Behind the Iron Curtain

When the International Epidemiological Association met in Helsinki in 1987, the organizers offered an excursion to Leningrad as a side trip for a few days before the meeting.  Wendy and I seized the chance with both hands. Mikhael Gorbachev had recently become general secretary of the Communist Party; it was the era of Perestroika or openness.  Gorbachev had loosened the tight bonds of the communist state significantly. Censorship of information coming into the Soviet Union had been relaxed so Soviet citizens were much better able than at any time since the Bolsheviks came to power in the last months of the Great War of 1914-1918 to read and hear more or less freely about life in the rest of the world.

Wendy about to board our train in Leningrad
 en route back to Helsinki 

On a day of watery sunshine in August 1987, we boarded a train in Helsinki for the 6-7 hour journey to Leningrad.  We traveled First Class but our carriage was uncomfortable, with little or no padding on the seats, reminiscent of ‘Hard Class’ train carriages in China. As we left the Helsinki suburbs behind us the skies cleared and the rest of the day-long journey passed by in brilliant sunshine.  We travelled first across the prosperous-looking farmland of Finland with expensively fenced, neat, well-kept fields, fat cattle, shiny modern farm machinery. The border was the most intimidating, fearsome looking border we had ever seen, with multiple rows of high barbed wire fences, watch towers and gun emplacements on the Soviet side, and shabbily uniformed soldiers seemingly on guard against a possible invasion by the peaceful tiny nation of Finland.

The contrast with farmland behind the Iron Curtain was dramatic. It was as though we had passed through a time warp to a land fifty or even a hundred years earlier. The farmland was shabby, unkempt, ancient farm machinery, single-blade ploughs pulled by an ox, not a tractor to be seen anywhere. Where were the tractors of the Soviet propaganda?  Farm buildings looked like hovels, although at least they mostly seemed to have TV aerials. It was dark by the time we reached the outskirts of Leningrad but what we could see revealed huge apartment blocks amid a wilderness of weed infested vacant lots.  We saw some more next day, huge apartment blocks that we were told had units for 1000 or more families.  Each was painted a different bright colour, presumably to convey a sense of cheerfulness, but the enormous size made them look intimidating.  Our hotel was intimidatingly huge too, run by Intourist, the Soviet state travel agency, a vast, soul-less place surrounded on all sides by acres of vacant land, presumably so we would not contaminate the Soviet citizenry with our evil capitalist ideas. The impression of vast empty space was maintained in the cavernous interior of the hotel: there was an enormous dining room that would probably seat close to 1000 people, in which our tiny tourist party, about 20 strong altogether, seemed to be almost the only guests. Our evening meal was easier to eat because we were ravenously hungry than it might otherwise have been. It consisted of sauerkraut, turnips, black beans swimming in a sludge of luke-warm gravy, and two or three thick slices of what was probably pork, although it was hard to be sure of this. It helped to wash it all down with a few mouthfuls from a large tankard of beer, which seemed surprisingly good, considering the second-rate boarding-house quality of the food.  Desert was a large bowl of gritty fruit, pears or quinces, and custard.

Next morning we met our tour guide and began our exploration of Leningrad, when our small bus took us first into the heart of what had once been the Hanseatic League city of St Petersburg, a city of graceful white mansions, tall thin spires of disused old churches and in the city centre, vast public squares, palaces and public buildings, the most impressive of all being the Hermitage museum, to which we returned next day.

It was a beautiful city – or rather, it had been a beautiful city, probably in the days of the Hanseatic League.  Now it looked shabby, down at heel, dilapidated.  All the buildings needed sprucing up, a coat of paint, sidewalks tidied, cracked and broken windows replaced. It reminded me of the more down-at-heel sections of Surabaya,  Columbo or Calcutta, more like a third world city than the second city of the second-greatest world power.  We passed but didn’t stop at a large department store with sad looking window displays, but saw no interesting little shops. There were a few kiosks that sold newspapers and magazines.  Another surprise was how empty the city seemed to be. Unlike a  western city, Paris or Amsterdam for instance, the sidewalks were almost deserted, no throngs of happy shoppers.  I don’t recall seeing any sidewalk cafes.  Leningrad is the Venice of the Baltic, a city at sea level with many canals and bridges, some of which were very attractive although very shabby.

Our next stop was the Summer Palace, which had very recently been renovated and was really spectacular with a wonderful display of fountains, many emerging from recently “gold”-plated statues.  We saw this in bright sunshine and it was a most spectacular sight. The whimsical display of fountains outside the Pompidou Museum in Paris is the nearest comparison that comes to mind for sheer entertainment value, but of course these fountains at the Summer Palace are much grander. 

We also saw (from a distance) large numbers of huge apartment blocks, most 20-30 stories tall, occupying an entire city block.  Each was painted a bright colour that was different from any other nearby tower block, I suppose in an endeavor to dispel the intimidating image that might otherwise be conveyed by the sheer size of these warehouses for people.  Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for almost two years during what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War.  Most of the city was reduced to rubble under incessant bombardment during which more than a million died (significant numbers died of starvation, as well as from war wounds) and these vast apartment blocks were hastily erected soon after the war to provide homes for the survivors. Wendy and I would have liked to visit an apartment or two and meet the occupants.  We’ve seen photos of course, and they look comparatively spacious.

We got back to our vast hotel late in the afternoon but in high summer at that high latitude it was daylight until about 1030 at night so we strolled outside after our evening meal on a balmy mild late afternoon. Our hotel was a long way from the nearest part of the city and suburbs of Leningrad, surrounded on three sides by acres of waste land and on the fourth by an estuary or inlet from the Gulf of Leningrad on which we could see two quite large yachts in the distance.  The waste land was much used by local people to exercise dogs, mostly large dogs, well cared for Siberian huskies, collies, spaniels and mixed or unidentifiable breeds. Clearly there were many dog lovers in Leningrad.  Some were accompanied by entire families, others by a single person, usually a man, and some of these men appeared to be very keen to make our acquaintance, to engage in trade or barter with us. Unfortunately neither we nor any others in our party had anticipated this, so we had nothing to trade but it was at least possible to exchange friendly gestures.

We spent most of the next day in the magnificent Hermitage Museum, one of the world’s greatest collections of art.  It was a hot, humid day, and the museum was packed with people. We saw whole large galleries of French impressionists, an entire room full of magnificent paintings by Monet, Renoir, Picasso and other masters who flourished in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, just before the revolution.  Thank goodness this rich treasure trove survived the revolution, and survived the Great Patriotic War. (Our guide didn’t know what was done to protect this priceless collection during the war).  I hope this collection survives the throngs of people who come to see it nowadays, and I hope a better climate control system has been installed by now as well as a better system to control the number of daily visitors. At one stage in a gallery of Spanish paintings the crowd was so dense that inadvertently my shoulder brushed against the surface of a large canvas by Velazquez.  As far as I could see, the varnish protected it and I left no marks upon it.  But I saw another visitor running his fingers over the surface of a Picasso and I shuddered to think of the damage these throngs of visitors could do.

Next  day it was back on the train, back to Helsinki, back to luxury, back to civilization.  Wendy and I were very glad to have had this opportunity to glimpse, however briefly, this little corner of what was clearly a totalitarian empire on the verge of its final collapse.