The Vanishing Futurist (6 page)

Miss Clegg, chins quivering, stood up. ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted. This is the last time I offer the hand of friendship to you, Gertrude Freely.’

‘Oh Miss Clegg, please don’t be offended. It was a joke, that’s all. Pasha, come and apologise, won’t you? She didn’t understand . . .’

But she had gone, rushing out of the house, clutching her bag to her chest. I went back into the meeting, where we decided on the finer details of laundry and mending, and established the Commissariat, to start work with immediate effect, the first Underwear Commissar being Pasha himself, who promised to work hard and absolve himself of the crime of ruining my reputation for once and for all at St Andrew’s Hostel for Governesses.

‘I couldn’t let that nasty woman take you away, could I, Gerty?’ said Pasha, not particularly repentant.

However much I resisted her attempts to interfere, I was still full of gratitude to Miss Clegg for bringing me to Gagarinsky Lane, for unwittingly allowing me the chance to participate in the task of auto-transformation. Mankind, we believed at the IRT, was only a half-designed product that had taken shape by accident rather than through conscious choices. In many ways we were not so different from the millions who seek self-improvement today – the spiritual questers, and those in therapy, and the readers of self-help literature; like them, we were hopeful that with self-awareness human beings are capable of living together in harmony.

‘It may sound an insurmountable task,’ Slavkin said, ‘but the whole history of man is really a long, slow war against our base instincts. A couple of centuries ago it was acceptable to burn witches and to hang pigs for heresy. In this context you see a large part of the road has already been travelled . . .’

Pasha, who was fascinated by Freud, argued for a psychological approach, and from the beginning all of us were expected to write accounts of our Revolutionary Development (a few of which I still have in my dusty cardboard boxes) – the steps that had led us towards the commune, that we read aloud to the other members. He also suggested episodes of ‘group criticism’, at which people were encouraged to express any emotional difficulties they might be experiencing as a result of our communal life. We attempted to solve disagreements in this way.

Fyodor saw simple discipline as the key. The Revolution, as he perceived it, was chiefly a matter of efficient organisation and training. He and Nikita clashed over this view.

‘I can’t help it, Fedya,’ said Nikita. ‘Your picture of the future fills me with dread.’

‘You’re too emotional about it,’ snapped Fyodor. He was rather cherubic, with very red, full lips. ‘Behind all your talk of technology is a sentimentalist.’

Nikita, in fact, was an unusual mixture of the pragmatic and the idealist. He understood better than any of us that from now on, in human history, man would be formed by machines as much as the other way around. Man
would
have extraordinary powers – the power to fly like a bird or swim in the deepest oceans, the power to throw up mountains, even blast out of the shell of the Earth’s atmosphere – thanks to the advance of technology. His focus, therefore, was on designing the machines that would reshape man’s psychology.

Towards the end of 1917, he had begun work on his first psychotechnological device, the Propaganda Machine. This ‘audio-visual sensory chamber that aimed to convert an individual’s mindset from bourgeois to Revolutionary in a single, twenty-minute session’, as the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
later described it, was no more than a rusty upside-down grain hopper from the back stables bolted onto the Kobelevs’ open carriage. Nikita insulated the hopper with thick cotton wadding and covered it with canvas, all but the funnel, which peeked out at the top. We coated it in what should have been Revolutionary red paint, but dried a sickly salmon pink, so from the outside the whole thing resembled nothing so much as a colossal, plumply upholstered bosom on wheels.

To enter, one mounted the steps of the carriage and squeezed through a door cut in the side of the hopper. The benches had been removed and instead there was a single large chair, heavily padded, with a footstool, while the curving wall in front was entirely covered by a white screen. The patient seated himself in the chair and was strapped in around the waist, legs and arms. A sizeable helmet was lowered to restrict his viewing solely to the screen. Then the door was closed and the anti-bourgeois vaccination began: a series of short films and flashing images, accompanied by a soundtrack played on a gramophone lodged at the top of the funnel. The images were very large and close; the sound was slightly distorted by the acoustics within the hopper, and rather loud. Meanwhile canisters of different, powerful smells were discharged into the hopper; the temperature was raised by means of several gas lamps and, at certain moments in the session, the whole construction could be violently and unexpectedly pushed and joggled from the outside. We hoped the combination of these effects would produce an indelible impression on the brain. Night after night, we pooled our ideas and experimented with the Propaganda Machine settings – the right images, the snatches of speech, the timing – searching for the irresistible
coup de foudre
, the touchpaper to light people’s hearts.

What will people think of our efforts now? As I write this, in 1974, the dreary banner of realpolitik
with its stench of atom bombs and oil fumes seems almost to have smothered any talk of a better world. Of course there are my friends in the Women’s Reading Groups and the anti-racist organisations; there are the demos and the strikers. But outside a few places like our little radical republic of Hackney – after Vietnam and Watergate, Hungary and Prague, hasn’t idealism been universally dismissed as a shorthand for naivety and self-indulgence? Graham Greene expressed it succinctly in
The Quiet American
: ‘God save us always from the innocent and the good.’ This cold-war generation will probably say that we were impractical and unrealistic – ‘not living in the real world’, as the patronising phrase goes.

And yet the truth is that the realities of our life in 1918 ground us between their hard edges in a way that most people today would find unbearable: we were constantly hungry, we were cold, the country was in chaos. Despite it all, we set out on the hard, hard path of change. We were not daunted, we were tenacious. The real cause for astonishment, to my mind, does not lie in our failures – of which of course there were many – but in the incredible extent of our success.

‘The city of the future looks more like a village every day,’ remarked Pasha in the summer of 1918. It was true: harebells and cow parsley now flourished in the strangely empty, hot thoroughfares. Shopfronts were boarded up, most of the markets were closed down, and the onion domes were stripped of gold; day by day evidence of the city’s flamboyant pre-Revolutionary life faded from the streets. Muscovites left in their thousands, and even when Moscow was declared the capital city in March, the government ministries did not plug the gaps.

As though reclaiming their territory, the rats came out into the daylight – too many even to be kept down by the packs of stray dogs and cats, abandoned pets that had, so it was said, developed a taste for human flesh. The birds seemed to have lost their fear of humans. Once a flock of rooks attacked me as I walked home – perhaps I passed too close to their nests. I flung up my arms to shield myself and they stabbed my hands and the back of my neck with their beaks.

After our measly breakfast, we joined the crowds of people trudging to work in the middle of the road. Occasionally a lone tram, faces crammed against its windows, would divide them; silently, the crowd closed up again in its wake. Gone were the costumes of Imperial Russia – the vivid blues and reds of the dress uniforms, the merchants in fur coats and their wives in sarafans and pearls, the priests. Everyone now dressed in a jumble of drab khaki, old suits and plain dresses – partly due to the lack of clothes on sale, and partly from expedience. An epaulette, a smart collar or even a pair of spectacles was enough to single one out as ‘bourgeois’, and the city was full of characters who looked forward to an opportunity to mete out punishment to the bourgeoisie.

Occasionally I came across friends of the Kobelevs who had not gone into exile. They were classed as ‘former people’, prevented from working in any but the most menial jobs. I was overwhelmed by the stoicism with which they adapted. An old general, a cousin of Sonya’s in-laws, now worked as a lift operator at the Metropol Hotel, while his wife sold clothes she sewed out of old curtains. ‘It’s not so frightful,’ he told me. His skin hung in pouches around his face and he had the sallow glaze of malnutrition; the plump ones seemed to suffer the most. ‘I’m sorry to say that in the old days we didn’t do all we could to prevent this.’

One heard this sentiment again and again. ‘We have brought this on ourselves,’ Prince Lvov commented when he heard about the October Revolution. In August the Committee for the Mobilisation of the Bourgeoisie began to organise ‘former people’ – even the elderly – into labour brigades to sweep the streets and the yards; others, one heard, were forced out of their beds to feed the electricity stations in the middle of the night, and, in winter, to clear snow from the railways. It was a horrible sight. Occasionally they were beaten up, but even if they were not physically attacked they were taunted and abused by passers-by. I was so grateful that the Kobelevs did not have to endure it.

Our little republic at No. 7 Gagarinsky Lane kept to its own rhythm; behind our gates we were building a very different revolution from the one we saw on the streets. Yet we couldn’t help but be aware that this newborn Bolshevik world – ‘Sovdepia’, the land of Soviet deputies – was encircled and isolated, battling for its life. There was war at every compass point, and several in between – against the Germans in the Ukraine, the British in the north, the Czechs on the Volga, the Whites on the Don, and the Japanese in the Far East. In the summer Trotsky introduced martial law, and conscription sucked up many of the pupils at my school – either into the ranks or as far from them as possible. Every day we saw peasants marching through the streets to join their new regiments. A more pitiful fighting force would be hard to imagine. Many of the peasants seemed to be visiting the city for the first time and were terrified of the traffic, sparse though it was. They would break formation and huddle by the side of the road, peering anxiously to left and right; then get their timing completely wrong and scuttle out just as a lone vehicle approached them. They seemed constantly to be asking the way, usually to a church, which they called by their own names: ‘Girl, if you please, can you tell me how to find “St Michael no-hair” or “Mother of God with the oak tree”?’

We had no accurate news about what was going on outside Moscow – or, rather, we had no way of gauging its accuracy. Our information came either from the propaganda posters and slogans that papered the capital or rumour. No one paid much attention to the endless articles in
Pravda
about the Red Army crushing the Whites under the boot of the proletariat.

‘What, he has boots?’ as some old fellow was said to have remarked. ‘This Mr Proletariat sounds like a rich man!’

We thought the whispers in the market were more plausible, those that told of the White leader Denikin’s army of forty – a hundred – five hundred thousand, armed by the Germans. The papers reported the cruelties they inflicted on any Red soldiers they captured, which, on the whole, we believed: we already had years of experience of Cossack behaviour against unarmed demonstrators, let alone on the battlefield.

‘Our skinny Revolution, in birch-bark shoes, clutches on to its little victory by a whisker,’ Nikita put it.

And so we understood why Trotsky ordered Tsarist army officers to join up and fight for the Red Army, and also why he took their families hostage to keep them loyal. The army was starving and short of every type of equipment; so we accepted the need to send the brigades into the villages to collect food, and even to break up the factory committees. We understood – although it was also true that we preferred not to dwell on such matters.

I continued to teach English more or less without pause through all the upheavals. It was as though the overthrow of Tsarism had released a surge of energy among the working classes – a huge impulse towards learning and self-betterment of every kind. After the Bolsheviks took power many of my younger, middle-class pupils left to go abroad or to the country, but their places were taken by double the number of adult students, who seized their first opportunity to study. English seemed a more or less random choice; they could just as easily have decided on book-keeping, chemistry or statistics. They were endearing students, eager and demanding. Many of them were barely literate in their own language, let alone in a second. I remember one jowly young man, always quick to criticise my teaching from a Marxist perspective, asking, ‘And how do you pronounce this letter, with the eye at the bottom?’

‘Which letter?’ I was confused.

‘Why, this one! It’s a Russian letter too, but I don’t know—’ He stopped suddenly, blushing. He was pointing at an exclamation mark. I murmured to him that we’d discuss it after class. These new students had a good deal of
pride; it did not do to embarrass them.

America was their passion: the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Detective Pinkerton, and Charlie Chaplin, and the new ‘jazz’ music, the tango and the foxtrot (considered decadent, of course, by the authorities, but exciting nonetheless). ‘Americanizatsia’ and ‘Fordizm’ were the words on everybody’s lips. I taught from a copy of the
Illustrated London News
, by good fortune kept since 1916, which showed recent technical innovations in the USA and Europe. My pupils learnt useful terms such as ‘cable traction’, ‘gasoline engine’ and the ‘dynamo-electric machine’. Sometimes I taught for ten hours, and then went on to see my private pupils. If I worked hard enough, I might be spared another wakeful night.

One hot Friday in late August I walked from the school to the Hotel National at the bottom of Tverskaya. The streets were dusty and quiet. A young guard, barely seventeen, slouched at the main door of the National, drawing pictures in the dust with the end of his bayonet. I fumbled in my pocket for a permit and held it up to show him.

‘I’ve come for a meeting with Comrade Pelyagin.’

‘Huh,’ grunted the guard, jabbing his bayonet in my direction, making me jump. He laughed, pleased with himself, and gestured towards the ruff of other permits at the bottom of the blade. ‘Stick it on with the others. Don’t cut your little white hands, will you?’

‘Nothing white about my hands,’ I retorted sharply, sliding on the scrap of paper.

The hotel lobby smelled of
makhorka
– cheap tobacco – and stale alcohol; the fleshy, heroic marble figures holding up the ceiling and the remnants of the marble floor contrasted bizarrely with its new role. I climbed the grand art-nouveau stairs to the office of Emil Pelyagin, a Party official who, so the director at the language school had told me, wanted private English lessons. He was part of the Department of Industry that continued to operate from the National after other departments moved over to the Kremlin.

‘Enter!’

Pelyagin did not look up as he said this and my first sight of him was of a round, startlingly white bald patch surrounded by black brilliantined hair. He was peering closely at a file in the centre of his desk, while on either side of him stood a tower of other books and papers. A poster hung on the wall behind him: ‘Exterminate the idler and the filcher!’, with a worker smiling unpleasantly as he stamped on a runtish wrong-doer.

‘Ah, Comrade Freely, very good. If you wouldn’t just mind waiting while I finish a small piece of business off?’

I sat in the corner of his office while he called in his secretary. ‘Bring me those papers, comrade, and don’t muddle them up as you did yesterday.’

His secretary, a tall, serious girl who looked somehow familiar, did as she was told. I waited for almost half an hour while Pelyagin worked through these papers, speaking petulantly to the girl now and again. I may have been wrong, but I got the impression that this behaviour was partly for my benefit.

At last he waved the secretary out of the room and stood up. He was barely any taller on his feet than sitting down and as slight as a twelve-year-old, in a dark suit with a celluloid collar. I stood, and sat down again quickly, embarrassed by my extra foot of height. ‘So, you are the English teacher,’ he said, very dignified. ‘Are you trained?’

‘Yes, comrade.’

‘How quickly can you teach me, then?’

‘Well, it depends how much you know already, how fast you pick it up . . .’

Self-importantly, he began to declaim: ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do—’ He managed to give it the flavour of a report on production levels. ‘Brazil, where the nuts come from.’

‘Very good! Where did you learn your English, as a matter of interest?’

He blushed. ‘An acquaintance of mine had a gramophone record which we enjoyed listening to, as children . . . Now, comrade, get started. We must not waste time!’

Apart from his snatches of music-hall songs, it turned out that he knew little more than the alphabet. I learnt later that he had taken up English in response to a directive issued by the head of his department, one of a flurry of orders that were only fleetingly complied with by most government officials. Only Pelyagin, with his dogged determination to finish any job once started, plodded on with his lessons.

On that first day, the room filled with a rich smell of beef stew, a waft from the Party members’ evening meal bubbling in the canteen, which must have been quite near Pelyagin’s office. It came upon me suddenly, as I was going over the present tense, and caused me to lose the thread of what I was saying.

‘Yes, where was I? You are, we are . . .’

Pelyagin had the decency to look embarrassed, and at the end of the lesson, as he paid me in large sheets of uncut Kerenkas (the old currency that had officially been banned), he said rather tentatively, ‘Lenin himself has stated that it is essential for key Party workers to receive fuller rations, in order that they may carry out their Revolutionary duties effectively.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I murmured, not catching his eye. A sliver of humanity, just the smallest glimpse, is enough, after all, to prove that it is present.

‘I think you are a Party member yourself?’ Pelyagin went on.

‘No, not a member, but I consider myself a loyal supporter of the Revolution.’

‘Yes – I’ve heard about your Institution, and Slavkin, is that his name?’ He stood up to dismiss me. ‘Perhaps you will tell me about it in our next lesson.’

I hurried straight from the National to meet Pasha at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, where he was working in the Department of Museums, thanks, really, to his father’s reputation as a collector. Pasha and I had been appointed to the commune’s ‘shopping triumvirate’; we’d arranged to visit Smolensk market together that evening.

All day I had been aware of this task ahead of me, a knot of apprehension in my stomach. The markets were periodically closed down by the Soviet, in an attempt to control all the food distribution in the capital – and ultimately to abolish money altogether – but as most of Moscow’s citizens received either a ration that would have killed them off within a couple of months, or nothing at all, we were forced onto the black market.

The traders swirled and eddied, vanishing from Kuznetsky Bridge only to pop up in the Sukharevka market, regrouping in the suburbs and then creeping, street by street, back to the centre. Each time the Red Guards knocked them back more viciously, confiscating their goods, beating and arresting them. It was a frequent sight; the rumour flitted around the stalls – ‘They’re coming! The dogs are coming!’ In moments the goods would disappear, people would scatter, and the one woman who did not pack away her bread rolls fast enough would be knocked to the ground and her goods gobbled by the guardsmen . . . The pavements around were often stained with blood, but even that didn’t stop the traders.

That day there was an old woman selling bowls of steaming
shchi
–
cabbage soup – outside the entrance. A few men were spooning it in hurriedly, bowl only inches from mouth, and I found myself staring at them, my mouth watering. They must have had tongues of leather to eat it so hot.

‘Come on, Gerty,’ Pasha urged me. ‘We don’t want to hang around.’