I was blaming this wild incompetence on Marxism until I walked in St. Basil’s Cathedral, that mountain of Persian domes and painted dazzle that is the very symbol of Russia, not to mention the symbol of U.S. TV anchormen broadcasting from Russia and telling us what’s what. One thing they don’t tell is that the inside of St. Basil’s is a dusty jumble of catacombs and closets, badly made and primitively decorated—that the whole thing is really just a pile of bricks and timber, and more like something molded out of mud by kids than a real piece of architecture.
St. Basil’s was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, 350 years after the cathedral at Chartres. According to legend, Ivan had the architects blinded to keep them from building another. Perhaps he went too far, but he certainly should have had them beaten over the head with a book of lessons about how to make vaults and arches.
Barbaric touches persist in Russia. Packs of wild dogs roam the streets of Moscow. One pack lived by Red Square, lurking on Vetoshny Street in the back doorways of the GUM shopping mall. Another pack lived behind the best hotel in town, mine, in an alley directly below my window. They barked all night and slept all day, tempting me to open my casements in the middle of the afternoon and shout, “Sit! Fetch! Roll over!” for a couple of hours.
Russia possesses more recent vulgarities, too. Lenin remains on display by the Kremlin walls, laid out like a bad ideological salad under a big glass sneeze guard. Not many people come to see the dead maniac anymore, but the military sentinels are still there, as serious as ever, and still empowered, as all government authorities in Russia always have been, to make your life a misery if you laugh or moon the sarcophagus.
A few days after the election, I took the night train to St. Petersburg. It was still dusk when I left at midnight. I dozed for a while in my compartment, but by 4:30 the sun was up. I sat on my bunk watching the dormant countryside, sipping terrible sparkling apricot wine that I’d bought by mistake at a party-hearty kiosk. The meadows, marshes, and birch forests were spread with a low-hanging mist and dusted with Queen Anne’s lace. In the little clusters of farmsteads, only the corrugated roofing and the occasional single thread of electric wire indicated modern times. The houses were built of logs with gables, eaves, and small, deep-set windows decorated with hand carvings.
There is an open-air museum, the Skansen, in Stockholm, where dwellings like these have been preserved. The home that I saw in the Skansen that most resembled the homes I was looking at now dated from the sixteenth century. In Russia, people are still living in them. Potato plants grew up to the front doors. Open wells and outhouses stood in the yards. I counted one truck and a motorcycle. This is the part of Russia that’s closest to Western Europe. This is the route between the nation’s two historic capitals. And for one complete hour, looking out that train window, I did not see a paved road.
In the morning in St. Petersburg, I went to the Winter Palace. From across the Russian-size expanse of Palace Square, it was an impressive building, becoming less so as I walked toward it, following the path that charging Bolsheviks didn’t actually take when they didn’t really storm the Winter Palace, which wasn’t in fact defended by the czar and his minions but by members of a moderate provisional government. But it made a great visual in the Sergei Eisenstein film October, and that is more than the Winter Palace does in person. It is painted call-the-lawn-service green picked out in lardy white and cheap gilding. Ugly statues and clumsy urns line the cornice tops. Whole families of servants used to live up there, performing such tasks as keeping the royal plumbing from freezing by dropping hot cannonballs into the cisterns. They built huts between the chimneys and fed goats on the grass that grew on the roof.
The building was designed in 1754 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli. He spent most of his life in Russia, and it shows. The look is Go for Baroque. In unimaginative decoration, coarseness of detail, and infelicity of proportion, the Winter Palace has everything Stalin would want 200 years later.
The Hermitage museum, housed inside, is not much better. There is spectacular art—El Greco’s The Apostles Peter and Paul, Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Infant Christ, Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna, Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross. But there is so much art that, just as a statistical matter, some of it would have to be spectacular. And most of it’s junk. There are Titian rent-payers, Peter Paul Rubens factory seconds, Watteaus painted by the yard, rooms full of Dutch genre paintings that explain the phrase “in Dutch,” and a batch of Fragonards that should have gone to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. All of this is slapped on the walls at random, hanging in full sunlight in galleries with the windows standing open.
The place looks like Art Club for Czars. Which it was. Catherine the Great bought European art collections wholesale and shipped them to her private quarters. “Only the mice and I admire all this,” she gloated.
Russia is a country that didn’t even become medieval until Ivan the Terrible introduced feudalism in the late 1500s, a country where the small landowner was known as a smerd, a “stinker.” Russia never had a Renaissance, never had a Reformation. There was no Enlightenment here, no Romantic period, no Rights of Man, no parliamentary reform. What little Industrial Revolution Russia had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia never had a Roaring ’20s, a Booming ’50s, a Swinging ’60s, or a Me Generation. There was just one Them Generation after another. Standing in the Hermitage, you realize just how far out in the suburbs of Western civilization Russia is.
Of course, America is pretty far out in sophistication’s subdivisions, too. An American instinctively understands big, silly, sprawling, clumsy St. Petersburg. It’s an artificial capital like our own, willed into existence from nothingness, built in a swamp as worthless as the District of Columbia’s, and designed and laid out the way Washington was by arty-farty foreigners who loved grand vistas and hated places to park.
St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Czar Peter the Great as a base for Russia’s navy. Russia didn’t really have a navy. Russia didn’t even own the land. This corner of the Baltic coast was occupied Swedish territory and didn’t officially become part of Russia until the Peace of Nystad, in 1721. The climate was terrible. There was nothing to eat. No building supplies existed. The Neva River regularly flooded. And Russia already had a principal city and seat of government that no one was interested in leaving.
Peter the Great was no more daunted by these things than a good American would be, though he used some Russian methods to overcome the difficulties. He press-ganged 40,000 workers. They died of cold, starvation, and disease. The next year, he press-ganged 40,000 more. And so on. For nearly six decades, every carriage, wagon, boat, barge, or sled entering St. Petersburg had to pay a toll of building stones—very inconvenient things to carry in the troika’s change tray. In 1712, Peter simply ordered a thousand families to the new capital and told them they were “required to build houses of beams, with lath and plaster, in the old English style,” the first recorded instance of a “themed” development.
That stuff rapidly succumbed to fire and rot, but St. Petersburg retains the fake-o-la look of an eighteenth-century Epcot Center. The mansions are supposed to be like Italian villas, but they’re crammed wall on wall, as though they were town house condominiums. The czars had pads all over the map—Summer Palace, Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, New Hermitage—each looking like it came from Palaces for Less. And St. Petersburg has canals. The city is sometimes called the Venice of the North. But not very often. This is Venice as interpreted by a U.S. real-estate mogul: “Give me a bigger ditch. And lose the canoes.”
St. Petersburg is a city of largeness. You could hold the Reno air races in Palace Square. St. Isaac’s Cathedral is big enough for God to come down from heaven and feel like He was rattling around in there. The hall corridor on each story of the Grand Hotel Europa makes a loop sufficient in size for a high-energy-particle accelerator. (No doubt some interesting quarks could be produced by collisions between protons and room-service wa
iters.)
And Russians are a people of largeness, too—large bodies, large gestures, large voices. In fact, Russians are enormous. Being an average-size American in St. Petersburg is like being a girl gymnast at a Teamsters convention. And these are Russians who were raised on potatoes and suet and bread that you could use for a boat anchor. Envision them after a generation of good nutrition. Twenty years from now, Americans may ask themselves if winning the cold war was worth losing the Super Bowl.
To an American used to cute, fussy little Western Europe, Russia is…not a breath of fresh air, certainly, since the place is kind of smerdish, but it’s like mail from home. News that your dog died, maybe, but mail from home nonetheless. There’s something very American about Russia, despite a history as deprived and unlucky as ours has been hopeful and rich. The historian Ronald Hingley says the saga of Russia has been marked by “a peculiarly Russian tendency for tragedy to mingle with high farce.” But Hingley is British, and what would he know? That doesn’t sound peculiarly Russian to Americans. It sounds like the Clinton administration.
Speaking of pumpkin rollers in the corridors of power, I went to see the house where Rasputin was assassinated. The overblown and butt-ugly Yussupov Palace belonged to a family who owned, basically, everything in Russia. Rasputin, a Siberian peasant, was a televangelist. TV had not been invented, however, so he had to swindle people one at a time. The one he picked was Alexandra, wife of the last Russian czar. It’s a shame that Alexandra didn’t live long enough to talk to Nancy Reagan about horoscopes.
Some of the czar’s advisors decided Rasputin had to go. Young Prince Felix Yussupov volunteered to do the honors. Felix liked to cross-dress. He took a chef, a chauffeur, a valet, a housekeeper, and a groom with him when he went to college. He didn’t sound too tightly wrapped. I kept waiting for the tour guide to tell me that Felix killed Rasputin to impress Jodie Foster.
The prince lured Rasputin to the Yussupov Palace and fed him on cyanide-enhanced cakes and wine. These had no effect. So Felix shot Rasputin in the heart. The charlatan seemed to expire, but an hour later, when Felix returned to get the body, Rasputin reached up and grabbed him by the throat. Yussupov managed to free himself, and Rasputin ran into the garden, where one of the coconspirators shot him three more times. The prostrate Rasputin was put in a car trunk and dropped through the ice into a tributary of the Neva. Even then he didn’t die. His body was found downriver, clutching the pilings of a bridge. Rasputin was the Richard Nixon of Russian politics. Don’t tell me our countries haven’t got a lot in common.
In comparing free-market and collectivist systems, the temptation is to prove too much. Socialism is not the simple cause of Russian bungling any more than laissez-faire is the simple cause of Albanian larceny. Economics is too complicated for that.
Economics is probably too complicated, period, for somebody who was beginning to think of Russians as a Yankee lost tribe. Maybe I hadn’t been getting enough sleep. It was the summer solstice—the White Nights—and daylight lasted until 3 A.M. Even then, night came only to street level. Above, the sky was still glowing.
During the White Nights, everybody walks around the city from supper until breakfast in a genial haze. There are concerts and dances, and busloads of army cadets bring their dates to Palace Square and whistle and yell to see the sun up at midnight. All the people in the streets are solicitous and cheerful. Which is quite a change, because another thing that’s American about this country are the manners. Russians have American-style manners and then some. Russians have American professional-athletics-style manners.
Russians don’t, won’t, can’t line up for anything. At every turnstile, ticket booth, or cash register, they shove in from all sides like piglets on a sow. They have no sense of personal space. They’ll walk across an empty Red Square to stand on the toes of your shoes.
Every question or request, at even the most “Western” hotels and restaurants, is met with a stare of dull surprise and a grudging, laconic response.
“Do you have soup today?”
Waiter pauses, frowns, grimly considers. “Yes.”
“What kind of soup?”
“Different kinds.”
“Could you tell me some of the different kinds?”
“Soup of the day.”
Small boys, when they see a passing train, give it the finger. An Intourist travel agent, queried on whether it would be worthwhile to visit Khabarovsk, rolled her eyes and said, “Pfft. I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
I asked a long-distance operator, “Will you put this call through to the United States?”
“Maybe,” he replied.
Suggested slogan for post-Soviet tourism promotion campaign: Russia—Barge Right In.
People who weren’t in Russia before 1991 sometimes think Russian rudeness is a product of freedom. “I guess the Russians are finally free to be rude,” they’ll say. They’re wrong. Manners were worse yet in the USSR and were accompanied by a public atmosphere of defeated fatigue and indefatigable suspicion. Plus, half the people were drunk—a thrashing, helpless, hello-coma kind of inebriation I saw almost nowhere on this trip except occasionally in the mirror.
So socialism causes rudeness. And capitalism causes rudeness. But if you go to Sweden, where they’ve got both, everybody’s polite. You figure it out.
I gave up and took a boat trip to a palace complex built by Peter the Great—Peterhof, named after Peter, as everything that Peter named was. Here were four or five residences too big to live in, plus one too big to walk through without taking a break for lunch.
Fountains, cascades, and other waterworks clutter Peterhof’s grounds. The ordinary garden hose has taken much of the thrill out of fountains, I think. Right in our backyards we have something that sprays water beautifully into the air, and you can squirt your wife with it. Also, we have electricity. Spumes, spritzes, and artificial drizzle received more oohs and aahs when viewers knew that hundreds of serfs were scrambling uphill with buckets to make them happen.
Peterhof’s fountains have been under restoration since World War II. Some spitting gargoyles had a plaque that read, THE DRAGONS WERE RAVAGED BY THE NAZIS. Which must have been a sight to see. Not satisfied with sexually molesting the garden ornaments, Hitler’s troops ruined all of Peterhof during their unsuccessful siege of what was then Leningrad.
I went to the appalling Throne Room and looked at the gilded rococo moldings slobbered all over the walls and ceilings. A dozen immense purple glass chandeliers from a whore’s idea of paradise ruined the space overhead. Underfoot, an ugly jigsaw puzzle of parquet flooring spread for acres in all directions, so much of it that there were once servants whose job was to skate through the palace in big socks, keeping everything buffed. The throne itself was preposterous, and above it was a portrait of fat Catherine the Great, the picture bracketed by personifications of Justice, Truth, Virtue, and other things that Catherine wouldn’t have known if they bit her.
An afternoon at Peterhof is enough to explain the whole Bolshevik revolution, especially in 1917 to starving sailors on the Kronshtadt fleet, freezing soldiers at World War I’s Eastern Front, and semichattel peasants hauling water buckets for the Peterhof fountains. I was ready to join the revolution myself if I’d get a chance to heave that throne through a window, make a penny-arcade shooting gallery out of the chandeliers, and play ducks and drakes with a hand grenade on those parquet floors.
The problem is, the Bolsheviks didn’t do those things. And when the Germans did, the Bolsheviks spent the next four and a half decades carefully restoring the place. This is because marxists are insane.
Marxism has had such an impact on this century and remains, even after the fall of the Soviet bloc, such a potent intellectual force that we tend to forget how loony are its fundamental tenets.
Karl Marx believed that man is created by economics, not the other way around. No soul is involved. Nebuchadnezzar, Jesus, Attila the Hun, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Albert S
chweitzer, and Alanis Morissette are all just different versions of investment maven Warren Buffett. And mankind, like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company, moves ever forward economically. History, to Marx, was nothing but the inevitable evolution of economic systems. First there was snatch and grab, followed by hunt and gather, then feudalism, capitalism, and, finally, there will be snatch and grab again, as much as you like, in the communist utopia.
Marx insisted that these economic systems determine everything. He lived in the capitalist age, so all of what he saw around him was a construct of capitalism: marriage, family, religion, government, nation. When communism came, these would disappear. Poof! No more wife and kids, and you don’t have to go to church on Sunday, you can play golf. Unless golf is a capitalist construct, too, in which case you’ll be standing in the grass with a niblick in your hand and no idea what to do.
Faith in the primacy of economic determinates is, in brief, putting a price on your mother. As I pointed out in the last chapter, a good economist can do this, if pressed. But Marx was not a good economist. He espoused the Labor Theory of Value, the idea that the value of a product is determined by the work required for its production. Thus, a hole in the ground is worth more than a poem. (Although this actually happened to be the case with much of the poetry written in the Soviet Union.)
Marx also believed that once private property was eliminated and communism had arrived, all of humankind would be gathered into one huge, cohesive, all-pervading socioeconomic cooperative. How this would happen, however, Marx hadn’t a clue. He hinted it would be accomplished in a big, gooey, spontaneous, Woodstock way. In Russia, it was done with guns.