DRAWING BACK THE CURTAIN

 

Denis Healey was bom in 1917 and brought up in Yorkshire. After gainig a double first at Balliol College, Oxford, for six years he was a soldier learn­ing about real life.

Another six years as International Secretary of the Labour Party taught him much about politics, both at home and abroad. From 1952 to 1992 he was a Labour Member of Parliament for Leeds.

He is a prolific journalist and broadcaster. He has published Healey's Eye, a book on his life as a photographer, and has contributed essays to many publications for the Fabian Society¹ including New Fabian essays and Fabian International Essays.

When Shrimps Leant to Whistle, Signposts for the Nineties, also published by Penguin, include a selection of his earlier writings which are relevant to the world after the Cold War.

 

In the early years after the war, when we first heard the truth of what Russia was doing in Eastern Europe, and began to look more objectively at the Soviet Union itself, my genera­tion was powerfully influenced by George Orwell's 1984, and by a flood of books which purported to analyse the nature of totalitarianism.

My visits to Eastern Europe cured me of any erratic illu­sions. No power could destroy national traditions which were rooted in centuries of history. Moreover, these peoples yearned to return to the Europe in which Chopin and Bartok were part of a common civilisation with Bach and Verdi. Once Stalin died, it was clear that Soviet Communism already carried the seeds of its own destruction. The Russia of Tolstoy, Tchaikov­sky and Herzen was still there beneath the surface. Stalin could no more expunge it from the consciousness of its people than Hitler could liquidate the Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant.

 

I had been fascinated by Russia since I readits great novel­ists as a schoolboy. My years in the Communist Party at Ox­ford had given me sufficient understanding of Stalinism to re­ject it even while I still saw Russia as a socialist state and a necessary ally against Hitler. I was also impressed by much of pre-war Soviet culture.

The great Soviet film-makers of those days — Einstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko — seemed superior to their Western rivals. Though I loathed "Socialist Realism", I admired the paint­ings of Deineka. They were in a book given me by a friend; she also introduced me to Shostakovich's opera, The Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk.

After the war I found that my friend had disappeared during the great purges, and that Lady Macbeth had been banned.

This helped to reinforce the bitter hostility I had developed for Soviet policies both at home and abroad.

Most of our visit was spent in sightseeing. We were of course, with our consent, taken to schools, factories, and col­lective farms. It also included the visits to the Hermitage in Le­ningrad and the magnificent summer palace of Peter the Great overlooking the Gulf of Finland, its fountains sparkling in the autumn sun, its rococo buildings gleaming with white and gold; like most other palaces, it had been meticulously restored to its former glory after almost total destruction by the Nazis. In Leningrad we were given a concert at what had originally been the club where members of the first Russian Parliament, or Duma, used to meet, hi those nineteenth-century surround­ings, the concert itself was like a salon at the court of Queen Victoria, as sopranos and baritones in evening dress sang ballads and songs by "Kompositori Verdi" in voices of remark­able purity.

By comparison with the eighteenth-century canals of Lenin­grad, which might have been part of Amsterdam or Bremen, the Kremlin brought us to the heart of old Russia. I had imag­ined it a building as grimly functional as the Party it housed, and was quite unprepared for the mediaeval splendour of its palaces and churches, scattered among copses of birch and lilac.

My visit to Russia in 1959 began to give me some sense of these cultural changes. I was immensely impressed by the

 

charm and quality of the young sixth formers we met in Lenin­grad at school.

In manner and appearance they could have come from any of the upperclass families described by Turgenev or Tolstoy. Similarly, the colleges which taught foreign languages and in­ternational affairs were giving a rounded education to able young men and women, who are now in key positions in their country, where their knowledge of the outside world is invalu­able.

The creative intelligentsia, such outstanding people as Sa-kharov, with his strong opposition to using the hydrogen bomb, Solzhenitsyn, exposing the life in a labour camp (A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich), Yevtushenko with his poem Babiy Yar on anty-Semitism in the Soviet Union — were giving a headache to the authorities.

And yet we saw signs of the cultural thaw all around us.

Jazz was officially disliked, but they didn't use the power of the state to prevent it. Its public performance was then largely confined to the circus and music hall. In Leningrad we saw an ice-spectacular in which the girls were half-naked, in costumes reminiscent of the pre-war Folies Bergere.

The theatre and ballet had changed little since the revolu­tion, the best had been preserved.

The Moscow Arts Theatre performed Chekhov as Stanislav­sky had produced it half a century eariler — as sad comedy rather than as tragedy with humour. The only ideological change I noticed was in Uncle Vanya: Astrov was presented as a handsome, vigorous young prophet of a better future, rather than as the wrinkled cynic of Olivier's² interpretation at the Old Vie³. We saw the aging Ulanova at the Bolshoi in a ballet based on a novel by Peter Abrahams about Apartheid⁴ in South Africa, which called on her to act rather than to dance. On the other hand we saw Plisetskaya at her best as prima ballerina in Prokofiev's The Stone Flower. Ishall never forget her rippling sinuosity.

In 1963, when I next visited Russia, the general atmosphere was more liberal than on my first visit, and as I was not on offi­cial delegation, but attending an informal conference between Soviet and Western politicians, I had a good deal more free­dom.

 

 

Our guide was a gentle young man called Kolya who had just got his degree in foreign languages. He had been at the World Youth Congress that summer in Moscow, and greatly enjoyed reciting phrases of hair-raising obscenity which he had picked up from his American comrades. Jazz was now all the rage, and since imports of Western records had been stopped, a disk by Dave Brubeck was beyond price. Since then the inter­national youth culture has swept the whole of Russia like a hurricane.

I learned much from these visits to Russia, restricted though they were, and was to learn more still from later visits. I do not accept the view that short visits to foreign countries are more likely to mislead than to educate. On the contrary, providing you have done your home-work before you go, they not only enable you to check some of your views, but also provide you with a library of sense-impressions which give reality to any news you read later.

However, for this purpose I think three days is better than three weeks.Anything over a week and less than three years is liable to confuse you. But series of short visits, at intervals of over a year, can give you a sense of the underlying trends in a foreign country which no accounts in the press can provide. Above all, I learned that the Russians, like us, were human beings, although they were not human beings like us.