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The driver for the first trip along the Oranela was Igor Timofeevich Skvortsov. It was he who five years ago brought the old Bresh tram out of its place of retirement in the tram park and all this time had been driving it along a tourist route. On the eve of the anniversary of the Petersburg Tramway I went to see the man responsible for this "time machine".

I opened a metal "gate" and mounted the platform from where I could glance into the driver's cabin, just as it had been years ago. Compared with today's cabins, it is rather Spartan. The usual control handle for the left hand is there, but here all similarity ends. There isn't even any seat, which was to appear much later. The cold and dust, rain and snow were for a long time the enemies of the driver, until the advent of the electric heater in the cabin.

In the carriage running the length of the ceiling above the long wooden benches there are metal bars with leather straps hanging from them. The straps were for the passengers who used to hang off them in clusters right up until the 1960s, when the last trams of this design finally disappeared from the streets of Petersburg.

The very first carriages were divided by a barrier into two compartments, first and second class. Tickets cost six and four kopecks, respectively. The door to the first class compartment was operated by the conductor who sat in one comer. When the tram was crowded he could flip up his seat and carry on with his work standing up to make more room.

The regulations on the old tramway were stricter than they are today. It was strictly prohibited to "Smoke and Dirty" the carriages. Trams were off limits to "chimney sweeps, herring salters, millers, painters and persons in a state of inebriation". People entered by the rear doors and left through the front. Some passengers were permitted to enter through the front doors. For a long time it was a special privilege. There were even reduced price tickets, which, said our guide, were given to people like the ballerina Galina Ulanova.

Next to the conductor was a mark on the wall, measuring one metre from the ground. Children who were shorter than this were allowed to travel free. The kids of those days who couldn't afford to travel inside the tram had their own special "privilege" — they could hang on outside.

Our tram uses a disused ring line. Tourists from Moscow, from the Urals and the Ukraine come here to study it. They are all especially interested in the famous footplace that people used to perch on outside.

It was not an easy going for the tram in Petersburg. It was introduced here quite a long time after other cities. The City Duma wanted a tramway but could not get permission to lay rails along the streets as this was in the power of the horse tramway owners to grant and they of course did not want a'ny-thing to do with the "electrical competitor".

Although the very first tram did appear in Petersburg in the 19th century, it ran over the iced-up Neva River in winter, the first one to run on dry land did not appear until this century.

The tram is a hard worker. It carries freight and to this day works between the factories on Vasilevsky Island. It has carried millions of passengers. The Petersburg tramway is a fighter too, having worked throughout most of the Siege taking troops and munitions to the Front. It only stood idle from December 1941 to March 1942 when there was not enough electric power in the city. On April 15, 1942 it restarted its passenger service.

Today there are more than a thousand comfortable trams plying over 60 routes in the city. If all the rails were laid end to end, they would reach Moscow. These are the sort of statistics that come to mind at anniversaries. The rest of the time our friend the tram does not get from us as much as a word of thanks.

RUSSIAN LITERATURE — PAST AND PRESENT

There is Russian Soviet poetry and prose, just as there is poetry and prose of the other peoples living in the USSR. It is an illusion, however, to talk about Soviet literature as a single entity somehow uniting all these various literatures. For many years writers, simply to survive, were forced to compromise with their conscience. Moreover, they compromised with their writing, which was equally destructive. Some managed to adapt well, other sold out (neither the former, nor the latter were saved from the Russian roulette of Stalinist terror), still others committed suicide. But the grief brought by this torture coupled with the arms twisted by the censor could hardly serve to cement the Tower of Babel of Soviet belles lettres.

This tower was erected on orders from above instead of collective compromises. The orders demanded that writers adhere, not honestly but blindly, to the general line. It zigzagged incessantly, appearing like some joke on its most orthodox believers. These constantly changing orders tested the extent of the believer's baseness rather than the strength of his conviction.

Soviet literature was the child of the Socialist Realist worldview reinforced by the weakness of writers dreaming of the good life, fame, and preserving their standing with the State authorities, which were anointed, if not by God himself, then by a Universal Idea. In the opinion of the early 20th century philosopher Vasily Rozanov there were several elements that lay at the foundation of Soviet Literature. The power of the State and the weakness of human nature, for one. Also, the social complexes underlying Russian literature and the orgy of loutishness that followed the Revolution and was embodied in the Utopia of a "cultural revolution". When they cleared the "scaffolding" away in the 1920s, there was good reason to gasp at the result.

This grandiose tower of Soviet Socialist Realism designed according to Stalin and Gorky's blueprint was a baroque structure with plenty of room for all. It survived for several decades and even reproduced itself in other neighbouring Socialist cultures.

In the last years of its life, having recovered from the Stalinist shock, Soviet Literature existed in three main currents. These three trends were "Official", "Village" and "Liberal" prose. Each of them was in the grip of a crisis. Official literature operated according to the principles of "Party Spirit" established in the 1930s and 1940s. In its essence this literature passionately strove towards goals that were outside of literature. Its most infamous task was the construction of a "New Man". Socialist Realism taught the reader to view reality in the process of revolutionary transformation. It preferred the future to the present, oriented itself towards overcoming the hardships of everyday life, and was full of grand promises.

During the Brezhnev period corruption infected all society. It pervaded Socialist Realism as well. If during the Stalinist years the writer served Socialist Realism, then under Brezhnev Socialist Realism began to serve the interests of the writers. This shift was not so apparent from outside, but to those caught up in it, it undermined the very idea of selfless service. Moreover, it contributed to the relentless degradation of the entire system that eventually forced society to seek another societal model. In this way, the womb of senile Brezhnevism conceived the preconditions for Perestroika.

In those days the question of how far a Brezhnev-era writer such as Georgy Markov believed in what he wrote was never asked: it seemed indecent. Such questions were not discussed. Moreover, they were not even thought about. Because of social schizophrenia there appeared a peculiar kind of writer who was a spokesman for State thinking at his writing desk and an adherent of the consumer society at his country house. But what has this to do with literature? A great deal. It is not entirely insignificant that Official Literature had a readership of hundreds of thousands. It formulated their tastes, even to the extent of manipulating their way of thinking. In a closed society, the scope of each citizen's rights is a function of his social position. The elite echelon of official writers (known as literary "Nomenklatura") often speculated on forbidden or semiforbidden themes. This brand of Official Literature is referred to here as "Secretarial'Literature". Only influential secretaries of the Writers' Union could produce it, since they occupied positions secure from both critics and censors.

These taboo subjects included: Stalin, the determinants of the Russian national character (here Official Literature overlapped the conservative flank of Village Prose), the collectivization of agriculture, the dissident movement, emigrating, youth problems, and so on. It goes without saying that Official Literature deliberately distorted these themes and intentionally misled the reader. It monopolized these themes in the censored press which appeared side by side with the piquant themes of Soviet intelligence abroad or the Af-gan war. The mass reader, starving for information, devoured these "secretarial" works with genuine enthusiasm. He found satisfaction in partaking in forbidden and "hot" issues, even though he ended up with a muddled head for his labours.

With the advent of Perestroika Official Writers themselves grew confused. They viewed Perestroika as some kind of Party maneuver whose hidden meaning ^hey were unable to decipher..Above all, Perestroika stripped Official Literature of its ideological role and its inviolability. The child of a closed society, Official Literature was able to exist only in a hermetically sealed environment. Now, however, liberal critics had grown courageous

enough to deride it frequently, pointing out how feeble, shallow, and stereotyped it was.

Official Literature became an intransigent opponent of change. One proof of this opposition were speeches by the writer Yury Bondarev. Bondarev likened the new forces in our literature to the Nazi troops who overran the Soviet Union in 1941. On the lips of a former front-line soldier, Bondarev's comparison was a pretty sharp accusation.

As Official Literature was falling into decay, it could have well taken as its theme the Shakespearean tragedy occurring among the older generation. Some people in their 70s had suddenly grasped the futility of their earthly existence. Enlightenment had come too late. They had wasted their lives in worshipping false ideals, while scoffing at belief in any metaphysical values. However, Official Literature was too weak to cope with genuine conflicts. It preferred its trusty weapons of political intrigue and the old-comrade network. Official Literature thus found itself miscast in the role of an opposition, a role it could not fulfill, for it was essentially devoid of principles and operated only on others' authority. However, it was prepared to search for new paths, by aligning itself with the Russian nationalist movement — which, in fact, it had always secretly favoured. As it made advances to the nationalist camp it appeared rather ludicrous — after all it once sang the glories of Internationalism! Yet, even while laughing at its misadventures, one had to remember that should the process of reform be halted, it would be hard to imagine more zealous ideologues of counter-reformation than "Secretarial" writers.

To be sure there remained the path of repentance, but it was chosen only by a handful of official writers, and hardly the most representative ones. Others preferred another version of self-justification. They argued that they took part in the persecution of dissident writers — from Pasternak down to the participants in the "Metropol" almanac — on "orders" from above. Official Literature broke up into sections and decayed but this actually had little relevance, if any, for the future. However, as it declined, this resulted in tangible changes in the literary-social hierarchy of values.

The degeneration of Village Prose had greater significance for literature, as it involved more gifted and socially important writers. Village Prose arose in the post-Stalinist years, describing the horrific conditions in the Russian countryside after it was subjected to ruthless collectivization and the miseries of WW II and the post-war period. It created portraits, sometimes brilliant ones, of village eccentrics and home-spun philosophers, bearers of popular wisdom, and it contributed to the revival of national self-consoiousness. The central figure of this literature was the Pious Woman who despite all the hardships of Soviet life remained true to her religious instincts. She was to be found, for example, in Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryona's House".

In the 1970s, Village Prose flourished, as Victor Astafiev, Vasily Belov and Valentin Rasputin succeeded in establishing an independent school, under the banner of "Patriotism". Precisely this patriotism attracted Official Writers, although it was not sufficiently pro-establishment and this often led to misunderstandings. Nonetheless, Official Prose tried to draw Village Writers into its ideological ranks and coerce them into joining in the fight with the West. Establishment showered them with State prizes and medals. It did not always work; Village Prose had its own religious and political agenda, even boldly taking part in the ecological movement.

In time, however, things began to change. The shift began even before Perestroika, but with its arrival it became more profound. Soviet Society took a pro-Western turn in its development. This happened spontaneously and without official sanction. It also determined the social basis for reform and brought about a clash between the Village Writers and society. Village Prose began to expose and condemn rather than to extol. It had three "sworn enemies".

Strangely enough, the first new enemy was woman. Whereas before the female figure was a positive heroine as the "Righteous Woman", now, in the role of a sensual and even promiscuous wife, she was portrayed in the spirit of the old Orthodox doctrine, as "Satan's seed". The second enemy was youth and youth culture. Village Writers bristled with a pathological hatred of rock 'n roll ("spiritual AIDS"). They regarded aerobics with equal venom. Village Prose, much like ancient folklore, demarcated "us" and "them" — two categories of people who dressed, ate and thought in entirely different ways and were ontologically incompatible. "Them" included Jews and Non-Russians in general. This was a delicate topic for Village Writers. They discussed it in soft tones, ambiguously and evasively, but incessantly nonetheless, just as the "Pamayat" society did it in its declarations. Village Writers were seriously alarmed by the Jewish influence on Russia's fate. They had a unique brand of racism which was shaped by a historical desire to shift the blame for all national catastrophes onto "them". They wanted to find an enemy and through hatred to sublimate their own national inferiority complex.

In other words, Village Prose was not so much a thematic school, but a way of viewing the world. Traditionally in Russia, as in other countries with a large farm population such as Canada and Poland, this literature was infected with a messianic spirit. This disease was a strange combination of a national superiority complex, bred on ethnic and religious exclusiveness and an inferiority complex. Its language was saturated with dialecticisms. At the same time it was highly impassioned and induced a headache even when it described the real tragedies of the Revolution and Collectivization. The Village Writers appeared to reject "Soviet" values, but their apocalyptic tone drowned out everything else, exhausting the reader with its total lack of taste.

They saw their saviour in the foggy, romantic monarchist-religious dream of a theocratic order. They would replace Socialist Realist fantasies with the no less monstrous idea in which hatred reigned over love. It was no accident that this literature was in decay. As was demonstrated by literary history, a literature bitten by hatred inevitably destroyed itself, either scaring off or amazing the unbiased reader.

One serious problem of Russian literature has always been hypermoral-ism, a disease which exerts tremendous moral pressure on the reader. It can be found even in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and other classics of the 19th century. It had often been considered the distinguishing trait of Russian prose. No doubt the foreign reader viewed this hypermoralism as amusing and exotic. Yet even to me, it is something alien: that is the demand that writers be socially committed grew so great that it all too often distracted Russian literature from aesthetic concerns and drew it into the realm of sermonizing. They often assessed literature by the acuteness and social significance of its topics.

Village and Liberal Prose, each in its own way, suffered from this hyper-moralist disease.

Liberal Prose, the child of the Khrushchev Thaw, is an honest movement and has always been. Its main concern was to tell as much truth as possible in its fight with the censor, who tried to permit as little truth as possible. Censorship was a formative influence for this Liberal school. It fed an addiction among Liberal Writers to an obtrusive reliance on allusions. Similarly, readers grew addicted to a "treasure-hunt" for hints, to seeking out places where the writer had his tongue in his cheek. The result was that writers got carried away with all this tongue-in-cheek parody and forgot how to think.

Liberal Prose hailed the advent of Perestroika and played, at least at first, the role that it had always sought: that of public prosecutor judging society by the laws of morality and common sense. But that joy was short-lived: unlike Khrushchev's Thaw, Perestroika proved to be a bottomless well, in which many works that not long ago seemed remarkably bold sank without trace.

Curiously, a large proportion of Dissident Literature originated in Liberal Prose, which had over-estimated the softness of post-Stalinist censorship. In other words, many works fell into the dissident category by accident. Yet, having shed all censorship restrictions under the aegis of Western publishers, the significant majority of these writers suffocated from too much oxygen. Logically speaking, the Liberal Writers should have blessed their comfortable bondage; in fact, the more intelligent ones did just that.

But now, with freedom at home (albeit still incomplete), the boldest works of literature aged with amazing speed. Examples of such works are Anatoly Rybakov's "Children of the Arbat" or Mikhail Shatrov's liberal dramas.

An enormous number of works intended to be "Liberal" died, carrying away decades of writing by talented writers. I remember the dramatic moment when poet after poet stepped up to the "first" open microphone, in a Moscow literary club to recite their beloved liberal poems written in great secret during the Brezhnev era. It turned out that the young audience didn't need these poets, they simply hounded them off the stage with an ironic flood of applause.

"A poet in Russia is more that just a poet", Yevtushenko, a liberal Soviet poet, once remarked, hoping to extol the poet's role here and not understanding that actually a poet in such conditions is less than a poet, because he eventually degenerates. In general, a writer in Russia had to fulfill several functions at once: to be priest, prosecutor, sociologist, economist, mystic, and expert in matters of love and marriage. While he was busy being everything else, he was least of all a writer. He was often unable to feel the particular texture of literary language or of a writer's figurative and often paradoxical way of thinking. He would rent out a style for each particular job as one rents a car, it was nothing more than a vehicle to reach his social destination.

This is why Russian critics were rather suspicious of irony, seeing it as violating the serious view of literature as a social enlightener. This is why literary functionaries were annoyed to see any playfulness in art, just as they were annoyed by Solzhenitsyn's political sedition. The socially-oriented literature of resistance, both in its liberal and dissident varieties, completed the social mission which literature, alas, was forced to assume during the era of a closed State. But in the post-utopian Russia, it's time we returned to literature as such.

Today we are witnessing the emergence of "another", "alternative" literature. It is opposed to the "old" literature chiefly by its readiness to communicate with any culture — even the most remote in time or space. Its aim is to create a polysemantic and polystylistic structure, a structure that would draw support from Russian philosophy of the turn of the century, from the existentialism of world art, from the philosophical-anthropological discoveries of the 20lh century that Soviet culture preferred to ignore. Moreover, this new literature also draws strength from adapting to the conditions of free self-expression and rejecting opportunistic political journalism.

Soviet Literature was burdened by a social commitment of either the official or dissident nature. It has come to an end and {his in fact offers an opportunity to revive the ethnic literatures throughout the former Soviet Union, including, of course, Russian Literature. The first roots of this "alternative" literature give cause for hope however modest they may now be.

13 Зак. 101

"ENEMY SYNDROME": THE ANATOMY OF A SOCIAL DISEASE

Question: Why are so many people in this country bent on creating "enemy images"?

Answer: There are several reasons, I guess. One of them is that for centuries the peoples inhabiting this country lived under an authoritarian state.

Authoritarian rule is seen as a salvation when people are poor and the state is poor. Poverty is the thing that makes people seek "monolithic" unity. They need it to survive. This tendency is also the result of a low level of education, the lack of information and the state of confusion created by the nature and scale of problems that require prompt and resolute action. It is also the awareness of an external threat, real or potential, and the need to be ready to rep'el an attack.

Russia, for instance, was always either besieged by enemies, who tried to tear her apart, or herself conquered new territories, seeking access to seas and oceans from Moscow to the Baltic and Black Seas, the Pacific and the Arctic. It often nearly disintegrated as a result of internecine strife or social upheavals, but later pulled herself together. She has had so many enemies to fight against. And all those wars have remained in people's memories. They have molded our national consciousness and our national character. You may lose and you may win, but the fight stays in your memory anyway.

Russian history has always had a lot of this. Psychologically, it is our crippling heritage. The same applies to the decades of Stalinism, when millions of people were forced to seek out and destroy "enemies". A great many people perished in that grisly hunt for dissidents and many more became spiritually impoverished as a result of the constant hatred, spying on one another and struggle for power. Fear turned many into cynics or cowards.

Such is the price we paid for that witchhunt. It still drives on those who hope to turn the clock back and regain power, honours and privileges. These people have no principles or morality. They are like autumn flies that bite you fiercely before they go to hide in the snow. However, the wave of reaction that is now trying to clear the way for a rightward shift will ebb away in the end. It will end up in farce.

Time is cruel and merciless, unfortunately, for all. Yet, it is also beneficial because the human memory along with time itself records people's behaviour, exploits, betrayals, intelligence and ignorance. It remembers the petty intrigues of nonentities who harassed their contemporaries. They did it out of envy and servility. That was in the last century, and during the past 80 years we have been fighting all the time: in the absence of an enemy, we invented one.

These are genetically inherited factors. But there are also subjective factors, such as hatred, inordinate ambition and vanity. One should also add to

these stupidity, ignorance and arrogance. Against this general historical and social background one should see absolutely concrete things, such as the actual relationships between different people, who can be mean and dishonest, kind and honest, emotionally involved and indifferent.

Such is reality. And reality molds consciousness. Consciousness may be destructive sometimes: it may create social groups and forces who need an enemy, no matter who it may be. Such consciousness cripples the soul of the new generations, which under certain circumstances may also feel the need to create some sort of an "enemy image".

Who needs all this? What for? This is needed by all who are angry and lazy and jealous, who would not hesitate to trample anyone underfoot for the sake of their own career and ambitions. It is convenient for a money-losing factory to blame suppliers for its own faults. It is convenient for an incompetent or lazy manager to claim the existence of all sorts of "conspirators" and "intriguers". It is convenient for a person to blame anyone except himself for his own failures and incompetence.

True, there are different things that make people behave in this manner. One can make another person's life hell by harassing him or spreading rumors about him. Unfortunately, this desire to find an "enemy" is part of human nature. Many writers hi Russia, especially Dosfbyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov identified this in Man and despised him accordingly.

The authoritarian way of life suppresses human individuality and independence. It has thousands of ways of doing this. The suppression begins at kindergarten and school. This fact has long been the subject of public concern. It continues at university and vocational school, in the army and at work.,All that happened when we were in bad need of democracy. We still do not have enough democracy. We should have no illusions on this score.

As a result a person fails to learn a great deal of what he might have learned professionally and from the point of view of his general culture. If one lacks culture it is the result of lack of skills. No wonder many try to make up for these shortcomings with vanity, arrogance, preoccupation with other people's faults and failures and the search for "objective reasons" and all sorts of "enemies". This is the reason why some people are so fond of lies, abusing others whom they don't like and doing other atrocious things.

Is it possible to change this situations? Certainly. We can change it if we raise the level of general and individual culture of human relations. If we fail to do so, we shall have a lot of trouble, because there are too many pyroma-niacs around who are playing with matches and may set our home on fire.

Question: Why is this social disease getting worse (there are many signs showing that it is)?

13*

Answer: Perestroika is a veritable revolution. It has brought about many new and sometimes incomprehensible and unexpected phenomena, which many cannot accept. This agitates people and makes them nervous. They face a choice: either try to understand these phenomena or reject them. The most important thing is that perestroika requires constructive action and many people are unable to take such action, because for many years they have been taught not to.

As soon as it became clear that the old methods and practices were ineffective, it turned out that there were people in all social groups, including the intelligentsia, who were interested, for one reason or another, in discrediting the new policies.

We set out to curb the powers of the economic bureaucracy and encourage independent producers, including the co-operatives, but look what has happened. At first the l.ocal government officials gave the green light to cooperatives that sought to make quick profit by dishonest means. Such cooperatives had more money and were more "compliant". I know of dozens, hundreds of cases when such co-operatives were registered in a couple of days, while it took months for industrial co-operatives to overcome all the bureaucratic barriers.

However, when the first kind provoked a public outcry, the authorities cracked down on all co-operatives, and the industrial ones were the first to go. This is just to show how perestroika was sabotaged by the bureaucrats and also an example of a new search for "enemies".

As soon as things became a little more difficult for the black-market dealers, corrupt officials and the shadow economics and politics, there appeared all sorts of social provocations. All these people and groups need some justification for their egotistic and sometimes criminal interests and actions. They all need an "enemy" and when the situation becomes dangerous, their anxiety to find such an enemy increases.