Tides From Two Cities: Petersburg

...Despotism is so deeply entrenched in its history that you can almost smell it...

...It is also one of the most depressing cities in the world because these rivers and canals are deserted...

...I was not in the Soviet Union in 1989, but I am told that people still thrilled to words like perestroika and glasnost and that Gorbachev was the national idol...

...But these people belong to a minuscule elite that has about as much in common with the average Soviet office-holder as a medieval nobleman had in common with the average serf...

...The streets are thunderous with traffic and the air is thick with the vile fumes of low-octane gasoline...

...A cynical remark, perhaps, but not an unintelligent one...

...Even solid working-class people are eager to accumulate enough dollars or deutschemarks to go to Yugoslavia and buy second- or third-hand cars to drive around Leningrad...

...Such people, like the party hacks at the Writers' Union, are often sworn enemies of freedom...

...For example, the ballet is to them what the opera is to the Italians, a form of theater they both know about and care about...

...Perhaps the Soviets also remember that, after a few weeks' experience of enlightened despotism in the empire of Catherine the Great, Diderot changed his mind altogether and ended his days as a champion of Montesquieu's kind of conservative liberalism...

...She feared that if her workforce were reduced to an economically efficient number—as has happened in Dresden—about 40 percent of her fellow workers would lose their jobs...

...Who is going to invest in us...

...What Bitov calls "Stalinist taste" lingers on...

...But how can that disposition be acquired by a people nurtured on suspicion...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 25...

...When rigid censorship held sway, dissidents imagined that it hid a treasure trove of literary and artistic creation...

...Openness" is a favorite word of Mr...

...At the Hermitage, or the Winter Palace or the Peterhof or Tsarskoye Selo, infinite pains are taken to reproduce eighteenth-century moldings and carvings in the palace rooms to the standard of the Emperor's skilled artisans, while in the stores of Leningrad there is hardly a stick of furniture for the ordinary housewife...

...Many of the better-paid workers and petty party functionaries drive nasty little East European models, battered and unwashed...

...T write of Leningrad, but that may 1 not be its name much longer...

...Even people who oppose the old regime, express their opposition in an authoritarian idiom...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 W hat ordinary people would make of free expression is another question altogether...

...TALES FROM TWO CITIES (I) PETERSBURG by Maurice Cranston T eningrad claims, with some justice, 1-/ to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, displaying, like Venice and Amsterdam, its finest buildings along the banks of rivers and canals...

...You cannot buy anything as simple as a street map in Russia...

...ered around TV screens to watch Yeltsin argue with Gorbachev...

...But in the absence of economic freedom, the media remain at the mercy of those who control the instruments of publishing—the printing presses, the paper mills, the transmitters, and the studios...

...the other fat, untidy, and jovial—the classic interrogation team of the bully and the false friend...

...Of the foreign writers with whom I traveled, one was mugged outside the Kirov opera house, another had his watch discreetly removed, two, unwisely using the Soviet airline Aeroflot, lost theirbaggage...

...Bush...

...What was she doing in Leningrad, anyway...

...Crime is becoming widespread...

...When I pointed out that Mr...

...Gorbachev in hopes of creating a market economy in the Soviet Union, West German universities continue to spread the doctrine that capitalism is evil...

...Perhaps due to their past as a religious people, the people of Leningrad put up with things that would drive other nations to riot...

...On the Nevski Prospekt, the Fifth Avenue of Leningrad, people look in vain for necessities in the big department stores, while foreigners with hard currency can stock up on luxuries at the tax-free shops...

...By way of explanation one hears the word perestroika...

...Andrei Bitov, the courageous author of one of the few international bestsellers to come out of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, suggested in Leningrad that seventy years of Communism had so distorted the Russian language that it is almost impossible to articulate anything except authoritarian ideas...

...The new generation of writers shows considerable talent for journalism, but not much for literature, and the young artists are as old-fashioned as their elders...

...At the Kirov they have one of the finest dance companies in the world—but the best seats at the Kirov go to foreigners and state guests...

...Although it is the monuments that tourists come to see, restoration has not been for tourists' sake...

...If you follow the rules you may do quite well: if you try to go your own way, you are lost, even as a foreigner...

...I was told by Kremlinologist Robert Conquest that even the unpublished street maps of Moscow are deliberately distorted...

...On our television screens we are introduced to such urbane and cultivated figures as Nikolai Ryzhkov, Eduard Shevardnadze, Boris Yeltsin, and, of course, Gorbachev himself...

...such thingswould betray information to potential enemies...

...Kohl was already heading the queue of potential Western investors in the reformed Soviet economy, she retorted: "He's trying to buy off Gorbachev's opposition to the reunification of Germany as cheaply as he can...

...the party alone knows...

...at the Lenin Museum on Khalturina Street, the custodian said: "Only foreigners come here nowadays...

...One writer honored in today's Leningrad is the poet Anna Akhmatova...

...the same two-or three-hour wait for a hamburger...

...The small apartment where she lived on the Fontanka canal has been turned into a museum, and foreign tourists are encouraged to visit...

...Under Gorbachev, workers are neither afraid nor yet rewarded with anything worth having, so work slackens, or there are strikes and productivity declines still further...

...At the end of the day traffic stops, because the main bridges close every Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...No line, no food...

...After my hotel bedroom was burglarized, I reported to a Leningrad police unit that specializes in dealing with tourists, and brought a friend to interpret...

...They are certainly much needed as a counterpoise to the dead weight of the party hacks, almost all of whom see Stalinism as a corrupt form of a valid philosophy, Marxism, just as the New Left intellectuals of the West have since the 1960s...

...Italian architects designed so many of the principal monuments and buildings that you might not believe you were in Russia but for the gold-encrusted domes and towers of the Church of the Savior's Blood, or the massive functionalist barracks which serves as the Leningrad Hotel...

...Lenin and his successors have left people cowed, bewildered, and hungry...

...there are moving souvenirs of her achievements and sufferings under Stalin, and of the persecution of her upper-class family under Lenin...

...The unemployed would not even have that...

...She was worried by developments in East Germany, where factories had been overmanned under Communism as extensively as was her factory outside Leningrad...

...There is no more reassuring sight in any Communist country than a Western jet on the runway when you have a ticket in your pocket and the right to leave...

...The country they inhabit is still a gigantic prison camp, and Mr...

...night...

...Petersburg, because the city was dedicated to the Apostle, not to the Emperor...

...Those grand Imperial buildings have been preserved and restored, while the houses of private families have been left to rot...

...On summer nights, when there is hardly any darkness this far north, there is a strange, sad beauty about the silent city, the river so wide that one can see at the same time the splendid palaces of the Hermitage, the noble fortress of Peter and Paul, and the proud Rostra' columns of the Strelka, incongruous amidst the bankrupt socialism of Leningrad today...

...They were not bored by public debates, and crowds still gath'An updated edition of Conquest's 1968 classic The Great Terror was published this year by Oxford University Press ($24.95...

...Gorbachev's reforms have a long way to go before they make it anything else...

...The Soviet Union has so far kept intact the main structures of organized privilege...

...As it is, the party hacks envy the success of good authors who can get their work published abroad...

...Similarly, minds shaped in the Stalinist mold cannot readily entertain the method of systematic doubt that underlies philosophy...

...Soviet television already transmits hour after hour of parliamentary debates, party congresses, and council meetings, so monumentally boring that the public pays no attention to them...

...I would have expected the Soviets to make more of Diderot, since his opinions were at one stage very like those of Stalin on such subjects as atheism, determinism, imperialism, and even art...

...There is hardly such a thing as "public opinion" in Russia...

...I would not like to have met them if I had been in any real trouble...

...Conversely, the various national, regional, and local assemblies are packed with authoritarian dullards, for it is only such men who were ever wanted in the so-called legislative bodies established by the Soviet constitution...

...They did not show much interest in my lost clothes, but zoomed in on my interpreter...

...The hacks know that if there were a free market at home they would be lucky to be published at all...

...Freedom of speech has undoubtedly made its debut in Leningrad, and Gorbachev has said he wants it to prevail, both in the press and in broadcasting...

...If there were a McDonald's in Leningrad as there is in Moscow, there would be the same mile-long line of customers...

...Along with some other foreign writers, I signed a petition to Gorbachev to restore Soviet citizenship to exiled intellectuals who had been deprived of their passports for having defected...

...The officers were from central casting: one uniformed, smart, handsome, and stern...

...Gorbachev...

...It is not simply that the party knows best...

...I wrote the librarian for permission, took a taxi to the premises, and presented my card to the directorate, but all I heard was "Ne vkhodit," which even I could understand meant no...

...Although I did not meet any academics in Leningrad, I heard some of that New Left jargon from students who had been in touch with West Germany...

...If the average Soviet citizen does not know what to think, the average Soviet legislator does not even know how to think...

...Venice is said to be crumbling, but Leningrad is in much worse shape...

...The petition was granted to several, but would exiles really wish to return...

...Conquest is highly regarded in the Soviet Union nowadays, since he is almost alone among Western scholars in having published the grim truth about Stalin's crimes.' The liberal American "experts" who whitewashed the LeninBrezhnev era are held in great and deserved contempt...

...As censorship has been lifted over the past five years, nothing along these lines has emerged...

...In effect, it is a curfew...

...I had shirts and coats stolen from my hotel room...

...They suspected that she was some kind of spy, and were reluctant to let her leave with me...

...The Leningrad public is offered other companies in theaters where the standards are by no means the same and even competent dancers have to perform to incredibly bad recorded sound...

...Touts are everywhere, trying to sell pots of caviar or buy foreign currency for rubles by offering tourists four or five times the official rate...

...Jean-Jacques Rousseau being my special subject, I asked permissionto pursue some research at the Saltykov-Shchedrin library on some Rousseau manuscripts which landed there as part of the archive that Catherine the Great bought from Diderot in the eighteenth century...

...Italked to a factory worker who was an official of her union...

...Lenin is not loved in the place where he arrived in a sealed train from Switzerland in April 1917 to overthrow the constitutional monarchy of Kerensky...

...and from pre-revolutionary prints and photographs you can see that there was once more navigation here than in Venice itself...

...Why did she claim to be English...

...She had a Polish accent, they said...

...I noticed that the list of readers had had no names added since Arthur M. Wilson of Dartmouth College had worked there on his biography of Diderot some forty years ago...

...Many of the old noblemen's mansions and grand bourgeois apartment blocks are dismal shells enclosed in rusty scaffolding, from which fragments sometimes drop on passersby...

...They can more easily accommodate the dogmatic structuralism and Marxist humanism imported from West Germany...

...Fear of espionage remains deep-seated...

...At the Writers' Union, the members were bitterly divided among themselves...

...So I turned to the bureaucracy of the Writers' Union, and four hours later I was driven by a chauffeur to a side-door of the Saltykov-Shchedrin and ushered into a vast reading room, where I sat alone in the presence of the world's richest French Enlightenment archives...

...When I suggested to her that the unemployed in East Germany would soon find new jobs in better-managed factories, she said that was because East Germany had a rich big brother in the West to put up unlimited capital...

...At the Writers' Union meetings I attended, every speaker referred to the place as Petersburg, and since then the local council has asked the government to restore the original name—although strictly speaking that should be St...

...As you wander beside the wide Neva, or the Fontanka or Griboyedova canals that wind through the center of the city, you pass hundreds of landing stages where no vessel has tied up for over seventy years...

...Unlike Budapest or Prague or Warsaw, where folk memories of liberty make it easier to visualize democracy being restored, Leningrad has never known anything like democracy...

...The vast Leningrad Hotel has two sorts of restaurants—those selling bread and cheese for rubles, and those selling caviar and wine for dollars...

...According to Leninism, the party thinks for the people, and the leaders think for the party...

...The split was not simply between "conservatives" and "radicals": it was between the mediocre writers who would be lost without the patronage of the state and the good writers who welcomed both the opportunities and the risks of free press...

...Observers in the West have an altogether romantic image of the average Soviet politician...

...People have never been asked to reflect, and reflection itself has been considered subversive...

...The Writers' Union itself might go, or, at any rate, cease to be a club where writers with a union card enjoy far better meals than anyone can at home or in restaurants open to the public...

...Outside the gastronom, or food shop, you would see a line of people with empty baskets: that was a sign there was something for sale...

...the Communist regime has long had imperial dreams of its own...

...Thatcher...

...Stalin saw himself increasingly as the successor of Peter the Great and other heroic Emperors, and made Soviet relics of Imperial relics...

...So all you see are police launches and pleasure craft for tourists or, further downstream, the occasional jetfoil for important passengers...

...It is ironic that while Chancellor Kohl is thrusting credit onto Mr...

...The people who live there, of course, do not have that right...

...Since there are no barges on the waterways to carry heavy freight, trucks in endless convoys carry stone and rubble for a giant dam being built somewhere down the Neva...

...Wretched as the situation was now, she argued that at least a man or woman with a job could earn enough to pay the rent and buy enough cigarettes and tea and vodka, if not enough for food and clothing...

...I arrived in Leningrad by train from Moscow, and left by air for Frankfurt...

...Gorbachev's policy is blamed for the failure of the economy, and one can see why—people work if they are rewarded or if they are afraid...

...The Soviet regime does not approve of boats, which can be sailed down to the Gulf of Finland and on to freedom...

...In politics the situation is even more serious...

...There is not much food either...

...In Leningrad this summer, everyone said that the food shortages were worse than they had been for several years...

...His closest collaborators come from similarly privileged backgrounds...

...Gorbachev was trained in the KGB's own college, which has been compared both to a Jesuit seminary and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris for the sophistication it imparts to its graduates...