Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

Party delegation, with Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan. Our meeting 
with Krushchev confirmed the views I had now formed of him. He 
was exceptionally well briefed, but was not ashamed to ask Gromyko 
to put him right if necessary.
Kruschev never carried a chip on his shoulder about men born in 
more fortunate circumstances. He had a natural dignity and self-
confidence which rejected class envy.
Most of our visit was spent in sightseeing. We were of course, with 
our consent, taken to schools, factories, and collective farms. It also 
included the visits to the Hermitage in Leningrad and the magnificent 
summer palace of Peter the Great overlooking the Gulf of Finland, 
its fountains sparkling in the autumn sun, its rococo buildings gleam-
ing with white and gold; like most other palaces, it had been meticu-
lously restored to its former glory after almost total destruction by 
the Nazis. In Leningrad we were given a concert at what had origi-
nally been the club where members of the first Russian Parliament, 
or Duma, used to meet. In those nineteenth-century surroundings, 
the concert itself was like a salon at the court of Queen Victoria, as 
sopranos and baritones in evening dress sang ballads and songs by 
“Kompositori Verdi” in voices of remarkable purity.
By comparison with the eighteenth-century canals of Leningrad, 
which might have been part of Amsterdam or Bremen, the Kremlin 
brought us to the heart of old Russia. I had imagined it a building as 
grimly functional as the Party it housed, and was quite unprepared 
for the mediaeval splendour of its palaces and churches, scattered 
among copses of birch and lilac.
My visit to Russia in 1959 began to give me some sense of these 
cultural changes. I was immensely impressed by the charm and 
quality of the young sixth formers we met in Leningrad at 
school.
In manner and appearance they could have come from any of the 
upperclass families described by Turgenev or Tolstoy. Similarly, the 
colleges which taught foreign languages and international affairs were 
giving a rounded education to able young men and women, who are 
now in key positions in their country, where their knowledge of the 
outside world is invaluable.
The creative intelligentsia, such outstanding people as Sakharov, 
with his strong opposition to using the hydrogen bomb, Solzhenitsyn, 

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exposing the life in a labour camp (
A Day in the life of Ivan Deniso-
vich
), Yevtushenko with his poem 
Babiy Yar
on anti-Semitism in the 
Soviet Union — were giving a headache to the authorities.
And yet we saw signs of the cultural thaw all around us.
Jazz was officially disliked, but they didn’t use the power of the 
state to prevent it. Its public performance was then largely confined 
to the circus and music hall. In Leningrad we saw an ice-spectacular 
in which the girls were half-naked, in costumes reminiscent of the 
pre-war 
Folies Bergere
.
The theatre and ballet had changed little since the revolution, the 
best had been preserved.
The Moscow Arts Theatre performed Chekhov as Stanislavsky 
had produced it half a century earlier — as sad comedy rather than as 
tragedy with humour. The only ideological change I noticed was in 
Uncle Vanya
: Astrov was presented as a handsome, vigorous young 
prophet of a better future, rather than as the wrinkled cynic of 
Olivier’s
2
interpretation at the Old Vic
3
. We saw the aging Ulanova 
at the Bolshoi in a ballet based on a novel by Peter Abrahams about 
Apartheid
4
in South Africa, which called on her to act rather than to 
dance. On the other hand we saw Plisetskaya at her best as prima 
ballerina in Prokofiev’s 
The Stone Flower
. I shall never forget her rip-
pling sinuosity.
In 1963, when I next visited Russia, the general atmosphere was 
more liberal than on my first visit, and as I was not on official delega-
tion, but attending an informal conference between Soviet and West-
ern politicians, I had a good deal more freedom.
Our guide was a gentle young man called Kolya who had just got 
his degree in foreign languages. He had been at the World Youth 
Congress that summer in Moscow, and greatly enjoyed reciting 
phrases of hair-raising obscenity which he had picked up from his 
American comrades. Jazz was now all the rage, and since imports of 
Western records had been stopped, a disk by Dave Brubeck was be-
yond price. Since then the international youth culture has swept the 
whole of Russia like a hurricane.
I learned much from these visits to Russia, restricted though they 
were, and was to learn more still from later visits. I do not accept the 
view that short visits to foreign countries are more likely to mislead 
than to educate. On the contrary, providing you have done your 
home-work before you go, they not only enable you to check some of 
your views, but also provide you with a library of sense-impressions 
which give reality to any news you read later.

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140
However, for this purpose I think three days is better than three 
weeks. Anything over a week and less than three years is liable to 
confuse you. But series of short visits, at intervals of over a year, can 
give you a sense of the underlying trends in a foreign country which 
no accounts in the press can provide.
Since the Labour Party was then in opposition, there was little that 
I or my colleagues could do on these visits except to talk and learn. But 
they enabled me to follow the later evolution of the Soviet system with 
more understanding than some of the professional experts who knew 
nothing of Soviet reality. I did not find the emergence of Gorbachev 
surprising. Nor, like so many Russia-watchers, did I ever think that his 
early speeches were simply designed to take the West off its guard. 
When I later met men like Burlatsky, who had written speeches for 
Krushchev, I knew that his articles had to be taken seriously; he, like 
Gorbachev himself, represented something in Soviet society which had 
always been there, even in the darkest days of Stalinism.
Above all, I learned that the Russians, like us, were human beings, 
although they were not human beings like us.