Russia preserved

Alan Brien

Russia Close-Up George Feifer (Cape £3.95) Ten Years After Ivan Denisovitch Zhores A. Medvedev (Macmillan £3.95) "Imagine — a sixth of the world's surface — and not a single golf course," complained an American businessman passing through Moscow. It was no use asking him how many cricket grounds there were in the United States. He had discovered what seemed to him a denial of a basic human right.

Last week, on the radio, Rex ,Reed. the American critic and journalist described his reactions to a four-day visit. So long as he is writing about his own society and culture, he wears his sophistication like make-up, filling a gap somewhere between Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe. But on the Soviet Union, he sounds like the society page editor of a hick-town weekly. No Pepsi or Coke, would you believe? Can't get a taxi back from the suburbs! No nightclubs, no bars! Nothing to buy to take home! No movie stars any American reader has ever heard of! How alien can you get?

Soviet values seem so topsy-turvey to the unprepared outsider, .that he is often reduced to nagging about trivia. He becomes incapable of role-reversal — of asking himself, perhaps, where you go in New York for a glass of !mass? Or how many Western cities have public transport systems, costing two new pence for the longest journey, running into the early hours, where you never wait more than a few minutes for bus, trolley or tube? Even many foreign residents, ordering their luxury goods by phone from hard currency shops, have never visited a Soviet market. They seemed a fair test of any country's real. kitchen-table.prosperity and I sampled them in ten cities in seven republics during a fivemonth, fourteen thousand-mile tour this year.

I had never expected again to find eggs so orange and tasty they almost made me sick, fruit and vegetables everywhere that would win prizes at the Royal Horticultural Show, steaks more tender and succulent than any I ate in two years in America in the 'fifties. Even in 1972, on my first trip, the year of the worst harvest in a generation, the bread shortage I had read about in our press meant only that half a dozen different kinds were available in Moscow instead of the usual thirty five. • The honest observer, who searches for truth even if it disturbs his prejudices, soon discovers that every generalisation has to be riddled with so many exceptions that it ceases to be a generalisation. Every sentence of praise attracts a footnote of criticism. Every paragraph of criticism needs a qualifying clause of praise. All books about the Soviet Union, especially perhaps the best books about the Soviet Union, only really come alive for readers who have been there themselves. Russia Close Up, one of the very best, may be an exception. But I can only say that I enjoyed it, and trusted it, because everywhere I could check it against my own experience it rang true. Mr Feifer's opeiiing sentence is "Once again a book about Russia begins with an apology." And all journalists recognise the need. He vividly revives the memory of the obstruc tions, the evasions, the excuses, the silences, the delays, the last-minute permissions even more disturbing than the last-minute refusals. Which attend any attempt to set up the simplest interview, the most innocent visit, the most routine assignment. My own brief was almost word for word

I saw myself roaming the city to report on a wide variety of subjects: film and sports stars, cultural developments and causes eelebres, social fads. fashion trends and interesting personalities ... as far as possible I wanted to examine what a journalist in any major capital would. It was 'everyday social activity — slice of life stories of no direct political overtones— that interested me rather than Kremlin secrets.

And he felt that he failed to achieve his modest ambitions.

The sloth of bureaucracy, the reluctance to take initiative without specific authorisation from the man above the man above the man above you, the uncertainty as to what would seem success and what failure in Western eyes, the odd mixture of boastfulness and self-consciousness, pride and shame, about the most ordinary facts of life, block the way at every turn. But Mr Feifer does himself an injustice. Equipped with a fluent command of Russian, and what is obviously a warm, win ning personality, unburdened by any deep ideological commitment either way. with the experience of a year as an exchange student behind him, he saw more on his three long trips than he often seems to realise.

He gives a brilliant account of a visit to a People's Court with the weary, grimed judge, at once matey and paternal, dealing with a shiftless; insecure accused who has been caught queuing for scarce goods and then reselling them at a profit. He does not tell us

whether the judge, as is probable, was an 'activist worker elected by his fellows, nor does he stress that such private enterprise is

by Soviet standards the moral equivalent of shop-lifting. But such is the accuracy of his eye, the passion for detail of his pen, that we are there, physically present, and can make our own judgement of Soviet justice at magistrate's court level.

He spends ten days at a collective farm. noting its successes as well as failures, the ' grouses as well as boasts, penetrating into the personal lives with almost embarrassing in

timacy. He is able to get through to members of the Soviet elite, such as the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, an outspoken (though by very few), fearless, eccentric figure with opinions on everything and everybody. Indeed the book is full of long, verbatim conversations which illuminate all kinds of holes and corners of Russian life rarely even acknowledged to exist in the presence of foreigners. There is an account of the building and running of the Rossiya Hotel, Europe's largest, which almost dwarfs the Kremlin, full of richly humorous anecdotage and weird information. And there is a riveting analysis of the Moscow demimonde, from the ten-minute stand-up prostitute in the dark alley to the expensive courtesan who boasts she never wears "a single crummy Soviet stitch," which would be a prize:winning investigation in depth anywhere in the world. Mr Feifer confirms my impression that under the authoritarian crust of conformity, there is a wild, disordered, impulsive secret life to be discovered by those who can 'go native.' And he also reveals that at grass roots there is often a genuine, honest, egalitarian democracy unsuspected by those who see only the rubber-stamp, unanimous-vote parody of it in the Supreme Soviet. Unless I had visited a Soviet show factory, and seen the loafers' smoking and sleeping corners, the gossipers killing hours in the canteen, I should have been surprised how many work-haters get by cheerfully in a society officially dedicated to the worship of work.

He ends ... "it is still virgin land for reportage." Not quite. Mr Feifer has shown that a reporter who never takes "no" for a final answer can woo his way much deeper into Soviet arms than you would imagine from his opening apology.

Zhores Medvedev's personal, concerned, yet cool and restrained, account of the slow stifling of Solzhenitsyn, his friend and fellow non-conformist, would be more useful if it were more revealing about the author. Much of the information, at least until the writing of August 1914, is already available here. What gives it its value is when the author himself appears, as at the funeral of Solzhenitsyn's supporter and protector, Tvardovsky, the dismissed Editor of Novy Mir.

Since the book appeared, Mr Medvedev has revealed that he would like to return to the Soviet Union, despite the revocation of his citizenship. We all can see why some people want to leave Russia. But neither Mr Feifer nor Mr Medvedev explain why others should want to stay. I have my own theories, but the testimony of someone involved himself in the decision would tell us a great deal of what we still do not know about Soviet life. It is a pity that this could not have been included in Ten Years After Ivan Denisoviteh.

Alan Brien has recently returned from an extended visit to Moscow as a correspondent for the Sunday Times.