I knew what kept me in his power. Having made the dramatic move of leaving school to become a farmhand, I couldn't return at least until fall. Why I went on these escapades in the first place was harder to fathom. My mother and father constantly fought, but whose parents didn't? As long as I can remember, they both worked—and I felt so alone that I concocted quixotries like returning to Mother Earth. To escape solitude, I fled to that geezer's forsaken farm where—this was the laugh—my loneliness was unbearable.
I crept out of the attic in the dead of a September night, walking to Malone without hitching in case a neighbor reported me to Blackcock. When the stores opened, I spent my last five dollars on a pair of white sneakers for Jim. . . .
I slump in my seat, remembering my pastoral summer with tender relief. When things are punk, it's a comfort to relive something much worse. Having pulled through the genuine misery of Blackcock, I'm not going to surrender to today's petty panic.
What's the great death blow if I drop my dissertation, don't get my Ph.D., never become a professor? That's no cause for these waves of self-contempt. The irony is that I never really wanted the academic life—until this year, when I realized I'll never get in. Being a professor was my last substitute after the fiasco of doing something "basic" through farming. And now I've convinced myself, for some self-destructive reason, that I'm too old and have come too far in graduate schools to switch to anything else: if teaching's out, there's no other way to earn and justify my existence. How typical of me, this whining self-pity! I can do something free from intellectual pressure—drive a taxi, for example—and be happier for it. The way to see my inability to work here is release from something wrong for me, not to whine about "another day's defeat."
The Lenin Library "^ 95
My big mistake was not buckling down to my research immediately, in September. No, it was choosing the wrong subject. I'm trying to work on municipal government: the daily functions of city Soviets. But I'm not permitted to observe their sessions, see their agendas, lay eyes on archives about meetings ten—or fifty—years ago. I've begged to attend five minutes of a single conference—a discussion, say, about revising a bus schedule—in order to sample Soviet democracy in action. I'm answered that this is unnecessary and even foolish. Soviet self-government, the freest and most open in the world, has been exhaustively described by Soviet professors. Why attend meetings, my academic overseers reply, when the material for my dissertation has already been painstakingly prepared? Unfamiliar procedures may mislead a foreigner at any given session, whereas skilled Soviet scholars provide a complete picture of the whole. For analysis of municipal institutions in action, they say, go to the books—the most reliable sources. And read Lenin. Study and restudy Vladimir Ilich—"this is the duty of a scholar examining a Leninist society."
But the books are impossible. Like wartime save-paper editions, these tomes from the State Publishing Houses of Juridical and Political Literature have warping covers and marginless pages, and chapter after chapter of text so dense that the pages make me seasick. And all of them, all the millions of words I'm supposed to be digesting, are arid elaborations of a defunct illusion:
In our country, an all-peoples' state has come into existence —a crucial landmark on the road to Communist self-government. In Communist self-government, into which socialist statehood is growing, the Soviets, trade unions, cooperatives and other mass organizations will merge into a single, unified structure. . . .
As well as in the policy and practices of all state organs and officials, the strict safeguarding of citizens' rights is organically inherent in the Soviet state. V. I. Lenin devoted enormous attention to socialist legality. V. I. Lenin summoned the toilers to unflinchingly observe all laws and regulations of Soviet rule, and to keep vigilant watch so that everyone observes them. . . .
96^MOSCOW FAREWELL
The Soviets' strength lies in their indissoluble ties to the masses, to the people. V. I. Lenin called the toilers' enlistment into the administration of the state a "marvellous means" capable of "immediately, at a single stroke, multiplying our state apparatus ten-fold. . . ."
Socialism and Communism, Marxist-Leninist theory teaches, are products of the creative work of a people who are organized, tightly united and striving toward a single goal. Therefore, the further growth of workers' mass organizations and of the masses' unification constitutes an objective, inevitable development of the Soviet state and Soviet society. . . .
Enhancing the role of local Soviets is one of the natural, inevitable phenomena of the Soviet state's development at the present stage of the full-scale building of Communist society. Basing himself on Leninist propositions, L.L Brezhnev pointed out that "the genuine character of Soviet democracy is also evidenced by this fact: that in our country an ever-greater role in the State's administration and direction is being assumed by local governmental organs and communal organizations. . . ."
The Communist Party teaches that an essential condition for the Soviets' successful accomplishment of its tasks is the further deepening of socialist democracy in all their activities. In carrying out their mass-organizational work, the local Soviets participate more and more actively in attaining the course plotted by the Communist Party toward gradually transferring the functions now fulfilled by paid state officials to mass organizations of workers.
For whom is this gibberish written? Only a handful of foreigners—saddled graduate students, like me—ever see it, while the dimmest Russian student isn't taken in. He may be a vigorous patriot, may even feel personally committed to socialism; but the ritual constructions about socialist legality, Soviet democracy and workers' participation have long ceased to mean a thing. Yet new editions pour forth in hundreds of thousands of copies every year, with the key Lenin quotations rearranged in keeping with the latest nuances of the line: pamphlets, brochures, booklets, fat volumes ... an ocean of pulp flooding a country where—despite immeasurable timber resources—paper is rationed for most useful applications.
The Lenin Library "^ 97
Every book in the standard typeface; each a plodding repetition of the same mumbo-jumbo fraud. There can't be another mass of literature so monumentally tedious in the world.
The humiliating thing is that other exchange students working on even stodgier, less relevant subjects keep to their duty, cramming five-by-eight cards with notes. But my paralysis grows; I can't read another page. I've never daydreamed so much before, sunk to such purposeless wandering. And although I can |j
hardly believe I've washed out, the failure also confirms what I've always known about myself
When I was in the third grade, I felt I'd never possibly reach |
the wise and giant kingdom of the eighth. In the eighth, I couldn't picture myself in high school; in high school, college seemed far beyond my abilities and reach. The difference between me and others who surely entertained these commonplace thoughts was that I made too much of them because of a notion that something was wrong with me, which would reveal itself before I fully grew up. And to verify the infantile dread, this block materializes in ye olde Lenin Library, on the last step from student to grown man, bringing greater shame than a thousand abandoned dissertations could otherwise provoke.
What an idiot I am! My presumed brain finds it interesting to feature me in plotless, reasonless melodrama. Unemployable at my age, supposedly because nothing's good enough: /'m not good enough.
With a swallow, I clear my ears of the jeers of the rabble and return to reality. The thing is to take some kind of action —get up to peruse the morning's newspapers, for a start. A stack of the nationals lies on a table near the door, supplied daily, as in every public room: whatever else doesn't work, the Soviet people must "sharpen its political consciousness" by reading the Soviet press. For this hall's sophisticated public, Communist papers from abroad are also available, although rHumanite and 77?^ Morning Star are missing when the issues contain a disapproved photograph or opinion.