THE BIGGER BANG
Mayer, Milton
The View from the Metropol Window The Bigger Bang by MILTON MAYER This is the second of a series of articles by Mr. Mayer on his observations in Soviet Russia. The third and concluding...
...Prices—together with all the American reports you have had about prices—are meaningless because they are nonconvertible...
...because the world will now have them sooner than it will have, or want, free elections, free speech, and a free press, and the terrors of government ownership of everything, to those who have never owned anything, are inconsiderable...
...I looked back, over my shoulder, at the concrete courtyard and long wooden building (probably the park implements shed...
...No use...
...But there is nothing wrong with the Russians' artistic taste...
...If it is, then Dulles no more "lost" the Middle East than Acheson "lost" the Far...
...And it is identical, inside and out, with Moscow's five other skyscrapers, one of them the University, and one the Foreign Ministry...
...I was sitting next to a cockney machinist at a Moscow Air Show, and, as the jets tied and untied themselves in knots, he turned to me and said, "They ain't apes, are they now...
...You're back in the "West"—Copenhagen, Vienna, Zurich, Stockholm, Paris—where the air you breathe is the air you know...
...it is simply frozen, at the year 1917...
...The classless society has two classes of railroad accommodations, "hard" and "soft...
...Sputnik did not spring full-panoplied from the brow of Khrushchev...
...If it takes socialism to provide these blessings and these dignities, then the world will be socialist...
...And he wears shoes in the summer...
...A head waitress in a restaurant told us that shoes were her biggest worry...
...So you know that two rubles, to a Russian, would be a dime—or less—to you...
...A generation ago—less—we went on our "middle way" kick...
...The day you leave Moscow for Helsinki, you travel "hard" for 24 hours...
...At the end of the yard was a grim wooden building, with high, heavy-wire-screened windows...
...the air of multiformity...
...That's an exaggeration—the lowest unskilled monthly wage I heard of was 900 rubles, and common shoes sell from 200 to 400—but let's accept it...
...its tram fare is the highest in all of Europe...
...They are living, psychologically, on earnings...
...that, no matter how many thieves there may be, no man can say that he has to steal bread...
...And they go madly to museums and parks and expositions, and, of all things, for a Sunday ride on the wedding-cake subway...
...in consequence, Russian ice-cream is uniformly excellent, available in all the stores and at street corners in, of course, uniform variety, and massively popular...
...Historically, of course, the choice may be absolutely significant, because more people want cigars, or potatoes, than have them...
...But in any case their bang comes a lot cheaper...
...she likes to wear, and wears, elegant shoes, which she gets at speciality shops at 700 to 800 rubles a pair...
...the air that isn't Russia...
...that, no matter how much discrimination there may be, no man can say that there is no place to lay his head because the innkeeper doesn't like Jews or Negroes or Orientals...
...the titter was amiable, and I suppose the Americans were then and there given credit for pretending to be able to do what, if it could be done, would have already been done by the doyens of human progress...
...Are the two alternatives exhaustive...
...Why shouldn't ours...
...Day in and day out the joylessly joyful Russian press publishes accounts of our layoffs and evictions, our breadlines and living costs, our crime and our delinquency, and our cold pogrom against our non-Caucasian fellow-Americans...
...They get a bang out of their country...
...And, most significantly of all, he wears good, solid shoes in the summer, the season when poor people wear their worst shoes, if any...
...Movies are cheap, long (some run in two parts, in successive weeks), overdone technically and dramatically, often (but not always) political (The Idiot's message is just as subtle on the screen as it is in the book), never erotic, and never violent (except for the dreary flow of heroic war films...
...they won't be in anywhere in Russia until October...
...I was glad to be there...
...and at the immobile man on the steps, and then I went toward the tennis courts, the fountain, the cafe...
...It's the air of the West...
...If in August you want to look at Russian skis, and at one store you are told that they will not be in until October, there is no point in looking anywhere else...
...You drool, but you do not buy, for Helsinki is inflated sky-high...
...The cinders look and taste diffeient, but nothing else changes until you get to Helsinki...
...It's ours...
...Are we trying to get our bang out of America's Valley Forge two centuries ago or Lincoln's Proclamation a century ago...
...The Russians thought it was a good joke because nobody, not even they, has escalators on mountains...
...The only thing the new Russian isn't sure of is gags...
...Americans would seek, and find, no middle way...
...Here is everything, every trifle and every truffle, every flower and every fruit, just as you left it all when you left the West for the East...
...Russian artillery was the world's best before the first World War, and the pre-Revolutionary Trans-Siberian railroad was a world masterpiece of mechanics...
...But two rubles cost fifty cents at the official rate, and 20 cents at the legal tourist rate...
...they believe that it was they who transformed it, they who built it, they in whose lifetime the wooden plough went from every field into every museum and the electric light (be it only one 25-watt bulb hanging naked from the ceiling) into every country cottage whose floor is still dirt...
...Television, magazines, and newspapers (all politically priced items, like bread) are very cheap—but so, comparatively, are refrigeratorsl Summer resorts—would you rather have to play bingo or have to listen to the Party Line?—are within the easy reach of every worker, like summer-long camps for children...
...Must men choose (or, choiceless, inherit) between the kaleidoscopic splendor and misery of capitalist parliamentarianism and the concrete monotony of socialist dictatorship, and violence the capodastro of them both...
...And out of talking about it...
...The variety of food, of every kind, and of clothing, is adequate, in the cities, and so is the supply...
...may be that the Westerner is as rigidly compelled by his ancestors (Finland has the oldest Parliament in Europe) as is the Easterner by his contemporaries...
...But their mechanical taste isn't frozen...
...They are awful braggadocios, embarrassingly awful...
...that no woman can say that she has to be a harlot, no matter how many harlots there may be...
...The Twentieth Century American might call it childish, but not the Nineteenth Century American...
...Outside and in it is, in every respect, painfully ornate...
...I handed him a package of matches, but he shook his head and said that what he wanted was a cigarette...
...and that same ash-tray is in every room, of the hotel, the University, and the Foreign Ministry...
...I didn't ask her her wages—or if she had seen the slave labor camps...
...I said I had only pipe tobacco, and he said that would do, and he pulled a pipe out of his pocket and so did each of his companions...
...On the steps of the building sat a grim man...
...But tea is far and away the cheapest in Europe...
...tomorrow none...
...The air of the West is the air of the whimsical individual who seems to go his own way, whose purpose, or purposelessness, seems to be all his own...
...And the best things in life, in Russia, too, are free...
...the arrowy air of expectation...
...Beyond them a fairy fountain played, and off to the right a glass-and-aluminum office building, with an open cafe on the sidewalk, and burgers sitting over their mid-morning coffee and cigars...
...but love laughs at locksteps, and, if public sexual behavior is puritanically restrained, the Russians nevertheless tend (like the beeses and the bearses) not to go in threeses but always go in pairses...
...So was Russia's Valley Forge, when the Bolsheviks repulsed the invasion of fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, in the winter of 1919, or more recently than yesterday, when they fought off the Germans who walked through France...
...Little Julie's daddy, a block off the young chip, informed the crowd that we Americans had sent up an empty Sputnik and brought it down with a dog in it...
...Lenin's Proclamation was only yesterday...
...There are three or four stores in a crossroads village...
...Today every grocery store has strawberries (came the Revolution, they eat strawberries and cream—and like it...
...At the Agricultural Exposition outside Moscow—surely the loveliest permanent exposition park in the world —they stand gloriously agape at the Sputnik exhibit while a young scientist shows them, with a life-size model, how their dog Laika was fed, watered, and aired en route to the stars...
...You are told that a suit costs a month's wages, a pair of shoes two weeks...
...Behind the Iron Curtain or behind the Eight-Ball—are these the only alternatives...
...Is an agonizing reappraisal of the human condition called for...
...When a government-controlled press pours it on like that, it means that the government is willing to say, in front of its own people, that none of its people is forgotten (not even, we say, in sour retort, the person who wants to be...
...Our strictly popular reformist economists talked about Sweden, where, as here, everyone was free and where, as in Russia, everyone was secure...
...Although the older Finnish construction has much of the gray massive overtone of Russia, Helsinki will do as well as Stockholm or Paris for the purpose...
...but exactly the same articles of produce are being sold in the stalls, at any one time, as are being sold in the stores...
...now our reformist evangelists talk, still irrelevantly, about Sweden's insanity, alcoholism, divorce rate, and prostitution...
...The question of shift is when, where, why, and in what direction...
...A Russian ice-cream bar costs two rubles, and Russians buy them like crazy...
...The air of the West is the air of established capitalism, with its suave and subtle elegance, its streaming boulevards, its Babylon of lights, its flamboyant windows arranged to pique every appetite and beguile every purse...
...If you and I spent two weeks' wages for a pair of shoes, how would we pay our rent and our doctor's and dentist's bills and our taxes and insurance and lay a little something by for old age...
...A month—a week—in Russia informs you that the Russians get a bang out of having built it all, and out of believing they own it...
...I needn't have seen anything like it in Russia—I'm not at all sure that I did—but I suddenly breathed the air of Russia, 24 hours behind me...
...they will, they must, bray like Californians, even like Texans...
...Three more-than-middle-aged men sat on a bench, and, as I passed them, one of them said something and gestured...
...I did a one-hundred-eighty-degree pivot and confronted the park again...
...The prices, of course, are identical everywhere, except for the cheaper, and generally slightly inferior, fresh fruits and vegetables sold capitalistically by farmers who bring their truck surplus to the stalls or kiosks in the city...
...when an American General named Eisenhower said (in 1944), "The war-making power of Germany should be eliminated," that was the American Party Line, which, one may safely say, has since shifted...
...Does liberty have to cancel out security, and security liberty...
...Seems...
...Let's not consider bread—politically priced in every dictatorship—but an amenity like ice cream instead...
...It has three thousand—count 'em, three thousand—rooms, each with a fully-tiled private bath, and a half dozen colossal dining-rooms...
...and the people you see buying their children icecream bars could not, at home, easily afford 20 cents...
...Liquor, priced artificially high, is for special occasions, and then the small proportion of Russians who drink get drunk...
...At first whiff, it seems to be the air of liberty, but liberty is what you call what you know...
...it is new...
...one of them is a bookstore where no bookstore was before...
...Somehow, somewhere, your Westerner cares not how or where, I emerged from the park to confront a grim concrete courtyard overhung with grim floodlights...
...The Finns are producing the most imaginative designs in Europe now, and you drool at the shop-windows...
...It has, on historic occasion...
...On the wall of your room is a still-life of fruit, an original...
...The day you leave Russia is the day you know you've been there...
...that no man there can say that he can't find work, no matter how many bums there may be...
...Is this the way things are or, worse yet, we are...
...Can they not be had without the "breaking of eggs," the cracking of heads, the material and spiritual lockstep that is alien, not only to Westerners, but (as the Russian reveals by his free-and-easy behavior) to Easterners too...
...And if these blessings and dignities can not be had without the lockstep, then they will be had with it...
...as if Sweden, ancient, homogeneous, and harmless, with its hereditarily balanced economy of seven million persons, had any more relevance to our economy than Switzerland had to our polity...
...if what they get a bang out of marks them as primitive, maybe what we get a bang out of marks us as decadent...
...But the air is there, and I went out to take it, into the quiet Western morning of the wooded park they call the Botanical Garden...
...I tried to persuade some of them to stop bragging by telling them what our Little Julie said when she was struggling up a mountain in a company of German school-kids: "Bei uns in Amerika gibt es immer Rolltreppen," "We have escalators on our mountains...
...What they think is beautiful, like an elephantine chandelier, we think is gruesome...
...On your table in the dining room is a green cut-glass ash-tray, distinguished by the impossibility to teeter a cigarette on its edge...
...Does it then take socialism—even socialist dictatorship—to provide these blessings and these dignities...
...But these, you say, were, or easily could have been, the achievements of National Socialism, too...
...But shoes make the point as well as anything else...
...the West...
...But the variety is everywhere the same...
...But a Russian's rent is nominal (roughly the cost of utilities) and he has no doctor's or dentist's bills or taxes or insurance or old age savings to take out of his 900 rubles...
...The bang the Russians get out of what they have got is all the bigger because it was they themselves who went and got it...
...and instead of talking about what they'll have some day, they say, "We've got it...
...We weep ourselves silly for the suffering Russian and his two weeks' wages for shoes, but the Russian has shoes, and his father or grandfather hadn't...
...It should have been built, in the West, eighty years ago, or in Russia forty...
...I was back in the West, with its fairy fountains and its benching bums...
...Had they will be...
...We laugh at them because they don't have automobiles that light up like Christmas trees, as if the dictatorship could not (if it were interested in production for uselessness) build automobiles instead of skyscraping cranes, on rails, that lay down five- and seven-story apartment houses from above while we still haul materials up a scaffolding by hand or monkey-engine...
...At Tolstoy's home, Yasnaya Polyana, a hundred miles from Moscow, the custodian who was showing us the house said, "We are trying to stop time here at the year 1910," the year Tolstoy died, and an Englishman in our group said, "Precisely what the Americans are trying to do in Lebanon...
...The air that always titillates...
...The air of the West is the air of cleanliness taken for granted, unobtrusive, unnoticed, an air unper-fumed because there is no need to overcome the pungency of carbolic acid and lye used by a people who are trying and succeeding to keep themselves clean...
...Why shouldn't it...
...breads, cakes, candies, tinned goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, meats...
...The suffering Russian is, in his own view, rich...
...After you have bread and shoes— and ice-cream—you lift up your head and look around life for the things you can get a bang out of...
...A poor pair of alternarives, neither of which does a man any great credit if he chooses the first because he has a cigar, or the second because he wants one...
...Nor, to the point, is their political taste frozen...
...I like clay courts and cafes and aluminum...
...There are no Russian saloons...
...The third and concluding installment will appear in the December issue of The Progressive— The Editors...
...The Soviet system, cultivating equality where Hitler's cultivated inequality, has masculinized women from the start, opening every profession to them and every form of manual labor...
...He hears the world's best music, sees the world's best ballet, and buys the world's classics at from one-fourth to one-tenth the price I pay at home...
...At the Finnish border the Russian coal locomotive is replaced by a Finnish wood-burning locomotive...
...And in mine...
...Nothing is at first more depressing, and then amusing, to the Western visitor than the sameness in the Soviet Union...
...Your hotel is a thirty-story skyscraper covering two good city blocks...
...and on the wall of each of the other 2,999 rooms is the same still-life of the same fruit, each of them an original...
...it sent a confectioner abroad to get the recipe, and he happened to fall into the hands of an excellent ice-cream maker...
...And the air of the West, which is the air we call liberty, is the air of skid-row and the sharpie and the ad man and the con man and the buyer beware and the tranquilizer and the two-and-a-half-tone convertible and money at 17 per cent and no money at all, and the widow and the landlord, and the boss and the burglar, and the worker and the soup-line, and, behind the boulevards, the tenements that will never come down until they fall down, and the flick-knife and the Negro who has to choose between knowing his place and not knowing his place...
...And the eyesores—country shacks, and long, low, two-story wooden tenements in the cities—are coming down as fast as the nation's one landlord, who, whatever else he has on his mind, hasn't profit, can get to them...
...The story is that the Soviet government, in the early thirties, decided to introduce ice-cream on a grand scale...
...Handsome young people, the boys in white ducks, the girls in white shorts, were playing tennis in a row of clay courts at the edge of the park...
...the elite in Communist Russia isn't leisured...
...Taste—in beauty—is the product of a leisured elite...
...It's the air of Munich under the Nazis and of Munich out from under the Nazis, of New Orleans under Long and of New York under LaGuardia...
...Is it true what they say about Adam, Odysseus, and Faust...
...If it is, then we seem to be losing only because we are losing, men everywhere and always choosing between these two alternatives except in their meaningless moments of ecstasy...
...Are we Western capitalists living, in more senses than one, on capital...
...If what's theirs looks dull to us, maybe what's ours looks jaded, and therefore dull, to them...
...We wouldn't...
...From our black scorn for those who follow the shifts of the Party Line, we proceed, via non sequitur, to be scornful of the fact itself that the Party Line shifts...
...if they weren't Russians, they'd be Californians, and therefore much less remarkable...
Vol. 22 • November 1958 • No. 11
