right to emigrate, took part in strikes and demonstrations, and helped those who also dared to ask for exit visas.

  Repeatedly arrested, she was sent to Siberia for four years, living in conditions unsuitable for all but the most robust. Back in Moscow, she was exiled to a town near the Rumanian border, hundreds of miles from her home. Even there, though ill, she was continually harassed by the police.

  My article could have brought little comfort to the Soviet authorities, but whether it was any help to Ida Nudel I couldn’t say, for some time elapsed before she was allowed out �
�� but leave she did.

  Anticipating that happy event I wrote The Interview, a one-act play in which someone like her is brought before a Soviet officer of the emigration services to talk about her most recent application for a visa. The piece was put on at St Martin in the Fields, Janet Suzman taking the part of Ida. Not many people attended, though I was asked to talk about the matter on the BBC.

  At about the same time I was shown a flysheet advertising a discussion to be conducted by graduates and teachers of the University of London Union. David Mercer, the playwright (who was also sympathetic to Israel), and myself, were accused of being ‘traitors to the English working class’. The paper explained, in Marxist baby talk, why they thought so. Their reasons were amusing, though I was alarmed that supposedly educated people could believe in such rubbish without blushing. God help the students who had types like that for their teachers.

  The Interview was later put on at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho, and I took more interest this time by going to rehearsals. The actor who was to play the interrogating colonel quibbled about certain of my phrases on the grounds that they were difficult to say, but my feeling was that he thought them too anti-Soviet – though I may have been wrong. The facts were so incontrovertible that it made little difference, and the full text was to be published anyway.

  Those were the days when international pressure against Israel was increasing, though one wondered when it hadn’t been. Anti-Zionism was (and still is) the fashionable thing, whether or not it is a country always in peril from surrounding neighbours. I went with Stephen Spender to Paris to protest about Israel having been voted off the UNESCO cultural organisation. Spender and I spoke our views, then had an excellent meal together in the Eiffel Tower restaurant.

  A year later I went to a conference in Brussels dealing with the plight of Jewish ‘prisoners of conscience’ in the Soviet Union, and spoke at that too. Golda Meir was there, and I forget what we said to each other, but not much because she was so busy, our introduction little more than a handshake. A further conference in Paris took place a little before Israel was voted back into the UNESCO organisation.

  Some of all this must have filtered through to Valentina Ivasheva in Moscow, because in talking to a British academic (who reported back) she remarked that I was nothing more than ‘a Zionist agent’. Such flattery was repeated in a Hungarian magazine, and perhaps others, though that was the only one I knew about, pointed out to me by a Hungarian who worked for the BBC.

  I recalled another comment of Ivasheva’s about Pamela Hansford Johnson in Russia with CP Snow. She had written in one of her novels that when they were in Moscow there were ‘bugs’ in their room. Valentina was outraged on reading this, saying that there were no such insects in Soviet hotels. What Pamela had meant, of course, was that the room was bugged, that it had concealed microphones to hear the conversation of the guests.

  Another anecdote was about John Wain and John Braine. The first John was invited into the latter John’s room for a drink, but Wain told Braine to keep his voice down and be careful what he said because the place was bugged. Big, bluff, outspoken Yorkshireman John Braine was having nothing of this, and on asking where they were went over to the nearest picture, behind which the mike was no doubt concealed, and bellowed: ‘If you’re listening to us you know what you can do, don’t you? You don’t? Well let me tell you. You can FUCK OFF!’ He then strolled back to John Wain and said: ‘We’ll be all right now. We can just say what we like.’

  It was easy to see why Valentina was disappointed, even offended, by my activities but, perhaps strangely enough in those years, countries of the Soviet Bloc occasionally invited me to their parties and receptions. Ruth and I were even awarded – shall I say? – a week in the German Democratic Republic, memorable because I met Günther Klotz. His translation of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was reputedly so good that it became the only German version used.

  We talked a long time in his flat, and he told us that, having himself come from a ‘bourgeois’ family he’d had much prejudice to fight. People were nurtured and given all the best jobs if they came from the ‘proletariat’, no matter what their intelligence or eligibility. That was disgraceful and stupid, I said. ‘Any country which abandons merit and relies blindly on “class” will in the long term be doomed.’

  After the unification of Germany I received a large royalty cheque for the many copies of my books sold while the German Democratic Republic existed. None had been cut or censored either, so I can say thank you very much, for it’s more than I can say for Russia and other East European countries.

  The Hungarians and Czechs printed one or two of my stories in magazines, and I was asked by the Bulgarian cultural attaché to translate work by their national poet Hirsto Botev (1848–76), which I did. More surprising was when my novel A Start in Life was serialised in Foreign Literature Magazine in Moscow, and I received a certain amount of money for that. Perhaps I wasn’t so much out of favour after all.

  Still, I wondered what had been done to it. My novel Key to the Door, published in the early 1960s, came out in an edition of two million copies, which would have earned me a tidy sum had the Soviet publishers abided by the Berne Convention. Cuts, however, had reduced the original 500 pages by a third, and I found out why when Adelheid Fandry, a young woman from Hamburg University, came to see me. She had made the translation from English into Russian the subject of her thesis, so gave an interesting breakdown on what had been inadmissible in the. Soviet Union – nothing very surprising.

  I continued to meet Russian writers in London. With Ruth Fainlight, Ted Hughes and others, I went to Yevtushenko’s performance at the Commonwealth Institute in 1979, and he all but mesmerised the full hall by his dramatic recitation. In some ways it was outlandishly hectoring, even had a sort of bullying tone, well developed I supposed after so many appearances in front of Russian audiences, who traditionally liked that sort of thing. On my first trip to the USSR I had bought a record of readings by Mayakovsky and Yesenin reading in the same mode.

  Unlike British poets Yevtushenko knew his work so well he had no need to look at a text, everything going into the impressive delivery.

  We went to a restaurant for supper, and on our way in he detached himself from, the others and, embracing me in the Russian fashion said, close to my ear: ‘Keep it up, about the Jews.’

  I couldn’t understand the necessity for secrecy, though did not expect him to bawl it out either. But his tone was as if wanting me to know that we were in the same underground club together, and that it was inadvisable to let anyone hear his exhortation, which might get one of us – though him most likely – into difficulties.

  In the restaurant he endeared himself to everyone, even those not of the party, with his uninhibited behaviour, generously ordering champagne and handing it around.

  On 28 May 1981 George telephoned me from his hotel in London, and we made arrangements to meet, though not for lunch. I was surprised he hadn’t been told to give me a wide berth, though even if he had it wouldn’t have worried him. In any case I had already been to several gatherings at the flat of the Russian cultural attaché and his wife, and had been invited to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution at the Soviet Embassy. During that party someone said you must meet the Lord Mayor of Nottingham, and I thought why not? There he was, with all the glittering tin of regalia on his chest as I put out a hand to shake. Maybe I’d had a few by then, though to my regret only wine was served, but he drew back on hearing my name, and wouldn’t greet me. I suppose he thought my books had given his city a bad name.

  We saw George only twice, for he was a busy man. He came to dinner with us and the film maker Mira Hammermesh, and then we took him to a reading at Bernard Stone’s bookshop. He was eleven years older, and a little more corpulent, as became the director of a large Soviet publishing house that had sent him on business to a London that didn’t have the same atmosphere of doom as before.

  I was glad to see a
renewed and confident man of substance who had made something of himself after the disaster of 1969. He was happy to be in England again, having a genuine love for the country which never left him.

  The only mention of Kuznetsov was when he chided me for remarks I’d made at a certain dinner, when I should have kept my mouth shut, which were taken up by a journalist and published in a local paper.

  The friendship resumed its old intensity on talking about our marathon motor trip, one of the good times of his life, as it had been of mine. We were much older, and though there couldn’t have been the same sense of intimacy as before, it was to rekindle when we met again in Moscow for the last time, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

  Part Six

  The Last of George

  2005

  Saturday, 7 May

  Getting up at half past seven was far too early, but that had always been the case when setting out on a journey. I was looking forward to seeing Moscow again, and in the intervals of our work for the British Council hoped to meet up with George Andjaparidze. My novel Moggerhanger was going the rounds to find a publisher, so a break from the hard slog was welcome.

  The hire car came on time at ten, and standing at the door I noticed a strong west wind, which meant our plane would have a well-assisted take off into it, and a good push at the tail on turning east.

  The couple of hours’ wait in the departure lounge could have been better spent in bed, for the plane wasn’t scheduled until 13.20. Ruth read the paper, while I went to the smoking area, noting a fine day beyond the sealed windows, and hoping we’d have similar weather in Moscow.

  We boarded the plane at the set time, but were still on the perimeter track forty minutes later (with apologies for the delay) till the captain saw a green light from the control tower, or however it was done these days, and rocketed his full bus above the clouds. The familiar conurbation was soon out of sight and, after a tolerable British Airways lunch, I dozed, for there was nothing to see but sky.