the view from the metropol window
Mayer, Milton
the view from the metropol window by MILTON MAYER This is the first of several articles by Mr. Mayer on his recent journey to the Soviet Union. The second will appear in the November issue.—The...
...Heaven forfend...
...The students, like all students, could teach their elders something...
...Does it take an inhuman dictatorship to restore personal sentiment to personal relations...
...I know that the Russians grumble...
...But what if they believe—and don't merely say—that their government is representative, and that they obey their government's laws with no more or less terror than we do ours...
...What they need is an iron hand...
...said Mr...
...I'm never going to be one...
...I may be dead wrong, but on the basis of our eccentric contact I should not be sure that he, any more than we, knew where the real Russia was...
...but she will stand, or sit, for hours on end in a government anteroom, a vaccination queue, a union meeting, or a market, moving, writing, speaking, and, I suppose, voting exactly as she is told to (or, more likely, exactly as she is expected to, without having to be told...
...What are they afraid of, or whom...
...they don't believe us when we say there are no chain-gangs...
...I already loved those I knew...
...To associate this spectacle with repression, inhibition, fear, and dictatorship is impossible...
...My instruction began my first morning in Moscow...
...But if I am accused, in addition, of having taken Moscow gold for the interview, I would be in terrible trouble," and I sighed...
...The contrast with, say, France or Italy, where every third man is a revolutionary, rejecting the system itself, is acute...
...they're in sports clubs...
...The writer Sergei Michal-kow, when I first met him in the Tyrolean Alps in the dead of winter, was wearing an Argentine polo cap...
...Vassiliev, after a pause, "you said in your interview that you were an American liberal...
...We said we'd like to, and how about it, and just then somebody approached and he beat it...
...You will not be amazed to learn that there are Russians who have always been in Russia and who, after seeing East Texas (or the Bowery, or Shanty-town, Pa...
...Mayer," said Mr...
...I've been there, too, and I know that their parents send them voluntarily—some stay home to work or study—at irresistibly low fees...
...I wanted, instead, to go to the Finnish Embassy, and I asked the guide if I might go alone...
...maybe not...
...She asks the other clerks, who abandon their customers to consider the matter...
...Your third morning out you know: the Russian carries himself exactly like the jaunty, self-confident, and unself-conscious Yank, the "outgoing man" of the sociologist's jargon...
...no government that ever was or will be can make people smile...
...You ask a clerk at a crowded counter in one of the ubiquitous state resale or secondhand stores if she has an old chess set...
...In a couple of days, I said...
...You have not persuaded him that he is oppressed...
...I asked him how he'd liked Russia, and he said, "All I can say is thank God that I'm a citizen of the U.S.A...
...There must be plenty of terror...
...Now 500 rubles buys an old shahkhmahti, and 500 rubles, at the blocked rate for tourists, cost $50, which I did not have to spend...
...A few years ago, when I'd sat three days in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin without seeing anybody, and I complained (to Pastor Grueber of Berlin) that the Communists are slow, he said, "That's the whole trouble with the Americans...
...If you've got anything to sell on the black market, she'll handle it...
...they're in the Young Pioneer camps in the country...
...The dictatorship...
...When we met a troupe of fifth-graders with their teacher, and they clustered around us and danced and jabbered and said, "I—talk—the—English," A. J. Muste said what the rest of us thought: "These are beautiful, natural, happy children...
...The Russian who does you a personal service and smiles, smiles because he wants to...
...I am one of the rich...
...You show him on your map where you want to go, and he insists (the spy...
...What then...
...I can't compare...
...The lady bus conductor on Line 63 in Moscow takes a snooze in the back seat at the end of the line, awakening only when the bus jerks into motion...
...But is the comparison With the United States —especially in the light of our pretension to the love of liberty—as unflattering to the Russians...
...They think they're dealing with Communists, and they forget that they're dealing with Russians...
...the exception being except for a miniscule and detested section of our press (though that is certainly something...
...We couldn't find him again...
...You bet they are...
...I've been there, and I've been in Chicago...
...I don't know how much we Americans think about liberty these days...
...She seemed to be terrified...
...But it must be somewhere around Kropotkin Street...
...Anomaly...
...The Russians were poor and terrified of poverty...
...Where is the manager to fire them, or at least whip them...
...And, while a couple of thousand is not a couple of hundred million, I can not believe, would I want to, that a whole people, in the town, in the country, can look like what they are not...
...You never meet the Man in the Street, but if you stay in the street, and out of the ministries and the universities and the hotels and the restaurants, you meet his eyes, and his meet yours...
...Maybe there is fundamental dissent among as many as one per cent of the Russians, or of the Americans...
...While perversity, unlike flattery, will get you nowhere, it does keep you from believing what you read, or write, in the newspapers...
...And in the area of foreign affairs—which for 40 years has had the character of national emergency—the uniformity of press and people is very depressing...
...I didn't see them being afraid of the boss—though I'm sure they are—because I didn't see them being bossed...
...profound anomaly, as, I dare say, a foreigner finds in America, the land of the free, with unfreedom practiced and even principled...
...I did get lost, and I got back through a maze of railroad tracks and construction projects, and I kept getting lost for a month...
...She hasn't, as it happens, but now wait—where did she or somebody else see one recently...
...Does an American Communist know what it is to be an American, or only what it is to be an alienated American...
...there was something nutty, or strictly American, about them...
...Nazism promised and delivered bread and work, and when, after the war, I pointed out to a very simple-minded ex-Nazi that he had had no free speech, he said, "Who wants to make a speech...
...and if you have some way of letting him know how badly you want that pin, your chances of his giving it to you are good...
...I asked her (we were alone) why she didn't write to her wealthy brother, and she looked around furtively and shook her head and said she couldn't...
...I've never been a Russian...
...maybe because he has always been oppressed, but, in that case, where is the hang-dog grin, the bowing and scraping, the "Yas-suh, boss" of the long oppressed who always mean "No-suh" and always say "Yas-suh...
...Who wants to make a speech...
...People who are terrified do not tell strangers that they are terrified, so maybe the Russians are terrified...
...The Russians I looked at seem to be cheerful, the most cheerful people I have ever seen, and not, like the Germans under Hitler, euphoric...
...All this is voluble, so voluble that the abandoned customers overhear...
...There are no "No Smoking" signs in the rococo subway stations of Moscow and Leningrad, and nobody smokes...
...She told me about her rich brother in Paris...
...Here, above all, one concludes tentatively but forcibly that these intelligent, if long isolated, people are convinced that neither they themselves nor their elected representatives have competence, and that the executive elite always rules right...
...If—just if, mind you— that happened here, and I was accused in America of having given you an interview in which I condemned American practices without condemning Russian practices, I could defend myself by saying that the Literary Gazette had committed the Chicago Tribune's habitual crime of context-omy against me...
...he told me that in Russia they always are...
...I like it there, too, as a matter of fact...
...So I was prepared to go overboard, in Russia, and overboard I went...
...Our tourist group was scheduled to go with our girl guide to meet a stuffed shirt...
...Nowhere outside America have I seen so few policemen or so many citizens arguing with the policeman who bawls them out for parking wrong...
...is a laugh...
...Maybe they're unafraid, independent, and happy...
...Where are the juveniles...
...Then," said Mr...
...The waiters in the restaurant are engaged in the most animated possible jabber, while the customers, strangely uncomplaining, are neglected and themselves engage in animated jabber...
...You have learned that this Russian "slave" is a man of more dignity than you are accustomed to meeting abroad or at home...
...A day's wages—low—for a day's work...
...They got their crow through a window—a 16-year-old boy...
...There's the head waiter...
...And not, I suppose, many Russians...
...They won't be able to tell you where it is, but they'll give you some books in English to read, and when it's lunchtime just show people this"—she gave me the name of the hotel on a slip of paper—"and go where they point...
...I told him that in America interviews were never paid for...
...We wouldn't do that in America, but we might give them a few wholesome talks on Americanism...
...The government...
...The East Texas jury gave them a five-year suspended sentence...
...Vassiliev's words, and those were mine, and you ought to see my old shahkhmahti...
...He expects, and will accept, none of the customary contemptuous gratuities that, at home or abroad, you toss to the servile...
...her indifference to authority (if there is any authority), to the bus line inspector who might come along, is unmistakable...
...So I said she should give me her brother's full name, and I would find him in New York, and she said she would, but she didn't, although I saw her several times after that...
...Does Lucius Beebe know what it is to be an American, or only what it is to be a rich American...
...some of them grumbled to me...
...Or anyone else leaning out of the Metropol window...
...They are Russians, you know...
...Nazism was a hideous affair, no more in practice than in theory, and its theory, the theory of natural slavery, is much more popular in the United States than it is in the Soviet Union...
...Your eyes—and the Russian's—did not deceive you...
...We talk about it, I know...
...But she did not give me her brother's name, though I saw her again, and then I met a Frenchman who said, "Oh—that one...
...not the salesman, the panhandler, or the pusher, but the man who knows who and what and where he is, where he is going and why and what he's about, and is ready to make friends for no other reason than friendship's...
...was a good place to be or a bad one, but had always been there...
...Nowhere, inside or outside America, have I felt so secure from pickpocketing as in a Russian crowd, so secure from thuggery as in a Russian alley, so secure from holdup in a deserted midnight street as in a Russian city, so secure from offensive approach as from a Russian drunk...
...Francis said something about poverty—he said several things about poverty—that comes to me...
...They gave me a very hard time, on which I hope to dilate in a subsequent report to The Progressive...
...and the next day he arrived with 500 rubles...
...Without the language, nobody ever yet got to know anything about a country and its people, and Russian is a difficult language because it's so rich, and an impossible language (for newcomers) because of its alphabet...
...But I thought that Senator McCarthy was dead," said Mr...
...There used to be a sign in the corner saloon that said, "If You Spit on the Floor at Home, Spit on the Floor Here...
...Then," said Mr...
...They're not in the streets after school...
...I knew I should find it easy to love the Russians...
...Leaving Russia the other day, by way of Leningrad, I met an East Texan...
...Vassiliev, who interviewed me for the Moscow Literary Gazette...
...Without her you die, because without her you can not read the word for bread (much less know that it means bread or ask for bread...
...I am," I said...
...but I doubt it...
...Nowhere outside America have I seen jaywalking so universally practiced...
...Maps and guide books and treatises, sermons, interviews, tours, and translations, are not enough...
...what they want in exchange is an American (that is, a foreign) coin or stamp (of any denomination), and when your supply is exhausted and you offer a kid Russian money for a pin you want, he refuses it...
...As long as you don't expect them to be good Americans—they're Russians, you know—you'll love them...
...They pleaded guilty, with extenuating circumstances...
...They cluster around, and everybody, clerks and customers, gets into the consideration...
...Nobody...
...Vassiliev...
...Of course," she said...
...Where there are no juveniles, there is no juvenile delinquency...
...I spoke my piece freely and fully, and Mr...
...The Russians I talked to, all of them, seemed to believe that when they said it...
...They seem to have no real sense of political liberty, no awareness at all of the right of fundamental dissent as the very first principle of social organization...
...but one of them, Bill Edgerton, is a professor of Russian at Columbia...
...When our group left Moscow for the south, my wife and I wanted to stay on in Moscow and we asked the guide if we might...
...These preconceptions rested in turn upon my dissatisfaction with the popular, or Bad Man, theory of history...
...That's not where the Finnish Embassy is," she said...
...I found it just a wee bit hard, after the war (as before), to love the Germans...
...But I do not see that we are much better off than the Russians in terms of the liberty to attack the system itself and campaign for its overthrow...
...The Man in the Street—the man you wanted to meet and pretend to have met—speaks his native language, in Russia as everywhere else...
...Not an exactly," I said, "but let me go on...
...Then I told him I had a problem...
...they were young (in their twenties), full of beer, going fast, and without personal malice toward the boy they killed...
...My problem," I said, "is this...
...Of course we don't believe them when they say there are no slave labor camps, and (would you believe it...
...And St...
...He said that to know poverty one must be poor...
...Just take a taxi...
...He is," I said, "but his soul goes marching on...
...Thomas said something about God—he said several things about God—that comes back to me...
...Now I can say, "I did go to Russia, and I didn't like it there, either...
...The other was a lady who told us, first, that her whole family had been killed in the war, except for her oldest beloved brother, who had gone to New York 40 years ago...
...on going with you to make sure you get there, and, when you get where you're going and you make the mistake of offering him a cigarette, he declines, or insists on your taking a more expensive Russian cigarette from him in exchange...
...And when they said "Free elections" and I said, "But all the candidates have to be Communists," they said, "And in America all the candidates have to be anti-Communists...
...You reserve your astonishment, mistrusting your morning's experience...
...The Russians I met simply can not, I think, bring themselves to think very much about personal political liberty—and, if not the cosmopolitan Russians, certainly not the uncosmopolitan...
...Vassiliev laid the rubles on the line and asked me to sign the Gazette's receipt for the fee...
...the last parliamentary debate over the decentralization of the tractor collectives, for instance...
...The second will appear in the November issue.—The Editors Ayear or so ago a couple of fun-loving East Texans tanked up on beer and gas and decided to do a little crow-shooting as they tore through Niggertown...
...And then I told her we were leaving and to give me her brother's name, and she said she would, and then she said again that she had to support herself on 400 rubles a month, a fourth of which went for rent, and she did not know what she would do if it were not for the kindness of Americans she met...
...It's like this: When you see the word "Paris" on a French railroad station, you've got at least a Free Chinaman's chance of knowing where you are, but you'll never get off the train at Leningrad alone (or the Moscow subway at Leningrad Station) because the sign, which says "Leningrad" to a Russian, says gibberish to you and, without your guide, you panic...
...never having bought the Worker's Paradise abroad or the White Man's Paradise at home, the perverse fellow can afford to blow himself to a chuckle at the sight of the purged Molotov toddling nattily around Moscow, like the purged Brownell around Washington, and I should have been no more surprised or unhappy to see Malenkov in for a quick visit, and a couple of shows, from the Urals than to see Herbert Hoover in from the Coast Range to get his high collar vulcanized on Fifth Avenue...
...The colossal anomaly is everywhere and instantly apparent: On the one hand, the whole behavior of these people conspires to convince the visitor that they are individualistic by temperament to the point of anarchy, self-standing, self-assured, self-minded...
...They were no more open-minded than the Americans, and just as open-hearted...
...With whom...
...You bring your Russia to Russia with you, and the Russia you brought with you is the Russia you take home...
...But I couldn't get them to grumble about liberty, the few I met, not even to defend its restriction (as they might have, had they wanted a rationale) on the ground of national emergency, which President Eisenhower so recently argued in defense of the restriction of the right of Americans to travel...
...Those were Mr...
...But after I'd lived in Germany, with my wife and little ones, and I wanted to live in Russia, again with my wife and little ones, and I asked Martin Niemoeller whether he thought we could bear it, he said, "Anybody who can live with the Germans can live a lot easier with the Russians...
...She had to support herself, she said, on 400 rubles a month, a fourth of which went for rent...
...Laxity...
...The bell-hops in the hotel, between hops, untie their neckties and drop off to immediate sleep in the biggest chair in the lobby...
...Some of my best friends are Russians...
...But always within the system...
...but it may be nothing but perversity...
...How, then, would I, or anyone else in the Metropol (or the Waldorf-Astoria) know what it is to be a Russian in Russia, or whether or why another people are happy or unhappy, or what they believe in, or what they oppose...
...The Swiss—says the German—live off the world's tips...
...He is the Russian, and the only Russian...
...And are the little ones blotting up Communist Propaganda at camp...
...I went to Russia because I never knew what to say when people got up in the audience and said, "If you don't like it here, why don't you go to Russia...
...Let you?—They couldn't make you...
...The Texan was, I think, simply venting the common persuasion— from which the tumbleweed itself may not be exempt—that it is better to be one place than another...
...think of the slave labor camps...
...Plenty of anomaly...
...I'm still sure it is there, but where...
...The Russia I brought with me was wonderful, and it's the Russia I take home...
...Maybe no other terror, now that they're no longer poor, terrifies them...
...This dissatisfaction is, I hope, a manifestation of the faith that there is that of God in every man, even in Stalin and me...
...It's in Little Kropotkin Street, which is not on the map...
...We scurried around for a month, looking for the terror...
...I don't know...
...He said that getting to know God is like getting to know a country—you have got to live there...
...in cities in Russia there are no signs on the receptacles, and everybody helps keep the city spotlessly clean...
...Within the system they wrangle furiously...
...not the Russian...
...We did, and our instruction proceeded, and myth after myth fell apart, beginning with the myth that spies are fastened on tourists as guides...
...Not many Americans...
...There are not many Old Bolsheviks left, and still fewer Old Anti-Bolsheviks...
...I don't suppose that they ever have, on the whole, except for liberty from shoelessness...
...Or are they afraid...
...You don't have to know the language to find your way home...
...Our friend Lois Hogle, who wanted to see Russian children, decided, her first day in Moscow, that there are no Russian children...
...But the streets and the buses and the shops and the cheap cafeterias are instructive, and I came to Russia to be instructed...
...Now I know you have promised me that that would not happen, but interviewers for the Chicago Tribune have made me the same promise and their superiors broke it for them...
...You have got to live there...
...It's you who insist on the guide —or interpreter, or spy...
...When Time magazine celebrated the death of Stalin with the caption, "Killer of the Masses," and at the same time estimated that several million Russians went weeping past his bier, perversity suggested to me that by "Masses" was meant "Luces...
...At the end of a month on the streets, your experience unvaried, your astonishment is complete...
...Vassiliev...
...But of whom, and of what...
...Vassiliev, with a question mark, "the liberals in America are also afraid of Senator McCarthy...
...Besides, I like it here...
...I argued with the Russians I met —not, remember, with the Man in the Street...
...But what I have said here will not be published until next week, when I am gone, and you have already told me that you may have to cut the interview, because of length...
...And the farmers—just imagine!— grumble...
...I saw no signs—not even secondary signs...
...I didn't see Russia or the Russians in a month there, but neither did John Gunther...
...Maybe the counter-revolution, for which we waited from 1918 to 1935 and for which we thereafter prayed in some of our churches, is brewing in secret...
...He said, in English, without our asking him, that we hadn't seen the real Russia...
...I don't need to wonder if the Soviet crime statistics are phony...
...I wanna get lost," I said...
...But the 500 rubles, since I could not take them out of Russia in cash, or get dollars for them, I could spend on an old shahkhmahti in as good conscience as anyone can ever have buying an old shahkhmahti...
...And of what, or whom...
...I wanna walk," I said...
...In all our scurrying, we found two who showed signs of terror...
...the view from the window of the Metropol Hotel is uninstruc-tive, and so are the canned interviews with the officials...
...And you're another...
...What I said here, I would say in America, with, however, more difficulty in getting it published...
...You've learned to say "shahkhmahti" by this time...
...And when I said "Beria," they said "Rosenberg," and when I said "Hungary," they said "Lebanon" and even "Guatemala," and so it went...
...Mine were formed by Russian literature and by the idea of Christian communism (Acts 4: 32-35), which, disused by the Christians, was being misused, but at least used by the anti-Christians...
...This is the Russian, who, your first morning out on the street, seemed to you to carry himself in a manner that reminded you of someone you had seen before...
...Two of the American Quakers who went to Russia in 1954 went all the way across Russia alone, to Tashkent...
...There's no Service 15%, no Kurtaxe, no Imposta di soggiorno, no head-waiter's petty panhandling...
...but of whom...
...You'll get lost," she said...
...They may still be terrified, all of them, without looking, walking, talking, or acting terrified...
...But, on the whole, they didn't, any more than decent Americans, on the whole, do...
...And if you get hopelessly lost, just go into any bookshop...
...Where did somebody see an old chess set recently...
...Are these people, who seem, on the street, so unafraid, in fact afraid, and of what, or whom...
...Never having been a left or right deviationist...
...He did not mean that the U.S.A...
...why doesn't he jack up the service, or send the offenders to Siberia...
...Vassiliev said nothing...
...Others are Texans...
...Your experience has extended to the kids you met at the Kremlin, who offer you Russian lapel pins of all sorts...
...On and on it goes...
...We Americans are at liberty, if we are rich, to buy this car or that, to move to this town or that one (if we are either rich or jobless), to send our children to private or public schools...
...and, on the other, they respond, adequately and contentedly, though with never a goose-step, to a collectivism incongruous to that temperament...
...Where is it...
...Perversity, or cussedness, can come in useful in this life...
...In our cities at home there are "Help Keep Our City Clean" signs on the trash receptacles on the sidewalks, and nobody helps keep our city clean...
...He doesn't know he's a slave, and it is his view of his situation, not yours, that's decisive...
...and this summer he and I had a bucket of tea together in Moscow, and he suggested—an German, the only language we have in common— that we should go to China together and write a book about it...
...This slave (as you call him) acts as if he owns the place...
...Decent Germans should have resisted Nazism on its theory alone...
...Then walk," she said, and she showed me Kropotkin Street on my map...
...If they find the theory of communism much less hideous than the Germans should have found the theory of Nazism, and if, in practice, they have bread and work, I can imagine that, like other people, they do not see why they should assassinate their rulers, who walk much more freely and unguarded among them than ours walk among us...
...Forty years is a long time...
...Who but an American or a Russian clowns around like that...
...The boss is not to be seen, to hustle the clerks back to work, nor, quite obviously, is there among the happily abandoned customers a government spy who is going to report the laxity...
...One, obviously a student, followed us around a corner and accosted us, and kept pulling us around still another corner whenever somebody approached...
...I doubt it...
...Maybe, praising communism so effusively as in itself to make a sophisticated American suspicious of their earnestness, or at least of their sophistication, they dispraise it in their hearts...
...With Senator McCarthy," I said...
...And the Russian expatriates in America, our Russian experts, who tell us what to think about Russia, do they know what it is to be a Russian in Russia, these ex-princes of blood or caste or money or Trotskyism...
...Her brother owned a chain of stores, but never wrote her or sent her anything, presumably because he was afraid to...
...Laxity...
...But the next day he telephoned to ask when I was leaving Moscow, because, he said, he would arrange to have my fee paid if I were leaving right away...
...The lady spoke to us in a European language...
...But the hardest time of all was given me by young Mr...
...and the Russians talk about peace, and I don't know how much they think about peace...
...You have been instructed, the first morning you were out on the street...
...So I said,"How about writing him and giving me the letter to take with me...
...Perversity likewise warned me, while all the Times in America were celebrating Khrusehev's obliteration of Stalin, that I should not be surprised to go to Russia three years later and find the pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and of them alone, still hanging in every postoffice and their busts still standing in the lobbies of public buildings, and Stalin still holding down his half of the box in the Holy of Holies outside the Kremlin wall...
...The Russian Dialectical Materialist is the first non-materialistic man, as a whole people, you have ever met...
...They grumble about bureaucracy, and about shortages, and about prices, wages, hours, and working conditions...
...She explained that the whole group had one guide, so we'd have to stay on alone and find our own way around...
...But in cutting it somebody—not you—may cut what I said about Hungary, for instance...
...She said she would, but she didn't, although I saw her several times, and then I asked her for the letter, and she said she was afraid to write...
...There, one says instantly, is liberty, and the only liberty the Soviet system does not allow: the liberty to reject the system...
...all you have to know is that you don't know your way home, and two hundred million Russians will show you...
...We are all walking bundles of preconceptions...
...The young lady elevator operator is reading her book—usually a foreign language textbook—while the customers stand woodenly (wooden Americans among them) in the car, and there's the chief operator, seeing it all and doing nothing about it...
...Maybe he does...
...The natives you really meet (like the few multilingual native Americans you meet at home) are the cosmopolites...
...How would I know...
...That's why the question, "Do they let you travel around Russia alone...
...We spent some time with two groups of American students on their way home, one from Cornell and vicinity and the other from Whittier College in California, and when we asked them what they liked best about Russia, they all hollered in ecstatic chorus, "The people," and when we asked them if they really liked Communists, they said that, although the people they liked were Communists, that was not what they meant...
...And in the summer they're not in the city at all...
...thank Lenin that they are citizens of the U.S.S.R...
...Can it be because they really, in their socialized innocence, lap up that "Our City" stuff...
...Not many Germans...
...Vassiliev, speaking for the first time, "you do not have an exactly free press in America...
Vol. 22 • October 1958 • No. 10
