Reunion with Moscow
Franck, Sebastian
As THE CAR MOVES from the airport through the city, memories return: the giant village of two-story houses we saw 38 years ago is still there. Tall towers in Stalin's weddingcake style now...
...On the other side is the downward escalator with another woman, and another queue...
...One of them remarks that he considers Saul Bellow's Herzog the most important book of our time...
...It takes 5 to 10 minutes to get from the 15th floor down to the lobby...
...Long queues form in front of them, and black-marketeers offer you tickets as you come within reach of one...
...You may have to wait an hour or more in the after-theater rush...
...and bad organization...
...Nor can you get it any earlier at the airport restaurant, even if you say—as we did—that your flight is due soon...
...A Russian friend tells us: "Every Russian peasant makes a pilgrimage to Moscow...
...We have a similar conversation with an East German diplomat: The people here [he says] look at it this way: we have lost 150,000 men in order to take Czechoslovakia from Nazi Germany...
...A hundred customers crowd around a stand with a single saleslady, while three bored salesladies mind another, whose wares attract no one...
...He himself couldn't keep going if he couldn't order goods by phone (which is, of course, possible only for those who are more equal than others...
...The longest queues are in the food and the clothing stores...
...It is not unlike the U.N...
...Don't you have to wait in your stores...
...A staff member of CMEA, showing me around that office building, comments, "Parkinson's Law: when we move into it, it will already be too small...
...You stand in a long queue until you reach a woman with a coffee machine...
...But in the center of the city, on Kalinin Avenue, a modern representative boulevard springs up, with giant glass palaces, broad-windowed department stores, restaurants, movie theaters...
...His final remark is that one must get used to the fact that the Czarist bureaucracy is still alive in Moscow...
...Above all, they are so busy with their own affairs that the outside world has very little meaning for them...
...We usually buy L'Humanite...
...If you don't know the price of the article you want to buy, and have not taken the precaution of acquiring a sales slip, you wait still longer...
...in the hotel we have a suite—separate sitting room and bedroom, hall and bath—with furnishings contributed by Comecon-member states...
...And second, because of the long rows they form to revere the body of St...
...They patiently queue and wait...
...Or take a two-story food shop in Kalinin Avenue: there is a self-service department on the upper floor...
...He goes to see Lenin, walks in the Red Square, and shops at the GUM...
...but most Musco vites still have to share a small apartment with another family...
...Starved-looking chickens cost 2.80 rubles per kilogram—and the average monthly income is about 120 rub les...
...But when a small wooden stall springs up in a street, a long queue forms immediately...
...The galleries have little stands with long queues of shoppers, and there must be tens of thousands of them in the building...
...Touch anything, and you face an indignant salesman...
...But on some days all we can get is nyet, probably because the paper has been seized by the censorship...
...Everywhere, Moscow gives the impression that masses of humanity are pouring into it...
...A third cannot be excluded: people are kept busy long after NOTEBOOK their working hours, especially since the stores are open till late in the evening and on Sundays...
...building on New York's East River, with its half-circular meeting-hall annex...
...The restaurants are chuckfull, to say nothing of the stores...
...international confrontations are brought about more and more by political means, and Russia was in danger of losing power if it employed purely political means...
...But the short counter is not the only explanation...
...Communist newspapers from all over the world can be had at the hotel...
...A high East German diplomat confirms this...
...To keep people busy, says a Pole, the movie houses are kept cheap...
...But almost all prices look high, when measured by the income of the shoppers, let alone by the official course of the ruble...
...He then has seen Moscow and goes home satisfied...
...Germain des Pres...
...but they are soon gone...
...Only cheaply-packaged goods are on sale here: soups, sauces, soaps, etc...
...Leaving the store one comes across another queue, some kilometers long, moving slowly toward Lenin's tomb...
...The bomb makes wars impossible...
...When I talk with Western journalists here, they tell me they would lose their jobs if they always wrote what they liked...
...It must take hours to get there...
...They can double their income by working two practices...
...but it is like an oilpatch on the ocean...
...There are gaps, though, through which foreign literature reaches Russians...
...Better—and more expensive—ones are said to be available in the peasant markets on the outskirts of Mos cow...
...We take an escalator up...
...Buyer and goods are kept as separate as possible...
...He also says it is all a matter of bad organization...
...One also has to wait for taxis, which (for the foreigners) are a necessity in Moscow...
...Nearby is a hotel for the delegates, with a big restaurant...
...GUM is unbelievable—a very old building with several floors of galleries from which one can watch a never-ending stream of people coming and going...
...Only one client at a time can try anything on...
...There is no city street map (nor, for that matter, a Moscow telephone directory for private numbers...
...Streams of people flood the subway...
...As we walk at night along the empty streets and discuss Czechoslovakia, our companion says: Czech freedom of the press was the chief reason for the invasion which was, in any case, decided by a majority of only one vote...
...As someone put it: the counter has become much too short...
...only, he says, these are not real doctors—they merely confirm that you are sick, so you can be quickly taken to a hospital to be examined or treated by a "Professor...
...But the strongest impression is still the same as 38 years ago: queues outside and inside the stores...
...Everything is smooth, modern, elegant, well-lit...
...THE GUM DEPARTMENT STORE and the tomb of Lenin are quite close to each other...
...The treatment of buyers in the stores is shocking...
...The sad offerings of fruit and vegetables are of the worst quality...
...If next year brings a little more than last year they are quite satisfied...
...Clothes and milk are especially dear...
...A BIG HOTEL with 29 floors and over 1,000 rooms is a good example of "organization...
...She is checking the contents of the shopping-bags against the sales slips...
...But the people wait patiently...
...The doctors, strangely enough, are said to have a monthly income of only 90 rubles—unless they are willing to move to Asia...
...English-speaking Rus NOTEBOOK sians ask you: "Have you brought anything to read...
...you need 20 minutes...
...The oldfashioned buses are so crowded that their doors don't shut...
...First, because people there have to live that way...
...The apples or carrots on sale can hardly be imagined...
...Yes, there is such a thing...
...asks my official guide, a young student, incredulously...
...There are at least two other reasons: a spirit of "who cares...
...You spoke of the German Democratic Republic as a country governed by terror...
...But in international confrontations governments must have control...
...And even when you get a taxi, you still cannot be sure that the driver knows how to take you to your destination...
...The highest of the new glass houses is the building of CMEA (Council of Mutual Economic Assistance), at the beginning of the Avenue, quite beautiful, overlooking the Moskva River...
...This goes even for the new stores on Kalinin Avenue, where the variety is larger but the waiting time no shorter...
...Certainly, rents are low...
...They would surely tear us to pieces [meaning those in opposition to the government], if the men in power were to decide they should do so...
...Could that be true?] And what about the masses...
...Tall towers in Stalin's weddingcake style now shoot up in-between every now and then, and long rows of new high-rise apartment houses line the arterial roads...
...One suddenly feels no longer in Moscow but in St...
...Freedom, as the Czechs allowed it, exists nowhere...
...we can't let it slip out of our hands...
...WE CAME HOME dejected...
...As THE CAR MOVES from the airport through the city, memories return: the giant village of two-story houses we saw 38 years ago is still there...
...Chickens may be offered for sale, or melons...
...It is also very unpleasant not to know what goes on in the world...
...One evening we are taken to the Caf6 National...
...And one must admit, besides, that de Gaulle was right when he did not tolerate student rebellion...
...A delegate from an African country says at a professional meeting, "Some are more equal than others"—and the translator adds in Russian: "He is quoting an author widely read in Western countries...
...Lenin...
...In the restaurant you are warned that there will be a 20-minute wait for the soup of the day...
...You choose and go to the cash register to pay...
...The distance between the coffee machine and the glass cabinet suggests that the customer should appear before the woman, sandwich in hand— not to speak of the installation of a second coffee machine...
...The men in Prague went too far when they made the press free...
...the others wait patiently...
...Translators can read modern books in their original language, so as to keep in touch...
...She not only serves the coffee and takes the money, she also has to run to a glass cabinet where the customers (most of whom do not speak Russian) point out to her which kind of sandwich they want...
...One must see the world as a whole...
...Interesting faces, modern clothes...
...a woman sits at the entrance and marks the goods we have brought in...
...To Western eyes the goods look scant and—with some exceptions—second- or thirdrate...
...A 10-minute break is not enough to get yourself a cup of coffee...
...Our companion tells us, "The opposition used to meet here in Stalin's days...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
