Republican Party Reptile(15)

Whatever the official Soviet attitude toward us may have been, the private Russian attitude was manifestly clear. The Russians, when they’d had a few drinks, would repeatedly make declarations starting, “I am not an anti-Semite, but. . .” And, at least to judge by last names, many of our tour members were Jewish.

One of the crew, in the most confidence-imparting stage of drunkenness, told me, “You know Brezhnev is married to a Jew. Many members of the Presidium are married to Jews. This is why we cannot be so firm with the Israelis.”

But the peaceniks and the leftists were blind to this, or passed it off as anti-Zionism only. Their only serious concern was with the CIA. They were convinced there must be a CIA agent aboard. I suggested the fat man, surely an agent provocateur. But they’d decided he was okay, since he’d apologized to Nick. Someone said the leftists suspected me—that coat and tie. I asked Nikolai who he thought it was. “All of them,” he laughed.





MONDAY, JULY 26


I think the Russians had decided both privately and officially that these Volga peace cruisers were inconsequential people, unable to influence American policy in any important way.

When we docked in Togliatti, the leftists were very eager to see the Lada automobile plant there, one of the most modern factories in the Soviet union  . They were swooning to meet genuine “workers.” But it wasn’t on the schedule. Our Intourist guides made a halfhearted attempt to convince the local Intourist office to allow a tour, but it was too big a group, too many officials would have to be contacted, it would take too long to arrange, and so on. The leftists were pretty sore, and went so far as to make no excuses for the Soviet system this time.

But meanwhile Nikolai had somehow got in touch with the Lada plant management and informed them that I worked for Car and Driver magazine. I’m only a contributing editor there, and even if I were editor in chief I wouldn’t have much sway over the FTC, DOT, and Reagan administration executive orders that keep the Russians from exporting cars to us. But I was a representative of the real world nonetheless. And that afternoon there was a big chauffeured car waiting at dockside to take me, the only admitted Republican on board, for a personal tour of the Lada plant.





ALL THE REST OF THE DAYS ON

THE TRIP


By Tuesday the 27th I’d come to the end of the tour, at least as a sentient being. There were still two days left to the cruise and six days left in Russia, but I was gone.

The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made of concrete. I saw buildings with the facades falling off that were still under construction. And everything that’s well built turns out to be built by somebody else. Moscow Airport was built by West Germans, the Grand Hyatt knockoff by the French, the Lada plant by Italians, the very boat was made in Austria.

The air pollution in the cities is grotesque. No machine seems to run well. And the whole of commerce visible on the Volga consisted of carting sand and phone poles from one port to the next.

The New Mexicans had a contest: a bottle of champagne to be won by the first person who saw a crane with an operator in it. No one won. Every building site we saw was three-fourths deserted. I asked Orlonsky where the workers were, but he turned sly on me. “Perhaps they are at lunch.” It was 10:30 in the morning.

What little of the old and charming architecture is left is rotting, sitting neglected, waiting to be torn down for its lack of modernism. Russia stinks of dirty bodies and evil Balkan tobacco and a disinfectant they must distribute by the tank car daily, some chemical with a moldy turned-earth stench as though vandals had been at it in the graveyard or mice had gotten into the mushroom cellar.

In the end, every little detail starts to get to you—the overwhelming oppressiveness of the place, the plain godawfulness of it.

We put in at Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin. Not an easy city to find your way around in. Take Lenin Avenue to Lenin Street; go straight to Lenin Square, then left along Lenin Boulevard to Lenin Place and Lenin Lane. Don’t miss the monument to Lenin’s sister’s dog.

And there’s no reason to find your way around. There’s nothing there, anyway. We were shitfaced drunk in the bar by noon. The New Mexicans and I were crazed now with the desire for a cheeseburger, mad for the sound of a pedal steel guitar, would have killed for a six-pack of Budweiser and a ride down the interstate at 100 miles an hour in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. But there was nothing to be done, nothing to do but drink. So we drank and told jokes: old jokes, bad jokes, dirty jokes.