Endre Kukorelly

Ruin: A History of Commonism

...

I'm feeling so homesick!
(My own mother, a Pest inhabitant, in her typical deb voice on the No. 47 tram passing over the Danube to Buda on the Freedom [formerly Franz Josef] Bridge)

At the beginning of the plague they had a vivid recollection... but... their imagination failed them. During the second phase of the plague, their memory failed them, too.
(Albert Camus: The Plague)

The statement that that lot took everything we had away from us means nothing to a small child. Slowly, minutely, all at once-everything. That lot, i.e. the commies, but then who are they? My father's great-aunt, her husband was a retired colonel, was forcibly resettled to a village by the name of Boconád near the small town of Heves, my cousin Pali was not allowed to attend a grammar school. As a forced-labour soldier he was put to work in a stone quarry; he defected at first blush in 1956, or rather second blush because first he took part-only after that. He defected to Germany.
The bicycle on which he trundled up to Pest, for the events, he left in our cellar, in the wood hole. It's a marvellous old, solid, indestructible iron-frame, we took it out to the plot of land in Szentistván Settlement where we had a holiday house, it became the family machine, and I used it to cycle down to the Danube.
They were not deported from the country at the end of the war, like more than three hundred thousand other ethnic Germans, for Franz Werner was neither here or there, the old boy having been a Hungarian army officer, after all. So, Magyar to the core, in other words, but he Magyarised the name to Monostori when he was awarded a hereditary knighthood for distinguished service before the war. Between 1945 and 1950 Hungary's ethnic Germans, as a collective punishment, were packed off to Germany in their tens of thousands. A third of them children and the elderly. Including more than sixty thousand children under twelve years old. They were bunged into cattle wagons, then off with them, a familiar scene already practised on other Hungarians-splendidly broken-in wagons, they were.
My cousin Géza, who fought in Corvin Passage in '56, defected-if it is now again permissible to use that (eztet^*) word- to Argentina. He had a fairly weighty reason to do so, for anyone who had held a weapon in their hands was hanged by the Kádár regime. Argentina, however, seems not to have worked out, so he emigrated to Australia, then, with that too not proving right, in the mid-Eighties, leaving his family behind, he moved back home. To Hungary. Due to his terrible, unbearable homesickness.
Unmanageable homesickness. He could not bear not to. So was it finally alright for him here, at home?
Sure it was.
In no time at all he was dead.
Father came home one year after the end of the war from an American POW camp in Germany, to which he had been transferred due to the severity of his wounds. He and a fellow officer clung on to the roofs of railway wagons, and if the train was going in the right direction, they would stay on it, and if it wasn't, they would scramble off, that was the general idea. Back home he was screened, then they offered him a job at the military academy but he preferred to demobilise in view of his wounds. Because he'd had enough.
He'd already had enough, but my Uncle Joe was taken over into the new army, where he taught until 1949, only being arrested when the first class of trainee officers had passed through. He was arrested on the academy's premises, and in full view of his students dragged across the courtyard to be bundled into a car, exactly as you see it in films. Not so well-oiled.
The way it was done was his boss linked arms with him in friendly fashion, they sauntered up and down the corridor, then two ÁVÓ men jumped out from one of the classrooms.¹ He was released from Kistarcsa in the autumn of 1956, worked at a glass grinding works, that was the trade he learned, if memory serves me right, Uncle Joe ground glass tumblers.
He never spoke about those things with anyone except his wife, and when his wife died shortly afterwards, he recounted no more tales. Kistarcsa or wherever the hell it was. A forced-labour camp.
Uncle Joe, the one whose army unit, an entire company, went over to the Russkies while they were retreating on the Eastern front. He didn't see one of them again: not one of them returned from captivity.
Father was given a formal discharge from the army after the war, receiving a few forints in back pay and being made to resign his rank. After that came the nationalisation of all sorts of family property, I won't go into it here, and he was unable to find a job.
For a while he was unable to find any job, but eventually that too was sorted out and he was given work. The that lot took everything we had amounts to their taking away his past, his habits, his lifestyle. What he had learnt, what he had become accustomed to, much that was fine and much that was not so fine, and now that's how it will always be.
At the end of his day's work, the worker heads for the house of culture-that kind of outrageous doltishness was left. Library work is a theatre of war. The enemy will do everything within its power to get workers to read pulp fiction and pornography.² They, the Russians that is, are not going to leave here, Father said, I should take a look at them, travel there, I would understand why. Not that it's of any importance.
Of importance to understand them.
However long they stay, that's how much chance they have, but that is why they will do anything, they have enough strength for it. And everything will be destroyed, and what they build on the site of the destruction, that too will eventually belong to the destruction, and how. It will break down, run out, be shattered by frost, closed down, clapped out, only their machine guns with the drum magazines will not become clapped out. They really were not shattered by frost. If a road surface cracks, they don't bother to repair it, for them it's just fine as it is, maybe that pothole will come in handy, they don't even step across it or avoid it, they simply go straight through it, what's to understand.
Or not understand. Not for fun, they bump into it more just on a whim, there's a huge jolt and that's it. A tank trap. Later on, it so worked out that I made it several times to the real existing Soviet Union with my friend László Haller.
The broken-down, frost-shattered, clapped-out soviet Urnion.
Conked-out soviet. Closed-down soviet. We squeezed onto a Moscow trolley bus, clung on on the rear platform, then came the potholes. Squeezed against one another, the Russians stood around amicably, with the jolting they would shoot up to the ceiling, not at all for fun, nobody had fun or got angry, in point of fact it was comical. The endless patience³ was almost comical.
In point of fact not so comical. The Russians, according to Nikolai Berdaev, are a people at the end of history, it is not sure, here in the trolley bus, that the people knew that, nevertheless it seemed as if they did know it. By and large, this end was transferred over to us Hungarians, here at home.
Sadly I had no desire to leave, my father announced to me. In essence by chance.
Like everything.⁴
Just like everything in the world, more by chance than not. He wasn't paying attention, maybe that's why he said it the way he did, during supper, where's the saltcellar and meanwhile I'm bringing in the soda siphon. What am I supposed to say in reply? I was just on the point of asking, then didn't ask after all, it was not the sort of thing we talked about. In truth, what did we talk about? Making a habit of despair is worse than despair itself, so says Camus. Should I say to him bravo, wonderful, come old chap, there are already some magnificent examples, Imre Muszka, Hungary's best lathe operator, fulfilled around 230-270 per cent with his new norm, you did the right thing, why indeed would you have left?
If it comes to that, why on earth did you return to Hungary from the POW camp? So that having once been released from the one it should be straight, double quick, into the other? Into being where at the gate to the Uralski Heavy Industrial Works a whole row of artistic portraits immortalises the factory's Stakhanovites. First in line is a portrait of Viktor Terentevich Ponomarev. This famous gearbox miller undertook to fulfil 40 years of the norm within the period of the five-year plan. Did you get into the swing of things in 40 years?
Uncle Ernô's family, by the way, or rather the womenfolk, Auntie Clara and my mother, were the ones who hit on the idea of having signs tattooed on the children so they would not be exchanged, on the grounds of better safe than sorry.
So they should not exchange us if we were resettled.
The street's inhabitants are awakened from their morning slumber by the sound of labour-movement marches. The radio's cars arrive and there is already a huge crowd waiting in front of the apartment blocks under construction. They work in accordance with the so-called continuous production system. The first hour: 10,200 bricks! Second hour: 11,273! By the time the 8-hour shift is over a new record has been set: laying 77,000 bricks in the form of a mass of 209.8 cubic metres of wall, over a length of 140 metres. There is a huge storm of applause to greet the winners.⁵
They hit on the idea that the tattooing should be done by Uncle Ernô. Uncle Ernô had been the medical officer in my father's battalion on the Russian front. In the end we all stayed, we were not carted off, there was no tattooing. Nevertheless, for a while every evening my parents used to pack things so as to be ready for the off. For a while the.
The.

 

(14)

The fact that the USSR interferes is a quite different matter. They don't interfere with 10% efficiency, they can do much better.
(István Szirmai. Minutes of the October 1963 meeting of the Politburo of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. Subject: how radio jamming can be made more effective.)

At least there weren't portraits in Moscow.⁶ Hung up everywhere at all times. Lenin in official places, but not in butcher's shops like Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia. Admittedly with Yugoslav butchers you could also get meat along with the Tito vegetable dish on the side, but in the Soviet Union there wasn't any meat either. I saw plenty of Dzhugashvilis in Georgia, they would be religiously plastered on the windscreens of lorries, more out of nationalism than internationalism. I don't recall now whether that disturbed me or angered me, or whether I just found it droll, indeed relished it. I can't recall whether the Soviet Union interfered when I was visiting it. It disturbed and angered me, but I relished it and it amused me. I was in it. A few excerpts from the first pages of my diary for 1982:
Friday, 1 January, Moscow. Plus 5-6° C, rain, we slip around in the slush, they don't even try to clear it. I manage to pick up some champagne in ulitsa Gorkava; we're going round to Wahtang's mate's place, Aftandil, a mathematician who collects seashells and snail shells. We got to know them in Sukhumi last summer. They're a bit odd but somehow they've managed to lay hands on all kinds of grub, typical Georgian open sesame. While they show off their snail shells the chap and his wife squabble about whether Stalin wrote his works single-handed or got assistance. Yes he did! No he didn't! Did!
Didn't!
Did! His wife, who is probably not Georgian, reckons he did get help, Aftandil gets pretty worked up about it. Surely he didn't marry an Abkhaz woman? Wahtang is also upset but then she isn't his wife, he doesn't interfere. On the good side, I had honeydew melon and drank so much coffee that I had a job getting off to sleep last night.
Saturday, 2 January. I wake up then drop off again, and that goes on till 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We slither along to the Troitsky Cathedral, incredibly wonderful. In incredible surroundings. On the way back we take a proper look at the onion-domed churches in front of the Rossiya Hotel. In the evening the Bolshoi, a ballet evening with Bartók's Wooden Prince (Anisimov as the prince, Luzhina the princess, Bylova the fairy), Death of the Rose to the slow movement of Mahler's 5th Symphony, with Plisetskaya, and Rodion Schedrin's Carmen Suite (with Plisetskaya, Barikin, Radchenko). We sat a bit off to one side.
Monday, 4 January. In the morning off to the police to report my arrival. They are not open, however. But I have to report in. A café called Lira, self-service, they even have salmon sandwiches. There is virtually nothing and yet virtually everything, both at once. It has become frigging frigid, we warm up in the Melodiya record shop, I bought a stack of LPs, they are almost giving them away. They stink something awful, not the records but the glue they use to gum the sleeves together. The plan is for us to have lunch at the Dom Zhurnalist, and by the time we have walked there I'm perishing. The restaurant is closed, sanitarnyi den, sanitation day, they have put up a small notice. Which I pinch. I'm frozen solid, taxi over to the Intercontinental Hotel, a fresh sense of there being everything to be had, salmon, caviar, fried fish, champagne-for two hundred roubles. A teacher's monthly starting salary is 90. In the loo Wahtang asks if I need a woman.
Tuesday, 5 January. After a tolerable amount of queuing I check in at the police station. On the way back the tram ran into something and we had to get off, so we made our way into the centre on foot. Taxi from Magazin Leningrad to the Bolshoye Pirogovskaya, where we're going to see Mrs Bulgakov. She shows photos; everyone else enjoys it but it bores me and I'm glad to get away from the poor old dear. His first wife, that is, not Margarita. In the evening again at the Bolshoi, we have fifth-row seats: Khrennikov's tiresome incidental music to Much Ado About Nothing-much ado about nothing. Beatrice danced by Vlassova. In the interval champagne and a caviar sandwich. I haven't seen as much ballet in my life as I have now. Nor eaten as much caviar.
Wednesday, 6 January. Off to the Hotel Ukraina with Lado, who wants a pair of sunglasses. He can't, though, because only foreigners are permitted to purchase goods in the Beryozka shopping chain, which is where we come in. So Lado can have his sunglasses. I take no part in the transaction but read Bulgakov's Morphine in the lobby. In the end they didn't buy any sunglasses, but he did buy a few cans of beer. A beefsteak for lunch, the usual luxury in a sea of nothingness. A jitney to Kalinin prospekt, a bookshop, where we acquire a guidebook to the Caucasus for 75 roubles. That's three weeks' pay. Wahtang is waiting in front of the National, a taxi on to the Dom Zhurnalist, a Bulgakov-style Massolit,⁷ absolutely everything, because there's even coke, and where there's coke there's everything. In the evening to the Taganka for The Master and Margarita. Seats are sold out for years ahead but we are admitted, in part because we are Hungarians, like Lubimov's wife, and in part out of Commonism. Shcherbakov and Shatskaya in the title roles, Smekov as Voland, Sapovalov as Pontius Pilate.
Thursday, 7 January. Minus thirty and there's barely any heating. I decamp to the kitchen and light the gas stove; if it were up to me, I wouldn't budge from here. I go out to buy grub, but the nearby Magazin had just shut so I was left looking for another in a dreadful blizzard. There's not a sausage there but two queues, one for chicken, the other for frankfurters of a rather dodgy colour, but the queue isn't moving at all, the shop assistants are sedulously doing some administrative paperwork, so I go. Eggs haven't been seen in Moscow for months. A sandwich snack at Lira, the Druzhba bookshop, then the National, it's Rashid's birthday supper. Mounds of caviar. Rashid recounts how on one occasion he was caught in some infraction of the rules in the Metro, whereupon the policeman told him not to behave like a Hungarian.
Friday, 8 January. In the morning to the Hungarian shop on Dorogomilovskaya. It has been ransacked bare: they can't get any stocks because of the snowstorm. Cans of Yugoslav ham, salami, chocs, that sort of thing-a very heaven for the locals. In GUM there's an astonishing crush of people, you can't get near a counter. The rumour has got about that there is Ponds face cream in stock, all Moscow is in a frenzy. I buy three jars for four roubles (or was it four for three?), I too have caught the bug. I have no idea what the Ponds is to me. It's in stock. One wants it because it's in stock. I pop into TSUM, and it's not in stock there. There is such a thing as a consumer society and a society that's simply gagging to consume.
Saturday, 9 January. We have a look at the Borodino Cyclorama. It was boring, the old trout who was the guide went into the details in an irritating singsong, and there was no way of getting out. Once you have paid. So why did you. Or even to move closer, because then they'll tell you to keep still. The woman explains, the people stare at her, not the picture, and when she stabs a finger the people look in that direction. Not anywhere else. Then back at the woman, whereas I'm watching this and exploding instead of enjoying it. [I think I enjoy now what was exasperating me then, but this is now and not then. That is continually happening to me. That's what this book is about. The "all"-knowing, more or less extinct posterity.] From there on to the Tretyakov, getting off at the Dobrininskaya metro stop when it ought to have been at Novokuznetskaya, all the way to Pyatnitskaya. Rublev icons and Russian old masters, but the modern section is closed, instead of which they have an Armenian painter's portraits of Lenin and Brezhnev in something like ten gallery rooms. We have supper in the National-35 roubles for three, I won't go into what. Stroganov. Smirnov. Indeed, Gorchev. Half an hour happy sliding home in a Zil taxi from Metro Dynamo.
Sunday, 10 January. After some typically Russian dawdling around, we set off at getting on for noon, Kropotkinskaya metro, Yaroslavl railway station, and from there by elektrichka (half a rouble) to Zagorsk. Not unduly cold, blinding sunshine, snowed-in landscape, but when it's time to get off the fact is that in practice one can't get off. The thing being that the moment the carriage doors are opened those waiting to get on don't wait for us to get off but swarm inwards and push us back. They even climb in through the windows to get a seat, and it's so astounding that I can barely react. Not that there's much choice in the matter besides pushing back, so that's the game-they push inwards and I push outwards. First of all the Troitse, the Holy Trinity Monastery, Rublevs, there's mass going on, we stroll around a park, the Uspensky is shut and so too the Dukhovskaya, an icon museum, applied art (Riznitsa), into the Trapeznaya (restaurant), to the Cathedral of Saint Sergius of Radonezhi, this too sluzhba-a mass going and therefore we don't go in. Late 17th-century buildings, wonderful colours and shapes, crunchy evening snow, snow sprinkling down in the lamplight, stillness, fir-trees-that sort of thing. We bought some eggs.
Monday, 11 January. I wake up late, the museums are closed, pure luck, so I sit at home, the gas stove going in the kitchen, and read. I bought a Hungarian daily, the Népszabadság, Taróczy and Günthardt won eighty thousand dollars in Birmingham. Meeting with L. around noon at Metro Sportivnaya. While I was waiting I counted goods lorries: thirty of them, four of which were closed, six apparently transporting produce, one carrying cardboard boxes and wooden crates, another two lengths of wooden ladder, the rest empty. That means 18 empty. That ratio is the soviet Urnion. L. came along. Courting in Russian-ukhazhivati.

¹ ÁVÓ (Államvédelmi Osztály, State Security Department), later ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hivatal, State Security Office), with headquarters at 60 Andrássy Avenue, which had formerly been the HQ for the wartime fascist Arrow-Cross militia, and just two doors away from my primary school. Its head was Gábor Péter.

² Ötéves tervünk: béketerv [Our Five-Year Plan: A Plan for Peace], Ministry of Popular Education, 1951.

³ "Anyone who turns towards the end in order that, out of infinite impatience, he should bring off something before it 'would come of its own accord', who wishes to get to the world's end, whatever the cost, in the final analysis that person is turning his back on 'another world', and instead of creating 'another world' is condemned to making a pile of ruins from this world." Ákos Szilágyi: "Orosz Apokalipszis [Russian Apocalypse]," Magyar Lettre Internationale, 33.

⁴ The outcome was essentially accidental, writes Deutscher (Stalin: A Political Biography, London, 1949) about the upper hand that Lenin's faction won at the Second Congress of the Russian Labour Party in 1903. After the voting at the Maison du Peuple in Brussels, under Trotsky's chairmanship, they won a two-vote majority over the Martov faction. That is why they were called the Bolsheviks. That is the reason for all this. Is that the reason for all this? Lenin uses the word accidental in The State and Revolution: "such a meaningless and ugly term as 'Bolshevik'... it expresses nothing other than the merely accidental fact that... we were in the majority." However, the main difference, according to Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Empire 1875-1914. London, 1987), was that Lenin's comrades were better organised, more efficient and more reliable. "Citing Karl Kautsky, the acknowledged authority of Marxist theory, Lenin stubbornly repeated that middle-class intellectuals, Marx, Engels and others, had brought socialism into the labour movement from outside. That proved that it made no sense to trust in the 'innate' socialism of the masses. The Party needed to be a body of the elect...a vanguard that did not flinch from resolute and disciplined actions."

⁵ Szabad Nép, 31 August 1950.

⁶ "And from the Party's window Rákosi's image: / He looks reassuringly and smiles across at you." Ferenc Juhász.

⁷ Acronym given to the largest literary association in Moscow (The Master and Margarita).

^* See end of note 5 to Section 1.