The Nomenklatura^[25] Half-boots

I must begin with a confession. I practically stole these shoes…

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin^[26] visited France. Russian émigrés there asked him, “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

And they really are stealing. On a broader scale every year.

People carry off beef carcasses from meat-packing plants. Carders from textile factories. Lenses from photographic firms. They swipe everything – tiles, gypsum, polyethylene, electric motors, bolts, screws, radio tubes, thread, glass.

Often this takes on a metaphysical character. I’m talking about completely mysterious thefts without any rational goal. That can happen only in the Russian state, I’m convinced.

I knew a refined, noble and educated man who stole a pail of concrete from his job. Along the way the concrete set, of course. The thief threw away the rock-hard lump not far from his house. Another friend broke into a propaganda office and removed the ballot box^[27]. He brought it home and promptly lost all interest in it. A third friend stole a fire extinguisher. A fourth stole a bust of Paul Robeson^[28] from his boss’s office. A fifth, the poster column from Shkapin Street. And a sixth, a lectern from an amateur theatre club.

I, as you will see, acted much more practically: I stole good-quality Soviet shoes, intended for export. Of course, I didn’t steal them from a store. Soviet stores don’t carry shoes like that. I swiped them from the chairman of the Leningrad City Executive Committee – otherwise known as the mayor of Leningrad. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

After the army, I took a job with a factory newsletter. I spent three years there. I realized that ideological work was not for me. I wanted something more direct, posing fewer moral doubts.

I remembered that I had attended art school a long time before (the same one, incidentally, which graduated the famous artist Shemyakin^[29]). I had retained a few skills.

Friends with pull^[30] got me into a DPI, a decorative and applied arts studio. I became an apprentice stone-cutter. I decided to “find myself” in monumental sculpture.

Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!

For work like that you need a roomy studio. Significant support systems. A whole staff of assistants, moulders and loaders. In short, you need official recognition. And that means total dependability. And no experimentation…

Once I visited the studio of a famous sculptor. His unfinished works loomed in the corners. I quickly recognized Yuri Gagarin, Mayakovsky, Fidel Castro^[31]. I looked closer and froze – they were all naked. I mean, absolutely naked. With conscientiously modelled buttocks, sexual organs and muscles. I felt a chill of fear.

“Nothing unusual,” the sculptor explained. “We’re realists. First we do the anatomy, then the clothes.”

But our sculptors are rich. They get paid most for depictions of Lenin. Even Karl Marx’s labourintensive beard doesn’t pay as well.

There’s a monument to Lenin in every city, in every regional centre. Commissions of that sort are inexhaustible. An experienced sculptor can do Lenin blind – that is, blindfolded. Though curious things do happen.

Once, for instance, in the central square of Chelyabinsk, opposite the city hall, they were going to erect a monument to Lenin. A major rally was organized. About fifteen hundred people showed up. Solemn music played. Orators gave speeches.

The statue was covered with grey cloth.

And then the moment of truth. To the sound of a drumroll, the bureaucrats of the local executive committee pulled down the cloth.

Lenin was depicted in his familiar pose – a tourist hitching a ride on the highway. His right arm pointed the way to the future. His left was in the pocket of his open coat.

The music stopped. In the ensuing silence someone laughed. A minute later, the whole crowd was laughing.

Only one man did not laugh: the Leningrad sculptor Viktor Dryzhakov. The look of horror on his face was gradually replaced with a grimace of indifference and resignation.

What had happened? The poor sculptor had given Lenin two caps, one on the leader’s head, the other one clutched in his fist.

The bureaucrats hurriedly wrapped the rejected statue in grey cloth.

In the morning the statue was unveiled once more to the crowds. The extra cap had been removed overnight…

We have been sidetracked once again.

Monuments are born this way: the sculptor makes a clay model. The moulder casts it in plaster. Then the stone-cutters take over.

There is the plaster figure. And there is the formless hunk of marble. Everything extra has to be removed. The plaster prototype must be copied with absolute accuracy.

There are special machines for that, called dotters. They make thousands of chips in the stone. In this way the contours of the future monument are determined.

Then the stone-cutter arms himself with a small perforator. He removes crude layers of marble. Picks up the hammer and chisel. All that’s left is the finishing stage, the filigree, very demanding work.

The stone-cutter works on the marble surface. One wrong move and it’s the end. Because the structure of marble is like that of wood. Marble has fragile layers, hard spots, cracks. There are structural clots, something like knots in wood. Many traces of other ores are mixed in. And so on. In general, this is exacting and difficult work.

I was put into a team of stone-cutters. There were three of us. The foreman’s name was Osip Likhachev. His helper and friend was called Viktor Tsypin. Both were masters of their craft and, of course, confirmed drunkards.

Likhachev drank daily, while Tsypin suffered from chronic binges. Which did not keep Likhachev from having an occasional binge or Tsypin from having hair-of-the-dog^[32] at any opportunity.

Likhachev was grim, severe and taciturn. He said nothing for hours and then suddenly pronounced brief and completely unexpected speeches. His monologues were continuations of complex inner thoughts. He would exclaim, turning sharply to whoever happened by, “And you say capitalism, America, Europe! Private property!.. The lowliest darkie has a car!. But the dollar, let me tell you, is falling!”

“That means it has somewhere to fall,” Tsypin responded merrily. “That’s not so bad. But your shitty rouble has nowhere to fall.”

But Likhachev, plunged once more into silence, did not react.

Tsypin, on the contrary, was talkative and friendly. He liked arguing.

“The car’s not the point,” he said. “I like cars myself… The point is that under capitalism you have freedom. If you want to, you can drink from morning till night. If you want to, you can slave away around the clock. No ideological education. No socialist morality. Magazines with naked babes wherever you look. And then there’s the politics. Let’s say you don’t like some minister – fine. You write to the editor: the minister is full of shit! You can spit in any president’s kisser. To say nothing of the vice-president’s. But a car isn’t such a rare thing here, you know. I’ve had a Zaporozhets^[33] since 1960, and so what?”

And Tsypin had indeed bought himself a Zaporozhets. However, since he was a chronic drunkard, he didn’t drive it for months at a time. In November the car was covered with snow. The Zaporozhets turned into a small snow hill. The neighbourhood kids were always around it.

In the spring the snow melted. The Zaporozhets was as flat as a sports car. Its roof had been squashed by the kids’ sleds.

Tsypin seemed almost relieved. “I have to be sober at the wheel. But I can get home drunk in a taxi…”

Those were my teachers.

In due time we received a commission, a rather lucrative rush job. We were supposed to hack out a relief depiction of the great writer and scientist Mikhail Lomonosov^[34] for a new metro station. The sculptor Chudnovsky quickly prepared the model. The moulders cast it in plaster. We came to take a look at this business.

Lomonosov was shown in a suspicious-looking robe. In his right hand he held a rolled paper. In his left, the globe. The paper, as I understood it, symbolized creativity, and the globe, science.

Lomonosov himself looked well fed, feminine and unkempt. He resembled a pig. In the Stalin years, that’s how they depicted capitalists. Apparently, Chudnovsky wanted to reaffirm the primacy of the material over the spiritual.

But I liked the globe. Even though for some reason it showed the American side to the viewers.

The sculptor had diligently modelled miniature Cordilleras, Appalachians and Guiana Highlands^[35]. He hadn’t forgotten the lakes and rivers, either – Huron, Titicaca, Manitoba…

It looked rather strange. I doubt that such a detailed map of the Americas had existed in Lomonosov’s era. I mentioned this to Chudnovsky. The sculptor grew angry.

“You talk like a tenth-grader! My sculpture isn’t a visual aid! Before you is Bach’s Sixth Invention^[36], captured in marble. Rather, in plaster. The latest thing in metaphysical syntheticism!”

“Short and sweet,” said Tsypin.

“Don’t argue,” Likhachev whispered. “What’s it to you?”

Unexpectedly, Chudnovsky softened. “Maybe you’re right. Nevertheless, we’ll leave it as is. Every work must have a minimal dose of the absurd…”

We started work. First we worked at the studio. Then it turned out that it was a bigger rush. The station was going to be opened during the November holidays.

We had to finish up on-site. That is, underground.

Lomonosovskaya Station was in its completion stage. Stoneworkers, electricians and plasterers were at work. Innumerable compressors created a fiendish din. It smelt of burnt rubber and wet lye. Bonfires burned in metal barrels.

Our model was carefully lowered underground. It was set up on enormous oak scaffolds. A four-ton marble slab was suspended next to it on chains. You could make out Lomonosov’s approximate contours on it. The most delicate part of the work lay ahead.

And here an unexpected complication arose. The escalators were not working yet. To go up for vodka meant climbing six hundred steps.

The first day, Likhachev announced, “You go. You’re the youngest.”

I’d never known that the metro was so deep, especially in Leningrad, where the soil is damp and friable. Twice I had to stop to catch my breath. The Stolichnaya I brought back was consumed in a minute.