Philip Marsden - The Spirit-Wrestlers

PHILIP MARSDEN

The Spirit-Wrestlers

And Other Survivors of the Russian Century

For Charlotte,
whose expertise made it all possible

For the best part of one post-Soviet Moscow winter I travelled in to the Lenin Library and read stories of Cossacks and Old Believers and plotted a journey to the south.

It was a long winter. Over the months it drained the colour from the citys public face from the fur-coated bundles on the metro trains, the ranks of anonymous buildings, the milky skies. The only exception was upriver from the Lenin Library where a host of orange hard-hats swarmed over the reconstruction of the cathedral.

Of that improbable building, nothing had existed until New Years Day when the Patriarch of Moscow and All The Russias, Aleksei II, bent his patriarchal back and laid the first stone. Originally the cathedral had been built to commemorate Russias victory over Napoleons Grande Armee and dedicated to he whom they had most to thank: Christ the Saviour. It had been a vast building, big enough for ten thousand worshippers. But in 1931 Stalin dynamited it to make room for his Palace of the Soviets. The palace was to be thirteen hundred feet high, topped by a statue of Lenin so large that even his index finger would be nineteen feet long until the planners realised the clay beneath would not support such a structure. An open-air swimming-pool was put there instead.

For reasons I could not fathom, the Lenin Library issued me with a readers card usually reserved for eminent professors and high-ranking government officials. The card gave me access to Zal no. 1, where pallid scholars sat all day hunched over volumes from which they never looked up. They never noticed, therefore, the little marks of privilege that distinguished Zal no. 1 from all the other zals the succulents and ferns on top of each desk, the bun-haired woman who watered them, or the billows of pink curtains which bordered thirty-foot-high windows. Too much of my time, however, was spent gazing out of those windows at the golden cupolas of the Kremlin, and out beyond them to the factory chimneys which leaked streams of grey smoke into the grey sky.

In September 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte stood at the Kremlin windows. He was gazing out at the city he had conquered. It was ablaze. Whole quarters were subsiding beneath flames which had been ignited by the Russians themselves. He saw at once that the fire was the herald of great disasters.

What extraordinary resolve! he muttered. What men! These are Scythians!

The emperor knew the passage in Book IV of Herodotuss Histories in which the Scythians defeat the Persians by drawing the enemy back into their own territory, then destroying everything.

But talk of Russians and Scythians put me on my guard. It filled me with the suspicion Id reserved for glib phrases like Asiatic cruelty and the Slavic soul. Pitfalls for outsiders, I concluded, and steering round them, aimed for the dissenters and misfits of the Russian fringe.

There, by chance, I stumbled on a mystical movement known as Scythianism. Instigated at the time of the Revolution, it counted Aleksandr Blok among its devotees, and in his poem Scythians he wrote: Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asiatics /Russia is a sphinx, triumphant and mournful.

Several years earlier, I had been to St Petersburg for the first time. It was mid-summer and the air was thick with flies. The citys benign grid of canals, its cliff-like faades, its by-the-yard classicism left me unmoved. Only in the collection of Scythian gold in the Hermitage was there any sense of the vigour which Peters capital so lacked. The collection had been gathered -largely by looting Cossacks from graves in the Ukraine and the south of Russia. At the time I had looked at it with awe, at those miraculous curled-up Scythian wolves, the running golden stags, all the fluency and ease of the animal style, and saw no relevance at all to the present. But after reading Blok, I refiled those Scythian beasts with the things about the Russian winter that were conspiring to send me south.

For five years, Id been skirting around Russia. Id spent long periods in Belarus, in Lithuania, in the stony uplands of Armenia. Id ambled through Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Id watched like everyone else the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, sensing that what happened in Russia would somehow define the new century just as it had, more than any other country on earth, defined the old. But the more time I spent here, at its centre, the more I felt drawn back to its rim, to its burning radicals, to its remoter villages and the ambiguities of its fraying southern border.

In mid-January, the temperature dropped. The black waters of the Moscow river clogged and froze. Light snow swept over the ice. In the hours before dawn a stillness fell upon the city as if the earth itself had stopped spinning. One night when it hit thirty-three below, I remember walking home and feeling the breath freezing in my throat. But most Muscovites agreed that it wasnt a cold winter.

Early February came and the Moscow river thawed. Tabletops of ice drifted through the capital, past the White House, through the loop by the Sparrow Hills and out again into the forests. On the metro the fur coats became fewer. The orange hard-hats at Christ the Saviour finished the foundations and started on the walls. Clear days shone between the grey. Looking out of the Lenin Library window one morning, I saw the entire city fish-eyed in the Kremlins golden cupolas.

Each morning in the yard below my flat, there now appeared a woman with a broom who replaced the wintery scrape-scraping of snow shovels with an odd litany of shouting. May the devil take you! The devil dance on your grave! Jokers! Criminals! This isnt a country, its a prison!

Such was the vitriol of her cries that it occurred to me that she swept the yard not because she had to, but out of some desperate need for self-expression. When I talked to her, it turned out she was the widow of a former Soviet ambassador to Brazil.

I am a spiritual man, said a spiritual-looking man in the Alexandrovsky Gardens. Please give me some money so that I may spend the day in prayer.

At the open-air book market I came across Boris. He had travelled up from his southern town hidden in the trains luggage compartment; the money hed saved had gone on a three-volume edition of Borges, a book of medieval witchcraft and a cassette of Irish music. He had a high regard for the Celts and in his town had started secret cell of IRA. One night hed pulled a balaclava over his face and sprayed FREE IRELAND! on the railway bridges. The authorities didnt mind as it was in English, and no one knew where Ireland was anyway.

Nor did Darya from Borodino when she was instructed, in a dream, to study the Irish language. She and I had been on the same course the year before at the University of Galway, and when I went to see her in Russia, I reminded her of the amazement the Connemara fishermen showed at a Russian speaking fluent Irish. But she had never noticed it. She was now studying to be a nun.

Generations of force-fed ideology had not diminished that peculiarly Russian passion for belief. But in Moscow at least, it had certainly distorted it. Each time I went to see Christ the Saviour, and the cranes and the scaffolding and the orange hats had climbed yet higher into the heavens, I could not help feeling a strange sense of vertigo.