The Games War: A Moscow Journal
Booker, Christopher
THE GAMES WAR: A MOSCOW JOURNAL Christopher Booker / Faber / $18.50, $8.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr. Goodness, how sad is our Russia!" Pushkin is said to have exclaimed after hearing Gogol's Dead Souls...
...These were not dead souls, but buried souls surviving in an internal exile far from Siberia...
...it had been driven inward and, if anything, intensified among the strongest and most decent individual Russians...
...the last I saw of my Soviet shadow that afternoon, he was slumped against a wall of the GUM department store, purple in the face, mopping his brow and gazing dumbly through a grimy display window at a disconnected black-and-white television set reminiscent of Motorola's 1952 economy line-a dead soul staring into a dead picture tube...
...In a real world so full of tragic possibilities, Booker wonders where this lack of moral imagination may lead us...
...I returned to the Rossiya prepared to write off the Russian people along with the Soviet state...
...As a Aram Bakshian, Jr., is a Special Assistant to President Reagan for the Arts and Humanities...
...When politics are banned everything becomes politicized, ergo everything must be controlled or suppressed by the state...
...in the warm smile on a gnarled peasant face responding to a few garbled but courteous words of Russian...
...Which is perhaps the greatest historic irony of our time: The half of the world living under the heel of materialistic totalitarianism has failed to produce a new Soviet Man but may, in spite of itself, have produced through persecution a dif ferent breed of superman-a mi nority of invincible spirits unequalled in the torpid West...
...Booker leaves Russia relieved and glad to re-enter the free world...
...under the surface muck the lode was not yet played out...
...in the wink of the plump blond gallery attendant who, the moment our Party guide turned his back, hustled us out of a hall full of hideous Socialist Realist canvasses and into a smaller room of fin de siecle masterpieces ("I am thinking you are coming here to see art,'' was all she said-it was enough...
...lowly speechwriter amidst the White House big brass, I had been assigned a distinctly inferior shadow, a fat, warty little man in a baggy gray suit who looked like a cross between Peter Lorre and Helen Traubel...
...Repeatedly, Booker points up the Soviets' obsessive "horror of anything spontaneous" which results in the conversion of Moscow into a garrison city during the Games and even in the brutal routing of an impromptu crowd of mourners at the funeral of Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia's most beloved actor and singer...
...the more a regime bars direct political expression from its people, the more it comes to fear any genuine outpouring of popular feeling...
...the taxi driver who, in return for a freely offered pack of Winstons, insisted on trying to translate a few historic, pre-Revolu-tionary plaques with great feeling and scant coherence...
...Zhivago, to a wry handling of the regime's paranoid running of the Games themselves...
...There are many memorable moments in The Games War, ranging from a visit to Pasternak's grave that launches a magnificent essay on Dr...
...He is struck by a thought of the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky: "The lack of bitter experi ence of the people in the West makes them incapable of imagining trag edy...
...Christopher Booker, one of England's most talented author-journalists, returned from a more recent trip to the Soviet Union with much the same impression of individual hearts still beating in a collective coffin...
...Estonian joke: What is the largest country in the world...
...Not all is grimness, however...
...As I met with individual Russians beyond the coterie of Party hacks one had to deal with officially, I detected more and more traces of the Slavic "soul" I had always loved in White emigre friends in the States...
...Just as individual Russians preserve their internal humanity, Booker witnesses the stubborn survival of national character among Soviet subject peoples during a visit to tiny Estonia...
...Even the spring sunshine failed to cut through the gloom, and a bright moment in a commission shop where I bought a battered but beautiful old brass and onyx desk set only added to the melancholy mood when I pondered the probable history of its original owner, some long-purged functionary or bourgeois merchant whose bric-a-brac had been reluctantly pawned by hard-up relicts...
...Assigned to cover the Moscow Olympics for the conservative Daily Mail, Booker went a great deal further, collecting the raw material for a moving, wide-ranging view of people and state that merely uses the Olympics as a point of departure...
...Again and again the crowning dilemma of totalitarianism comes through...
...It was like panning for gold in a murky stream...
...Despite official bias and instances of outright cheating, Russian contestants are trounced by several Cubans, Poles, and East Germans, and one of the few genuine "Third World" victories is won by a Zimbabwe women's hockey team consisting entirely of white Salisbury housewives...
...Over the next few days, however, my attitude changed...
...Breaking away from the official presidential entourage at the Rossiya Hotel, a splendid specimen of the Elephantiasis school of Soviet architecture, I decided to spend a few hours rambling through Moscow's thoroughfares and side streets...
...It was a muggy day and the collective impression of Moscow's streets and crowds was one of sweat and cabbage...
...But the elation is short-lived when, back in London, he is impressed by the comparative moral flaccidness of so many Westerners...
...Not surprisingly, Booker's insight is in part hereditary (Russian blood on one side of his family), and it comes across in such passages as his description of the pre-Revolutionary Russia which lives not only in shuttered souls but in one of the greatest bodies of literature produced by any nation in any era, "a land of magnificent individuals where everyone, regardless of class, seemed somehow able to express the glory and the suffering of human existence, in both the outer and inner worlds, more fully and intensely than any other people on earth...
...The immemorial warmth of the Russian spirit had not been killed by the new order...
...He also describes a number of amusing Soviet blunders in the running of the games...
...Although sketchy in parts, and in danger of becoming a loosely strung series of random impressions, The Games War does have a saving grace: a warmly entertaining style coupled with a genuine understanding of its subject...
...Only a few derelict churches with the gilt peeling from their once gleaming onion domes lent distant enchantment to the prospect-the closer one approached the less enchanting it became...
...Shaking him was the work of a few briskly walked blocks...
...You saw it in little ways...
...The same thought occured to me on my first day in Russia in the spring of 1974...
...Pushkin is said to have exclaimed after hearing Gogol's Dead Souls read for the first time...
...Estonia, because its coastline is on the Baltic, its capital is Moscow, and its population is in Siberia...
Vol. 14 • August 1981 • No. 8
