The Russian Interpreter

In September, with the hard-won visas in our passports, we found ourselves aboard the Vyacheslav S. Molotov, the Soviet steamer that plied then between London and Leningrad (at any rate until Vyacheslav S. Molotov was discovered to be a member of the so-called Anti-Party Group, when it modulated tactfully into being the Baltika). In Moscow we were installed in Sector B, the well-appointed guest quarters of the university’s spanking new high-rise wedding cake on the Lenin Hills (previously and subsequently the Sparrow Hills), dominating the southern skyline of the city. And were presented with our timetable for the coming month: a series of visits to collective farms, the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the Red October piano factory, et cetera, et only too predictably cetera.

The notes I made at the time record a series of ‘terrible’ meetings with the people in charge of us, where we protested that this was not what we had agreed to. In the end we went on strike. We refused to emerge from Sector B until the time-table had been withdrawn. All kinds of people – organizers, Komsomol (Young Communist) officials, concerned students – came to cajole us and plead with us. We were guests in someone else’s country – we couldn’t behave like this! The Red October piano-makers had been practising special songs to entertain us! They would be deeply hurt if we failed to turn up and hear them!

It was awful. But we stayed struck.

And in the end we prevailed. We were free to attend lectures, seminars, and classes unsupervised and unaccompanied. We became, so far as I know, what we had aspired to be – the first genuinely independent student exchange between a British and a Russian university.

Or at any rate half of one. Our rebellion had apparently scuppered the chances of the Russian group that we had been expecting. By the time I left Cambridge the following year they had still not arrived.

 

Nobody at Moscow University had ever seen anyone from the West before, so everyone wanted to talk to us. It was only later that we discovered how many of our apparently chance encounters in the refectory or the corridors had been, like so much else in Soviet life, pokazukha, as Russians call Potemkin villages and other false frontages pasted over reality; they had been orchestrated by Komsomol. Out on the streets, though, the pokazukha of the new Stalinist architecture didn’t entirely conceal the seedier reality behind it. Empty monumental prospects led to dusty backstreets lined with tumbledown wooden houses. The roofline of the central squares was broken by vainglorious slogans; on the pavements below it was difficult not to see the glistening contents of the spittoons. The sweet reek of men’s perfume warred with the smells of low-octane exhausts. In the woods to the west of the city there were still the heroic remains of trenches and shattered steel helmets, where the German advance was finally halted by the onset of the Russian winter in 1941; legless veterans scooted along the streets in little home-made trolleys, and the walking wounded held out one open palm for money, one raw amputated stump as explanation.

By the mid-sixties, ten years later, when I wrote the novel, a number of things were different. There were plenty of western students doing their year at Russian universities, together with postgraduates like my protagonist Paul Manning, and visiting businessmen like his old friend Gordon Proctor-Gould. But the underlying feel of the city remained much the same. I’d been back as a journalist by then, covering the visit of the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1959, and had written an account of walking round Moscow which had attracted a front-page article in Izvestia describing me as ‘a stinking rocket of the Cold War’. I subsequently went back several more times, on various missions, and each time my despairing Russian friends would say, ‘This place must change! It can’t go on like this!’ But it did, year after year, and the Moscow in which my novel is set is still pretty much the city that first etched itself so sharply upon my consciousness in 1956.

 

I look now at the dog-eared notes I laboriously typed up each evening during that first visit, and try to remember who all the people I mention were. It’s often difficult, because I changed the identifications of anyone who spoke at all freely, on the assumption that anything I wrote would be found and read.

Some of them, though, are easier to reconstruct because they have fictional counterparts in the novel. The well-worn assurance at the front that the characters and situations ‘are, of course, entirely imaginary’ isn’t quite true. Is it ever? But the originals in this case, given the nature of the Soviet state, needed disowning more than most.