ANOTHER VOICE
Reasons for not wishing to visit the Soviet Union
AUBERON WAUGH
About 25 years ago, when we were all rather younger, Mr Ferdinand Mount shocked me very much by saying that he did not have the faintest desire to make love to Elizabeth Taylor. She was then a great sex symbol, I should explain — the thinking man's Bardot or Monroe. He said he could perfectly well imagine what it would be like, and Saw no need to put himself out to the degree required for such predictable pleasures.
In the same way, I sometimes shock people when I reveal that I have not the faintest curiosity to see the Soviet Union, or any other Iron Curtain country with the possible exception of Hungary, where the black market seems to be coming out on top. It is not just that I can imagine what Moscow is like. Having read enough and talked to enough people, I feel I know perfectly well what it is like, and am confident that it would depress me. The same consideration deters me from visiting mainland China. So long as any of us can go to the Soviet Union or China if we wish to do so, I am quite happy to accept other people's accounts of both places, whether Colin Thubron's, or Sarah Lloyd's, or Paul Theroux's.
In fact they confirm what I always suspected, that socialism does not work and communism is hell, but that is a matter of private consolation. If we were forbid- den, or otherwise unable, to visit these countries for ourselves, I suppose we might reasonably wonder whether we were not being taken for a ride by some organised conspiracy of the capitalist world. It might be just possible for an unemployed man in Liverpool to conclude that everybody who travels in the Soviet Union (apart from Communist Party propagandists) is ipso facto a member of the privileged class, and therefore unlikely to report truthfully on the extreme happiness of a society which (at any rate until recently) had no unem- ployment. On the principle that the grass is always greener, he might be reluctant to accept that many unemployed families on the dole in Britain are better off, better housed, better clothed, eat better food and generally have a better time than Grade I employed workers in the Soviet Union — coalminers, electrical engineers, traindriv- ers.
Equally, of course, nobody in the Soviet Union is allowed to know that the unem- ployed in Britain receive any dole at all. It is generally supposed that they starve, and this impression is reinforced by the selfless efforts of innumerable Soviet and Western journalists pilgering away to convince them of its truth. The big difference, as I say, is that Soviet and Chinese citizens are forbid- den to make the journey to find out the truth for themselves, whereas we are free to do so, if we wish.
Yet few are curious enough about condi- tions in the Soviet Union to have informed themselves from the books which have been available in the West ever since the time of Stalin's purges and mass liquida- tions. And journalists permitted to reside in Moscow, under whatever restrictions, have been shamefully — some would say cravenly — concerned to emphasise the `positive' sides of Soviet life.
Some of these were always communist sympathisers and deliberate propagandists for the Soviet cause. Others were aware that their press credentials would be with- drawn if ever they described the hideous drabness, inefficiency and misery of life even in Moscow — itself a showpiece, hiding the much greater destitution and neglect which exists everywhere else in the Soviet Union. Perhaps a few decided it would somehow be unfair to the British Labour Party if they demonstrated how socialism, in practice, must always reduce to an asses' tea party.
What has happened since Gorbachev is that the spirit of glasnost, now perhaps officially condoned, has communicated it- self even to the craven ranks of Moscow correspondents. The freer and more adventurous spirits among them — the Sunday Telegraph's Xan Smiley is a shining example — are using the opportunity at long last to describe the Soviet reality, stripped of all its 'positive aspects' and whimsical sidelights.
On Sunday we read of Gorbachev's problems in disentangling the 'massive lie' which keeps the Soviet system going with- out, in the process, destroying his own claim to authority. Needless to say, the problems are insuperable. The massive lie embraces not only the history of commun- ism in the Soviet Union, with its 10 or 20 million people murdered by Stalin; it also embraces the refusal to allow anyone in Russia to know about real conditions outside the Soviet Union. Smiley brilliantly draws a comparison between the condi- tions of life in an unknown cattle town in the middle of Kenya, called Nakuru, and conditions of life inside the Soviet show- piece capital.
The traditional response of visiting pressmen (like Booker, whose enthusiastic account of the Russians he met while reporting the Olympic Games for the Daily Mail still rankles) is to say that they loved the people, hated the system. It is as if they find themselves overwhelmed by the dis- covery that Russians, too, are human beings. I never doubted it, but feel that after the hundreds of years of brutal oppression in which they have co- operated, the description needs some qual- ification.
Smiley writes of a 'crushed people, still living a collective lie', of 'a people who have been battered and numbed into a sort of blankness'. He describes this massive lie about the past (and the present) as a cancer that erodes the integrity of a whole people: they trust neither each other nor anyone outside. They live in a deprived society, kept going only by an odious system of state-enforced privilege.
The most powerful impression that strikes the newcomer to the USSR [i.e. Moscow] is its Third-Worldishness: the tacky and dilapi- dated surroundings, the decay even of recent buildings, the drabness, above all the people's idle apathy and drink-sodden fatalism in the face of decades of coercion, negligence, hypocrisy and tyranny. Russia is not a modern country.
At last, I feel, we are beginning to arrive at the truth. What price, then, the 'inevit- able' triumph of socialism? I should have thought that its ultimate triumph was more likely than not. Not (unless we all suddenly go mad and vote for disarmament) as the result of military threat; not as the result of ignorance or pilgered misinformation; not as the result of revolution or riot. Simply as the result of endless agitation within the public sector for its own expansion: agita- tion for more doctors, nurses, kidney machines, policemen, social workers, school teachers, university lecturers. . . . The tide may have been held back a little in places, but I believe it will prove inexor- able. Then we shall all have to start looking to our state privileges.
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