A Million and One Nights in Soviet Russia

It wasn't so long ago (children) that one simply didn't travel to Russia as a routine thing. Years and years ago distance was the thing--it is 1500 miles from Paris to Moscow, and historical accounts of the distance leave permanently in mind how long it took, how hard it was, and how unprofitable the journey for the most publicized 19th Century traveler from Paris to Moscow, who barely made it back, leaving most of his army behind. More recently, the casual traveler was simply not permitted to go to Russia: Tourism was one of those few, blessed subjects upon which V.I. Lenin did not pronounce, and therefore the presumption--during the Twenties and Thirties--was: No. To enter Stalin's Russia, you had to be a journalist, preferably friendly; or a scientist who knew the multiplication tables better than whatever Soviet scientist pleaded for permission to get you in; or Paul Robeson. After the War, it was much the same until after Stalin died; and then, little by little, the curtain was shiftily parted, and a trickle of disinterested Americans came in. By disinterested, I mean Americans who went there other than to make cold war--for instance, the gang of performers who went there to do Porgy and Bess, accompanied by Truman Capote, who wrote memorably about that trip for The New Yorker. I wish I had been there when the articles, translated, were put before the relevant commissars. It must have astonished, and maybe dismayed them, that Capote had such a very good time--verrry suspicious. Visitors to the (continued on page 314) Soviet Russia (continued from page 236) Soviet Union are unpredictable, the Russians have every reason to believe. During the last days of the War, Henry Wallace, only a month or so before F.D.R. replaced him as Vice-President, had traveled to Siberia with Owen Lattimore at his side, to report that he had not seen any of the fabled, and therefore presumably fictitious, concentration camps. A prominent American industrialist had been over there and reported exuberantly that, you had to hand it to Russia, there were absolutely no labor-union problems over there.

Anyway, on into the Fifties, the Soviet Union decided to encourage tourism, and the program for tourists was laid out, as diligently as a Five-Year Plan, and as dreamily. Insofar as the idea was to lay claim to an appropriate share of the tourist dollar, the program--like the Five-Year Plans--failed. There are many reasons for that beyond the obvious ones, beyond distance, beyond ideology. I had read about what it was to travel in Russia, felt I knew something about it when Frank Shakespeare called and asked if I would travel to Novosibirsk as a member of the United States Information Agency's delegation to inspect the opening of our exhibit there, on May 12. Frank Shakespeare is an old friend of mine. He is the head of U.S.I.A. and known in chic circles primarily as the Bad Man in Joe McGinniss's book The Selling of the President. The thesis of that book is that Frank Shakespeare, formerly of CBS, conspired with one or two other expert television cosmeticians to sell Richard Nixon to the American people. The book is a glorious performance, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world; indeed, would as gladly have read it if it had been written about Hubert Humphrey, whom the ingenuous author ingenuously conceded it might just as well have been written about. Anyway, we are to be very suspicious about Frank Shakespeare, McGinniss suggests, because during the Presidential campaign--just imagine!--Shakespeare exclaimed to another Nixon aide when the news of Russia's armed invasion of Czechoslovakia came in over the wires, that no one had the right to be surprised, that being the kind of thing Russia tends to do, when in doubt. It is utterly consistent that such a Red-baiter should have suggested to Mr. Nixon that he appoint me to serve as a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information. I have to confess that, like the rest of the world, I was unaware of the existence of said commission on the evening when Mr. Shakespeare tendered me on the President's behalf an invitation to join it, subject--to be sure--to confirmation by the Senate. Duties? They are prescribed by law: The commission must report periodically to the Congress and to the President on the activities of the U.S.I.A. Salary? Zero. (That, you understand, is what makes it prestigious.) Perquisites? Novosibirsk, every now and then. And, of course, access to extremely interesting people. The five-member commission ("not more than three of whom shall be from any one political party..." wrote the wary Congress in 1948) meets once a month in Washington. We have dinner on Sunday night with whatever VIP from the State Department or wherever drew the shortest straw, then no-nonsense meetings beginning at nine A.M. Monday, and stretching through lunch (with another VIP), into the late afternoon. The chairman of the commission is Dr. Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, who is the most efficient and the most hospitable man in the entire world--it is he, I think, whom I would call if I were head of the Bureau of Standards, and I suspected that my normative yardstick had shrunk--or grown: He would know what to do about it, how to do it genially, and, if necessary, how to break the news to the scientific world. I visited with Dr. Stanton (he is a Ph.D. in psychology) before accepting the appointment, in order to raise a few questions, among them whether joining a Presidential commission mightn't mean a conflict of interest as a journalist. Nonsense, he said--after all, by statute at least two members are from a different political party from the President's, presumptively dedicated, therefore, to his political undoing.

So I accepted, was taken in to chat with President Nixon (his desk is very neat, as is his mind, have you noticed?). I enjoyed the visit, beginning with the cozy tour of the surrounding rooms, in which Shakespeare and I whiled away the few minutes it took the President to finish with the Queen, or whoever. The Cabinet Room is directly adjacent to the Oval Room, and I observed that just under the President's chair are three call buttons, after each one of which is written the name of one of Mr. Nixon's aides, should he need any one of them to come in quickly during a Cabinet meeting. Frank told me that the three buttons survived from the days of Lyndon Johnson, but that in those days they were marked, respectively, Pepsi-Cola, Dr Pepper and Sprite. President Johnson apparently did not conceive the necessity of needing mere mortals to nourish him. The President was very very cordial, and said one or two things which I would have been reluctant to disclose in any case, but which at this point I would disclose only on my deathbed, confident that no one would at that point very much care. Because, as they say, securitywise, you can call me Sealed-Lips Buckley, after what I went through. The President having appointed me, weeks and weeks went by, during which the Federal Bureau of Investigation went after me; during which I received telephone calls and letters from girls and boys I had not seen for years and decades, advising me that they had been visited by the FBI, who had asked whether I was a reliable citizen, and really and truly anti-Communist. I remember thinking, after one old friend who had served with me on the Yale Daily News 20 years ago called to tell me that his FBI inquirer had asked whether Mr. Buckley would be willing to sign a loyalty oath, that if the FBI declined to clear me, I would at least have consummated the greatest imposture of the generation. But, in due course, the FBI, William Fulbright, and the Senate of the United States having cleared me, my "commission" came in. I studied it carefully. It is an impressive scroll, standard for all Presidential appointments, high and low. There is the printed form, and four blanks, which permit a fine holographic rendition of (1) your name, (2) the office to which you have been appointed, (3) the duration of the appointment, and (4) the space that is introduced by the printed words, "in recognition of ..." after which, in my case, was written, "his integrity and ability." I found that altogether satisfying, quite content with the President's apparent knowledge of my integrity and ability.... But then I found my mind wandering. What was the inventory of honorifics from which these two qualities had been selected? Numero unius exclusio alterius, my mother used to say to me. If I was singled out for my integrity and my ability, what was I by inference not being singled out for! A few months later, I was in Saigon, listening to Ambassador Bunker, who was interrupted and called out of the room. My eyes strayed and I spotted, in the corner of his office, his commission. I rushed over and looked at the corresponding blank--and read, "in recognition of his integrity, ability, and prudence." The FBI had found me out.

• • •

Who else would go to Novosibirsk, and what was the purpose of the trip? I asked Frank Shakespeare. Frank Stanton, JacobBeam (the U.S. Ambassador to Russia), Kempton Jenkins (U.S.I.A. area director), Shakespeare, and I. The purpose: to inspect the exhibit at Novosibirsk and, in general, U.S. cultural and educational activities in the Soviet Union. Would it be a good opportunity to poke about a bit and learn something about the Soviet Union? Ideal, said Frank Shakespeare, among whose charms is his enthusiasm, which would ignite waterlogged wood. I signed on.

• • •

London. Urgent message to call Lou Olom, staff director of the Advisory Commission. I got through to him, a few hours before the flight to Paris where I was to convene with the Novosibirsk delegation, and go on to spend one night in Moscow, then on to Asia. The Novosibirsk opening is off, said Olom. The Russians, he explained, had informed the embassy that it would be "at least" a week before it could open, because of an unforeseen scarcity of electricity and sanitary facilities. The inference in Washington, he told me, was that the Soviet Union was looking for a way to react feelingly to a speech delivered a few days before by Premier Kosygin denouncing the United States' "invasion" of Cambodia. The Communists' scanning device having come about 360 degrees looking for a way to blip their displeasure, the handiest thing they could come up with, of a nonconvulsive nature, was our innocent little opening at Novosibirsk. But, true to their own fashion, the Soviet officials would not admit that they had staged an official act of petulance, whence the story about the shortage of electricity and sewage facilities.

It was marvelously handled, I was to learn a few days later in Moscow. Monday, May 11, is a holiday in the Soviet Union, celebrating Victory Day. At exactly five P.M. on the preceding Friday afternoon, a Soviet official from Novosibirsk, telephoning from the office there that handled (pursuant to the cultural exchange agreement) the Soviet end of the U.S. exhibit, left a message with the U.S. Embassy announcing the postponement. At this point the American dignitaries were homing in on Paris from various parts of the world, where they would assemble for the afternoon flight to Russia on Sunday. The embassy, trying to assimilate the meaning of the postponement, called back to ask for a fuller explanation. No answer. The ambassador then took over--Jacob Beam is a veteran, who may sound like Mr. Smith come to Washington, but who atthe cockpit of the Pentagon on X-Day would be indistinguishable from John Wayne--and he called the Foreign Office. No answer; same excuse--national holiday. Undeterred, he tracked down a responsible official at his home. Said Russian promised instantly to telephone to Novosibirsk, to find out what was going on, and to call back. He did so, to report--his voice heavy with surprise--that, in fact, there was a shortage of electricity in Novosibirsk.

Now that, friends, you will understand as a real diplomatic crisis. The Russian in Moscow reports to the American in Moscow that, incredible as it may seem, the Russian in Novosibirsk is telling the truth! Diplomacy has its limitations, and one cannot imagine Ambassador Beam, for all that he is a man of disarming candor, informing the Moscow Russian, huffily, that he does not believe a word of what the Novosibirsk Russian said, that what is more he, Beam, is from Missouri, which in any case he is not, having graduated from Princeton after a happy boyhood spent in Kent, Connecticut.

It transpired that the electricity required to service our little educational exhibit in Novosibirsk came to a daily total of 100 kilowatts. Novosibirsk is an industrial center of over a million people, so that the Russian cavil about the shortage of electricity is something like New York's Carnegie Hall canceling a scheduled concert pleading that it could not furnish the electricity necessary to illuminate the piano player. The shortage of sanitary facilities was even less convincing, inasmuch as no new facilities were in fact added during the week in which the exhibit was held in suspense, not to mention the unspoken Soviet assumption that no Soviet citizen worthy of his fatherland was likely to tarry at an imperialist exhibition long enough to run up against the necessities of nature.

• • •

Under the circumstances, the ceremonial opening was permanently canceled. One cannot deploy Shakespeare, Stanton, Beam, and Jenkins, like a mobile, by merely moving everything up a week. But Buckley had the week clear, and decided to proceed to Russia, and allocate the time that had been reserved for Novosibirsk to Moscow and to Leningrad. I proceeded, after consultation with Shakespeare in Paris, to Orly for the nonstop flight to Moscow, on a Japan Airlines flight that would, after dropping down at Moscow, proceed to Tokyo nonstop. I traveled with Larry DuBois, from Time magazine, who hadn't been to Russia either, and came along to see the action, if there was to be any. I had been briefed in Washington, and would be briefed again in Mascow, on how to keep out of trouble in Russia. No sex (the cameras are ubiquitous); no drunkenness(beware the mickey finn); no compassion for the stranger who approaches asking would you please mail this letter to her daughter when you reach New York (entrapment); no rubles bought in Paris (where you can get them at, approximately, seven for one versus the one-for-one official rate); no provocative ideological literature (even if it is for your own use)--a novel by Solzhenitsyn is not the ideal thing to carry in your briefcase, unlikely as it is that it will be confiscated on the spot (other things might ensue). I read, on the plane from Paris, Andrei Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?--and dutifully left it aboard the plane, even though I had not finished it. At just about that time, Amalrik was taken in by the KGB.

I should at this point admit that for years I have husbanded a little skepticism about the horror stories one hears of as routine in Russia. I know, I know, that the Soviet Union has done everything from exterminating millions of recalcitrant little farmers, to instructing Alger Hiss on just how to smear Whittaker Chambers. But people whose lives revolve around the civilized seasons find it hard to believe in the particulars of the institutionalized Orwellian state. There are all the familiar historical cases.... The gentleman is on his way to the Hotel Metropole, and an old man gives him a sheaf of papers--would he please read them when he gets a chance? He is just entering the lobby when he receives the packet, sohe nods--pleasantly (as who would not)--stuffs it into his pocket, and before even turning around, he is seized by the KGB and charged with espionage. The incident would have been as newsworthy, in Russia, as a prostitute's arrest for communicating venereal disease--except that the gentleman was Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale, the President of the United States was John Kennedy, the Premier of the Soviet Union was Khrushchev, the historical situation was halfway between Kennedy's high point of strength (October 1962) and Khrushchev's downfall (October 1964): And the United States chose to make an international issue out of the victimization of poor Mr. Barghoorn, who was presently released by the KGB. You can't win them all. But they win a lot of them. I was told about a recent case, an English M.P., a lovely fellow, brimming over with the milk of cultural exchange, who dutifully undertook at a ceremonial lunch to match his Soviet hosts drink for drink, toast for toast, beyond the point when, his vision having blurred a bit, he could notice that the Russians who were now raising their glasses of vodka were not in fact the same Russians who had excused themselves a few moments before to use the sanitary facilities. They were what we imperialists call Ringers, and they drank heartily, until the point of conviviality was reached beyond which our English friend could not express himself except by lurching forward to the only window in the little banquet hall, and there relieving himself of every good wish he had so ceremoniously ingested in honor of mother Russia and her contemporary leaders. By utter coincidence, exactly across the street, an amateur Russian photographer happened, together with telescopic lens, to focus on the guilty, sick Englishman, whose plight he instinctively recorded, which photograph, quite naturally, the Soviet press published widely, suggesting, ever so delicately, the incontinence of the typical English official visitor to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So you believe one particular story, because you believe the man who told it to you, because he is all professional and is not there to waste your time nor to titillate you; but, mentally, you reason that it must be yet another exception. You pick up a book, late in the evening of your third night in Moscow. It is called Message from Moscow and is signed, "An Observer." It is published in America by Alfred Knopf (hardly a Russian-baiting firm), and the author is a student who after three years of graduate work over there has taken careful stock of what it's like everywhere, all the time, in Russia. He doesn't reveal his own name, because he fears to implicate his friends. About himself he divulges only that he is a socialist (he might be British, or he might be American). On one point only is he absolutely impatient, and that is toward those who disbelieve the lengths to which the Russians routinely go to effect their repressions. You are never absolutely secure, he says; not in the classroom, not in the grocery store; not even in bed with your occasional distraction. That book, so very understanding--so very sympathetic--is the skeleton key to life in the Soviet Union these days. It is a book that cannot be disbelieved, and it taught me, as I went through its pages, how impossible it is for an American to compete with someone like the Observer who wrote this book, who stayed three years in Russia, speaking the language fluently, untouched by any initial ideological hostility. What a curious Western tradition it is, that we should all of us try to say better what we cannot by the nature of the case hope to say one half so well as that gentleman over there, who has written a book which nobody has read, to speak of.

Moscow. The airport (which, along with military installations, you are forbidden to photograph. Especially you must not photograph bridges. Never photograph a bridge. Don't even bring along with you a picture of your favorite bridge back home.) The terminal we landed at is strangely unmenacing in appearance, and would be thought inadequate as the municipal airport for, say, Bridgeport, Connecticut. There is Muzak (or radio. I don't know) and I hear Home on the Range. The American brass are there, and they slither me through. I had completed the Customs Declaration Form, answering No to the question, Did I have with me "gold, silver, platinum, metals of the platinum group, coins, bars, unwanted scrap, precious stones, pearls, and articles thereof." The drive into Moscow. It is Sunday, late afternoon, during the equivalent of the Western weekend rush hour. I didn't count, but I am certain we did not see 20 passenger cars along the 25-mile route. It was a Vlaminck sky, dark gray, white white. At the little gate of Spaso House was the guard supplied by the Soviet Union--by common acknowledgment, he is a member of the KGB. (Fair enough. Ours probably report to the FBI.) He saluted us through, and I got out into the enormous, oddly-structured town house completed for a Moscow industrialist in 1917 (1917!), and used by us as an official residence ever since F.D.R. sent William C. Bullitt as our first post-Czarist ambassador, Maksim Litvinov having promised him that Russia would absolutely honest Injun give up subverting the world. Mr. Beam, tall, white-haired, crew-cutted, fluent in East European affairs, bookish, old-Southern in hospitality, married late to a chatty, amusing, handsome, iron-willed, super-large-hearted former employee of Voice of America The circumstances were embarrassing, because a dinner had been laid on for the entire delegation. Now arrived at Spaso was not the whole egregious delegation, but a single member of it, with no plans for Novosibirsk, and five unscheduled days--unscheduled also for the ambassador and his wife, who had planned to be with us in central Asia. I suggested delicately to an aide that under the circumstances I remove myself and bunk down elsewhere after the first night; but the ambassador would not hear of it, and I have to admit it that I was very pleased, for all the obvious reasons, but primarily because the Beams are perfect to come-home-to and to discuss with, informally, that day's vicissitudes (the last night I spent with them the staff was out, and we did TV dinners in the kitchen). After dinner that first night, with the deputy chief of mission, the head cultural officer, the aide-de-camp, and their wives, I asked whether the Voice of America got through in spite of the jamming, and the ambassador trudged out his great big portable Zenith and diddled with it, Mrs. Beam told him he was doing it wrong, here, let her try it, the deputy chief of mission said try holding it up, this way, pointing west, which the ambassador did. tapping the aerial with his finger, while Mrs. Beam, her face concentrated as though she were Arturo Toscanini's acoustics engineer, fiddled with the tuning dial. A few words were finally deciphered, but they sounded like enjambments, and were garbled testimony to the effectiveness of Soviet jamming, resumed after the Czechoslovakian invasion, after five years of non-interference. But the jamming, it transpired, is effective only in parts of Russia, and there is a lot of evidence that V.O.A. gets through. At Novosibirsk the U.S. Russian-speaking guides were, some of them, on temporary duty from V.O.A., and their voices were recognized by many Russian visitors to the exhibition who, the jamming notwithstanding, were regular patrons of V.O.A. broadcasts.

At this point I could contain myself no longer, and begged to be excused in order to lay eyes on Red Square, a mere ten minutes away. It was only ten at night, and I set out to meet Larry DuBois. He had had a typical experience, going from the airport to the hotel where he had reservations only-they-never-heard-of-him, on to a second hotel, which Yes, they had a room for him when-he telephoned-from-the-first-hotel, but No, when he got there ten minutes later they had-no-record-of the ten-minute old telephone-call. At this point in desperation he had called the residence, and the cultural-affairs officer, the Magnificent McKinney Russell, who speaks a Russian which is at once fluent, seductive, and imperious, took hold of DuBois at the other end of town like a crippled aircraft, and, by a series of soritical telephone calls, guided him down gently to the Hotel Metropole, where I picked him up, and from there we walked excitedly the 200 yards to Red Square.

Moscow is at latitude 55 degrees, abreast roughly of Copenhagen, so that during the late spring the day yields grudgingly to the night, and at 10:30 we could still make out the Prussian blue in the sky, giving the background for the golden domes and spires of the Kremlin, where at Ouspensky Cathedral 75 years ago, young Nicholas the Second was crowned Emperor of Russia, and the people, in an excess of enthusiasm, stampeded over each other during the attendant celebration, killing hundreds of celebrants. Their grandchildren, in their enthusiasm, line up day after day, by the thousands, to walk into the tomb of Lenin, who, through his minister Sverdlov, executed the Czar and his Empress and their children and, subsequently, every Romanoff he could get his hands on. They do not stampede, the contemporary pilgrims, because the queues in the Communist world are orderly, except where, as in East Germany not long ago, and in contemporary Cuba, the frontiers abut upon another world and give easy access to it, in which case the queues are quite uncontrollable, so much so as to require, finally, huge walls, and paralyzed airports, and gunboats foraging in the fishing boats for human cargo, to stanch the flow of pilgrims who yearn to get away from the world shaped by the little bald fanatic whose mortal remains are scarred so very much less than the world he had a hand in shaping.

But in Red Square, even as 400 years ago they worshiped Ivan the Terrible, they file into the squat, austere mausoleum on the terrace of which, 20 feet higher, we can see the inscrutable officialdom of Red Russia lined up on ceremonial occasions, the Kremlinologists of the world dangling over them with their calipers, to measure the telltale differences that might suggest who is closer today, who is further removed, from the power to catapult the world into one more war, the final war, perhaps. Behind Lenin's tomb is the wall of the Kremlin, on the grassy side of which the heroes of the Soviet Union are buried, or in any case memorialized, the least of them first, on the northern end of the wall, whose names are written on stone slabs. Then, proceeding south, the greater figures, who merit bronze busts and pediments. Directly behind Lenin's tomb is the simple slab beneath which are the remains of Joseph Stalin, removed from alongside Lenin soon after his anathematization in the late Fifties. But Stalin is gradually rising from the dead. Only a month or so after we dallied over his perfunctory slab, a bust sprouted up from the ground--an enterprise which could not have required less official attention than the launching of a Soyuz moon-landing. Just this year, the Soviets managed to publish an official history of World War Two without once mentioning Stalin after 1945--one of those breathlessly humorless accomplishments of which they are so singularly capable, reminding us again and again and again of the undeniable vision of George Orwell. But the hagiolaters will not be forever denied, as witness the unobtrusive rise, by the Kremlin wall, of the likeness of Stalin, which like the beanstalk is likely now to grow week-by-week back to full trinitarian status with Marx and Lenin. For one reason because a mid-position on Stalin is, historically and morally, like coming to rest in mid-air between the diving board and the water; for another because communism, or whatever you choose to call what it is that they practise in Russia, cannot easily allow for a ruler who, preaching Lenin, proceeded to misgovern for 25 years. Irregular performances by bad Popes well after the consolidation of the Church are one thing. But you cannot announce that Saint Paul was after all a liar, a thief, and a lecher, without subverting Christianity. So, in due course, they will preach that Stalin the Prophet was despised only by the despicable. And the injustice will be rectified, most congruently, by Stalinist dispositions of the incautious anti-Stalinists, who are, ever so quietly, nowadays running for cover (try to tease a condemnation of Stalin out of a Soviet official next time you come across one at a diplomatic do). Red Square is brilliantly illuminated, and the people stroll about it, the natives who find it a convenient place to stroll; the out-of-towners, who gawk, and take pictures, and crowd about the tomb to see the sentinels replace each other, strutting to and from their posts, stiff-legged and proud of their illustrious burden.

• • •

The next morning I spent at the embassy, listening to cultural and educational officials, and then yet another go with Security. There were two of us at that session, I and a bearded professor, a Sovietologist headed for Novosibirsk to stay there for the duration of the exhibit, in order to answer the questions of the visitors. I heard again what I had heard in Washington, plus also that the Russians were brilliantly informed on the passage of dope through their country. A little while back an airliner originating in Istanbul stopped at Tashkent to refuel, before going on to Copenhagen, and New York. Three young American passengers did not bother even to leave their seats, since the stop would be for only a few minutes. But Soviet agents went into the plane, called them out, searched them and found hash, and turned them over for sentencing to three years' hard labor. All of the huffing and puffing by our embassy has sprung only one of the three. Other countries in Europe are doing exactly the same kind of thing, I reminded Security, and he agreed, though neither of us had heard of anybody being pulled out of an airplane in a country he was visiting only for the purpose of picking up fuel. Anyway, I said gravely to the bearded American professor, under the circumstances he had better not pick up any junk at Novosibirsk, and he stiffened with rectitude, smiled nervously, and, duly briefed, went on to Novosibirsk--which did open, a week after the scheduled day.

The ambassador told me that he had laid on a biggish lunch with Soviet officials in anticipation of the full American delegation's being there (we would have gone after lunch to Novosibirsk). As it now stands, he said, er, it isn't obvious how many of them will show up. In other words, those Russian officials who had accepted, had been invited by the ambassador to lunch with the ambassador, with Frank Shakespeare (head Government-propagandist), and Frank Stanton (head capitalist-propagandist), just to begin with.

Now, in the two or three hours before lunch, we had in miniature, the entire spectrum of possible Soviet diplomatic responses. Possibility (1) was that all the guests would cancel, Kosygin having in his anti-Cambodia speech given the signal that the freeze against America was on, the subsequent postponement of Novosibirsk serving as a baton-rapping signal to the entire Soviet orchestra. In that event, the dozen guests had before them two alternative ways of expressing themselves. Either, (a) they could telephone in their decision not to attend the lunch, on the explicit grounds that they did not believe it appropriate, during this bloody chapter of American imperialism in Indochina, to proceed with the normal social-diplomatic amenities; or (b) they could telephone in to the embassy and advise that unfortunately there was a crisis in the Urals, or that they had to go to work on the sewage system in Novosibirsk, or that their mother-in-law had suddenly passed away: communicating to the ambassador the same message, but in a significantly different way. I.e., if form (b), rather than form (a), was used, it suggested to the diplomatic corps that the anti-Cambodian response was not to include any formal interruption of diplomatic contact; whereas form A would have suggested that precisely such an interruption was a part of Soviet strategy.

Then there was, (2), that one third, or even one half, of the scheduled guests would telephone in, giving this-or-that excuse for their sudden change in plan. Nothing there of grand diplomatic import, particularly if it was limited to one half. All that that would mean, then, was that the big shots involved considered it beneath their station to appear at a luncheon which had been raided of its premier celebrities, leaving only--well, me.

Then (bear with me if you will), there was possibility (3), wherein the guests, by their unanimous presence at the luncheon, might accomplish two purposes at once, if indeed, it were desired to accomplish them, namely, (a) to suggest that there was absolutely no complicity between the shortage of electricity in Novosibirsk, and Soviet foreign policy in general; and (b) to suggest that the acceptance of the ambassador's invitation to lunch had had nothing whatever to do with any Soviet curiosity concerning the person of the head of the United States Information Agency, or the headof the Columbia Broadcasting System. To do otherwise would be to suggest that they cared enough about U.S.I.A. and CBS to cause either the presence of their managers at lunch to be the reason for accepting an invitation, or their absence to be the reason for canceling their previous acceptance--all of this being, well, beneath the level of attention that attracts Soviet dignitaries of that category. Get it? You may believe that that kind of thing went out with the fan flutters of Madame de Pompadour, on the basis of which the court knew who was in and who was out. You would be wrong.

Anyway--if the suspense has not done you in--they were all there, except for one gentleman who telephoned in a legitimate excuse. It is interesting to speculate, in the Russian context, what it is that constitutes a "legitimate excuse." The very best excuse is to die. Accidentally, if possible, though the chances of that, in Russia, are poor to middling. Another good excuse is to be sent suddenly abroad. Third best is a grave illness in the family. Next is a summons by the Kremlin. But that becomes attenuated, because a summons to the Kremlin can be understood as a summons not to go to the ambassador's party.

Anyway--as I remember--this gentleman gave a moderately good excuse; i.e., his reason for not coming fell somewhere between dying, and being summoned by the Kremlin. And so, at 1300 Moscow Mean Time, on May 11, I walked down from my room into the great reception hall of Spaso and, for the first time in my life, found myself surrounded by officials of the Soviet Union, each of them with a drink in his hand. "This is Mr. Buckley, Mr. Sverzablydyczky." "How do you do, Mr. Sverzzzsky, so nice to see you." "How do you do, Mr. Buzzky, so nice to see you. Are you enjoying Moscow?" "Oh yes, yes, are you enjoying Moscow?"(None of that, Buckley.) "I mean, are you enjoying the weather in Moscow, Mr. Sverzzzsky?" And so on, right around the room, and then lunch is called. The gentleman on my right is the most important of all, and the gentleman on my left only a little less so. The Right gentleman had accompanied Kosygin when he traveled by car from the United Nations to meet President Lyndon Johnson at Glassboro. He reminisced about the trip, and I ventured that it must have made him feel homesick to find no traffic on the New Jersey highway, but we let it pass, let it pass. The gentleman on the left was afflicted with a fine sense of humor, which he turned on uniformly, on all matters, except of course that he would never turn it on at the expense of the Soviet Union. I mean, if you had said to him, "Didja-hear the one about what was the most important historical event of 1875? Lenin was Five years old!!!!," he might have laughed, but there was enough ideological steel there to cause you not to go in for that kind of thing, so we talked about his avocations, the most important of them being canoeing, of which he is a total addict. Canoeing. Hmm. That made him a Canoeist. I told him that not long ago Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada had been accosted, while moving through a crowd, by a lady who, seizing his lapel, asked him, "Is it true that you were once a Communist?" Trudeau had answered, "No, madame, not a Communist, a Canoeist"--and proceeded there and then to relate to her, at a length most distracting to his bodyguards and appointment-keepers, his last experience with the sport, canoeing down some Canadian river or other. "How long is that river?" my companion asked. I don't know, I said; very long. "Well," he smiled, "the river I went down on my last vacation was 1800 kilometers long--the part I traveled--and not one human being did I see the whole length of the passage!" I told him that that was quite extraordinary, which it certainly is, promised to send him James Dickey's novel Deliverance, and we agreed that we both looked forward to our meeting tomorrow, at the "U.S.A. Institute," which is a fairly-new, Kremlin-sponsored organization, composed of scholars, journalists, scientists, and diplomats--150 of them in all--whose job it is to concentrate on the United States of America, for the benefit of the Soviet Union. I asked him how many would be present at the session scheduled for me, and he said a half dozen or so, a halfdozen being exactly how many in fact were there, when I arrived at the haughty mansion that the fabulous Prince Bolkonsky, introduced to the non-Russian world by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, once lived in, and dominated.

In between was fairyland.... Viola, from Intourist, took us everywhere, to the Armory to see the treasures, beyond the imagination of, well: me. There, also, are the Fabergé Easter eggs, given to Alix by Nicky, one of them with tiny paintings of all the Romanoffs another containing a miniature of the entire Russian railroad system, with even a little locomotive that putters, or once did, along the tracks.... Where does Khrushchev live?, I asked Viola. He lives in an apartment house, said Viola. I know, but which apartment house? The same apartment house that Molotov lives in. Would you take us by that apartment house? Why? We Russians respect the privacy of private people--after all, Khrushchev and Molotov are private people. I know, I just have a private historical curiosity. Come on, Viola. Well, she relents, as a matter of fact, that is it over there--she points to the Bernard Baruch Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Urban Renewal John F. Kennedy Lower Upper Middle Income Plaza, which is mostly laundry hung outdoors, and television antennae. I wondered what would happen if one entered the building, looked under "Khrushchev" and pushed the elevator button.... But that is the kind of thing, in the Soviet Union, you will always wonder what would happen if you did it, because such things simply don't happen. I do remember the American a few years ago (a wonderful young man, as uninhibited as Silly Putty) who sailed into the Lubyanka, beamed at the startled man at the desk. "Hiya, folks, I'm Charles Wiley from New York, and I thought I'd sure like to take a tour around this here prison!" and off he went, smiling, and waving, and using his three words of Russian, going further than anyone before him had gone, whose destination was this side of the crypt of Amontillado, until, finally, the resources of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics mobilized themselves and, dumfounded but firm, led Charles Wiley back to the street, and presumably returned to tell their grandchildren about the crazy American.

The phone rang early in my room at Spaso. Pravda had published that morning an extensive and extraordinarily bitter attack on the U.S.I.A., on Frank Shakespeare, and on myself, calling us all "werewolves," right-wing extremists, etc. A translation would be made available to me before my meeting with the U.S.A. Institute, and indeed it was. It was remarkable primarily for its stylelessness: It was nothing more than ideological boilerplate, though as I say, rather more bitter than that kind of thing tends to be: enough so to raise the eyebrows of the embassy people.

I asked my friend DuBois to join me, and took along a tape recorder, having been told by the embassy that the week before, Theodore Sorensen, campaigning for the New York Senate seat of Robert F. Kennedy, had taken along his tape recorder (Sorensen lost in New York, and it is not known how he did at the U.S.A. Institute in Moscow, though historians should note that there is a tape). I was cordially, if formally, greeted--certainly I was not made to feel like the werewolf described that morning in the official paper--and found myself seated opposite a table at the center of which was my Stakhanovite canoeist friend of the day before. I asked if he minded if I recorded our conversation. Well, he said, as a matter of fact, the U.S.A. Institute's proceedings were off-the-record affairs, and he would just as soon I didn't use the tape recorder, unless I absolutely insisted on it. Well, I said, not at all, not at all, if it would make you uncomfortable, let's just forget it, as I shoved the little machine away from us, on towards the center of the table. Well, he said, beaming, I suppose you are left only with your one hidden recorder? The three men to his right laughed, and the two men and a girl on his left laughed, and Larry and I laughed, and I said, Well, you see, you underrate Yankee ingenuity, because I have a mike not only here (I pointed between my neck and my collar) but also here, under my right lapel, and here, under my left lapel. We all laughed, and I remember wondering whether some X-ray machine or other would quickly inform the chairman whether I was making a bourgeois joke, or was maneuvering from Bondian desperation.... Anyway, the conversation ensued, for two and one half hours. The usual things. With one or two interesting and not altogether expected emphases. The Chairman-Canoeist began with a ritual denunciation of our move into Cambodia, in which his Rockettes concurred (I do not mean to suggest other than that they were extraordinarily bright, and learned, and resourceful in their arguments: merely that they played together like the Budapest String Quartet), and I replied, Look, let's save time, the United States, belatedly, is treating the Cambodian frontier like the geographical fiction you people have been treating it as, ever since the war began; so what is the point in accusing us of escalation, simply because we behave like you?

We traversed the frontiers of the Cold War, at military, political, and even--ever so lightly--at philosophical levels. What interested them most, however, was--clearly--Economics. Only a week or so before, Henry Ford had come to town. The Soviet Union was after him to build a great big truck complex, and the reception given to him was, by all reports, the most fabulous since Marco Polo arrived in China. The Soviet big-cheese car is called a Zil, and they have probably managed to produce about five and one half of them, every one of which (or so it seemed) was put at the disposal of Henry Ford II, the capitalist-exploiter whose favors they so much wanted. They put him in the poshest dacha in town, and everything went for him smooth as can be, so anxious were they that he should go along on the matter of the trucks. To be sure, when one of his daughters who was traveling with him decided to buy a $4000 stole, she found that the seller wanted cash, c-a-s-h, and the poor girl spent the rest of the afternoon signing 400 ten-dollar traveler's cheques. But anyway, the chairman wanted to know how I could account for the stupidity of those Americans who opposed Henry Ford's setting up a truck plant in the Soviet Union when, after all, if we didn't, all the Russians would have to do was invite any old other country to do the same thing, like say Japan, or Italy, or Germany, or France, or England--and what would that do to our balance of payments? I murmured something about Americans' resentment of the number of trucks currently being sent by the Soviet Union to North Vietnam, which are in turn used to bring down ammunition to kill Americans with, whose parents might, under the circumstances, look darkly at the prospect of the Ford Motor Company's supplying the Soviet Union with those trucks it was short of, on account of its commitment to North Vietnam--get it? I was dealing with enormously sophisticated people, and of course it gradually became clear to all of us--but it would have been very impolite to recognize the hovering enthymeme, which was--is--that just any old country can not, in fact supply Russia with what the Ford Motor Company could supply it. A few days later, in Leningrad, I heard the news that Henry Ford, back in Detroit, had said No, he would not build the new plant in Russia, under the circumstances, the circumstances (unspoken by H. Ford) being, of course, the Vietnam war. I thought of my friends at the U.S.A. Institute, and the blast they would surely receive the next day from the Kremlin. Who, if not the U.S.A. Institute, is supposed to know the mind of Henry Ford? Why permit Russia to be embarrassed, if it was all that obvious he would say no? What in the hell do you people down there leading those posh lives and drinking cocktails with all those visiting Americans think you're up to? Well, I reflected, at least the bum steer hadn't come from me....

It was time to go to a lunch at McKinney Russell's with a few journalists, two of whom (Time, CBS) were expelled from Russia a week or two later, for venial sins of intellectual curiosity. I found them all very resigned about Soviet Russia. Henry Shapiro, of UPI, lives even now in the same apartment he bought from Eugene Lyons in 1935. Eugene Lyons! (Whose book, The Red Decade, brought more fellow travelers to share in his disillusionment with communism than any other book of the period.) In Moscow, if you are truly settled down there, you must be careful, very careful, very very careful. Shapiro--wise, learned, amiable--is a fixture, and wants to go on living in Moscow. A few days before, Kosygin even mentioned him (teasingly) by name at the appearance at which he denounced Richard Nixon. But Shapiro cannot mention Brezhnev by name, teasingly.

• • •

Another glittering afternoon and evening, a trip to Zagorsk, the spiritual home of Russia, where one of the three surviving seminaries continues the hapless production of a dozen priests per year, like eyedropping holy water into hell. The Bolshoi ballet doing Don Quixote. Blinis at the Metropole (in the restaurant reserved for clients who come forward with non-Russian currency: There are such restaurants everywhere, and PX-type stores, and they do to the Russian people what Jim Crow did to the Negroes); and then the midnight train to Leningrad. We sat, Larry and I, in my little compartment and offered Scotch whiskey to William Jay Smith, America's poet-in-residence at the Library of Congress, who had been invited over to read his poems and to visit with Soviet poets, and kept wondering where he could find Brodsky, who is in disrepute. Everybody is vague about where Brodsky is. The trouble was, we could not hear each other very well because the radio was playing right into my compartment from a unit high on the wall. I had reached to turn it off, and found that you don't turn off the Russian radio when Central Planning has decided it should be playing: Nor do you control the volume--there is no control, no on-off switch. But a half hour after midnight it did go off and we could then hear each other better--as could, presumably, the KGB. The next morning at exactly six A.M. the radio resumed with music the brassiness of which makes it easier to understand why so many Russians take vodka before breakfast. I went to brush my teeth, and noted the stewardess, sitting in front of a large samovar of tea next door to the bathroom. I smiled, said "Tea, please, spasibo," totally exhausting my knowledge of Russian, and she gave me such a glare of ferocious resentment as froze me in panicked perplexity. I rushed back and asked the poet, who knows Russian, whether the sounds "Tee pleeze" add up, in Russian, to a dirty word, and he said no, not that he knew of, and just then she appeared, and, incredibly, plunked a cup of tea down in front of me on the little collapsible table. DuBois asked her, or rather gestured to her, manufacturing a most effusive smile, whether he too might have a cup of tea, and damned if she didn't do to him exactly what she had done to me: Yet, a few minutes later she was back, plunking down a cup of tea for him. Woody Dernitz from the embassy, a young, experienced, Russian-speaking diplomat doing werewolf-tending duty, explained to us that many Russians are just that way, particularly in their professional dealings with people. Two nights later, I remember, we could not get anyone at either of two large restaurants to take our order--pleas, bribes, threats, availing us not at all. There is no available sanction, I was told. Tips are officially proscribed, but on the one hand they are routinely expected, and on the other, they simply do not amount to enough to influence the behavior of a waiter who is predisposed, whether by the Russian climate, or by the Russian political system, to--simply--resent clients or patrons. There isn't enough to buy in Russia, with that extra ruble or two that the waiter can get in tips. In Moscow when taxis are scarce the way to get attention is to raise your hand, concealing in it an American dollar bill. A few such bills and the native can enter the foreign-currency stores, and buy a few of the goods unavailable to mere ruble-earners. It is not easy to describe the concerted neglect of the interests of the consumer of which the Russians are capable; and it is necessary to know, when traveling in Russia, that the reason for this neglect isn't merely the vaunted xenophobia (though there is that, and sometimes one can taste it); but rather a lost tradition of service. You, the tourist in Russia, are indistinguishable, as far as the waiter is concerned, from the native traveling salesman or housewife. You must, all of you, be countenanced--because that is what is ordered from on top: That is one's job. All of you are a general inconvenience, and there is no point whatsoever in going through the motions of welcoming the patronage. (Obviously, there are exceptions, even as one comes across polite cabdrivers in New York.) Personal relations are altogether different.

Nina, for instance, who met us so coldly at the Intourist office in Leningrad; yet by the time we had opened the doors of the car, she was and would continue to be (except on the one occasion when she was provoked ideologically) marvelously hospitable and obliging, even when we offered her, for lunch from my tuck box, caviar and potato chips, having determined that we would never again willingly set foot in a Russian restaurant. Yes, she confirmed, this was the Square where the Revolution began. Over there--yes, stretching all the day down along the river--is the Winter Palace, the formal residence of the czars during the two centuries that St. Petersburg was the capital of Russia, up until the Revolution. We will go through it, the parts that are open to tourists, in just a few minutes, don't be impatient, she clucked. Over there, on the river, is the gunboat, preserved as a national monument, that fired the shot that triggered the Bolshevik take-over. You can see the fortress where Lenin's brother was imprisoned, but you can't quite see over to the fortress where he was hanged. Over there--we cruised--is the great town house of Prince Yussoupov where he and his friends murdered the monk Rasputin, just before New Year's Day, 1917, throwing him finally (he was harder to kill than King Kong) into the river, right in front of the house, and causing the shudder that, some of them say, finally demoralized the royal family which, a few months later, lost its power. The Winter Palace was never physically touched by Nazi hands, because although the Nazis besieged Leningrad for 900 days they never penetrated the city's defenses: This was where Russian civilian heroism ran the longest course, even as, at Stalingrad, military heroism saved the city--the same heroism, said Nina, the same people. Do you realize, she asked, that this was a city of three million people when the War began and I was a little girl, and when the War was over, the city was a city of less than one million people? But the Nazis, failing to get into the city, satisfied themselves by wrecking everything outside it, the whole complex of summer palaces of the czars, for instance, and then shelling Leningrad, doing great damage to the Winter Palace. The treasures of the Palace were packed up and sent away to the Urals before the Germans came, but some of them were found, many were damaged. We walked into the palace and the experience was breathtaking. I mean, there isn't in the West anything on the scale of the Winter Palace. Versailles is a Petit Trianon. The rooms, many of them reconstructed, are quite literally perfect, and the taste unblemished, the conspicuous exception being the fabulous throne room, where a chauvinist's lackey replaced the throne itself with a post-War map showing in mosaic the territorial reaches of post-War, prehensile Russia. The jewels, a collection of czarist baubles, outmatch in vulgarity and in beauty anything of the sort anywhere, and suggest the emotional reason for the contrasting drabness of the Bolshevik costume; indeed, for the drabness of Soviet art--the diabetic imperative. The architecture in the Winter Palace, and in the summer palaces, is mostly Italian in provenance. The czars no more thought to insist on Russian architectural or decorative preeminence than, say, we would think to insist on American pre-eminence in camera lenses. The scale of the thing--ridiculous and sublime--reflects the expanses of Russia, the lateral terrestrial infinity, the vertical complement of which was expressed in the Middle Ages by the height of the holy spires of the great cathedrals of France and Germany, which could not go higher only because of the dumb limits of contemporary science which already were strained to exuberant lengths. But building sideways there is no restriction, which is why for instance the Winter Palace simply goes on and on and on, and although I did not take measurements, I warrant you could walk from one end of the White House to the other fifty times before going the length of the Winter Palace; before reaching, if you started at the other end, the auditorium where, on the night that it was stormed, Georges Enesco from Romania, young, talented, glamorous, gave his scheduled violin concert, before a severely diminished house of aristocrats, who reseated themselves about him--less, one supposes on reading about it, because they sought the Gemütliclikeit that was otherwise unavailable in so large an auditorium, than because they thought, noblesse oblige, to console the artist against any suspicion that the plebeian irregularities outdoors in any way suggested a straitened appreciation of his art, or an unseemly abbreviation of Russian hospitality.

There is no American installation in Leningrad, but there is an agreement in principle to permit the opening of a consulate there, in return for a Russian consulate in San Francisco. There are many altogether respectable American legislators who resisted the idea of more Russian consulates in the United States, though even if one supposes, as it is perfectly reasonable to suppose, that a Russian consulate in San Francisco would be devoted to the elaboration of the art of subversion, surely the practice of that art, in the San Francisco area, would be an exercise in supererogation? Leningrad--like San Francisco--faces the sea; and on the weekend we were there, the streets--more accurately the restaurants and the foreign-exchange bars--were clogged with Finns, coming in with markkas in their jeans, taking the three-hour bus ride to get away, would you believe it, from the comstockery of their own surroundings. I speak of teenagers, blond blond blond, hippie, longhaired, jaded in appearance, 14-year-olds asking for dry martinis very dry (they are not served booze in Finland, at their age), qualifying to travel about in the spots where Russian youth are excluded, because they do not have non-Russian bread. They sweep in and sweep out during weekends, a visigoth children's invasion, cool, bored, unconcerned, except for sensual gratification. If it were physically passible (you get the impression) for these young Finns simultaneously to smoke marijuana, drink martinis, and copulate on the bar stools of the foreign-exchange bars, that is what they would most assuredly do, on Saturday nights. The only thing they would not ever neglect to do is, to return to Finland, when the weekend is over.

We told Nina how sad it was that we had so little time, but she did not repine; she is used to givens in any situation, whether it is the scarcity of food during the Nazi siege she survived, or the ebb and flow of tourist traffic, which could leave her overworked for weeks, or under-utilized for months: She was at one point sent to Indonesia for two years where she dutifully learned Indonesian, having kissed her husband goodbye as stoically as a whaler's wife at Nantucket two centuries ago. We drove finally to the summer palaces at Tsarskoe Selo, an hour's drive, and she led us to Catherine's Palace, once again endlessly magnificent, only a dozen rooms restored, but exquisitely. I asked if I might visit Alexander's Palace, just down the road, because it was there that the last czar and his czarina made their home. She resisted, as Viola had resisted in Moscow when I asked her to take us by the Lubyanka; but she did not make a point of it. Yet when the car stopped, outside the garden, 200 yards from the tatterdemalion columns, in design not unlike the White House's, on the informal side of the palace, she did not get out of the car, a gentle act of symbolic resistance that could hardly be assigned to lassitude, since she is surely the most energetic cicerone in Europe. So Larry and I got out, and roamed across the yard-high grass, ambling toward the great columns through which, when Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States, the czar and czarina and their four girls and little hemophiliac son would stroll from the garden into the house, whose apartments were mostly living quarters, but provided public rooms for the ministers who regularly waited upon the imperial presence, on the implicit understanding that the parliamentary devices that had grown up during his reign were, notwithstanding the explicit language of the constitution to which the czar had acquiesced, nothing more, really, than the democratic sufferances of an emperor who had been crowned the Autocrat of Russia. When he arrived at Tsarskoe Selo from the German front, after the storming of the Winter Palace, he had abdicated his throne en route. And in the next few days, walking through the columns into the garden, he could not suppress the habit of raising his hand to return the salute of what had been his imperial guard, which had surrounded the garden with adamant loyalty over the stormy years. That guard was gone, replaced by carefully selected revolutionary soldiers who would as soon have saluted the czar as take an oath against vodka. The head of die detachment insisted that the very large garden in which the czar and his family were used to strolling should for reasons of security be ruled off limits, except for the two or three acres through which we now ambled; and Nicholas, seeking exercise, decided to bicycle around the remaining pathways; whereupon the guards, it is recorded, entertained themselves by wheeling around suddenly and poking sticks into the czar's bicycle wheel, causing him to catapult over onto the ground, whence he would lift himself, silently, deliberately, unreproachfully, remount the bicycle, unminding of the taiuuers, who for half such an aggression would 30 days earlier have been knouted and hanged; and head back toward his family, so as not to interrupt, by any melodramatic defiance, the grisly end that awaited them all, 16 months later, in the cellar at Ekaterinburg, where they would be shot down, onorders from Moscow, already beginning to practice the trade in which it would become proficient: ordering the executions of royal families, dissident ideologues, small landowners, prisoners of war, hundreds, thousands, millions. I thought, as I walked through the grass, toward the gutted palace, that it is all no more difficult than undemanding the men who tumbled ihe czar's bicycle, an act, under those circumstances, as exhausting of the resources of human cruelty as would be the signing of the order to eliminate a million kulaks in order to prove a large institutional point. At the veranda a soldier appeared, his dress as shabby as the palace he guarded, to say that we hadalready wandered too far. No matter, there isn't anything left there to see, because these apartments, where the last Romanoffs lived, so intimately, so devotedly, have not been restored, and they do not lie on the Intourist route. I wonder why the government doesn't raze Tsarskoe Selo, but of course they have always shown that certain caution that many iconoclasts show: Thus, at Leningrad, they convert the cathedral of Kazan, where the czars prayed, into an "Institute of Religion and Atheism": but they do not tear it down, whether for reasons of husbandry, or because they believe that the profanation of a cathedral is high-class revolutionary piquancy. I think there is a third reason, which is that the Russians, even the Communist Russians, cannot practice wholehearted Orweliianism; i.e., they cannot induce themselves to destroy that which they disapprove of (unless it is a human being). They sublimate it (as with the Kazan Cathedral); or ignore it (as with Tsarskoe Selo); or profiteer from it (as with the crown jewels one pays to see). But you do not simply destroy it, for some reason; a reason the understanding of which would leave us better understanding the Soviet Union, and hence the world.

• • •

The next day--the last day--Nina took us to yet another summer palace, Peter's pad, to which we had intended--it is on the Finnish Gulf--to travel by hovercraft, that being the way one travels there nowadays; but it was the opening day of the season, and she feared that the water traffic would be too heavy, so we went by car, arriving at the fabled gardens through which one could hardly move for the people--surely ten or fifteen thousand were there--who came to rejoice in the fountains, and to line up (approximate waiting time: two hours) to enter the palace. Some of the fountains were designed to tease the children, and any grownup in the mood for that sort of thing. A hidden spout would go off at unexpected moments, dousing the trespasser, rather like the electric rod at Coney Island. We were agreeably surprised that Nina, after quietly talking with someone, led us past the head of the line into the apartments, again artistically perfect, again reconstructed inch-by-inch from the ruins left by the Nazis. I told Nina that she obviously had plenty of blat, and she turned on me, strangely suspicious--where had I picked up that word? (It is, I gather, high Russian idiom for "pull," and I had got it from the book Message from Moscow.) I thought to intensify the mystery and said to her, "Tolsti taught me die word." "Tolsti" is what one doesn't call Tolstikov (first secretary of the Communist Party of the Leningrad region and, according to some, the most ambitious neo-Stalinist in Russia); except in situations of utter security, which are ex officio never reached by Americans talking to Intourist guides. Nina's reaction was both cautious (she really didn't, understand how I could come on to the existence of Tolsti, or blat, not somebody who had proved himself as ignorant as I had done during the two days we had spent together); and amused--how exhilarating it is to see the ingenuous foreigner traipse so lightheartedly over such dangerous territory, because the foreigner didn't know about the land mines.

But her curiosity was contained, and she went back to explaining the works of art in the palace, her mastery of which, like her mastery of Russian history, was altogether extraordinary. That afternoon she took us through the Kazan Cathedral to survey the Museum of Religion and Atheism, which is as impartially devoted to religion and to atheism as the Museum of Natural History is to supernatural and natural history. Among the exhibits, all of them calculated to document Lenin's point that religion was an instrument of repression--raising the gullible question, Why did Lenin neglect to exploit the possibilities of religion as a mode of repression? Answer: He didn't--was a chestful of instruments of torture, labeled by the exhibitors as having been commonly used during the Inquisition. When I asked, kitchen-debate-wise, whether they had been borrowed from the Lubyanka Collection, Nina was most firmly displeased with me, and I was not able to jolly her out of that displeasure; so I acknowledged the tastelessness of my remark, and, of course, it was, in a way--in that context--the remark of a bully. One does not make light of the doctrine of transubstantiation with an altar boy. But, as we drove back to the hotel, we were friends again, and I asked if she would like to have me send her any books when I got back to New York. Well, she said, yes, she would, though she doubted that I would in fact remember to send them, just as she doubted that Larry would remember to send her any of the pictures he had taken on us. "They always say they will, but they never do." I asked her what books she wanted, and she did not hesitate. She wanted Peyton Place, Hotel, Valley of Ihe Dolls, and The Carpetbaggers. I promised her that I would send them, and Larry interposed jocularly to ask Nina whether she would like to have my own book, The Governor Listeth, and Nina said bravely that she did not know that I wrote books, but that she would certainly like to have my book, that she only hoped that it was not as biased as Harrison Salisbury's book about the siege of Leningrad, and I assured her that it was ten times as biased, and she smiled, and we pulled into the hotel. Her handshake was purely professional. I hoped to find a trace there of that tingle that distinguishes from the purely perfunctory experience, but I must admit that I did not. Whether, after she has read Valley of the Dolls. Peyton Place, Hotel, and The Carpetbaggers, she will acquire that sensitization our Esalen types preach of, which might have permitted us to embrace across the Iron Curtain, I cannot say; I would say only this, that I do not know what other books one can honorably recommend in the circumstances: What would you and I read, or want to read, if we were born and brought up in Leningrad? Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward sells there, in the black market, for 80 rubles, which is one third Nina's monthly pay: But there are other reasons against reading Solzhenitsyn in Russia, even if it were known that one could do so with absolute safety. Nina does not want to be troubled; and I would not want to trouble her, not unless the prospects of success were assured, or at least reasonably assured. "We waited for years for the American Army," a Polish intellectual told me a few days later--(in Poland, by contrast with Russia, they all sound like Lenny Bruce)--commenting on the recent visit of our astronauts, "And when it came, there were just three of them."