Would I Move Back?

By Andrei Sinyavsky Translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy

Look at Gorbachev's Soviet Union through the eyes of Andrei Sinyavsky, and prepare to be astonished. As a literary critic in Moscow, Sinyavsky for years secretly published bitter, moving short stories in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. When Soviet officials discovered Tertz's real identity in 1965, they arrested Sinyavsky, along with his friend Yuli Daniel, another underground writer. Convicted of "anti-Soviet acts" in a celebrated trial that for the first time drew the world's attention to Moscow's dissident movement, Sinyavsky spent almost six years in a labor camp, Daniel five. Sinyavsky emigrated to Paris in 1973, and Soviet authorities reluctantly permitted him to return last January to attend the funeral of his great friend Daniel. In the following pages, Sinyavsky reflects on those remarkable five days in Moscow, on Gorbachev, on the Soviet character and on whether his beloved country has indeed changed for good.

Recently a lot of people have asked me, Wouldn't you like to go back and live again in the Soviet Union? After all, now they're rebuilding the society, they've published Doctor Zhivago, they don't arrest people anymore under Article 70 (for "anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation"), and the conscience of Russia, academician Sakharov, is practically a member of the government . . .

Yes, I agree, things have changed. I tell my questioner that they've also published dissident writers such as Vladimir Voinovich and Georgi Vladimov, they've begun little by little to publish me, and they're even allowing some limited criticism of the General Secretary. If things go any further . . .

But that's just the question. Will things go further?

The Soviet system has aroused the interest and attention of the whole world as, perhaps, the most unusual and frightening phenomenon of the 20th century. It is frightening because it lays claim to the future of all humanity and seizes more and more countries and spheres of influence, considering itself the ideal and ordained end of the historical development of the entire world. It is so new, strong and extraordinary that at times even people nurtured in her womb, her children so to speak, perceive it as if it were some sort of monstrosity or invasion from Mars, to which we ourselves, however, still belong. We cannot have the calm perspective provided by distance, inasmuch as we are not simply historians but contemporaries and witnesses (and sometimes even participants) in this process.

Working on a book about Soviet civilization, I have come to the conclusion that the Soviet system is made up of massive, heavy blocks. It is well suited to the suppression of human freedom, but not to revealing, nourishing and stimulating it. On the whole, it resembles an Egyptian pyramid built out of colossal stones, carefully assembled and ground to fit together. A mass of dead stone, an impressive monumentality of construction, which once served majestic ends now beyond our reach, a huge structure with such a modicum of useful space inside. Inside -- the mummy, Lenin. Outside -- the wind of the desert. Sand. That's the image.

And so we must ask, Can you rebuild a pyramid into the Parthenon? The ancient Egyptian pyramids are rightly considered the most enduring of architectural forms -- much more durable and solid than the Parthenon. And the legitimate question arises: Do pyramids lend themselves to perestroika? It would be possible, of course, to adorn them with decorative colonnades, to cover them with molding, to suspend Greek porticoes on them. But would these changes enhance them? Wouldn't they spoil the fundamental style and profile?

I'm trying to use this transparent metaphor to explain why -- despite all my sympathy for the works of perestroika -- I share the doubts of many about the reforms that are being called forth to rejuvenate the Soviet system in the democratic manner.

When perestroika began, I asked myself if perhaps I hadn't been mistaken about the pyramid. But not long ago, I had the sad occasion to spend some time in Moscow. On the evening of Dec. 30, my friend Yuli Daniel died. If it had not been for his death, they would not have let me into Moscow. Moscow had been denying my wife Maria a visa for a year and a half. The Soviet consulate in Paris had informed us by telephone on the morning of Dec. 30 of the latest denial. Then, after two days of negotiations, they had to give us a visa. If they had not, a scandal would have broken out in the press. After all, for many years -- since our arrest -- my name has been inextricably linked with that of Daniel's (Sinyavsky-Daniel, Daniel-Sinyavsky . . .).

We didn't arrive in time for the funeral. We flew in the day after, and we spent the five days that Moscow gave us at the home of Daniel's widow Irina Uvarova.

Perhaps Daniel's death colored my impressions. Moscow seemed incredibly dreary. I hadn't been there for 15 years. The darkness was striking. From the first moment, while we were still at the airport, it seemed as if the electricity had burned out and that the meager light was being supplied by a weak portable generator. The sense of abandonment and homelessness was aggravated by the piles of dirty, blackened snow along the sides of the dark streets. It hadn't been like that before. Where were the streetlights? Where had the stately yard keepers, who used to clean Moscow, disappeared to?

It's good that at least they're writing about all this in the newspapers. Glasnost provides salvation from psychological destitution. But it's still a long way from physical evidence of perestroika. The gypsy cabdriver who drove us from the airport remarked in a melancholy tone of voice on the neglected roads, filled with potholes, over which we, swearing, were bouncing: "So have ended many great empires!" I was amazed at the daring and aesthetic exactness of his maxims. In my time, people didn't talk so freely . . .

< At the market near the cemetery, where we were buying flowers, someone tried to photograph our group. A watchwoman objected, "It's forbidden to photograph the market! The director doesn't allow it!" Why? Wasn't it because the market was catastrophically empty?

If the neglected appearance of the city inspired pity and bitterness, the people who lived in it aroused joy by their calm dignity and the maturity of their judgments. It seemed as if the electric light, which was so dim on the streets, had moved into their hearts and souls and had been rekindled in their illuminated faces. During the time allotted to us in Moscow, we encountered a mass of people, many of whom we had never met before as well as old friends. Mostly they were part of the constant stream of people who flowed through Daniel's apartment from morning until late at night. As a result, I can judge the striking change in the minds and moods of Muscovites.

The Soviet intelligentsia, particularly the young intelligentsia, these days are experiencing the enthusiasm and the happiness of speaking freely on a scale never before allowed them -- in their entire history. All anyone can think of is how to find time to read something new or to publish something new while glasnost still exists! Never before, I admit, have I read so many contemporary, current works of Soviet literature and journalism. And never with such intense interest. It seems as if the very foundations of the Soviet system must be on the point of reeling just from the change in the tone and language of today's literature. Of course, this is an illusion. But it's amusing to note in passing the extent to which the whole iron structure of the Soviet state rests on language, on trite bureaucratic phrases. Just blow on it, and it will fall! We are witnessing, for the umpteenth time, that magical attitude toward the word peculiar to Russians, to Russian literature and to all Soviet society.

But most important, the fear that is characteristic of Soviet people has disappeared. And this despite the obvious, although not always visible, presence of the KGB, which accompanied us. Sometimes it seemed almost indecent: after all, this shadowing and spying were transpiring over a fresh grave. Or should the death of an old camp inmate and scapegrace writer be arranged just as he had lived?

At times I think that thanks to glasnost, the organs of the KGB are growing out of all proportion. After all, now they have to spy on so many suspicious $ people, to listen in on the voice of the crowd and to keep a hand on the pulse, on the throat of public opinion! Perestroika is not profitable for the KGB, which is hostile to the natural condition of freedom, into which society is trying to move. If the society becomes free, who will pay for this whole swollen staff of dependents -- specialists in the suppression of freedom?

The KGB tried in every way possible to hamper and restrict my contacts, and intentionally created a flagrant show of vigilant shadowing, as if trying to force me out of my native city. Observers stood tramping their feet outside the building the whole time. Maria swore at them: "How can they stand there like that without doing anything! Give them each a shovel. At least they could clear the sidewalk in front of the building."

When we stopped for an hour or so at the dacha (twelve miles outside Moscow) where Daniel spent the last years of his life, the police turned up unexpectedly and announced in embarrassment that as foreigners we were "violating a forbidden zone." The good-natured policemen did little to hide the fact that they were being forced to draw up a report on the orders of the KGB. The quiet snowfall beyond the window, reminding us of an old-style Russian winter, was our reward for this "violation."

But in Moscow I was a welcome guest. I had not experienced such a surge of love and warmth in a long time. Perhaps only once before in my life had I been accorded a similar welcome -- when they brought me to the camp. But that was given to me by those zeks, who, like myself, were classified as "particularly dangerous state criminals." They greeted me as a brother, and the more furiously the newspapers stigmatized and the authorities pressured Daniel and me, the better they treated me . . .

A protracted ideological civil war is being waged in our homeland. Not long before our departure from Paris for Moscow we received a letter from a well- known Moscow poet:

"Today everything is gloomy and vacillating, a lot of people are hoping for a bloodletting, for atrocities and cruelties with all the 'ancient attributes': tyranny, the iron fist, a threatening master, army order. Already from every quarter appeals are heard to curtail Ogonyok editor Vitali Korotich; he irritates them more than anything else, and now the hosts of the 'loyal and prudent' are marching on him . . . No matter what those who are optimistic about perestroika say to you -- the situation is very grave, and it's a dreadful time to live, an enormous stock of malice has accumulated, oceans of worthless money, the fury of poverty, hunger and homelessness, of ethnic hostility and contempt -- all this is bursting forth from the depths and is being channeled against the intelligentsia, which have ungratefully forgotten that under the Genius of All Times and Peoples prices went down every year, there was order and every national group knew its place."

If the magazine New Times publishes an interview with Lev Kopelev, a well- known Russian dissident who today supports perestroika from his home in Cologne, then the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya attacks Kopelev in the best traditions of Stalinist phraseology, explaining in the same breath that Kopelev is a Jew. This recalls the old Russian round-dance game in which one group of dancers sings, "And we the millet have sown and sown . . ." And the other answers, "And we the millet shall trample, trample . . ."

The Russian intellectual, by his very nature a liberal and a democrat, is arrayed against the Russian nationalist, who is always trying to trample into the ground what the democrats try to sow.

The verbal tempest testifies, among other things, to the steadfast conservatism of this society, which wrings its hands and craves its perestroika but simply doesn't budge. It has turned out to be a lot easier to print Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago than to produce salami. And if there's no salami, little by little glasnost will die away as well. Besides the bureaucracy, the huge army, the KGB, the necessity of holding on to the republics and other countries in "socialist cooperation," the inertia of the masses, who have forgotten how to display individual initiative after being deprived of it for so many years -- all hang like weights on the legs of the country . . .

I am far from saying that glasnost and perestroika are nothing but a smoke screen released by a clever hand to deceive the population of Russia and the West about impending "liberating reforms." I rejoice in glasnost, proclaimed by "General Dissident" Gorbachev, who has translated some of Sakharov's ideas into the language of the party. Still, it's hard to shake off the expectation, born of experience, that one fine day all this perestroika will turn back on itself along the tried-and-true path to new "stagnations" and "freezes," as has happened so many times before. In the Soviet Union it is easier to forbid fragile "freedoms" than to grant them and inculcate them.

We find that attempts at democratization are possible only with the collusion of a leadership that has the courage to introduce freedom in carefully prescribed doses. Democracy is being introduced by order of the authorities, who at any moment can expand it or restrict it at will. Coercion is a condition of "freedom." Hence the inconsistency and timidity of perestroika, which seems to be afraid of its own shadow, constantly glancing back over its shoulder at its own "stagnant" past.

We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Gorbachev's good beginnings and intentions. All the same, the final foothold of Soviet liberalism and of Russian sovereignty remains the goodwill of the Little Father Czar and his faithful courtiers. We are experiencing a period of enlightened absolutism, and God grant that it continue. As always, tyranny serves as the only guarantor of progress and enlightenment in Russia.

Having called Gorbachev, according to the standards of the Brezhnev era, "Dissident No. 1" (for which I've already been harshly criticized in the ever vigilant emigre press), I am not at all inclined to idealize him. Gorbachev, like many in the Soviet leadership, passed through long bureaucratic training before he became a leader. The burden of those same traditions with which he is struggling so selflessly lies on him as well. He is not, I think, by nature a liberal but a pragmatist.

All the same, the only alternative to Gorbachev's perestroika remains war. The Pamyat society, with its anti-Semitic, pogrom-promoting sentiments, is the alternative to glasnost.

We felt the slanting, deadly shadow of the KGB, which falls over Moscow, for the last time at the border and in customs when we were leaving for Paris. I've never seen such a crowd of border guards, nor have I ever seen such a surplus of personnel work so slowly and take so long, examining our passports and luggage. What were they guarding? Our despoiled homeland?

They threw themselves on manuscripts, telephone numbers, addresses, receipts from Parisian dry cleaners. My wife, corrupted by Western notions about personal inviolability, couldn't understand for the life of her what business CUSTOMS had with her intimate correspondence and assorted panties and bras. She told the customs officers in some detail what she thought of them, and they, huffing dolefully, continued to read our personal papers: "Call Zhenya in the morning . . . don't forget about Yura . . . Sima . . . Sonya ; . . . Lyusya . . . In the evening -- 157-29-09 . . ." My wife didn't let up. I was bored. Why were they doing all this? After all, they didn't confiscate anything . . . Were they just trying to spoil the mood? Were they sniffing out bits and pieces now to remember for the future? Are they just waiting for the present freedom to end, and everything they find now will be usable then as operational material? Or perhaps it's simpler and cruder -- they don't want us to forget ourselves and give way to euphoria. "We, the KGB, are the masters here. We can do anything here, we can peep into any hole -- either from above or from below, and you have no business coming here." So we knew whom we were dealing with!

At passport control, Maria asked a severe and inaccessible young border guard, "Why are you so serious? Please smile!" The border guard loudly stamped her passport -- and suddenly he smiled. My wife said, "Try to smile more often. Then your life will be more interesting and easier to live . . ." Thus we bade farewell to Moscow.

"Well, even so," the correspondent persists, "aren't you thinking of returning to the Soviet Union?" The very posing of the question seems incorrect to me. As long as we are asked such questions, it's clear that we can't talk about any serious perestroika. Why, for example, when the English writer Graham Greene moved to France, didn't anyone ask him whether or not he was planning to return to England? Who cares where Graham Greene lives -- in England or in France? And Hemingway, he lived quite peacefully in Cuba (can you imagine! on an island!) and didn't hurry back to his Great Homeland. But Russia, it seems, possesses particular advantages (borders, the KGB, internal passports, patriotism, perestroika, nostalgia) that for some reason must be satisfied. The whole world begs you: Since you're a Russian writer, live in Russia. Especially since there's perestroika!

Seventeen years before my own (physical) emigration, I emigrated from Russia in my books, and I don't regret it. In the final analysis, isn't it all the same where the body of a writer dwells, if his books belong to Russia?