Going Back Again - III

(continued)

Amazingly, it turned out that our cases and bags weren't opened at the customs control on disembarkation in Leningrad. Other people were not so lucky – the abiding memory of that particular morning is of opened cases, with distraught owners trying to explain their contents to surly and uncomprehending male and female Soviet customs officials. At the same time, the general atmosphere was one of euphoria at having arrived. We got through unscathed with our Sinyavskys and Solzhenitsyns – not that these were especially dangerous, and we could and probably should have tried to take in some copies of Grani or Sintaksis, or even some Russian-language Bibles.. I think the reasoning was that as members of the British Council group, we didn’t want to cause embarrassment and get it and ourselves into trouble at the very outset. Or perhaps it was just that we were too cowardly to make the attempt – it’s too long ago to remember now. I mention Bibles, by the way, not because we were particularly religious, but because they were in huge demand among young people in the Soviet Union.

After the by now familiar ritual of the bus trip to the station and the night train to Moscow, we settled in to MGU fairly quickly. Once again the lodgings were in Zona V, though this time on the 8th floor. As a married couple, we were given a rather spacious room, of a type I hadn’t known existed in the Zone. It was rather bare, however, with hardly any furniture except for two metal-framed single beds – rather like hospital beds – with thin, hard mattresses, a table and two chairs. There was also a writing desk and the obligatory radio speaker, which one was not supposed to unplug, and which continuously played the lugubrious output of Radiostantsiya Mayak, with its 1950s-style “canned” music, military marches, and propaganda talks and speeches. While one could – and we did – unplug the radio, it had to be reconnected whenever the sankom or “sanitary committee” came round on its routine inspections, and many students in the British group actually kept their radios plugged in, playing softly throughout the day. This added a rather strange dimension to one’s everyday life – like an inner voice that wouldn’t go away. Later I remember reading the account by an imprisoned Soviet poet of this “compulsory” radio listening, where she talks about the instinctive desire she felt to tear the electric flex from the wall – in MGU we weren’t actually in prison, but it often felt like it.

At a fairly early stage of the semester, I told D., my wife, that I thought we should buy a record player to offset the radio. After all, there were all those Melodiya discs to buy and play on it, and we were both keen on classical music. D. agreed, and we went to GUM to look for a player. It turned out that there was only one model on sale, and there was a two-week wait for it. A couple of weeks later were able to buy the machine, and took it back to the university in a cab. Superficially it looked like a conventional record player, but was made of heavy, whitish wood. The turntable and pickup appeared to be fairly standard, but the stylus was not – in fact, the stylus had to be replaced after every 7-10 sides of playing, and fortunately the machine came with a pack of spares. The volume control was also extremely erratic. We had brought some LPs from England, and I’d hoped it would be possible to play them, but the machine couldn’t really cope with Western stereo discs, and would only play the Soviet-made (and some East German) mono ones. However, it was certainly better than nothing, and we were both glad of it during the months that lay ahead.

Unusually, we didn’t have a Soviet block neighbour. Our neighbour was one of the British students, Michael, with whom we shared the shower and toilet. Incidentally, all names of people in the British group, apart from my own, have been altered in this account of our stay. Some others have also been changed - the practice is the same one that I followed in the first series of posts.

Most of September was taken up with arranging our study schedules. D. was mainly in the mathematics department in Zone A, in the main building, while I had to organize my research at TsGALI – the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (now RGALI) – which lay right at the other end of town, up at Vodny Stadion, and involved an hour-long metro journey each way.

(to be continued)

See also:
Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II