by Jan Morris
Dazzled, the scales of the Ukraine still in my eyes, I wandered through all this lucidity. Across the river the sunshine gleamed miraculously upon the golden finger-spire of St Peter and St Paul, slim as a stiletto above its ramparts. In the upstairs galleries of the Hermitage, flooded in sunshine and surveying a brilliant landscape of white, gold and baroque, the great Renoirs, Gauguins, Monets and blue Matisses stood in gorgeous vivacity, to be inhaled like a fragrance or gulped like a draught of some exalting wine. Russia in winter is a dread and dreary country, clogged alike with sludge and dogma; but fly into Leningrad as I did, and your very glands will be rejuvenated.
For all its shrines of materialist revolution, its thumping industrial fringe, the atomic submarines upon its shipyards – for all these signs of the times Leningrad retains, like an ageless courtesan, many an inessential charm. I bought a batter-wrapped sausage that morning from a solemn woman in a white overall at a street-corner stand. I found a 1905 Baedeker Russia in the jumble of an old-school bookshop, inscribed in a spindly German hand in the ink of long ago. I strolled among the hidden statues of the Summer Garden, each one locked away for the winter, like a wayward nymph in a rock, inside its own little wooden house. I wondered at the profusion of fresh flowers on the tomb of Peter the Great, and I gazed from the balcony of St Isaac’s Cathedral upon the glinting steeple of the Admiralty, like a Buddhist stupa above the ice, and the fabulous immensities of the Winter Palace, where the Tsars lived in immeasurable splendour, and the revolutionaries stormed their way into history. In Moscow it is difficult not to feel a kind of snob; in Leningrad you are a serf in untanned thigh-boots, gaping at the carriages and climaxes of the past.
For this is a city with the gift of timelessness. Elsewhere most Russians seem so unalluring that it is a mystery to me how the reproduction of the species is maintained. Here there are still girls of a haunting and nostalgic beauty, such as you meet in the pages of the immortal novelists, and men of a natural elegance beyond class or era. Forgotten Western echoes, too, linger suggestively on. I observed two young diplomatists in my hotel, wearing heavy coats and high fur hats, whose immemorial English faces and languid long-limbed attitudes at the reception desk made them look like thrusting fur traders from Eastcheap, awaiting a concession from the Empress. I drank my morning coffee in a shop that might have sprung from imperial Vienna, and I listened to jazz so brassily honky-tonk that I might have been in some forgotten burlesque of the Loop, thirty years ago in Chicago.
Leningrad is a humorous city. The cloakroom attendant puts your hat on your head with a delightful parody of courtly excess. Even the official guides are slyly amused by the presence in the Anti-God Museum (the Museum, that is, of the History of Religion and Atheism) of a section reverently devoted to the adulation of Lenin. The young people of Leningrad, often rakishly and sometimes brazenly dressed, preserve a sense of bubbly fun: traces of taste, style and delicacy have survived the convulsion, and there are still a few citizens whose clothes fit and whose eyes are lit with a glint of gaiety.
There are modernistic trams in Leningrad – devices I had hitherto regarded as a contradiction in terms. There are polite and mercifully unobtrusive policemen. There is a mosque like something out of Isfahan, a square in which practically every building is a theatre, a house once inhabited by the inventor of the aeroplane (twenty years, I need hardly say, before the Wrights), a Wedding Palace for the white weddings now officially encouraged in Russia, a mammoth in a museum, a vase weighing nineteen tons and twenty-five Rembrandts. Even the snow-ploughs do their work with a special kind of symmetry, moving around Palace Square in lumpish ever-decreasing circles, like old-fashioned reapers, until at last they can revolve no more, and a squad of cheerful women with brooms and shovels leaps through their clouds of exhaust to remove the last central pile of snow, where the hare should be.
I went to a children’s puppet theatre in the afternoon and watched its entrancing fooleries among an audience so enthusiastically disorganized that it made the end-of-term play at an English village school feel like Order in opposition to Chaos. And in the evening I saw Die Fledermaus, staged with a genuine rollicking panache, and so instinct with the magic of the waltz, the whirl of white skirts and the flick of tail-coats, that when I inspected the faces of the women about me, Soviet proletarians every one, I found them glazed with a true suburban enchantment.
They gave me champagne at dinner, placing a neatly folded napkin like a white cone over the bottle-top, and very late that night, with the fizz still in me, I slithered down the river bank beside the Admiralty, and crunched a path across the frozen Neva, The sky above me was a deep cold blue. The lights of the city shone dimly off the ice, like phosphorescence. The golden steeple of the Admiralty was floodlit and resplendent, like an archangel’s wand in the night, and beneath the bridge I could just make out the three tall funnels of the old cruiser Aurora, and the speckled lights of her portholes. Leningrad lay lucent still, even at midnight, and seemed to me like an exemplar, a paradigm, an obituary of the European ideal.
Next morning a fog fell upon the city, and you could not see across the river from one side to the other.
I did not write about Leningrad again until 1999. By then it was St Petersburg once more, the new Russian capitalism was in full blast, and my German-owned hotel was extremely luxurious. I was still bewitched, all the same.
Odessa
I liked Odessa, too, still in those days the most Jewish city of the Soviet Union, although throughout my visit there I felt I was being trailed by the KGB more persistently than anywhere else in the USSR.
The most dramatic, as well as the most diligent, conductor in the world is to be seen in action at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Odessa. He is an elderly man, but passionate. All around him as he works peculiar things are happening. Behind, in the half-empty auditorium, a constant buzz of homely conversation underlies the score, and three ill-shaven Levantines in the second row seem to be in the throes of opium dreams, squirming and sighing in their seats. In front, the stage is alive with minor mishaps – trap-doors mysteriously closing and opening, fans being dropped, iron accessories clattering, while the cast of La Traviata, none apparently more than five feet high, smile resolutely across the footlights with a treasury of gold teeth.
The conductor is unperturbed. Majestically he sails through the confusions of the evening, impervious to them all, sometimes grunting emotionally, sometimes joining in an aria in a powerful baritone, throwing his fine head back, bending double, conspiratorially withdrawing, pugnaciously advancing, with infinite variations of mood and facial expression, and frequent hissed injunctions to the woodwind. Nobody in the socialist bloc fulfils a norm more devotedly, and nobody does more credit to the Hero City of Odessa. It is not often easy, in Moscow or Kiev, to respond to the simplicities of the Russian Revolution. In such great cities the deliberate vulgarity of communist life, the perpetual aura of baggy trousers, hair-cream and Saturday-night hop, is more depressing than endearing, and you begin to pine, however egalitarian your convictions, for a really snooty upper-crust restaurant, or the high-pitched gossip of debutantes. In a smaller provincial centre like Odessa, though, it is different. Here, far away from the dreadful workings of state, there still feels some faint suggestion of idealism to the People’s Dictatorship, a sense of simple pride and purpose: and in such a setting it is difficult not to warm to the conscientiousness of the modern urban Russians, whether it is directed towards a mastery of English vowels or the correction of a wandering contralto.
A century ago Odessa was an urbane seaport of Francophile tendencies, raised into eminence by a French satrap of the Tsar, the Comte de Richelieu. Though long stripped of its boudoir fripperies, it retains a certain faded elegance. A fine wide boulevard runs above the harbour, and from it descend the broad steps that figured in The Battleship Potemkin. There is an ornate old Bourse in Odessa, and the ghost of an English Club, the shell of a Credit Lyonnais, an Opera House of lofty traditional opulen
ce, muse-haunted and nymph-scrolled. There is even the old building of the local Duma, dishonestly identified by Intourist as ‘yet another former Stock Exchange under the old system’. Wide, straight, and Parisian are the avenues of the city, and embedded in the thigh of a statue of de Richelieu is a cannonball from HMS Tiger, a ferocious visitor to these waters during the Crimean War.
Odessa was built by the Tsars as a southern outlet for Russia, and remains the second port of the Soviet Union. It faces south and east, and its quaysides are embellished with vast welcoming slogans in Arabic, Chinese, French and English – ‘Long Live Peace and Friendship’, they proclaim, ‘among the Peoples of the Whole World’. A smell of tar hangs agreeably on the Odessa air, and a fine jumble of shipping lies always inside the moles: a pair of lovely three-masters manned by cadets; two or three smart Black Sea liners, running down to Georgia or Istanbul; freighters from Latakia or Alexandria; a squat Russian warship with sloping bulbous funnels. In the summer British and Greek cruising liners, flecked with the Aegean, put in here for brief inquisitive visits; in the winter a fringe of ice loiters around the harbour, and most of the ships seem to lie there supine and deserted.
The docks are shut off by high walls and policemen, and you can only peer at their quaysides from an eminence, or skulk about their gateways pretending to meet a comrade: but Odessa anyway feels unmistakably a port – a peeling, rather regretful port, a Soviet Tangiers. It is a cosmopolitan city still, full of Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, Egyptian seamen, Chinese delegations. The jolliest of old sacristans will conduct you around the decaying synagogue, lending you a white peaked cap for your head, and sallow Mediterranean faces will greet you solemnly in the Greek church. Odessa is a languid southern seaside city, snowless and sunlit, and even the pantheon of communist deities, even the Workers’ Honours Boards, even the blaring loudspeaker from the Central Committee’s headquarters, even the tinny new carillon, even the nagging suspicion that somebody is following you cannot altogether stifle the relaxed and easy-going nature of the town, like a soft warm breeze across the Bosporus.
Odessa is scarcely a show-place of the regime. It has busy industries, a large university and a celebrated eye hospital: but thanks to the occurrence of a soft subsoil it has none of your towering tomb-like blocks of flats, and you have only to step through an archway off almost any boulevard to find yourself back in pre-revolutionary Russia, with tumbledown apartments around a shambled courtyard, and women with buckets collecting their water from the communal outdoor tap in the middle. All feels small, friendly and unpretentious. In the new railway station, dedicated to Odessa’s heroic resistance during the war, there is a large notice-board which, upon the pressure of a button, illustrates in illuminated signs the route to any western Russian city; and there is something very appealing to the pleasure this simple toy gives the concourse of people constantly consulting it, the air of wondering merriment that hangs about its buttons, like country festivity at a fairground.
There is also something paradoxically old-fashioned about Odessa. Its restaurants, though sprawling with greasy young men and loud with brassy jazz, are marvellously nineteenth century in appointment. Its public buildings still preserve, beneath their threadbare sloganry, shreds of old decorum. And if you observe a pair of young women sauntering together down the promenade, you will be struck by niggling sensations of déjà vu. What is so familiar about them? Where have you seen them before? And then, in a revealing flash, you have a vision of old newspapers lining attic drawers, full of the cloche hats and long coats of the thirties: and you realize that these young ladies of Odessa take you back mysteriously to your childhood, like snapshots in an album.
Just think! Odessa is the second port of Russia, the gateway of the Ukraine, the pearl of the Black Sea; yet it all boils down in my mind, such is the indivisibility of time and experience, to an indistinct memory of childhood, dormant for thirty years and revived only by a glimpse of forgotten fashions above the Potemkin Steps.
My hotel room in Odessa was stiflingly steam-heated, and I am ashamed to say that, finding its windows hermetically sealed, I took up some heavy object and broke one to let the air in. In the Soviet Union of the 1960s one was often goaded towards ill-discipline. One morning on Kharkov airport in the Ukraine (then a part of the Soviet Union) I experienced a more glorious moment of liberation. I had been hanging about there for hours, fobbed off by supercilious airline employees through delay after delay in a bitterly cold and uninviting waiting-room, until at last the patience of my Soviet fellow-passengers expired. They found a boarding-ramp, pushed it on to the tarmac, climbed up to the aircraft, and brushing aside the horrified stewardesses, plumped themselves in their seats and called for vodka. I followed in their wake rejoicing, feeling as though we had stormed all life’s varied Kremlins.
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was probably the most oppressively communist country of the so-called Soviet Bloc, and when the Guardian sent me there it was my first glimpse of the dark world of Stalinist satellites. After a time I ran away from Prague, its capital, to visit the celebrated spas of western Czechoslovakia, once the resort of well-heeled valetudinarians from all Europe. They were now showplaces of the People’s Republic, which loved showing them off to their all too rare visitors from the West.
‘And this morning, Mr Morris,’ said my guide briskly, rearranging a businesslike bun in her blonde hair, ‘we shall visit Marianske Lazne, in the western area of our country.’ My heart neither leapt nor sank, for it was numb with cold and scepticism. I was deep in disbelief. The country was Czechoslovakia. The time was the very depth and nadir of a grim central European winter. The car into whose back seat I lowered myself, with a rather frigid smile of acceptance, was a bow-legged green Skoda. But as she settled herself beside me, giving me a sweet but not altogether convincing smile, my guide added as an afterthought: ‘Under the old regime, you know, they used to call it Marienbad!’
Marienbad! Instantly a bell rang in my mind, jangled but golden, cracked but still rich, oddly familiar after my peeling baroque evenings in Prague, my icy folk-customs in the High Tatra mountains, my long shuddering drives through the snow-enshrouded, fir-blackened, heartless and cheerless Czech countryside. Marienbad! It was like an echo of a golden age just to hear the name, and many a discredited vision crossed my mind, as my guide kindly explained to me the new medicinal treatments for workers’ families: visions of lace and stiff white collars, of clip-clopping greys and fawning courtiers, here a plumed imperial hat, here a fluttering embroidered fan – little lap dogs, hurrying servants, coffee on spindly tables, the orchestra tuning its fiddles among the roses and the hotel manager, moustaches pomaded, hurrying to greet His Excellency. They were pictures of an age that was rightly ended, of a society justly abolished, of unfair privileges and outdated protocol; but they retained an old lavender charm in the imagination, as of faded holiday postcards.
For me they offered more, too: for through them all, through the strolling old-fashioned crowds and the string bands, there glared boldly into my mind the eyes of a particular face. One of the divinities of my personal pantheon is old ‘Jacky’ Fisher, British Admiral of the Fleet, creator of the Dreadnought, iconoclast, egocentric, flatterer, failure and humorist, who died six years before I was born, but who is still marvellously alive in my affections. This old greatheart was an habitué of Marienbad in its palmy days. There he consorted proudly with the imperial potentates, and danced blissfully with the imperial ladies, and picked the brains of foreign generals, and cocked a gay eyebrow at many a Continental beauty. Many a letter had I read in Fisher’s huge-scrawled hand on the browning writing-paper of forgotten Marienbad hotels, with elaborate flowery letterheads, and engravings of the winter gardens.
So we were going to Marienbad! As we laboured through that grim landscape Fisher’s wrinkled cynical face peered at me constantly through the firs. He had an extraordinary face, so oddly striking that legend had him the illegitimate son of a Ceylone
se prince, so unforgettable that the Sultan of Morocco, once inspecting Fisher’s Mediterranean Fleet, was asked what had struck him most, among all the gleaming lines of battleships, the great barbettes and the impeccable gun drills, and replied without a second’s hesitation: ‘The Admiral’s face!’ Never was a face so congealed with self-esteem, so glorious with gaiety, so proud, so contemptuous, so flirtatious and so compelling! I could see its heavy-lidded eye winking, all but imperceptibly, through the damp fog that lay like a shroud upon the fields.
But we were there, and driving through the fine avenues of the place towards the graceful squares and colonnades that surround the baths. Marienbad was stately still, for all its dismal communist miasma. The old hotels, now occupied chiefly by proletarian groups, were still stylish beneath their peeling paint. The covered promenade (along which the girls of a Youth Association were sauntering in frumpish crocodile) was still sadly elegant. The fountains were still delicate. The gardens were still fresh. The charming houses, all official or institutional, still possessed a faint scented allure of satin and window-boxes. It was a ghost with shreds of colour.
We looked around the place conscientiously; and inspected the free treatment in the baths; and examined institutions of one kind or another; and strolled a little forlornly along the pallid splendours of the spa; and presently found ourselves, marshalled by a huge comrade of the coarsest kind, looking at the civic museum. This queer collection of souvenirs, mostly about the bad old days of the Habsburg Empire, was housed in a small pretty villa in the centre of the town; and sometimes, as we wandered from room to room, from glass case to glass case, while the Comrade Curator leered at the Archdukes, and the guide attended intermittently to her hair – sometimes, as we looked at this sad exhibition my eye wandered through an open window, to the curve of the esplanade below. How easy it was to imagine those old grandees of the 1880s, wicked perhaps, often selfish, generally heedless, sometimes cruel, but alive with a vanished panache and glitter! How easy to see the whiskered potentates, and the willowy English peers, and the doll-like Austrian ladies, and Fisher himself, the boldest of paladins, like a laughing mandarin among the feather boas!
