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PARTISAN REVIEW
sight: tourists are driven down streets emptied of beggars, drunks,
shabby buildings. No dead cats here. Children between seven and
twelve have been sent to pioneer camps to preserve them from
contact with the Western visitors. Dissident elements have been
hidden away in prisons and insane asylums. Meanwhile, the open
wounds of Afghanistan are being painted over, the invasion
packaged for domestic consumption as a defensive foreign policy
maneuver. More important to the Soviet leaders, the cleanup covers
the city with an unrippled surface reflecting back only the sparkle of
gold and silver from Soviet athletic victories.
The main streets of Moscow swell with automobiles diverted off
side roads by barricades. Gorki Prospect emptie Moscow's visitors
into Red Square where they are hustled to the front of lines stretch–
ing for a mile and given a tour that reflects the priorities of the most
carefully rehearsed Olympics in history. There is the obligatory
viewing of Lenin's body in its moisture- and temperature-controlled
glass case . Then on to the biggest cannon ever built (too heavy to
move, it was never fired), and the biggest bell ever cast (cracking
from its own weight before it could be rung). Both these anomalies
were built by Tzars but faithfully reflect obsessions that survived the
revolution that deposed them.
In the middle of Red Square, tourists view freshly painted Saint
Basil's Cathedral. Their photographs capture its Disneyland
exterior, but never the dark, empty space inside.
The Soviet Union rises into our conscious minds when a
famous dissident is disposed of, or when an invasion or threatened
invasion against some wandering satellite seems to move us all closer
to apocalypse. At these times we wonder: do the Russian people
know the truth behind their government's circus antics? Have the
tactics of mind control of this bureaucratic totalitarian state turned
the Russian bear into something less formidable and less worthy of
our anguish? Olympic visitors reported that the Russian public
seemed to accept, even welcome the eyewash that disturbed its
Western guests. But then the circus is such a national rite that this
shou ld hardly surprise us. Simply one more performance of the
painted elephant.
During the purge years of the thirties and forties, parents
prepared their children for life by teaching them not to ask too many
questions. The parents repeated the litanies of survival until they
themselves began to believe. "My children love Lenin most of all and
me only second." "In his whole life, Stalin has never been wrong
