Russian Assignment

by VICE ADMIRAL LESLIE C. STEVENS, USN (Ret.)

22

ONE night last week I left by train, the Red Arrow, for a few days in Leningrad. I had talked with Valodya, my chauffeur, once or twice about the possibility of getting to Leningrad by car, and he seemed surprised and a little disappointed that he wasn’t driving me up. However, this is the first time that the Soviet government has formally let me go anywhere within Russia that involved staying overnight, and I had no desire to risk complicating that opportunity at this stage of the game by insisting on driving.

Soon after the train pulled out for Leningrad, the Russian who shared my compartment wandered in and out a couple of times. He was fat, but light and graceful on his feet, and his head was completely shaved, as round as a billiard ball. He had hard gray eyes, and he carried himself with such an erect, military bearing that he definitely leaned backwards. A rich aroma of vodka accompanied him.

He reappeared with a middle-aged friend, who, like most middle-class and upper-class Soviet citizens, looked like a mechanic in his Sunday clothes. The friend apologized for my roommate’s condition, but I told him that such things happened in the best of society, and the two of us pushed and hoisted our fat friend info the upper bunk. He still kept a good-natured dignity, but was just too stiff to be able to help himself at all.

The roadbed was rough, and the train jolted and swayed. It being summer, there were no blankets on board, and although I got an extra linen spread from the nachalnik, it was uncomfortably cold. Worst of all was when the train started up after a stop. There was a great deal of lost motion somewhere in the couplings, for car after car would start separately, and by the time the middle of the train was reached, the engine was going so fast that those cars started with a jerk that would waken anyone—except my friend — from his sleep. At that, he was up ahead of me, brisk and bright.

After I had finished my breakfast of tea and good open sandwiches of ham and salamilike kolbasa, the fat one and his friend came into the compartment and sat down. Soon the girl from the buffet brought them a couple of bottles of beer. I held my peace, as always, and kept on with my reading, paying no attention to them, and sure enough, one of them asked me if I wouldn’t like some beer. Another glass and bottle were brought. I told them that I was an American, and that their beer was more like English beer, whereas our beer was more like German. I ordered three more big bottles. They said that this began a working day for them, but didn’t demur further. But they wouldn’t let me pay for any of it. We talked generalities.

At last the fat one said suddenly, “Why is it that you Americans don’t like the actions of Russia?”

Copyright 1953, by Vice Admiral Leslie C. Stevens, USN (Ret.)

This was such a sudden plunge into politics that I asked him to repeat his question to be sure that I understood it. Then I said, “That question has been answered many times. It seems as though all the world is out of step except Russia.”

I wasn’t sure that the metaphor would work in Russian, but it did. The fat one turned to his companion and said, “He understands, all right. And he speaks the truth.”

But his companion said, very softly, “He said — ‘it seems’! ”

23

WHEN we reached Leningrad and before I could get off the train, I was met by a slim, competent peaches-and-cream young lady from Intourist. We got into a diminutive automobile and drove down Nevsky Prospekt to the Astoria Hotel. It was eleven thirty in the morning, and the Nevsky Prospekt was bustling. Although a big block of buildings on one side of the street was being rebuilt, there was much less destruction than I had expected to see. At the far end of the street, ahead of us, gleamed a tall, needlelike golden spire. Somehow, already, the city seemed to have more of a Western atmosphere to it than Moscow, although the shops and signs were still much the same. Perhaps it was imagination, but there is one sound fact on which to base that impression — Leningrad houses and buildings do not have the air of great age about them that one feels in Moscow. Their corners are sharper, and they are not so much out of plumb.

There were three or four nice-looking girls in the Intourist office in the lobby of the Astoria, and they were very helpful indeed. They apparently are used to taking complete charge of foreigners, and were a little surprised when I refused to talk English with them and gave them some indications of having some ideas of my own as to what I wanted to do.

The Astoria was a bit run-down, but my room was comfortable enough. It was really a small suite, with the bed in a curtained-off alcove from the sitting room, and it had its own bath. One morning there was no water, but that might occur anywhere — or almost anywhere. I unpacked and straightway set off for a bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt which has the reputation of being the best bookshop in Russia, where they would even try to find things for you that they didn’t have on hand.

On the way I stopped in a combination restaurant and bar and had a cheese omelet and some beer. As might have been expected, I arrived at the bookshop just a few minutes after their luncheon closing hour began. Since it was too far to go back to the hotel, I killed time by wandering around that part of the city, along some canals and past a green park, and finally came back to the shop. They had nothing that interested me, but referred me to some other shops, a few blocks farther on, and told me to come back again before leaving Leningrad. There I found a whole nest of bookshops, and spent an hour or so in them, picking up a couple of books for which I had been looking for a long time.

By that time it had begun to rain, and I got thoroughly soaked on the long walk back to the hotel. I dodged under a great semicircular colonnade to get out of the rain, in front of a big brown basilicalike building which carried the carved inscription of “ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE USSR FOR THE HISTORY OF RELIGION.”On the great bronze doors was a sign which said they were only open on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month. A pink-cheeked, kerchiefed old lady told me that before the Revolution the building had been the Kazan Cathedral. Now it is shabby and run-down, with sheets of plywood covering great areas where once were windows.

By the time I reached the hotel I was thoroughly tired, and felt lousy besides, doubtless from all the beer that had served as an excuse for dodging in and out of the rain.

After dinner one of Intourist’s cars took me to the Kirovsky Theater. Leningrad has bridges, streets, statues, squares, theaters, hospitals, and all sorts of things named after the Kirov who was assassinated there in 1934. The death of that member of the Politburo touched off the Great Purge which eventually took in my friend Putna, who was Soviet military attaché in London at the time and whose loyalty to the regime had been to me impressive.

The theater was very like the Bolshoy in Moscow, only smaller, and instead of being done in crimson and gold it was green and gold and white, with a great fountain of a chandelier overhead. The production was Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ludmilla. The magnificent music was beautifully sung and beautifully played by a large orchestra whose dress varied all the way from the white tie and tails of the leader through black ties and dinner jackets and ordinary street clothes down to the garb of one of the oboists who wore no tie at all. I was close enough to the orchestra to learn that bassoons are muted by stuffing a handful of cotton down their muzzles.

The costumes were as splendid as those of the Moscow theater, particularly the wedding costumes, which were heavy with ropes of pearls and wedding crowns of pearls. But of the whole thing, the stage settings were easily the best. The Russians get an effect of vastness on the stage by a very clever use of perspective, but over and above illusion, the beams of the roof of the house of the Kiev Grand Duke were actually about five feet thick. Ruslan is a barbaric skazka, a gorgeous fairy tale all done with bunchugs, or standards, of horses’ tails and furs, foot-long waving mustaches and Russian Oriental splendor. One scene had a very effective use of the tall, half-carved stone Mongol idols, with skew-eyes and two or three great white teeth, that are called in Russian “stony peasant women.”Another scene was the field of the dead after a battle, with an occasional bone lying about and shapeless ominous bundles that were pierced with great feathered arrows as big as a man. The arrows were all at the same angle, and the effect, beneath a gloomy, lurid sky, was terrific. Still another scene had a gigantic head rising from the ground, whose eyes and lips and facial muscles moved as it spoke. The use of animal ears in the costumes also helped the barbaric effect.

One of the dances was led by Balbina, who must be a great favorite, from the way the audience applauded and shouted her name when she appeared. Even the Muscovites admit that the Leningrad ballet is ahead of their own, and it may well be that the same is true of opera. It was a good show, but long before it was over I suddenly, with a start, was surprised to find myself in a theater and wondered if I had actually dropped off to sleep. This shocked me so that I did not stay longer, but went on home to the hotel.

It was after midnight, but the streets were still as light as day, for it is the time of the White Nights. The streets were alive with people, but I walked sleepily along a peaceful canal which led me almost to the Astoria.

24

IT WAS nearly noon when I awoke. After a good breakfast of ham and eggs, served sizzling in the skillet in which they were cooked, chewy Russian toast with a huge slab of delicious butter, and coffee — well, it wasn’t really coffee, but it was hot and there was plenty of sugar—I put myself in Intourist’s hands and started off in a big Zees car with an auburn-haired lady with a nose like that of a Roman emperor. We started to tangle before we had passed the huge golden dome of the Isaak Cathedral across the square from the Astoria. She wanted to practice her English, and of course I wanted to practice my Russian. The customer won that bout.

We came out on the big square of the Winter Palace, with a great yellow semicircle of severe buildings facing the Palace and a tall monument in the center commemorating the victory over Napoleon.

“Has the Winter Palace always been of that green color?” I asked.

“ What difference does it make?" she asked back.

“I’ve seen many a painting of the storming of the Winter Palace during the Revolution, and I don’t remember any green in those pictures,”I replied.

“Well,” she answered, lamely, “it may have been some other color then. Perhaps rose. At any rate, this green is an authentic green, and it was a great favorite of the Russian Tsars, just as were also rose and a deep blue, which you will see in many places.”

The next place we tangled was near the Petropavlosk Fortress—the great prison of Peter and Paul. Behind the fortress is a very beautiful mosque, with a gently pointed, fluted turquoise dome, flanked with two very tall, turquoise-tipped minarets. It was so exquisite that I asked her what its name was.

“It doesn’t have any name,” she said.

“Oh, come! Surely it has some sort of name to distinguish it from all other mosques.”

“No. You see, it’s not Russian, but Mohammedan, and we Russians don’t give names to things that aren’t our own, because we’re not interested in them.”

“But even a dog has a name, whether you’re interested in him or not.”

“ Yes, but dogs belong to people. I’m telling you that that is a mosque, not a Russian church, and so it doesn’t have any name. Perhaps you don’t understand my Russian.”

“I understand your Russian very well,” said I, getting a little annoyed. “And I’m very much surprised that any Soviet citizen would talk in that fashion about their smaller peoples. After all, there are whole Soviet Republics that are Mohammedan, and I would have expected someone like you to have more respect for them.”

She began to be apologetic. “Perhaps it does have a name. At any rate, I do not know what it is. And I’m very sorry.”

We left the shining gold spindle of the cathedral that stood within the Fortress, which is so like the other gold spindle of the Admiralty that can be seen at the end of the Nevsky Prospekt, and drove past the Summer Garden. It was there that Eugene Onegin was taken when he was a child, as I took some pleasure in quoting to my guide. We went on to the Smolny Institute, the headquarters of the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution, and the Smolny Cathedral near by, with its striking deep blue and white coloring, and then back past the Nakrovy Cathedral, which was built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated. It has twisted domes very like those of St. Basil’s in Moscow’s Red Square, except that these are brilliantly colored instead of being soft and dull with age. Somewhere we saw a red flag over a dome, flying at half mast.

“Why is that flag at half mast?” I asked. “Is it a sign of mourning?”

“Oh, no. We use black flags for a sign of mourning. That flag always flies there.”

“But why at half mast?”

“It always flies that way.”

“It’s an international custom to fly flags at half mast when someone dies. Perhaps Russia doesn’t observe that custom.”

“I assure you that Russia respects all international customs better than any other country,” said my auburn-haired guide.

I never did find out why the flag was at half mast. Probably they just stopped pulling it up a little too soon. But it was clear that we weren’t getting anywhere, so I asked my girl friend if she were married, and when she said, “Yes. Why do you ask?” I told her that I was quite sure she was, because all attractive girls were married. After that, we began to get along better.

At my special request we drove out of the city, along a highway flanked with big narrow apartment houses very like those in Moscow, across long stretches of flat land filled with truck farms and little fields to a distant row of hills, beyond which lay Tsarskoe Selo, the place where Pushkin was brought up and a summer home of the Tsars. The fields were busy with workers, most of them women. Sometimes the peasants are quite ingenious, for once we saw an izba which had sagged down on one side being jacked up straight by the use of a long pole for a lever. On the end of the pole was lashed a tremendous collection of logs for a weight, and the entire family was heaving down on the end to add force to the lever.

When we got into the hills we were within the old German lines. Everywhere were conical concrete tank barriers, the familiar barriers made of railroad rails, and the snaggled fragments of buildings, completely shot away except for slivers and heaps. Pushkin’s village, with its many lindens for shade, was pleasant enough, but the great Summer Palace of Catherine the Great was nothing but a rose and white burned-out shell. It was set in the midst of a half-wild park and it stretched out for an enormous distance. Through its walls the sky and trees showed starkly. Here and there was a broken row of caryatids, or a twisted wrought-iron balcony from which the double-headed eagles still screamed. Within was nothing but tumbled brick and plaster. All the richness was gone, together with the wonderful and famous room of amber.

On the way back through the city my auburnhaired lady left me at the Russian Museum, a big yellow building with a city-square block of planted flowers in front, in which are all the Russian pictures in Leningrad. The galleries of the Hermitage now have only pictures from Western Europe. I had about half an hour or so until closing time, but the minutes could be spent to good advantage. They told me at the door where the Repins were, and I headed straight for them.

The first one that I saw was the one for which I was seeking — the “Reply to the Sultan.”A group of Zaparozhe Cossacks, barbaric, baggy-trousered, long-mustached, some with shaven heads and scalplocks by which Allah might seize them to save them on Judgment Day, crowd gleefully around a scribe who is writing their answer to the Sultan’s demands. Their letter begins, simply and literally, “Thou son of a bitch . . .”It has often seemed to me that except for the costumes and the haircuts this might well be a portrait of the Politburo composing a note to the United States or a speech for the United Nations,

25

IN the Astoria dining room that night was my fat friend of the train, erect and dignified as ever, sitting at a table with a middle-aged women. We never gave a sign of having seen each other before, but, for that matter, there was no real occasion to do so without going out of one’s way to seek it.

After dinner I set off on foot towards the Bolshaya Neva, past the huge dark bulk of the Isaak Cathedral, whose polished dark red columns of porphyry or granite were chipped with shrapnel, past the Admiralty and the Bronze Horseman, that huge figure of Peter the Great made famous by Pushkin, and down the left bank of the river. Below the Lieutenant Shmidt Bridge, which is the last bridge across the Bolshaya Neva, is a big bronze tablet which says that from that point the cruiser Aurora shelled the Winter Palace up the river. Across the Neva and a little lower down could be seen the Aurora herself, with her three tall, slim, old-fashioned stacks standing out against the clear evening sky.

Everywhere were sailors, walking in the evening with their girl friends, and it was clear that Leningrad is as much a Navy town as Norfolk.

I went past a submarine, which was moored to the sea wall and which had the usual guards with bayonets at the gangplank, and kept on until I was stopped by a high board fence where the Marti Shipyards began. I turned back, crossed the Lieutenant Shmidt Bridge, and went down the other bank of the river on Vassilevsky Island for a couple of miles, past the Aurora and many a tangle of tugs and trawlers, until I was again turned back, this time by the high board fences of the Baltic Shipyards.

All the way were crowds of sturdy, nice-looking sailors, with their long hat ribbons, their blue-andwhite striped shirts under their jumpers, and their neat broad belts. They were clean-looking lads who carried themselves well and who, as far as I ever saw, never went beyond the tender stage with their strong-legged, blue-eyed, clear-faced girls. For the most part they were just respectfully awkward and young with them. On more than one ship alongside the docks there were sailors dancing — and dancing well — to the lively music of accordions.

In the stream was the hull of a tremendous new icebreaker, and across the river could be seen the Marti Yards, with several small submarines in various stages of completion and the sinister sections of some liberated German Type XXI submarines on the ways. Those last set up new and difficult problems in sea warfare.

I walked back the whole length of the waterfront to the very tip of Vassilevsky Island, where there are two tall columns which once served as lighthouses and out of which project the stone prows of ships. Along the far side of the island, my feet began to grow heavy, for the Astoria was many miles behind me. Across the next estuary was the shining needle of the Petropavlosk Cathedral, rising from the low, squat, sinister walls of the Fortress. The back side of the island was rather like a warehouse section, echoing and deserted, except for a rare pedestrian. Part of the way the waterfront was shut off by board fences, for no apparent reason except perhaps to safeguard material, for it was easy to see through the boards that there was nothing but heaps of junk beyond.

It was getting on towards midnight; so, completely worn out, I cut across the island back to the Neva, through streets as busy as in the daytime. I sat down for a while beside the two stately granite sphinxes that were brought from Egypt in 1832, and looked at the powerful planes of their great paws and the savage peace of their faces. Nearly every passer-by stopped to read their inscriptions, for the whole city was abroad in unaccustomed places during these White Nights.

It grew imperceptibly a little darker, as though a cloud were passing by, but the sky remained clear and light. One could still read the fine print of a newspaper with ease. On the way back to the Astoria across the Shmidt Bridge, clouds of smoke from a couple of passing tugs made it still darker, but as I came out of the smoke everything had already begun to lighten with the dawn, paling the gibbous moon that hung low in the sky.

26

I HAD told Intourist that I wanted to see the other Summer Palace in Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland thirty or forty kilometers from Leningrad, and that I wanted to go there by boat. Although a British assistant attaché who was in Leningrad a month or so ago had said that Intourist denied any knowledge of any boat trips through the harbor, the girls told me promptly that the boat for Peterhof left at ten in the morning, and that they would provide a car to take me to the boat and someone to be sure I got a ticket.

When breakfast was over, a brown-faced, vivid, friendly young lady was waiting to see me safe on board. She berated me lightly because she had had to get up early to see me on the boat, for these days the Leningradtsy are up all night and sleep most of the day, if they can. I asked her if she couldn’t arrange to send a car after lunch to bring me back from Peterhof.

“It is a long and very bad road,” she said, “and it would be very expensive.” I resigned myself, but she went on, “Why don’t you come back on the train? They run every half hour.”

She was really helpful, and she insisted on climbing with me across the intervening shipping to see me settled on the little Turgenev. A nice-looking, elderly man with a strong face and a close-trimmed little white beard sat on one of the benches on the open fo’c’sle, smoking a pipe and reading a paperbound book in French.

“Ah, another foreigner,” I said.

“Maybe not a foreigner,” she replied. “Many Russians read French, or English, for that matter, as well as they do their own language.”

She went away to catch up with her interrupted sleep. I became fascinated with the shipping as we slid down the Neva, past the tall Aurora, past two brand-new, uncompleted, red-leaded cruisers, the Chkalov and the Chapayev, the big bulk of the still unfinished ex-German Lutzov, which is now the Petropavlovsk, past the mysterious Baltic shipways. We slid on through a very long, narrow fairway bordered with breakwaters that were covered with trees and grass, and were in the midst of some big Russian merchant ships, when I was aware of someone speaking to me.

“Your tobacco is so fragrant — what is it?” It was the scholarly-looking little old man with the well-trimmed white beard. And from that moment on, I had a real friend, gentle and courtly, interesting and interested.

He knew the Continent well from before the Revolution, and it was as much of a delight to him to talk with someone from the outside world as it was to me to talk freely with an educated man within this country. Just as the Intourist girls had warned me, he had been warned by his wife that he would be bored and tired, and should never have gone on such an expedition, particularly alone and at his advanced age. But that came out later.

On the boat we talked about tobacco and pipes, but he would never put more than a pinch of my fragrant American tobacco into his absurdly small Russian pipe. Most Russians are extremely anxious to do more than their part in little generosities, in entertaining and in paying for mutual expenses, but very few of them are in a position to compete in those respects with any American. This embarrasses them, and many foreigners make a mistake in not sensing their embarrassment, insisting upon generosity until the Russian, in defense of his own self-respect, avoids them and ends up with feeling that the foreigner has perhaps been flaunting his comparative wealth deliberately. When we went alongside the little dock in the meadows of Peterhof, with the fortress island of Kronstadt dim in the distance across the water, my friend said that the hour and forty minutes trip had seemed to him only ten minutes, and it seemed the same to me.

We walked up the grassy hill, landscaped with lindens and hemlock, along the straight canal that led to the sea from Catherine’s palace, and felt out each other’s tastes a bit. At the top, in the distance, were big signboards with posters of the current Five-Year Plan. From where we were, they almost completely screened the rosy, ruined walls of the palace. In front of the gaudy billboards and extending down to the canal past the dry fountains were scores and scores of statues. They were nearly life-size, and they were so newly and richly gilded that they shone like minted gold. I asked him what he thought of the statues, but all he could see was the atrocious incongruity of the billboards. We agreed that the statues must be of gilded bronze, because even the Soviet power would not gild marble lilies.

We walked slowly up to the top, and there talked with one of the strong, rosy-cheeked women who did everything at Peterhof. There was no complaint about her hard work or her hard life. She was only sorry that there were no longer in the world such great Italian masters to make more such statues and to build more such palaces. She said that almost every bit of the restoration, the statues, the water system, the buildings, and the fountains, had been done by women. There just were not enough women.

While we were talking the fountains were turned on, and we were able to turn our backs on the billboards and see the crowds of shining statues against a proper background of fantastic water and dark foliage. It was an extraordinarily beautiful sighta half-savage Versailles with a somber and shining splendor that was Russia.

The main jets sprang thirty or forty feet in the air, and long lines of tall, delicate columns of water went far along both sides of the canal and to both right and left into the surrounding trees. When the water fell back, it boiled and surged over the skillfully wrought bases as the sea streams over coral. There was a gigantic golden Samson in the middle, wrestling with the lion, and golden lion cubs peeped out from the streaming caverns beneath. Behind him were two flying Mercuries, one on each side. The long, curving jet of water from the mouths of the serpents which were twined about their arms made perfect continuations of the curve of their bodies, so that there were two perfect semicircles of gold and crystal. Here and there among the golden figures were spouts and jets, and great fans of water gushed forth like huge sea shells.

We must have sat on the parapet and watched and talked for hours. Still under the spell of the fountains, I asked my friend if he had ever heard or read of the strange experience which had happened at Versailles to two respectable, dull, middleaged English schoolteachers, the Misses Moberly and Jourdain. He had not, so I told him of the curious affair, which is sufficiently well authenticated to constitute a real puzzle and to have its records kept in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. One day, while on a cultural visit to Versailles, these two unimaginative spinsters suddenly and simultaneously experienced an unpleasant depression and an unaccountable subtle change in the park around them. They found the place populated with people in the costumes of the days before the French Revolution and dotted with long-vanished landmarks. Years after this experience, convincing evidence, which could not possibly have been known to those ladies, was found showing that those landmarks had once actually existed there.

Then my friend told me that once in his life he had experienced something to remember. “I went to a certain small Swedish city for the first time,” he said. “ From the minute I entered the city, I had the feeling that I had been there before, and that it was all somehow very familiar to me.”

“Yes,” I said. “That feeling is not uncommon. There is even a special word for it in English, and there are two or three possible explanations.”

“I know. This was quite different. For one thing, I could not shake off the strange feeling. I walked down one of the streets. There was a blind turn ahead where the street was blocked by a wall. The feeling of having been there before was so strong that I said to myself, ‘When I turn this corner, I shall see in front of me a tower,’ and I pictured to myself the arrangement of the turrets and the windows of the tower. When I turned that corner, my hair literally stood on end. There was that lower, its turrets, windows, and every detail as I had pietured it!”

27

SOME dark women, untidy and dirty, wearing kerchiefs and wide, gay skirts and blouses, wandered around the fountains below. “Do you think that they go with this scene?” he asked.

“Perfectly,” I answered. He chuckled and patted me on the arm.

What a place Peterhof must have been in Catherine’s day, with the fountains lit with colored lights in the evening to give a background for an open-air ballet and for the fireworks which the Russians still love so much!

There was some talk about getting lunch somewhere as we strolled down through the park. “My wife always insists that I take a little something to eat with me,” he said, “and I want to share it with you.” He brought out a little packet of bread and veal. I ate a slice of bread and meat, and when he insisted that I take more, protesting that he wasn’t hungry, I flatly refused until he finally promised to go to a restaurant with me and share a bottle of wine. Then I divided what was left equally in half. But he saw his story through and did not finish quite all of his half, keeping some to give to a passing child later on.

We walked along the waterfront, with the cathedral of Kronstadt bulking very dim in the distance like the upperworks of a ship almost hull down on the horizon. We came to the Chinese House of the Tsars. Its walls were still covered with green and white stripes of wartime camouflage to make it blend into the trees, and on its seaward side was still a big dugout, roofed with several thicknesses of whole logs and iron sheeting. Its windows were boarded up solid with plywood, but on the landward side were wonderful great beds of pansies.

My friend said he raised pansies at home, and his wife, who was a very good woman, particularly loved them. When I told him that my own wife, who did not raise flowers but loved them, was also a very good woman, he smiled and again patted my arm.

It began to spit rain from the low dark clouds overhead, so we went into the one open wing of the Chinese House, which had a small exhibition. It contained little but more golden statues and a few stucco masks and decorations from the great palace. Then we wandered out and sat for a long time on a bench, sheltered from the intermittent rain by the thick leaves of the great lindens overhead. Opposite us was the Chessboard House, now well ruined. He told me that it was so named because it had once formed a series of huge, sloping chessboards, over which flowed the water from a group of fountains.

A brown-faced gypsy woman came up, shook her big hooped earrings, and asked me for some tobacco. She lighted one of the handful of cigarettes I gave her, and told me that I had had a full, happy life — interruptions of annoyance from my friend -and that it would be even fuller and happier in the future. I would have talked with her at length, but my friend took no stock in gypsy fortunetelling. Besides, he had some things he wanted to say himself.

“Have you ever heard the Russian nightingales?” he asked, when she had gone.

“ No, but I have heard the English ones, many a time.”

“You must hear them. I will take you to a garden I know, where they sing every night.”

“But I am going back to Moscow tomorrow.”

“No matter. You will come back again, and then I can take you. I want you to come to my home, and to get to know my wife. Also, I go to Moscow occasionally, and when I do, I shall call you at your Embassy. Perhaps we can see something of each other then.”

We had kept away from polities until then, but at last the time had come when it was necessary to tell him what one has to tell alt of the gentle people who are kind and hospitable in the countries under the Hammer and Sickle. I told him that nothing would please me better than to see him again, but it would only be asking for trouble for him. During the past year, there was not one Russian friend of any American who had not been told by the secret police that he must stop having anything to do with the Americans. People said that it had not always been so bad, and perhaps this last year marked a low point. Perhaps things would change a bit for the better, and then, when it was clear that it would not harm him, we could see each other often. Meanwhile, we had had this one lovely day. And I quoted him Lermontov’s farewell to unwashed Russia.

“I know.” He looked depressed. “I have never had any unpleasantness myself. But I am a Russian, and I know that what you say takes place — that you speak the truth. You are right. But I cannot tell you how much this one lovely day means to me.”

We found a restaurant in a wing of the great, ruined, rose-colored palace, and there we took a table which was half outdoors on one of the little balconies but sufficiently sheltered to be clear of the occasional showers. There was no wine to be had, but we had some excellent big omelets and some beer. He told me much of interest, for he knew all of the artists, actors, ballerinas, writers, and scientists of Leningrad, and of most other places in Russia. All of the intelligentsia of Leningrad had been evacuated to the Urals during the siege, and he gave me a wise and understanding picture of Russian life.

I knew what would happen about the bill, so on the way in I had lingered behind and given one of the girls money to pay for whatever we might have. Sure enough, he tried to go back on his promise on the grounds that we had had no wine, but for once he was outwitted.

We might just as well have taken the boat back to Leningrad, for it was evening, but instead we caught a stubby little bus which took us to the railroad station. A nice-looking woman in the seat ahead of us was so obviously interested in our conversation that we both started talking for her especial benefit, and she was vastly amused. The railroad station was completely ruined and open to the sky, with only a long platform down one side.

Fortunately, the rain had stopped, and we did not have long to wait for our train. It was filled with holiday makers and children, all loaded down with wild flowers.

“At least you can call me on the telephone,” said my friend.

I laughed indulgently. “Then everyone will know I have called.”

“But I have my own private telephone. I am not on a switchboard.”

“Since when has any Russian telephone been really private?” I asked.

“Yes. You are right,” he sighed.

When we pulled into the Baltic Station, we took a streetcar. I know that both of us were genuinely sorry when we reached the general vicinity of the Astoria and it came time for me to get off. Perhaps we shall see each other again. One can never tell.

28

ON a bright and windy morning I took an Intourist automobile, for there was a lot of ground to be covered, and went straight over the bridges to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. It does not give the impression of strength that some fortresses give, for its low, moated walls are of brick instead of stone. And there are dwellings and rooms within them. Those walls make up in thickness what they lack in height. We drove inside through a long tunnel. Like the medieval kremlins, the Petropavlovsk Fortress is really a walled town, with many buildings, trees, and open spaces inside.

Although the prisons would have been interesting, there was one thing above all else that brought me there. We stopped at the doors of the Sobor, or Cathedral, and I went straight in. And there it was — a regular thicket of white tombs, packed close together in front of the altar screen and scattered all over the wide, empty floor. They were the tombs of all the Tsars from the founding of St. Petersburg to the fall of the Romanovs, excepting only Nicholas II, whose last resting place is known only to the Soviet power. Two great black flags of mourning hung across the tomb of Peter the Great.

It gave me a creepy, eerie feeling to read those names and to know that they were actually there —Peter I, Anna, Catherine the Great, the other Catherine, Elizabeth, the two other Peters, Paul, who had made his mother’s lovers stand watch over her body and that of his long-dead father. Russia has always been more or less inaccessible, always secret and mysterious, and the violent, fearful lives of those rulers of all the Russias seem so remote and legendary that it was hard to believe this evidence of reality and of mortality. With only two exceptions, every tomb is a plain white marble rectangular coffin, with no decorations other than the name of the inhabitant and a flat golden cross, with the one skewed crossbar, on the top. The wives and children, the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, are there also.

The two exceptions are the green jasper of the tomb of Alexander II and the rose quartz of that of Marie, his Tsaritsa. They are gorgeous pieces of stone. But there is a placard beside them, which says in the characteristically bilious Soviet fashion that the reasons for those two tombs being different were fear and deception. Nicholas II, terrified by the rising temper of the people after the 1905 Revolution, caused them to be made in order to build up the legend of Alexander II, the emancipator of the serfs, as Liberator of the People. Perhaps that may contain a grain of truth, which is doubtful, but even a loyal Party member must weary sometimes of the endless effort to grind every grain of grist in the propaganda mill. If it is in a Russian to appreciate the effectiveness of restraint, which seems often doubtful, the regime should be able to improve their propaganda from the viewpoint of their own interests. Still, no one can accuse them of not knowing what they are doing, and it is probable that those who are offended by their heavy-handed hammering are less numerous and less important to them than those they persuade. Intolerance stands high among their defects, and yet intolerance seems to be a peculiarly Russian characteristic.

There were several Russians in the Cathedral, all there to see the tombs and the church itself. Most of them were unconcerned and unmoved, but in two or three cases, including one Red Army officer, their deep reverence before their officially discredited former masters was remarkable. It would be easy for one who does not live in Russia to mistake such open respect for a sign of tolerance on the part of the regime. Just because the regime does not lay violent hands upon all who do not conform does not mean that it is not efficient in removing all competition. At best, the Red Army officer who was so moved at the sight of the Tsars’ tombs would be regarded as politically undeveloped, and those who are politically undeveloped have no future unless they mend their ways.

That night, after a good dinner of pheasant and ice cream, the tall, blonde, peaches-and-cream Intourist girl who had met me at the pale-green Moskovsky Station took me back to the same station and put me on the Red Arrow for Moscow. I shared a room on the train with a man whom I had seen once or twice at the Astoria and who I thought was a Russian. He had some jerky, nervous mannerisms, but was quiet, highly intelligent, and thoroughly civilized when I once got to know him a bit. He was not Russian, but a Finn who had lived for many years in Leningrad before the Russo-Finnish war, when the border was more open than it has ever been since. Like most of the Finns of my acquaintance, he was a stout fellow who was not afraid of the Russian Bear, but who had no illusions about it or its intentions. We talked and watched the ragged fields and forests go past the windows, drinking glass after glass of tea, until I looked at my watch and was surprised to find that it was nearly morning. The White Nights are no time to catch up on one’s sleep.

Nell was on the station platform to meet me, looking very vivid in a dress of Chinese red, and it was wonderful to see her. It seemed as though I had been gone for a month, and it was extremely pleasant to come into our apartment, high and light, with a cool breeze blowing through it on such a warm day.

Natasha, our maid, was tremendously interested in everything I had seen in Leningrad, and I had to tell her all about it at great length. At the end, she said, “Leningrad is indeed a wonderful city. They say that once they had a rain of stars there. They all plunged into the sea, and it was a wonderful sight.” After I had assured myself that I had heard correctly, she went on, “Yes, and once they had a great earthquake in the Crimea. The earth opened in great cracks in front of people, and it was very terrible.” I felt that I had failed her a bit in not having seen at least a sea serpent in Leningrad.

29

I HAVE been back home again in Moscow for some time. My new office is crowded with other naval officers and, since it is on the street level, noisy. Just outside the doors is a swarm of Russians — chauffeurs and help of all sorts — through which every visitor must come.

Yesterday the telephone rang in my office. It was the scholarly, aristocratic little old man whom I had come to know at Peterhof. He was in Moscow for a day or so on business, and he would like very much to renew our acquaintance. He agreed that perhaps it would not be well for him to come to the Embassy, but he was staying at the Grand Hotel and would welcome my coming to his room for the afternoon.

After hanging up, I started to worry. The last thing in the world that I wanted to do was to get this gentle old man, one of the very few Russians who I felt was really a friend, into trouble, yet it seemed that this was what would happen, just as the night follows the day. It is only since being in Russia that it has become clear to me that what passes for Soviet justice is not based on what people have done, but what they might do. Since from this point of view most of the damage had probably already been done by his telephone call, which was undoubtedly monitored by his hotel, I went to see him, taking a couple of bottles of wine and some tobacco.

He was the same warm, charming gentleman that I remembered, eager to talk about Russian intellectual life and the outside world. Time after time, when his voice would rise emphatically to make a point, it was necessary for me to make gestures which said that the walls had ears. Some of the hotel rooms even have concealed cameras. Nevertheless, it was an interesting afternoon, and when he accompanied me to the door of his room, he beamed and said, “This shows that it is entirely possible for us to see each other.”

“You are not yet out of Moscow,” I answered rather grimly. “Tomorrow, just before your train leaves, call me from a pay telephone in the station, and perhaps I will believe you. Don’t call my office, for I may not be in, and it would not be wise to leave messages. Nell will be in my apartment, and when she answers the telephone, just say ‘Vcyaw v poryadkye! — Everything’s all right.’ She will be expecting such a call.”

Today, when I came home from the office for lunch, all the Russian servants from the near-by apartments were gathered around our door, chatting excitedly. “Gospodin Admiral,” said one of them, “some Russian has just called on the telephone. He said that he was a friend of yours, and to tell you that everything was all right. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

Naïveté and a clear conscience must have brought to destruction vastly more Russians than anything they themselves ever did. Or maybe — just maybe — my friend was forced to seem free.

(The End)