Living abroad in general, and in Russia in particular, raises the question: who is one to trust? The problem is no longer, as it used to be, one of knowing who is lying and who is not. Russians are no longer directed by their government to lie to foreigners. The problem now is a more complex one: whose interpretation of reality can I rely upon, who is to be my touchstone for distinguishing true from false, real from illusory?
After leaving university, I decided to live for six months in Moscow. During that stay I was torn between two mutually contradictory versions of reality, and I am still unable to say which one was closer to the truth. My home was a room in a once grand pre-revolutionary flat in central Moscow. But in this flat a spirit of decay had taken residence. Everything was collapsing slowly into itself. Dust piled up on the parquet floor; paint peeled off the panels on the wall; the corners were filled with old toys, broken clocks and other junk which had sat there for so long that no one noticed its existence any more. My hosts, a couple of ageing geologists called Irene and Volodya, occasionally did battle with the spirit of decay. The television aerial, a fantastic construction of wires and tubes, required constant care, as did the telephones. But struggle was useless, since my hosts themselves were inhabited by the same corrosive spirit. Continually tired and sick and short of money, they reconciled themselves to its inevitable victory. The agent of reconciliation was vodka. After four glasses our conversation would soar high above the dilapidation of our visible environment, and dwell on art, history and philosophy. Volodya and Irene would become young and animated again. "To drink or not to drink: that is the question," Volodya would say. In Russian, "to drink," peet, rhymes with "to be," beet. For Volodya this was more than a mere play on words; it was a metaphysical truth. To drink is to be alive. Thus he and Irene outwitted the spirit of decay.
But in the morning, recovering from my hangover, I would go to work and encounter a different reality. I was employed by something called the Moscow School of Political Studies, a western-funded group, set up to provide young Russian politicians with a schooling in democracy. To this end we would organise large conferences in Moscow and in the provinces. "Distinguished foreign experts" would be flown in to deliver papers on Nato or the Russian fiscal crisis; the young politicians would listen respectfully, conscious of the school's high mission, and of their privilege in being part of it. The driving spirit of the school was Lena Nemirovskaya, an intelligent, imperious and generous woman. Coming from the intelligentsia, she had overcome that class's traditional aversion to political activity, its moral fastidiousness, its cynicism. The tone of the school was one of high idealism, earnest and didactic. The school's "great work," its "historic mission"-these were phrases continually on our lips and word processors.
Volodya, my host, and Lena, my boss, never met, but from the beginning they disliked and mistrusted each other. Listening to my accounts of drunken evenings, Lena identified Volodya and Irene as belonging to the hopeless old Soviet intelligentsia, the class against which she had rebelled. "I am finding you a decent family to live with!" she cried, her voice rising in a crescendo to silence dissent. Volodya's aversion to Lena was harder to explain. "You hated communism," I said to him. "How can you object to the attempt to expunge its legacy?" His replies were na?ve and confused: Lena was an idle word-spinner, a communist agent, a western agent, a member of the international Jewish conspiracy. The truth is he did not know who Lena was or what she represented, and that was why she frightened him. She had no place in his mental universe. That universe was divided into two parts, the light and the dark. In the light was his family, his old and close friends, his favourite books, his bottle of vodka. In the dark was "them," the regime, people with power and connections. As one of his toasts went, "Here's to us and the devil take them." But where to put Lena? Was she an agent of light or of darkness? Maybe she is a kind of Faust, I suggested, but he was not impressed. To him she was more disturbing than the communists; at least he knew where he was with them.
As I got to know Irene and Volodya better, I came to realise that although they had both detested the Soviet regime, their entire mental economy had been adapted to survival under it. And not only had they survived; they had, in a warped way, flourished. When drunk, they had a carelessness, a freedom of spirit, that in England you find only among adolescents or undergraduates. And that was because their position under the old regime was precisely that of adolescents. Like truant schoolchildren, their conception of freedom was essentially one of escape -through geological field trips to far away parts of the Soviet Union, through literature, through drunkenness.
It was with great relief that I arrived back in England, to read in the papers of the latest revelations about gay vicars and Labour's contortions over tax. Here there is only one reality-simple, undivided, and banal.
