Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (32 page)

THE TWO-PLANK BRIDGE

Anna and I sat in the sparkling new premises of a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor in central Saratov, sipping cocktails from long-stemmed glasses. Outside, the gold stars on the chapel’s turquoise onion dome gleamed in the morning sun and the sound of ascending arpeggios reached us from the turreted conservatoire beyond.

Last time we met I feared Anna was losing the battle against despair. But today she looked festive in a flowered summer frock, and her eyes sparkled with amused intelligence. I had often worried about her being lonely, but now I was celebrating her independence. For well over a decade the population had been shrinking at the rate of more than six hundred thousand a year, and Russia’s men were the core of the problem. They were dying of alcohol and drugs, committing suicide, crashing their cars, falling victim to the careless violence of a society which put as little value on the individual as ever. While Anna had to chronicle the effects of this in her journalism, at the end of the day she was free to go back home and write. Yes, she was writing poetry again.

Anna’s career had also taken an unexpected leap forward: she was working for the Saratov edition of a racy, muckraking, and extremely successful national paper,
The People’s Pravda
. The pressure on her to sharpen up her journalistic style had done her good. She now earned three times as much as a senior surgeon, a museum curator, or a teacher.

“Well, what do you make of Saratov?” she asked. I gulped my martini, playing for time. Saratov had defied my attempts to grow fond of it. Yes, the chapel outside had been restored; some bank had done up a Jungendstil building; a few new housing blocks had gone up, and a glass-fronted shopping mall. But the faces in the street looked miserable, and everything that was derelict two years ago was far more so now. The streets were pockmarked with holes, stinking hills of rubbish baked in the sun—the garbagemen, unpaid for a month, having gone on strike.

“I’m sorry, Anna, but it’s worse than ever …”

She sighed: “Yes—there really
is
something rotten about it! I can’t stand it. The business of living here, just living, is too hard. Everyone’s exhausted. I’d love to leave, to move up north, somewhere like Vologda.”

“Why don’t you?”

“My parents. They’re old. Three hours on the bus from here.” She fell silent, before adding: “Putting up with things, learning not to notice, not to mind.
That’s
the life skill you need to develop here.”

Over the next few days, leafing through back copies of the paper, I started to see what she meant. When Putin came to power, the budget per person in Saratov province was more or less on a par with the country as a whole. Five years later it was little more than half the national average, despite the fact that the country’s economy had been growing year on year. In neighboring provinces, investment had increased between two and forty times, but here in the province between four and five times less was being invested than a year ago. Official corruption had become so bad that the big taxpayers had decamped over regional borders. The province was a black hole for public money. The region’s ombudsman had received more complaints about this province than any other in Russia.

What about Putin’s reforms, I asked Anna. “Reforms?” she snorted. “Nothing’s changed here—they’ve just got worse. Well, I can’t say
nothing’s
changed—they did force Ayatskov out in the end.” The fabulously corrupt official Anna vowed to unmask in her
passionara
days had gone on to become the province’s governor. As long as he remained in the job, he enjoyed immunity from the law. Even now, he seemed to have cut a deal which protected him and his closest allies from prosecution.

A recent spate of arrests among top officials offered a spark of hope, however. Anna’s chronicles of official greed, in her capacity as the paper’s legal correspondent, were leavened by flashes of Gogolian farce. There was the city’s ex-mayor who buried diamonds and silver spoons in his garden; the ex-minister of roads, imprisoned on seventeen charges of stealing staggering sums from his budget. First he beat up a cellmate for smoking. Next, he complained that prison guards had shaved his head against his will and beaten him up. Then, after writing a formal complaint he proceeded to eat—yes, eat—his testimony. Now he was claiming that the incredible sums he stole were not for him, but for key members of Putin’s government, one of whom masterminded Putin’s presidential election …

The present governor was an honest technocrat. But how could he turn this soup of corruption into a viable administration? Months after the arrests of those top officials, many of their jobs were still unfilled. As the province drifted, rudderless, some businessmen were feeling nostalgic for Ayatskov, who at least “made things happen.”

Meanwhile corruption kept eating its way through businesses and bureaucracies, police stations, tax offices, colleges, and hospitals. I had come up against a tragic consequence of this among my own friends. When I arrived, I tried to track down the two sons of Vera Romanenko, my friend who had joined Vissarion’s community. After we had drawn a blank, Anna suddenly said: “Hey, Romanenko—that’s not a common name. Was one of them called Dmitry?”

That was how I learned about the murder of Vera’s older son: a gifted goldsmith and painter, he was attacked one night by a gang of drunken law students, celebrating their final exams. “Law students?” Well, not real ones, she explained. They were thugs whose families bribed their way through college. It was common practice: while the straight students sat writing their exams under strict invigilation, next door a lecturer would be dictating answers to the corrupt group …

“The corruption’s immeasurably worse than it was under communism. Then, people at least knew they were doing something wrong. Now they seem oblivious. I’ll give you an example: there’s a young detective who was sent to prison for taking an enormous bribe. I wrote the case up. When he came out he got a job as a journalist. Well, I was looking for a job, and this paper called
Reporter
offered me a place. “There’s someone on your staff who wouldn’t want me around,” I warned the editor. “Nonsense! He’d be delighted!” he replied. And it was true! He didn’t seem to have the faintest idea that he’d done anything wrong! That’s the trouble—we’ve lost our moral bearings.

“How can you change things? I don’t know. I was born in our local hospital, deep in the country. My father carried me home proudly in his arms. He had to cross this river over a bridge which was only two planks wide. The river was in full spate. On the other side the two grandmothers stood watching, praying he wouldn’t fall in. Since then Khrushchev has come and gone. So have Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. Now we’ve got Putin. But when I was back for my birthday this spring there it was—the same two-plank bridge. What kind of leader’s it going to take to broaden that bridge by just one plank, I found myself wondering!”

ST. SERAFIM AND THE BOMB

Anna now lived high up in a tower block on the summit of the “yellow hills” of Saratov’s Tatar name. It perched like a gull’s nest in a cliff. Factories and housing blocks stretched over the hillside opposite. But way below tall poplars swayed in the breeze. Swifts screeched softly as they swooped past the window.

It was Sunday morning, and Anna had gone to church. “So you’ve made your peace with Orthodoxy, then?” I asked as she changed into a modest skirt. Last time we met she was agonizing between the Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. “Well, there are things I still hate about it,” she replied in her categorical way. “I wouldn’t suggest someone in real trouble turned to our Church—it’s incapable of helping anyone. They’d stand there, unable to understand a word, while the priest chanted in that weird monotone. The services are interminable. And I can’t bear all that standing either. That stuff about having to wear something on my head, about not wearing trousers … Huh!

“But Catholicism—well … in the end I liked everything about it except what’s at the heart of it. I was so fond of the nuns and Father Michael—the way they were with one another, the way they lived their lives. It was just the concept of Christ I couldn’t take—this business about him being half man, half God …” She pulled a face. “I can’t explain it, though goodness knows I’ve read enough about it.”

Beside me on the window sill, Anna’s hamster, Anfissa, was whirling around on the wheel in her cage. With Anfissa and her black cat, Lucy, Anna was tender and intimate. As a prominent journalist, her public manner was confident now. But without that professional armor, she still found intimacy hard.

How painful that break with Father Michael and the nuns must have been, I reflected. Her reason was almost the same as that which precipitated the schism in Christianity in 1054. The Western Church proposed a slight change to the Creed. They wanted it to say that the Holy Spirit proceeded not just from the Father but from the Son, too. The traditionalists of the Eastern Church objected that the Latins were trying to make the Trinity too comprehensible, too rational: the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
was
a mystery, and so it should remain. Ten centuries later, Western Europeans like me were still itching to
understand
, to bring reason into it, to keep changing things. At the start of my travels, Anna and I both hoped naively that the fall of communism would change something in Russia. In retrospect, of course, liberal democracy never stood a chance.

The night before, the heat wave that gripped Saratov broke. Now, even wearing all my summer clothes at once, I was still cold. I paced up and down the flat, trying to keep warm. Once again Anna had left her diary out on the table. This time I did not even hesitate.

“This morning when I woke up I watched the light come up and saw what it was that stopped us living in the light. But now I feel ill and tired. Very tired. My nerves are shot. I can’t just comfort myself by saying, ‘You mustn’t. Going through all that again is meaningless.’ I’m tired and I long to go back to the church which has got so many warm associations for me.” She must mean the community of nuns in Saratov’s Catholic church.

“I’ve got to go on, make good my choice, embrace the cross. Though I find myself thinking: I’m too vulnerable psychologically, there are so many things I can’t bear—loud music, for example, crowds, the company of people who make me feel uncomfortable … Still I’ve got to do it, do what I can. First, I’ve got to stop complaining, blaming God. For the fact that ‘we live in a country like this’ and all that. Be happy that you can bring at least a little light into this darkness. How little, alas! So little that I can’t even seem to see it myself.

“Once, a long time ago, that silly little
S
***
W
***
[my italics] wrote to me: ‘You’re like a nun who lives in the world.’ I found it funny then—I didn’t like it. It didn’t seem to fit me at all … What’s important is bearing the cross. In its totality. And that I’m absolutely not capable of. My unworthiness starts right here—with my whining, my inner struggle. I measure my whole life by how good or bad I feel. My flat, my pay, blows of fate, relationships with those around me. Yes, we feel defenseless when we’re children. But we grow up. We have to decide how to relate to the world around us, to everything that happens to us. How to live, how to be. And that decision has to be radical, whole, focused. People like that can be positive, or negative. There was Serafim of Sarov and there was Lenin! But the principle’s the same—wholeness, radicalism.

“Great joy saves people. Deep spiritual truth. It’s that, not the outward kind of jollity, that attracts and saves people. Outwardly a person may be cheerful, but you can tell they’re feeling bad inside. That kind of jollity is often noisy, exhausting, importunate, extrovert …

“A complex which grows worse with the years: I’m going to have to go on working—think how ridiculous I’ll be, this babushka running around with her notebook. But what matters is how to work. If you do serious, principled work, rather than just earning your bread and butter, it doesn’t matter one bit if you’re a babushka …

“Very tired physically. Keep falling asleep. But I can still feel and see. There are some places, zones, that are alive and others that are burned-out, trampled, dead. Special feeling for the places that are alive—I’m drawn to them. But I’m tired. Horror, shame for the past, makes everything painful. It’s hot and the brief showers of rain bring no respite.”

I closed the diary, stunned. There it was, the raw matter of Anna’s daily struggle with despair, and the measure of her achievement. I once thought Anna might be a depressive. No, her despair was a rational response to the rottenness around her. Never once had she complained to me. But her days were spent chronicling the corruption of this city, the bottomless greed of its high officials at the expense of the powerless. If she was holding her own now, it was thanks to her faith. When I arrived and found her so buoyant, I thought perhaps she had found happiness. But no, she had just become more resilient. At what a cost.

Later, I found out more about Serafim of Sarov, whom she mentioned in her diary. An engaging character, he became a monk at the time of the French Revolution. After living on his own in a hut for twenty-five years, he came out into the world. He was credited with all sorts of miracles, including levitation and the gift of prophecy. But it was my guess that what appealed to Anna was the fact that Serafim was a mystic of a particular kind: he believed that anyone could reach the kind of mystical experience which was the ultimate reward of the contemplative’s prayer.

The town of Sarov, where Serafim spent his life as a monk, has acquired another more sinister claim to fame. It lay farther up the Volga from Saratov, by Arzamas-16, the secret military research base where the world’s first hydrogen bomb was hatched. Andrei Sakharov worked there, among many other top Soviet scientists. So secret was their research then, and perhaps now, too, that the scientists were not even allowed to talk to one another about it.