St Petersburg

While tripping your neighbor.

The appeal of rock as an unsanctioned cultural movement was a remarkable sign of coming ideological and political changes in the Soviet Union. The totalitarian system created by Lenin and Stalin, which had seemed eternal to many, was beginning to crack under the pressure of external and internal factors. Mikhail Gorbachev—the new Party leader who came to power in 1985, younger and more pragmatic and energetic than his ossified Politburo colleagues—tried to cope with the crisis, which had suddenly become apparent to all, through a series of political and economic measures. He introduced words that soon became current even in the West—perestroika (which referred to structural changes in the centralized administration of the country) and glasnost (which referred to substantial liberalization, at least in Soviet terms, in culture and mass media).

One of the last Leningrad Party bosses of the Brezhnev “stagnation period” (1964-1982) was the dogmatic Grigory Romanov, who spent thirteen years in his post. His surname led to many sarcastic parallels with the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled Russia for over three hundred years (it was founded in 1613 by Mikhail Romanov, Peter the Great’s grandfather, and ended only with the revolution of 1917). One joke was quite popular in Leningrad. A workman enters a grocery store with absolutely empty shelves, loses his patience, and starts cursing Romanov. He is immediately arrested and asked why he was attacking comrade Romanov. “Because,” the workman answered, “the Romanovs were in charge of Russia for three hundred years and they couldn’t store up enough food to last for even seventy.”

This joke was taken quite seriously by Anatoly Sobchak in his sweeping reinterpretation of the history of Soviet rule. (Sobchak, an economic law professor and prominent politician in the perestroika and glasnost years, was elected Leningrad city council chairman in 1990 and later mayor.)

For seven decades we lived by exploiting what had been amassed by the people and nature herself, and we wanted to enter the Communist future through the momentum of former development. We consistently depleted the country’s human, social, natural, and moral resources. Without exception the “successes” of the Communist doctrine—from the victory over Hitler to space flights, from ballet to literature—were all taken out of the pocket of Russian history.117

This tirade reflected the spirit that swept through Soviet society when the Communists, unable to control reforms that had taken on a momentum of their own, began to lose their many monopolies, not least the monopoly on information. Political, economic, and cultural information broke through the dam, washing away old dogmas that had so recently seemed immutable.

This ideological liberation brought decisive changes in the way of life of the new Petersburg mythos. In the years of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, it had existed as something semiforbidden. The intellectual elite nurtured it but quietly, among themselves. The mythos could not be publicly formulated or debated, and its greatest works were either unpublished, like Akhmatova’s Requiem, or appeared only with major cuts by the censors, like her Poem Without a Hero (whose hero was Petersburg, of course).

In order to bring the poems of Akhmatova or Mandelstam to a wider audience, some courageous television journalists in Leningrad tried various subterfuges; for instance, they used banned verses in voice-overs to nature footage without naming the authors. The ruse worked because ignorant Party censors never expected to hear banned poets on television. Émigré literature remained out of bounds in Leningrad; the works of old émigrés, like Zinaida Hippius, Merezhkovsky, Zamyatin, and Nabokov, and of new ones, like Brodsky, still circulated only in the underground.

All this started to change under Gorbachev. “The process was under way,” as Gorbachev liked to say, beginning with the rehabilitation of the poet Gumilyov. His works had not been printed in the Soviet Union in over sixty years; even in the early 1950s charges of having a picture of the “counterrevolutionary” author could lead to ten years’ exile in Siberia. But Gumilyov’s underground fame and reputation remained high all those years thanks to manuscript copies of his poems that circulated from hand to hand.

Gumilyov’s hundredth birthday fell in 1986, and though Soviet journals and newspapers published his poetry (thanks, it is said, to the support of Raisa Gorbachev, a fan) and articles about him that gave him his due as a poet, they mentioned his execution very gingerly. It was only in 1990 that the materials on the “Gumilyov affair” (from the archives of the secret police) were published. It became clear that Akhmatova had been right in insisting that the charges against Gumilyov of “active counterrevolutionary activity” were largely fabricated.