The anteroom to the museum was a shop selling all kinds of bric-a-brac, icons and cheaply produced polemical pamphlets, several written by the curator himself. One, by the dissident priest Gleb Yakunin, denounced the Orthodox Church for its close dealings with Lenin, Stalin and the secret police. Its cover showed a blotchy photograph of Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias Aleksii II (also known as Drozdov, KGB General) at a lectern beneath a statue of Lenin. The curator offered to sell us a lovely icon of three northern saints; when we explained that we would not be allowed to take it out of the country, he sighed: ‘It is only Russia that still does not understand that the world is round.’ The building was dilapidated; he needed money for repairs. Communists, he huffed, they let everything fall to ruin except their own palaces. It was as though this affable man’s lifetime of obstinate dislike for the ruling power had intensified the pressure of his blood, making his body push angrily at the seams of his clothes. In the great Vologda tradition of patriotic opposition that Shalamov describes, his mind was turned towards the World and the West (with a capital letter).
I told the curator we had come from Moscow on our way to Archangel. He warned us about the harsh wind that blows off the White Sea. Then he laughed. ‘Moscow, eh?’ (He made it seem so far away.) ‘Another of them died down there yesterday. Now he’s lying in the great cathedral … just another Communist!’ It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about Boris Yeltsin.
ELEVEN
Archangel
‘For a person who has had the experience of living in Russia, who has experienced the metaphysical Russian roller coaster, any landscape, including an other-worldly one, seems ordinary.’
JOSEPH BRODSKY, ‘Footnote to a Poem’, Less than One
Down on the waterfront, where we wandered late, the floating nightclub USSR was straining to create its own aura of night. Even this early in the northern spring, there was little way of telling the time from the light in the sky, which changed according to signals more mysterious than the hour of the clock. From his pedestal, Otto Shmidt, the ‘ice commissar’, should have been looking out from the prow of the city towards the throat of the White Sea, across the scatter of islands that flood and change shape in the violence of the snow-melt. Instead his granite gaze fell on a stack of stereo speakers leaning against a rusted iron door at the back of the club. The red-and-blue wooden structure throbbed so frantically in its solitary rave that it seemed ready to shake off its moorings, to be caught up in the pull of the ice floes that rushed past the curve of Archangel towards Molotovsk at the river mouth, turning and disintegrating in the seaward flow of the Dvina.
Monuments are so vulnerable. History drifts off and leaves them stranded. The statue of Peter the Great on the embankment was unveiled in the patriotic year 1914. When the Bolsheviks finally broke the White hold on Archangel, the Tsar was pulled down and left lying face first on the steps of his own house. In his place, the Party erected a monument to the victims of the Allied Intervention of 1918 (whose ‘greatest inspirer’, as Molotov underlined in one of his history books, was Churchill). Whenever centralised state power and national borders are at stake, the image of Peter I comes out, as it did in 1941, in a book in Molotov’s library by Academician M. M. Bogoslovsky called Peter I: Materials for a Biography. After the ‘Great Patriotic War’, at the height of Stalin’s own reign as ‘tsar’, Peter, the personification of Russian maritime power who dreamed at the end of his life of an Arctic sea route from Archangel to the east, was restored to a new position on the waterfront.
For decades, all across the Soviet empire, in the bleakness of town squares cleared to make space for them, giant statues of Marx and Lenin declared in stone that they had determined the course of history and pointed the way. The Lenin in Archangel’s main square was the last to be erected in the USSR, in place of a fountain that the local Party boss had tired of seeing from his office window. Its sculptor, Lev Kerbel, a Politburo favourite, said his conception was an ‘Ilyich’ that local people would want to approach for solitary contemplation, perhaps to ask advice. The bust of Shmidt – hero of Stalin’s ‘age of discovery’ – was chiselled in the same genre. He was the Soviet state’s ‘honorary walrus’ (as Valery Mezhlauk had caricatured him in one of the weird drawings in the Party archives). On the dirty grass by the Maritime Museum – long closed for remont, with cobwebs furring its windows – the adamant jut of his beard looked peevish, thwarted.
In my first sighting of him, in the diary of the Soviet playwright Alexander Afinogenov, Shmidt had been similarly diminished by the realities of daily life crowding in on him. Afinogenov visited him at his Moscow home in No. 3 in 1937, the year in which Shmidt would plant a flag bearing a portrait of the Great Leader on the North Pole and declare it Soviet territory. ‘Two other families live in his apartment,’ Afinogenov recorded, noting the large sad eyes of Shmidt’s wife Vera and her aura of sickness. ‘He has three rooms, the stuffy front hall smells of dinner from the kitchen, the study is tightly packed with furniture and books.’ ‘Why do we live here?’ Vera said. ‘Otto is used to it. It’s close to the food store and the hospital, close to the Kremlin and work.’
Afinogenov rejected the title ‘Drifting People’ for the essay he was writing about Shmidt’s polar research station: the word had too much shadow in it. Shmidt told him that he had fallen into the Arctic by chance, through mathematics, philosophy and history, and his fascination with the physics of the sea and the ‘white spots’ on the map. Now Shmidt was ‘master of the Arctic’ in the same way that a writer should be master of his craft. Shmidt embodied the Soviet virtues that Afinogenov was struggling to cultivate in his writing: self-criticism, fellowship, dedication to the collective, energy, happiness.
He watched Shmidt’s flight for Archangel take off from a Moscow airstrip, his heart pounding when the motors of the heavy aircraft faltered. Shmidt’s feats brought Stalinist tears to Afinogenov’s eyes, giving him the sense that the full flowering of happiness on earth was just around the corner. It had something particular to do with the conquest of the Arctic and the miracle of radio contact across the expanding reach of Soviet space, which made the Pole seem as close as the writers’ colony at Peredelkino just outside Moscow. ‘When communism has triumphed all over the world … our planet will turn into a flowering paradise,’ Shmidt orated from the Pole, ‘rivers will flow in the direction in which men point them, oceans will give up the strength of their waves to the service of humanity.’ Afinogenov imagined Soviet flags being planted on the Pole every year, and the sea ice, always on the move, carrying them off around the globe on floating mounds of ice, meeting ocean liners with their show of communist power. He had been reading The Brothers Karamazov all summer, ‘living’ in the novel. Yet Shmidt’s feats made his soul light. His inner life conformed. He turned away from Dostoevsky’s anti-utopian vision of sickness, doubt and shadow, rejoicing in the bright autumn of 1937, the great twentieth year of the Revolution, when it was good to be alive, and the streets of Moscow were hung with banners, full of smiling faces and young love.