Vassily Aksyonov
STORM OVER A SWIMMING POOL
Recently a friend asked me if I follow the Soviet press at–
tentively. I had to confess that I didn't, not out of ill will, of course;
it's just that the non-Soviet press is too accessible. But for that matter
(here comes another confession) I don't follow the non-Soviet press
too closely either-writing takes up time, and then there are always
the classics staring at me reproachfully from the bookshelf, there's
jazz blaring next door, there's basketball. . . .
"Shame on you," my friend said with a Leninesque intonation,
"At times you can find some arch-interesting pieces in it. I'm going
to send you a xerox of this article from
Komsomolka
and you'll see
what kinds of passions and fashions sizzle now among the Bolshe–
viks."
So I received a copy of an article by the journalist E. Losoto
that was printed in
Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The article is titled "Out of
Mind" and bears a subtitle in the best style of the Party press:
"Where the Leaders of the Pamyat Club Lead." It would seem the
article is aimed at the currently awakening reactionary-nationalists
in the Soviet Union, as if they were a non-Marxist force. A lavish
display of quotations from the leaders is given so that you can even
form an opinion of the ideological direction of this movement. Once
you've formed your opinion, you can more or less side with one of
the parties to the conflict, or at least have some feeling for where your
sympathies or antipathies lie; it's always the case that once you've
found something good you can conceive of something better and vice
versa, even something a bit nasty and totally aversive.
Reading this article, I tried to detect the slightest movement of
the scales, but I got flustered and couldn't sort out my feelings until
finally I realized both sides reeked equally.
Members of the Pamyat Club (we'll call them "pamyatniks" for
short) are self-proclaimed "patriots." Thus we have the architect–
patriot, the doctor-patriot, the engineer-patriot. Clearly "patriot" in
these instances serves as a far-reaching euphemism for non-Jewish,
or Russian through and through .
The author of the
Komsomolka
article begins with a discourse on
the nature of patriotism and immediately refers to the major fount of
worldly wisdom: "Lenin defined the new Soviet patriotism thusly :
