Back to the USSR.

Things are changing in the Soviet Union. Clerks are no longer rude on principle, anti-Stalinist books are being published there is even some good food

But why is Leningrad water unsafe? Why is sugar rationed? Why can't soap be bought in Moscow? Does Gorbachev want to know?

AS ON MY last visit to the Soviet Union, I arrived in Leningrad from Finland. The center of the city, magnificent in daytime, is haunting at midnight, during the "white nights" of summer when the sun sets but still shines, as Pushkin put it, in a "transparent dusk and moonless glitter." My first appointment the following morning was at the very beginning of the Nevsky Prospekt, in the offices of the literary-political journal Neva, which is serializing my book The Great Terror.

I should have said carlier that I was a few weeks out of my teens on my previous visit to the Soviet Union. Thus it is obviously unnatural that I should have meanwhile written a number of books on the major themes of the Soviet past which in most cases remain the only serious histories of these events in existence. The reason, of course, is that it was impossible to research, write, or publish truth in the USSR. Things have changed, The new Soviet historians have yet to emerge, but no doubt they soon will.

A well-known Russian writer said to me at a Moscow dinner party a few days later, "Can I pinch you to make sure you're here?" I'd been pinching myself once or twice. There and in Leningrad I had had several press interviews, been asked to go on television, given a number of talksin ,'act I was just back from addressing, in my vile Russian (from the very chair in which its great editor Tvardovsky had sat), the staff of the leading Moscow literary-political journal, Novy Mir, which is publishing excerpts of my book on collectivization, The Harvest of Sorrow. I spoke also to the staffs of other major periodicals about to publish such excerpts-Druzhba Narodov and Voprosy Istorii, the leading professional history journal. I met with publishers seeking the book rights. These books (listed on secret customs instructions as "anti-Soviet" but not "slanderous") were vilified or ignored until a year or so ago; though I have seldom met a Soviet intellectual or official who hadn't read The Great Terror.

For the intelligentsia, truth about the past, in which so many of their families perished, has long been an imperative need, satisfied only by the illegal reading of banned books such as my own. But this is only part of the story.

A third of a century ago, in 1956, I remember Professor Peter Wiles of the London School of Economics, who had just been in Budapest, being asked on television about the causes of the Hungarian Revolution. His answer was, "They were fed up with telling lies."

Then in Budapest, and now in Moscow, it is not only a matter of the intelligentsia and the truth about the past. Among people in general, throughout my visit the strongest impression was of their being exhausted and disgusted with the whole paraphernalia of falsehood and fallacious doctrine which had promised them, at the cost of endless sacrifice, a wonderful socialism; and which has in fact, as is now admitted, produced social and economic disaster. They are simply sick of Marxism, fetishism of the Party, the heroes of the revolutionary past, the whole boiling. Large majorities have wanted to change the name of the city of Gorki back to Nizhne-Novgorod. On Kalinin Avenue in Moscow, named for the long-serving president of the USSR, a woman said to me, "Why do we have to call our streets after that old dope?"

Their own ministers and other official spokesmen have been telling them that they rank fortieth or fiftieth among nations in per-capita GNP and in health care, that the deficit is twice as high as in America, that compared to the West half as much of a plant's income goes in the form of pay to its workers, that the ruble is almost worthless on the world market, that homelessness is far worse than in Western countries.

Phrases I heard several times were "in a normal country. . . ," "if this were a normal country . . . ," "in England or any other normal country . . ." There is this overwhelming feeling, at all levels, that deprivations otherwise unknown in civilized countries are being inflicted on them by the system and its bosses, the apparal.

A change from what has been reported until a year or so ago was the evaporation of the traditional khamstpoboorishness. In Leningrad my wife and I found none, in

Moscow and elsewhere very little, even in banks, shops, bureaus, offices. The old surly sabotage from anyone in a position to deny or delay a normal request had greatly diminished. One Leningrader explained this as a disavowat of the attitudes of the apparatchik. If so, it is a remarkable and perhaps indicative social change.

Vignettes: We are told of a return to having pets (though Literaturnaya Gazeta writes that even cats will not eat the Soviet sausage). Twice I saw handsome middle-class women each with two borzois. And we even bought a postcard of a basset hound (printed, it says on the back, in 4,850,000 copies, but perhaps that refers to the whole series).

-At a main crossroad on Gorki Street a car does not start when the light goes green. A shower has begun, and the owner is putting on his windshield wipers. When this is seen, the hooting dies down. (No one leaves the wipers on the windshield when parked, or they would be stolen.)

-"Iron Lady!" a cabdriver says admiringly of Margaret Thatcher. Her splendid performance on Moscow Television is still widely remembered. But she is also valued (with Ronald Reagan) for having taken the measure of the Brezhnevite policy and faced it down: "Her struggle and ours are the same," says an intellectual, just as admiringly.

-Fearful to tolerable food in some "tourist" hotels. Excellent meals at the Union of Writers, the Union of Cinematographers, and the (Leningrad) Union of Architects, at the Taganka Theater, and at a state "self-accounting" restaurant in Tbilisi.

I came across quite a few Western scholars and journalists. One lot-Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Frank Shakespeare, and others-are actually holding public seminars on conservatism. Unlike us, they are being put up in luxury in an official guest house. And they ride the exclusive middle lane in a large "town car." We go by metro, trolleybus, taxi, or foot. (One of us sees a huge black official Chaika roll by, preceded and followed by slightly smaller black Volgas: "That's what we call a Servant of the People," says our taxidriver.)

-Climbing the longest escalator in the world, temporarily out of order, in one of the Leningrad Metro stations.

-In underpasses, in Metro corridors, now and then an old woman begging, in white peasant babushka, sitting head down and hand out, "For the love of God," as in czarist times. Many passers-by are giving.

-A poet I had never met coming up to me outside an editorial office and, without a word, handing me a rose on a long stem.

In Leningrad the great Kazan Cathedral is still the Museum of Atheism. When I was last here, it was covered with garish posters showing, if I remember right, such scenes as Jesus waving a bottle of vodka and embracing Mary Magdalen. Nowadays all looks respectable, and foreigners are discouraged from entering. I didn't go, but a Jewish friend of mine did and (though himself an unbeliever) had a flaming row with the guard about the misrepresentation of Judaism. Elsewhere, I saw a sign "Former Cathedral, closed for restoration": someone had crossed out "Former." A student told me that at his institute the compulsory atheism classes were quite interesting, being in effect a study of comparative religion with only the occasional ritual denunciation. It was the (equally compulsory) classes in Marxism-Leninism which were the nadir of boredom.

Soviet television news: immediate coverage of the Fergana riots, with corpses and burning houses. Television in general: much dull stuff (a barman in one joint yelled "Propaganda!" at some official pronouncement); but also much iconoclastic debate, including the lively sessions of the Supreme Soviet. A continual opening of the minds of the masses? We shall see. Meanwhile, one is told that intellectuals who never watched TV have two sets, one for the husband, one for the wife, in case they miss anything.

Metaphysically, the whole trip was fascinating: physically less so. Readers will have come across many accounts of the ordinary horrors of a Soviet visit, such as the dusty emptiness of shops. Even the hard-currency Beriozkas, which most Russians can only dream of entering, are like combinations of a small, obsolete, ill-stocked supermarket and a souvenir shop in Atlantic City. As to purchases in rubles, GUM, the huge general store on Red Square, might be characterized as a place where in purgatory those Westerners who have shopped excessively in life are doomed to spend a million years. And Moscow is privileged: of a central food store in Vladimir, in the provinces, I would rather not speak.

But why? Why does Leningrad water contain intestinal parasites? Why is sugar rationed? Why can't soap-or even toothbrushes-be bought in Moscow? Why did our botel, the seventh or eighth best in the city, display such squalor in the rooming, the feeding, the ventilation? And why, incidentally, do decent Russians have to be met at the front door, while tarts and pimps enter freely? And if they do, why can't the pimps be required at least to look respectable-many would have been thrown out as excessively louche from a bar in the Marseille docks. The whores are more presentable-and can earn in half an hour the equivalent of two months' pay for a doctor. (There seem to be more pimps than tarts: a Russian explained that this was on the Soviet principle, "Two administrators for every worker.")

Still, at every hotel we were at, the lifts worked, the hot water was constant, and so forth. Why is it that in the USSR some things are efficient and others grotesquely incompetent? The Metro trains are fast and frequent-and cheap. The internal airlines too (though dreadful as to boarding, getting a seat, finding a safety belt, eating) were punctual and speedy. Books are beautifully produced. Streetcleaning is extremely good.

My impression was that though the economy as such is still in the trough of the wave, the efficiency is beginning, very slowly, to spread out into new areas, And also, not quite the same thing, that the "cooperative" shops-long disliked as profit-making by the man-in-the-street are just beginning to be accepted on their merits.

Suzdal, a couple of hundred miles northeast of Moscow, is a wonderful old showpiece of kremlin, cathedrals, monasteries, nunneries. Preservation is splendid. Modern buildings have to be low: a Russian told me that two architects had won a prize "for not spoiling the skyline." In the Monastery of St. Euthymius, a maze of lawns, onion-domed and "tent-roofed" churches, belfries and refectories, the guide shows us the former prison, used by the czars until 1907, and during the war the place Field Marshal von Paulus and his staff were held. And wasn't it, I ask, a "political isolator" in Stalin's time? "Yes, we are allowed to say that, but I have no names." Allowed, but not compelled (I have a few names).

Among the Suzdal phenomena there is, except when overlaid by the splendid bell-ringing, the continuous caw of rooks. I recall (having not thought about it before) a line from a short piece by that fine poet Andrei Voznesensky about a day at Suzdal with a girl, of which I published a translation in Encounter years ago: "In Suzdal there are . . . rooks." (The Russian word is usually translated "crows" but, like Sylvia Plath, I prefer "rooks.") The poem ends: "I live in Russia amid snows and saints."

I met Voznesensky 12 or 13 years ago in Washington. On our last day in Moscow our hostess says she hopes he will come to a little dinner at the Union of Cinematographers. And so he does. We talk of Suzdal and other matters. To the other side of me, I develop to my hostess a theory of Russian women, which so takes her fancy that she silences the other six, no easy task, in order to repeat it to them.

My view of Russian womanhood? Briefly that, more strikingly than with men, the long-drawn-out pressures of terror and suffering over the past decades have made the bad worse and the good better. Chekhov's selfish and shallow girls have developed into the awful Soviet "citizennesses." A recent article in one of the Moscow journals-by a woman-describes as perfectly natural an old shoemaker, at work secretly after a Brezhnevite decree against such activity, being denounced by local female busybodies. Indeed tourists, until quite recently, used to describe such women coming up and, without any authority at all, forbidding them to take photographs.

But (I argued) Chekhov's fine women characters have, as it were, been further purified by the flames and are deeply impressive in their gentle strength. There is less of the Western superficial sexiness, but what seemed a profounder and more relaxed feeling of the reciprocation between men and women. And coping, even now, with the steep hostile gradient against which ordinary Soviet life is ted, they put to shame some of the Westerners in the tourist hotels ("Oh Joseph, you know I have to have freshly pressed orange juice . . .").

Of course, such attitudes, if in less purblind form, are to be found to some extent in all of us. Any Anglo-Saxon visiting the Soviet Union should feel that he or she is unfairly exempt, saved by our culture's past history and politics. Even with the maximum empathy we can produce, there remains that barrier: they have actually faced the horrible past, and will have to face the unpredictable future. We have not and (presumably) will not.

When it comes to spoiling skylines, the five or six tall 1950s structures looming around central Moscow would take some beating. Their style is often called "Stalinist wedding-cake"; but that gives an impression, no doubt of tastelessness, but yet of delicacy or sentimentality. On the contrary, these buildings look above all like heavy projections of inhuman power. They remind me of the cover of a science-fiction magazine of the 1930s showing, in full color, fortresses from which implacable alien invaders have established their grip on earth's cities, ready with beamweapons at the pinnacles to burn down any revolt. Such a cover would combine the sense of mere unarguable power with the idea of a totally non-human style, but nevertheless a style. Perhaps Stalin took it, or his advisors did, from a 1931 issue of Wonder Stories. In any case, I found it sinister and oppressive in the extreme.

In those stories, the yoke of apparently invincible aliens was usually, in the long run, overthrown by human effort. Stalinism, if not yet its artifacts, seems to be dead or dying-though death-throes can be dangerous.

The nationalities problem presents enormous dangers, of course. It is not in principle insoluble (except in a few special cases like Nagorno-Karabakh). But the political and psychological obstacles are hard and tricky. Meanwhile it was odd (for example) to see outside the government building of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic a man collecting signatures on a petition for total independence (even though most Georgians want to combine this with protection from the "Mussulmans").

In tbe Arbat, Moscow's crowded literature-cum-shopping street, we saw 15 or twenty Ukrainian Uniate Catholics in line on hunger-strike, bearing banners demanding the legalization of their suppressed and terrorized church. The crowds came up and spoke to them, apparently with sympathy. (But they were not there the next day.)

As to the Soviet bloc, one foreign-policy official said, "We have so much to do at home that we are neglecting Eastern Europe-to the benefit of both parties." Still, among the Soviet and Soviet-bloc nations there are so many explosive possibilities that even the best of Western policies and the most skillful and sensible tactics in Moscow cannot guarantee a successful evolution. But we need not despair yet.

The economy is even more refractory. Its total collapse does not seem an immediate threat. Starvation is not imminent-the food is adequate though (except for the bread) of miserable quality. One man said to me that the notorious Soviet sausage alone would turn every rational Russian into a vegetarian-except that there are so few vegetables (and even less fruit). But the pressures are building up. Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev has said that if the food problem is not solved in two or three years, the present leadership might as well give in. And he strongly implied (what some economists have written openly) that it would be succeeded by an old-style Brezhnevite regime built on total rationing.

The events in Peking have much shaken tbe intelligentsia. Russians have every right to be pessimists. And the fear of something not quite the same as the Chinese experience, but nevertheless devastating, is widespread. More than once, and from different strata, one heard the idea that civil war could erupt. In the papers, writers have told of praying every day against the "merciless, mindless" rebellions of the People, the dreaded Narod, which Pushkin describes. It is certainly true that even now feudal-style attitudes exist on both sides. My wife and I saw several examples. All the same, the "people" voted for the intelligentsia against the apparat.

But most widely feared is a military-reactionary regime backed by the anti-Semitic Russian national extremists. In an interview with one of the Moscow journals I was asked my view of Gorbachev and answered that he seemed at present to represent the best chance of peaceful evolution. It is, indeed, tempting providence to think this of a single mortal: as Carlyle wrote of the French Revolution: "Had Mirabeau lived one other year!" Which is not to say that Gorbachev has a complete understanding of all the problems, or a perfect set of solutions to them, or the prospect of putting those solutions fully into practice. Such a politician has never existed anywhere on earth. Nor is it to say that he has made no political mistakes, and will make none in the future. And, yes, there are other potential leaders who grasp the need for radical reform. But the difficulties and dangers are so great that his personal authority and political skills, if he does not switch or falter, could just make tbe difference in a critical stage of the hoped-for Soviet transition at present still in the balance.

I was more than once told in Moscow, and quite truly, of the Russian lack of true political experience. This is indeed a crux. On the other side one can put a few intangibles. First (and no one could have been sure of this until lately), the fearful blows struck at the population did not, after all, succeed in destroying its spirit. On the contrary, a deep (though long only half-conscious) solidarity of rejection was created, a powerful resource ready for cooperation in a new order. Second, the intelligentsia has been almost totally disabused of the Marxist or any other utopian fanaticism.

On a different note, soon after the elections earlier this year there was a photograph in Moscow News of a girl in Leningrad carrying a poster with "Cross Out the Single Name!" What I found most striking was that she looked happy and relaxed, neither terrified nor defiant. And they did cross out the single name!So that, as Leningraders of all strata were proud to tell us, every one of the apparat's nominees in the city was defeated.

The odds against peaceful evolution may seem high, and at least we must all be prepared for dangerous possibilities. At best we can hardly expect smooth progress: though a few outbursts and disasters and setbacks can be contained. But given a fair degree of luck, and of political skill, there remains a reasonably good chance that the long transition only now starting may end in a resumption of Russia and the other Soviet countries into a politically and economically cooperative world order.

So far, in both international and internal affairs, there is an agenda. But in both we are still at the stage when the agenda has not yet been turned into substantial action. It is not the case that "the old world is dead and the new incapable of being born": but the difficulties of the transition remain. In foreign affairs, we should welcome the "new thinking"; but we should act on it only as, and when, and to the degree that, it is translated into practice. If we respond prematurely, the Soviets will have no need for improvement. If we respond too late, or inappropriately, new policies may be abandoned as unfruitful.

At any rate, as Orwell long ago predicted, "the Soviet Union will either democratize or perish," and the next few years will be decisive. Soviet traditionalism has been intellectually defeated; its economic system has been proved non-viable and its political system obsolete. But it still has powerful defenders, and is supported by powerful interestgroups; and a political coup is possible. If I am reasonably hopeful it is in part for historical reasons, but in part because this seemed to be supported by the pulse of the country, to the degree that I was able to feel it on this trip.