In 1965, Mandelstam’s widow wrote to Shalamov that she thought his prose, with its ‘inner music’, the best in Russian for many, many years; she thought it might be the finest prose of the twentieth century. Shalamov, who revered Mandelstam’s Acmeism (to him it was not just another poetic movement, it was a lifetime’s pledge, the heart of all courage, a means of existence), thanked Nadezhda Mandelstam for the compliment, saying that for him she was the ‘supreme court’.
In May of the same year, Shalamov attended an ‘evening of memory’ for Mandelstam in Moscow. For the first time, the poet’s name could be mentioned in public. When it was Shalamov’s turn to speak, he looked pale, with burning eyes (like the seventeenth-century heretic priest Avvakum). His hand movements were clumsy and unco-ordinated, but he spoke beautifully. He said he would read the story ‘Cherry Brandy’ which he had written twelve years earlier in Kolyma, in a desperate hurry to record the life of Mandelstam. It was only when he returned to Moscow that he realised that Mandelstam had not been forgotten; he had never died. Shalamov began to read his story. ‘The poet was dying. His hands, large, swollen from hunger with their white bloodless fingers and filthy overgrown nails, lay on his chest …’ Soon a note was passed to him by the organiser of the event, asking him to stop, but Shalamov put it in his pocket and carried on to the end: ‘The poet understood. He opened his eyes wide, not allowing the bloodstained bread to slip from his dirty, blue fingers …’
In Vologda, I heard again a glossolalia of facts about hunger.
It was Molotov who put men like Shalamov and Mandelstam on trains bound for hell. Molotov, who considered ‘all talk of morality and humanism false through and through’, and was always fastidious about not being ‘bourgeois’ or ‘philistine’, was asked by Felix Chuev at the end of his life what he thought about the fact that no one could find meat for sale anywhere in the USSR. ‘To hell with the meat!’ he replied. ‘Just let imperialism drop dead!’
‘In my youth, whenever I experienced failure I used to repeat the phrase, “Well, at least I won’t die from hunger,”’ Shalamov wrote in his story ‘Dry Ration’. ‘It never crossed my mind to doubt the truth of this sentence. At the age of thirty I found myself in a very real sense dying from hunger and literally fighting for a piece of bread.’ Shalamov’s Gulag stories, which are full of his hunger for the streets of Moscow and for the feel of books in his hands, give an account, rare in literature, of real hunger. He records how the human mind melts with the flesh, how when starvation is sucking the body dry, all human emotions disappear – ‘love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, the longing for fame, honesty’ – how ‘camp hunger’ makes people dream identical dreams – ‘rye loaves flying past like meteors or angels’ – how it can bring people to a level of indifference to the world that is as close to transcendence as it is horrifying, and drive them to mutilate their own dying bodies.
We had tea in a riverside cafe with walls lined in shiny red vinyl. A large group of middle-aged men and women at a table laid with many bottles of vodka was drunkenly singing in loud exultant chest voices the Young Pioneer songs of their youth. We walked back in the direction of the station under a milky sky. The streets in Vologda are so wide that the pretty wooden houses seem to be sliding away from each other into empty space. Many are silver-grey with age; their origin as trees more striking after so many years in the sunlight and the snow. They seem gradually to be returning to their element; cracks and peelings run along their lines of growth, ferrous blackness seeped into the grain of the wood, as their fittings rust and are not replaced.
We stopped in on the memorial museum of Lenin’s sister, the revolutionary Maria Ulyanova, to discover that its name had changed to the Samarin Museum of Daily Life. (Molotov had lodged with Ulyanova in Moscow when he moved his revolutionary activities from Petrograd in 1915.) I asked a white-haired attendant about Ulyanova, of whom there is now no trace in the museum. With a look of regret in her proud blue eyes at my asking about the revolutionary, she told me that Ulyanova had only rented a room in the house, and had nothing to do with its owners or its true history. The museum was now dedicated to displaying the innocent decencies of bourgeois life in pre-revolutionary Vologda: a family dining table with fine china soup tureens and a shiny samovar, icons and prayer books, white muslin dresses, sepia photographs of dacha parties and rows of schoolchildren in pinafores and ribbons.
The Museum of the Diplomatic Corps on Herzen Street, which I had particularly wanted to visit, was similarly disposed to rearrange the facts of the past according to a new set of political and cultural values. Its two rooms were on the ground floor of a large house that the US Embassy occupied for five months after moving out of its train carriage on platform five. The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, who believed the Allied Intervention of 1918 to have been a mistake, painted an idyllic picture of life in the quiet northern town. In the evenings, diplomats of several anti-Bolshevik nations gathered around a crackling fire in the large brick stove, telling jokes and playing cards, with the ringing of church bells and the creak of sled runners coming through the calm air outside.
By the summer, the Bolshevik government in Moscow had decided to drive the foreign missions out of Vologda, and Karl Radek (who worked then in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs) ordered that guards be stationed around all buildings occupied by diplomats of the Entente nations, and cut off their means of communication. In late July, the ambassadors withdrew to Archangel. Left in charge in Vologda was the English ‘mission secretary’, a mysterious figure named John Gillespie, a fluent Russian speaker, who assisted the local anti-Bolshevik underground in an uprising that quickly failed. The Cheka was, it seems, convinced that Gillespie was just another alias of Sidney Reilly.
‘In this town of uprisings, why was there no uprising against the new power?’ Shalamov wondered in The Fourth Vologda. The single reason that he can find is the will of one hard man, the commissar and Chekist Mikhail Kedrov, who came to Vologda in 1918 to break up the local authorities, declare martial law and ration bread. Night and day the arrests went on, Shalamov remembers; it was under Kedrov’s terror that his family lost all its possessions. Kedrov was ‘bone of the bone, and blood of the blood of the Moscow intelligentsia’, Shalamov says, a lawyer and a fine pianist, who impressed Lenin with a performance of the Bolshevik leader’s favourite piece, Beethoven’s Appassionata.
‘What tense do you want to live in?’ Mandelstam asks in Journey to Armenia. ‘I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle – in the “what ought to be”.’ It takes a certain disposition, however, to have iron certainty, throughout a lifetime of blood and loss, of what ought to be. ‘If there is no primary objective, then what is there to struggle for?’ Molotov said at the end of his life. ‘If there are no goals, what are we struggling for? Where are we going?’
The wheezing eccentric who showed us round the Museum of the Diplomatic Corps lived in a more complicated tense: the ‘what ought to have been’. As we soon discovered, the strange museum, with its small display of photocopied documents and photographs, was his creation, the fragmentary realisation of a lifelong historical fantasy. Followed by two slender young women (his graduate students, he told us), the heavy red-faced man explained in intricate detail, with the aid of many flourishing rhetorical questions, the diplomatic delicacies of 1918, and the spy intrigues and international love affairs – Reilly, Lockhart, Savinkov, the international femme fatale Moura Budberg – that may or may not have played a role in the destiny of the Revolution. He had written a doctoral dissertation on the story of the Vologda missions, and tried, without success, to travel to London to follow up the story in the declassified British state archives. Living in Vologda in the Soviet years when Russia was closed to the outside world, he had found a hidden burrow in history, tuning his ear to its facts, putative facts, lost possibilities. After the end of communism, he had spent years petitioning the local authorities (whom he despised as old Communists) for the use of the building. They all wanted to forget that the Allies had ever been here, he said. Now his museum memorialises a moment when Vologda was the stage for what he believed ought to have happened; if the people had risen up against the Bolsheviks with the aid of the Allied armies that landed in Archangel, if those armies had been stronger and had pressed down to Moscow, if the Tsar had not been murdered, if the ‘conspiracy apartment’ in No. 3 ‘Cheremeteff’ had not been raided, if Lenin and Trotsky had been paraded through the streets in their shirt-tails in the summer of 1918.