t.CETROPOLE HOTEL
181
they are in love with each other. They do not say they like bread:
they say, "All Russian people like bread," as if liking bread was a
medal won in a school of high morals. They no longer say, "Pushkin
wrote ..." but "Pushkin, one of the greatest poets who ever lived" -
and a few days ago, a woman said to me, "We have no bald men in
Russia." It's a kind of national coming-of-war-age pride. They don't
boast about the Red Army or the near starving
civil
population,
but they hurry to tell you about the millions of books sold last year,
the forty theaters that are filled at every performance, the people
who wait in line through the freezing nights to buy tickets for a ballet
or a concert. The Russian intellectual has had a hard life.
If
he is
now in his late thirties, forties or fifties he has gone through the
revolution and the hunger, privations and upheavals that followed
the revolution. The thirties were the first promise of something bet–
ter, but the promise was soon followed by the hurricane of the 1937-
1938 purges that sent him whirling, looking for the protective walls
that were not there. The accusations against his friends or his heroes
were only half understood and were, therefore, more frightening.
Such men and women tell you that one day they knew a criminal
charge of treason or disloyalty could not
be
true, the next day felt
uncertain, and within a short time were half convinced that perhaps
their country, their revolution might have been betrayed. Great hon–
or must and
will
be paid those who did protest the criminal purges.
It is hard to judge those who tossed about in silent doubt and des–
pair, but it is even harder to believe that they did not understand
what was happening.
Those
years of struggle from the dark centuries of ignorance and
poverty, then famine, then hope, then nightmare ideological up–
heavals, and, finally, war on a scale that has never been seen before,
have made deep marks on all of them. The least important scar,
perhaps, is a chip-on-the-shoulder feeling toward foreigners that often
takes the form of looking for the insult. Last week a woman I like
carne to see me. She is in her forties, a pleasant lady who translates
French and English poetry. Her face was tense and twitchy. She
began almost in the middle of a sentence, "Last night he said across
the table, 'Where is Akhmatova? Gone, gone with so many others.'
What do you think of that," she asked me,
«What do you think
of that?"
