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Book Review: A Room in Moscow
Sally Belfrage’s A Room in Moscow is a memoir, published in 1958, which begins at the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957, follows Belfrage on a short trip to China (all expenses paid by the Chinese government), and then stays with Belfrage for the five months she spent in Moscow with a job at the state publishing house.
Belfrage occasionally comes across as eye-wateringly naive, particularly with regard to China. In a way you can’t fault her for failing to foresee the Great Leap Forward, but at the same time, one feels she should have been at least a little more skeptical about the apparent unanimity resulting from re-education. “Those with ‘wrong ideas’ are censured and converted, and end up with [sic] self-criticizing with deep humility, determined to remould themselves in the pattern of society. I could never completely understand this mechanism because I’ve never known people made that way, but more and more I saw the value of it in a place like China,” she says, without evidently pausing to wonder if perhaps (1) she’s being steered to talk to people who with whom the re-education ‘took,’ as it were, and (2) whether the translators might be translating selectively to give a greater appearance of unanimity than there actually was.
I found it particularly puzzling that she didn’t rethink this after her sojourn in Moscow, during which she learned enough Russian and also spoke to enough Russians who knew English to discover that beneath the seeming uniformity there was, in fact, great diversity of views. “The standard criticism [of the USSR] that I object to most is the one about the Russians under the Soviet regime being nothing but a conforming mass of identical sameness. In fact I sometimes wondered if they were possibly less conformist than Americans, for instance, because the majority of Americans want to conform and lose their identity. The American people detest individual aberrations; the Russian people admire them, with the governments of both countries often seeming to encourage the opposite state of affairs.”
Maybe the brevity of her stay in China simply made it impossible for her to get any grasp on the language and therefore to really connect with ordinary people. And this was compounded probably by the fact that China was on the cusp of a great cycle of repressions, while the USSR had just finished such a cycle, and was undergoing a thaw. Belfrage recounts a LOT of spy paranoia while she was in Moscow - lots of scenes where her friends ask her not to speak in, say, a train station, so as to hide her nationality - but none of her friends seem to suffer for their association with her.
A few miscellaneous notes:
Belfrage comments on the sterility of socialist realist novels: “They must contain positive heroes and positive goals and be moral and instructive, and continually portray what ought to be instead of the worst of what is.” This also describes a certain strain of thought in modern social justice demands for representation (especially the relentless demand for positivity). The people who are in favor of this sort of thing should perhaps reflect on its effects, or rather lack of effect, on the citizens of the USSR.
On the Bolshoi and homosexuality: “Among the male dancers, incidentally, were the only homosexuals I heard of among all Russians. No one discussed homosexuality, but prudery wasn’t the reason; it isn’t a problem and virtually doesn’t exist.”
(Presumably it existed off to the side somewhere and no one felt like going up to the foreign girl and announcing, “Hello, I am a social problem!” But it’s interesting to see that this was the public perception at the time.)
While in Moscow, Belfrage got a bit part in a movie based solely on the fact that she spoke English and the movie had scenes in England. She and the other English-speaking extras reminisced so fondly about Christmas (the filming took place over Christmas, which of course was barely celebrated in the USSR, and in any case the Orthodox Christmas is on a different day) that the Russian cast and technical crew set up a party in the dressing room: candlelight, cake, little presents for everyone, “a tiny Christmas tree beautifully decorated with film and cotton and scraps of color.” One of the Englishman commented: “This, you see, is socialism - and Christianity - down to their core. They can be hot air - but they can also be real.”
Belfrage occasionally comes across as eye-wateringly naive, particularly with regard to China. In a way you can’t fault her for failing to foresee the Great Leap Forward, but at the same time, one feels she should have been at least a little more skeptical about the apparent unanimity resulting from re-education. “Those with ‘wrong ideas’ are censured and converted, and end up with [sic] self-criticizing with deep humility, determined to remould themselves in the pattern of society. I could never completely understand this mechanism because I’ve never known people made that way, but more and more I saw the value of it in a place like China,” she says, without evidently pausing to wonder if perhaps (1) she’s being steered to talk to people who with whom the re-education ‘took,’ as it were, and (2) whether the translators might be translating selectively to give a greater appearance of unanimity than there actually was.
I found it particularly puzzling that she didn’t rethink this after her sojourn in Moscow, during which she learned enough Russian and also spoke to enough Russians who knew English to discover that beneath the seeming uniformity there was, in fact, great diversity of views. “The standard criticism [of the USSR] that I object to most is the one about the Russians under the Soviet regime being nothing but a conforming mass of identical sameness. In fact I sometimes wondered if they were possibly less conformist than Americans, for instance, because the majority of Americans want to conform and lose their identity. The American people detest individual aberrations; the Russian people admire them, with the governments of both countries often seeming to encourage the opposite state of affairs.”
Maybe the brevity of her stay in China simply made it impossible for her to get any grasp on the language and therefore to really connect with ordinary people. And this was compounded probably by the fact that China was on the cusp of a great cycle of repressions, while the USSR had just finished such a cycle, and was undergoing a thaw. Belfrage recounts a LOT of spy paranoia while she was in Moscow - lots of scenes where her friends ask her not to speak in, say, a train station, so as to hide her nationality - but none of her friends seem to suffer for their association with her.
A few miscellaneous notes:
Belfrage comments on the sterility of socialist realist novels: “They must contain positive heroes and positive goals and be moral and instructive, and continually portray what ought to be instead of the worst of what is.” This also describes a certain strain of thought in modern social justice demands for representation (especially the relentless demand for positivity). The people who are in favor of this sort of thing should perhaps reflect on its effects, or rather lack of effect, on the citizens of the USSR.
On the Bolshoi and homosexuality: “Among the male dancers, incidentally, were the only homosexuals I heard of among all Russians. No one discussed homosexuality, but prudery wasn’t the reason; it isn’t a problem and virtually doesn’t exist.”
(Presumably it existed off to the side somewhere and no one felt like going up to the foreign girl and announcing, “Hello, I am a social problem!” But it’s interesting to see that this was the public perception at the time.)
While in Moscow, Belfrage got a bit part in a movie based solely on the fact that she spoke English and the movie had scenes in England. She and the other English-speaking extras reminisced so fondly about Christmas (the filming took place over Christmas, which of course was barely celebrated in the USSR, and in any case the Orthodox Christmas is on a different day) that the Russian cast and technical crew set up a party in the dressing room: candlelight, cake, little presents for everyone, “a tiny Christmas tree beautifully decorated with film and cotton and scraps of color.” One of the Englishman commented: “This, you see, is socialism - and Christianity - down to their core. They can be hot air - but they can also be real.”