One Russia, Two Chinas. George Fetherling

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      Kropotkin Street, named to honour the great anarchist, was formerly known as Blessed Virgin Street. It contains a sinister building partly hidden by a high wall topped with barbed wire; this is one of the psychiatric institutions where dissidents were held against their will and, in a few cases, still were, if rumours were correct. A short distance along is a building that was long home to two elderly women who kept scores of cats. Five years earlier, however, the cats were removed and the house became Moscow’s first cooperative, which is to say free-enterprise, restaurant, known simply as No. 36 Kropotkin. It wouldn’t even accept dollars much less rubles but took only credit cards and was frequented by groups of foreigners or by single foreigners like me, eager to repay the genuine hospitality of some Soviet acquaintances. It was not the most expensive of the seven or eight such eating places in the city; I was advised in a hushed tone that at a Chinese restaurant called the Peking the shark’s fin soup cost 100 rubles. But it was representative, I believe, and symbolic.

      Eating in any Soviet restaurant, you were conscious first of all that the printed menu, considered as literature and theatre, served quite a different function than in the West. In our tradition the menu is a basic list. You expect the waiter to ooze over to the table and say something like, “Good evening, my name is Mark, and I’ll be your server this evening. In addition to our menu selections, chef has prepared the following specials.…” Soviet menus by comparison were little encyclopedias, page after page of every conceivable chicken dish, fish dish, vegetable dish. The job of the server was to explain, in response to your enquiries, that the dishes you wanted were not available—until you began to suspect that they had never been available. “So what, then, do you suggest this evening?” you were finally forced to ask.

      “Bifsteak.” Boiled beef.

      “What would you recommend to go with that?”

      “Cabbage.”

      “Is there anything else available?”

      “Cabbage.”

      A cold fish course came first; the meat was the second course and was always boiled. Fresh fruit and vegetables were almost nonexistent. No. 36 was offering carrots that night, but they were cold. It was amusing to see the head waiter in evening clothes and the junior staff in stiff white tunics, trying to suggest the pre-Revolutionary style. They had the snooty looks down pat but kept serving and taking away from the wrong sides. The example might be a small one, but the point was bigger: one of the reasons why individual entrepreneurship was far more widespread and obviously more successful in China than in the Soviet Union, I heard it said, was that in China there was still an old generation that remembered how the salary system worked; 1917 was just that much longer ago than 1949 to make the same continuity impossible in the Soviet Union.

      Outside in the street, however, the world before the Revolution is apparent enough, in the old apartment blocks, the former private houses, the hotels or public buildings that serve completely different functions now but are so clearly a part of their own time and place—and class. Even the arrangement of the streets and boulevards shows the wealth that once obtained there. It is like London in that respect, though in general the similarity to the United States seems more pressing and germane: another of those sprawling, powerful, ungovernable countries that can proceed only by lurching from extreme to extreme in a kind of slow-motion ricochet in which innocent people so often get hurt.