Viktor has enough money to breakfast in the cafeteria, for he's rich by Soviet student standards. But he's also relentlessly frugaclass="underline" reads other people's newspapers to save the daily two kopeks; presses the pants himself of his single, funereal suit (it has never been to the cleaner's); dices a hundred grams of the cheapest grade of garlic sausage into the potatoes for his supper. He always goes to the movies (twenty kopeks, in one of the ground-floor auditoriums) alone, lest in a group he find himself nearest the cashier and be expected to pay for everyone, according to the loose Russian custom. He's saving money now to invest in the family plot, that precious half-acre allocated for dachas and gardens. But he would save mightily even without a specific goal; the compulsion is in his bones.
When prompted with trigger questions, he can dredge up quotations from his three decades of intensive socialist upbring-
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ing and training, reciting cram-course extrapolations from Engels on private property's psychological, sociological and familial evils. But never for an instant has he related his unfaltering ideological commitment to himself or his own treasure, the marshy little plot. Just as political evils are over there in the bourgeois West, his political enlightenment stops at the border—the Soviet border, on the Elbe—and in a schooldesk compartment of his brain. His real attitudes, the working ones, came with his mother's milk—in her photographs, mother is only slightly too squat and stern-looking to be the picture of the Russian peasant—and he loves what is his as powerfully as any Breton shopkeeper.
Viktor is a pudgy, Mongolian-looking man with an overdeveloped torso (he stores his weight-lifting equipment under his bed) and a mole shaped like Corsica on one starchy cheek. His smile is his most endearing feature, a sheepish, friendly grin that seems to say all this is too much for him. Being at this top University is too much; the thought of becoming a People's Judge—which he'll be "elected" soon after graduation—is too much; above all, rooming with a foreigner—an American —is more than he ever bargained for. Born in a village, he expected a peaceful life. The opportunities and adventures that have befallen him entirely by chance disturb more than stimulate him. Who could have guessed that his very ordinariness would reward him with such advancement? But he, the unimaginative plodder, is precisely whom the cadres-bosses recruit for the country's "leading ranks."
He is the only Communist—meaning member of the Party— in our wing of this floor of the dormitory. Other students will join in time, a handful out of conviction, most as a prerequisite for privileges or promotions; but they are still too young. Viktor is thirty-one; he was a tractor driver, a collective-farm assistant brigade leader, then an infantryman before becoming a student. (Party membership, a solid record as a soldier and a worker, and a sterling peasant-proletarian background squeezed him into the University despite his entrance exam scores.) It was in the Army that the unquestioning Young Communist of twenty-seven joined the Party itself. The regimental political officers tapped him for his "positive" attitude, stolid loyalty and, again, the desirable social origin.
e^MOSCOW FAREWELL
During his first eight months in uniform, he did not have a single overnight pass; not expecting one, he wasn't surprised. After basic training, he was stationed for nearly three years with a border garrison some sixty miles northwest of Vladivostock and did not manage so much as a day trip to the city, much less a week of home leave. The sum of his Army wages for three years was one hundred and thirty-five rubles, the price of his black serge suit. But he's proud of the hardships of national service. "Our Army is tough," he explains gravely. "We don't pamper the men; that's why we win." Moreover, he expects the opponents to live up to their reputations. Raised on comic-book-level spy stories and indescribable television potboilers featuring the intrepid secret police, he wants the evil, tricky imperialist agents to put up a proper fight before surrendering. His greatest disappointment in the American warmongers was the cowardice of Gary Powers, who so abjectly confessed. He offered me condolences for the ten-year-old humiliation, just as he dutifully congratulates me when an American team defeats a Soviet one in some track meet.
I have had fierce, friendly, meaningless and painfully enlightening political arguments with many other Russian students in the dormitory; often they start at supper and continue into the night. But Viktor and I never talk about anything political. His thoughts about the nature of man and society are limited to the opening paragraphs of the morning's Pravda editorial.
Having scanned today's issue—saving his two kopeks—he's returned it to my table. "The struggle between the two conflicting ideologies—socialist and bourgeois—represents the greatest battle of ideas in all history. It has acquired a genuinely all-pervading nature, and this is the principal characteristic of the contemporary stage of the ideological struggle."" This is the kind of statement he used to repeat, indeed to read doggedly to me, during our first trying weeks, before we'd worked out the terms of our coexistence: political truce based on political silence. His assertions of fact during the initial jousting were on the same leveclass="underline" Finland attacked Russia in 1939 and (since Soviet Russia has never struck a first blow) Japan also invaded in 1945. Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. (Viktor's clinching proof was Roosevelt's aid to fellow-Jew Trotsky in pursuing anti-Soviet
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subversion from Mexico.) The Communist parties of Britain and the United States are, ahhough illegal and repressed, the people's genuine voice—because all Communist parties are by definition repositories of truth and virtue, and everyone who, like himself, knows the way the world really works is automatically a Communist. In short, his "brass tacks" arranged themselves around a powerful magnetic field. Mother Russia is right, her opponents wrong.
Despairing over the usual dead end of our debate, I asked him one day whether the Soviet government had ever committed an injustice in its foreign policy. He gave some genuine thought to this unexpected question and answered with shining eyes and quivering sincerity.
"There were a few before the Revolution."
Yet although the living embodiment of Emerson's "We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples," Viktor knows less about Marxism or Leninism, not to speak of any other social idea, than some Greenwich Village barbers. He's never read Marx, only the primers for schools and the Army. There's no kinder way to say it: my roommate belongs to the camp of the Communist Party whose chief characteristic is not cruelty, drive for power or even ideological rigidity, but straightforward thickwittedness, stiffened by plebeian envy of his betters. "Not all the dullest and dumbest are in the ranks," said a wit across the corridor. "But the less you know the better. Ol' Vik's mental equipment makes him a natural."
But this is irrelevant in a sense, since Viktor is not really interested in Marx. Nor, in fact, in anything even faintly political; and unless provoked by me, the incarnation of the ideological enemy, he'd rather not pretend. He does care about three things: the fortunes of Moscow Dynamo, his favorite soccer team, the fishing conditions compared to this time last year and, again, the family half-acre. The plot is located in a little village of unpainted, ramshackle peasant cottages about forty miles east of Moscow. Directly after his last Saturday morning class, Viktor wraps his overalls in newspaper—the ones he favors in the room to save wear on his "lectures-only" trousers—and hurries to the station. A suburban electrichka and a brisk walk on eroded lanes delivers him home in two hours for a weekend of family council