Kropotkin Street, named to honour the great anarchist, was formerly known as Blessed Virgin Street. It contains a sinister building partly hidden by a high wall topped with barbed wire; this is one of the psychiatric institutions where dissidents were held against their will and, in a few cases, still were, if rumours were correct. A short distance along is a building that was long home to two elderly women who kept scores of cats. Five years earlier, however, the cats were removed and the house became Moscow’s first cooperative, which is to say free-enterprise, restaurant, known simply as No. 36 Kropotkin. It wouldn’t even accept dollars much less rubles but took only credit cards and was frequented by groups of foreigners or by single foreigners like me, eager to repay the genuine hospitality of some Soviet acquaintances. It was not the most expensive of the seven or eight such eating places in the city; I was advised in a hushed tone that at a Chinese restaurant called the Peking the shark’s fin soup cost 100 rubles. But it was representative, I believe, and symbolic.
Eating in any Soviet restaurant, you were conscious first of all that the printed menu, considered as literature and theatre, served quite a different function than in the West. In our tradition the menu is a basic list. You expect the waiter to ooze over to the table and say something like, “Good evening, my name is Mark, and I’ll be your server this evening. In addition to our menu selections, chef has prepared the following specials.…” Soviet menus by comparison were little encyclopedias, page after page of every conceivable chicken dish, fish dish, vegetable dish. The job of the server was to explain, in response to your enquiries, that the dishes you wanted were not available—until you began to suspect that they had never been available. “So what, then, do you suggest this evening?” you were finally forced to ask.
“Bifsteak.” Boiled beef.
“What would you recommend to go with that?”
“Cabbage.”
“Is there anything else available?”
“Cabbage.”
A cold fish course came first; the meat was the second course and was always boiled. Fresh fruit and vegetables were almost nonexistent. No. 36 was offering carrots that night, but they were cold. It was amusing to see the head waiter in evening clothes and the junior staff in stiff white tunics, trying to suggest the pre-Revolutionary style. They had the snooty looks down pat but kept serving and taking away from the wrong sides. The example might be a small one, but the point was bigger: one of the reasons why individual entrepreneurship was far more widespread and obviously more successful in China than in the Soviet Union, I heard it said, was that in China there was still an old generation that remembered how the salary system worked; 1917 was just that much longer ago than 1949 to make the same continuity impossible in the Soviet Union.
Outside in the street, however, the world before the Revolution is apparent enough, in the old apartment blocks, the former private houses, the hotels or public buildings that serve completely different functions now but are so clearly a part of their own time and place—and class. Even the arrangement of the streets and boulevards shows the wealth that once obtained there. It is like London in that respect, though in general the similarity to the United States seems more pressing and germane: another of those sprawling, powerful, ungovernable countries that can proceed only by lurching from extreme to extreme in a kind of slow-motion ricochet in which innocent people so often get hurt.
I managed to wangle a VIP pass to the May Day parade in Red Square, but was told to bring my passport and visa (the latter is a separate document, not something stamped in the former). Security promised to be tight because this was not an ordinary May Day, or Day of the International Solidarity of the Working People, to give it its full official name. For one thing, it was the 100th consecutive May Day parade to be held in Red Square. Some will be surprised to learn that this was a pre-Revolutionary holiday in new red clothes. It is in fact a pre-Christian celebration of the return of spring; even some of the Russian songs associated with it may date back the better part of a millennium. Some elements of the original ceremony survived into the era when aging patriarchs standing side by side atop the Lenin Mausoleum would give feeble geriatric waves to the endless line of troops and missile carriers passing below. That is the May Day we in the West know from years of television clips, though in fact the displays of unending might have always been more important as a feature of Victory Day on May 9.
In any case, this year was to be very different. No military parade at all and no rogues’ gallery of Red Army generals to take the salute—that would have been too Stalinist in tone and, in the present atmosphere, too provocative. This time the various trade unions and such would do the marching, organized not by the government but by the Society of Moscow Voters, a pro-reform organization, and others, but with the approval of the Council of Ministers, which also gave permission for a demonstration—a manifestation, as the Soviets said—to be held around the corner, so to speak, in Revolution Square. I couldn’t find anyone who knew for certain whether Gorbachev himself would turn up. In Leningrad and other cities the holiday would be marked in similarly radical ways; in Kiev local people did without government representation in the reviewing stand altogether.
By 9:30 or so the area around the Kremlin was filling up with humanity. I heard the size of the crowd estimated variously at 100,000 and 300,000—the latter seemed too high to me, but it made no difference really. I kept track of the number of times my papers were scrutinized at different checkpoints as I got closer to Lenin’s tomb; the final tally was nine. The soldiers were equally careful with diplomats, I noticed. From the concrete steps where I perched, closer to the reviewing stand, downwind, than to the Historical Museum to my left, where the marchers would proceed from, I had a fine view of the goings-on. I could see columns mustering, banners being unfurled and tested, brightly coloured groups of walkers pacing like horses impatient for the race to begin. To the right, TV camera crews on an unstable-looking scaffold were training their equipment on the top of the mausoleum, where the new extra-military dignitaries would stand. Soldiers were everywhere. There were also many security men in black leather trench coats with walkie-talkies. Through the long lens of my camera I could see others directly ahead, across the great cobblestone square, positioned along the rooftops.
I moved my gaze downward and began scanning faces in the crowd through my viewfinder. During one pan, I stopped with a jolt of recognition. The face was unmistakable. Yes, it was Honest Ed Mirvish, the zillionaire proprietor of Toronto’s oldest, largest, and altogether most garish discount store, a man who had parlayed the nine-cent light bulb and the job lot of slightly imperfect ladies’ ready-to-wear into a famous dynastic fortune. He was wearing a beautifully tailored dark blue wool suit and handmade Italian shoes that shone like obsidian. He seemed to be giving some people his business card. For just a moment, before he was swallowed by the crowd, I saw him framed against the GUM Department Store and could imagine it as perhaps he might hope to see it, its 2.4 kilometres of counter space brimming with toilet rolls and polyester tank tops, its long facade plastered in neon and witty sayings and blow-ups of articles from the Toronto Telegram extolling the legend of Honest Ed (boy, what a card). I couldn’t help but wonder whether he knew the significance of what he was about to see or whether it reminded him of the Eaton’s Santa Claus parade when he was a kid.
At the stroke of 10:00 band music came over the public-address system, followed by short speeches from a series of sonorous disembodied voices. The first speech was booed but not consistently or with real persistence. By now I could see the thin line of figures on the reviewing stand. The pent-up marchers were released, and there was another flurry of brass and drums, but live this time, from somewhere within the multitude. The participants lunged forward, men in suits, women in dresses, lots of children, some holding red flowers straight out in front of them like votive offerings. Suddenly I realized what a sea of colour it was, how surprised I was to see all the bright fabrics together,