“Under the shadow of thy wings shall be my refuge, until this tyranny be over-past.”
(THE 57TH PSALM)
Everyone else in the cinema was weeping. The film being shown, in a movie theatre in a northern suburb of Moscow, was not a romance or a sentimental drama, but a documentary entitled “We Can’t Go On Living Like This.” It had been released for distribution only after a fierce argument at the summit of the Communist apparatus still very much in charge of the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was June 1990, when the Gorbachev revolution was approaching its final crisis. Why were they crying? Because the film openly told the truth that they all knew but had never been able to discuss.
I remember several scenes: the orderly queue of neatly dressed citizens dissolving into a yelling riot when word came down that the vodka ration for that week had been canceled; the hideous prisoners, faces grotesque from habitual evil, being herded in sordid dungeons; the desolate cityscapes of concrete slabs under poisoned skies, the filthy yellow waste trickling from a crooked pipeline into a polluted sea, the excrement-smeared, desecrated ruins of what had once been churches, the corruption, and the unending official lies.
Soviet citizens all knew life was like this. They knew the daily drudgery of finding anything decent to eat. They knew all the sugar had disappeared from the shops because the official anti-alcohol campaign had impelled millions to make their own vodka in the bathtub. They knew that if they wanted anesthetics at the dentist, or antibiotics at the hospital, or co-operation from their child’s teacher, or a holiday by the sea, they would need to bribe someone to get them. Even in Moscow, the show city of the Evil Empire, they knew that they dwelt in the suburbs of hell, that in mile after mile of mass-produced housing you would be hard put to find a single family untouched by divorce, that no mother reared her own children, that the schools taught lies, that secret government establishments leaked radiation into air and water. Fresh eggs were an event. “No” meant “How much will you pay me?” Rats were commonplace and played merrily among the trashcans of apartment blocks and in the entrances of railway terminals. Windows were filthy as a matter of course; I never saw a clean one.
While most struggled to survive, a secret elite enjoyed great privileges—special living spaces, special hospitals with Western drugs and equipment, special schools in which their children were well taught in English, special waiting rooms in stations and airports, and special lanes (one ran down the middle of the street on which I lived) along which the Politburo’s giant armored limousines roared at 90 miles an hour, shouldering aside anyone who dared get in the way. The elite had privileged access to good food, foreign travel and books, and the groveling servility of the organs of the state, which oppressed the common people and extorted money from them. This society, promoted by its leaders as an egalitarian utopia, was in truth one of the most unequal societies on earth.
Thanks to the power of hard currency, I lived on the edges of this elite for more than two years. My apartment, officially a typical worker’s quarters, was in reality unavailable to anyone bereft of power or influence. It possessed twelve-foot ceilings, oak parquet floors, uplifting views of the Moscow River on one side and the whole panorama of the city on the other. Its staircase did not stink of urine and cabbage, as those of normal blocks did. My neighbors included the Brezhnev family and several senior KGB officials. It exuded power.
One night shortly before the beginning of the first Gulf War, I had been to a late press conference given by Tareq Aziz, then Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister. Because of the midnight hour, I had gone there in my car, a Volvo with special yellow license plates that marked me out as a foreign correspondent. I normally used the Metro, hating the angry, ruthless Moscow traffic and the endless attempts of the GAI traffic police to extort extra-big bribes from the rich foreigner, claiming that I had jumped red lights or broken speed limits when I hadn’t. That night, the GAI cops tried to wave me down, 200 yards from my building. I was doing nothing wrong and I ignored them, which sometimes worked because they were lazy as well as corrupt. This time it didn’t. Unusually diligent, they gave chase and followed me into the courtyard.
They were angry and perhaps drunk. “Your papers!” demanded the slovenly officer. I gave them to him. He tossed them into the slush at my feet, yelling, “How dare you drive past our checkpoint when ordered to stop! And what are you doing in here anyway?” He gestured in the general direction of the Brezhnevs’ vast apartment. He plainly thought I had tried to hide from him and was preparing to demand an unusually large bribe, until I said quietly, “I live here.” He stiffened and looked suddenly afraid. He picked up my papers. He looked again at my passport, with its residence permit for that address. He stepped back, saluted smartly, mumbled an apology for bothering me, and drove away without another word. This sort of privilege was unavailable at home in England, where even members of the Royal Family were pulled in for speeding. Yet here I was in a society devoted to equality, asserting real rank over an agent of the state.
I saw only the very end of it. Others have described the Soviet Paradise when it was at the midnight of its dark power—which was, interestingly, the time when it probably worked best. If you are going to have a command economy, then it will function most effectively if there is plenty of fear. By the time I arrived in the Soviet capital in the summer of 1990, there was a shortage of fear—to match the shortages of shoes, furniture, gasoline, cigarettes, and beer. But fear was still there in the background. People knew that the old monster could still lash out and destroy. I saw it do so in Lithuania in January 1991, when it made a last frantic attempt to stop the independence movement and blew holes in several people’s heads on a snowy, horrible night.1 Later, the military claimed that those it had shot were victims of traffic accidents—an insulting lie that made the action even more wicked.
Such abuses were part of a huge apparatus of what I can only call inquisitive evil—a self-serving interest in the lives of others that made normal human trust very difficult. The eventual opening of many secret police files in the former East Germany revealed that tens of thousands of citizens had spied on friends and neighbors in return for official favors. This is now generally accepted by everyone as having been the case, but in Moscow when I was there, we were only guessing at the extent of it. The German revelations confirmed the impression I had in Moscow that the Communist state had made a serious effort to replace and supplant such forces as conscience and self-control. It had taken onto itself the responsibilities of God and of believers in God. But its commandments were very different from those of God.
Even I, an insignificant Western reporter, attracted KGB attention before I had even arrived. A smart and attractive middle-aged woman, who spoke perfect English, made herself agreeable to me on the long train journey from Ostend, Belgium, to Moscow, and hired herself to me as my assistant without trying very hard to conceal her real interest. This could be briefly summed up as, “Are you a spy?” After a few weeks, when it was quite clear that this was most unlikely, she abruptly disappeared, along with the driver and cleaner she had also arranged for me. Years later, after Communism had collapsed, she reappeared in my life, claiming that she had vanished in order to care for her dying lover, a KGB agent. Even so, the KGB continued to keep an eye on me after she was gone.
My car was rather obviously fitted with a microphone. (The driving mirror fell from its socket the day after the device was installed.) My phone periodically stopped working, and I had to go around to the exchange and hammer on the door until laughing girls—who knew what was going on—leaned out of a high window to tell me it would be working again by the time I was home (which was always the case). My travel outside the city was closely monitored, and even a picnic in the woods outside Moscow was a nightmare of permissions and documents, since those innocent birch forests were crammed with missiles I was not supposed to see. You never knew who might be informing on you. You learned not to mind.
Mistrust and surveillance were not the only things that quickly struck me as different about this society. Soviet life, I learned speedily enough, was incredibly harsh and often dangerous. My Russian acquaintances thought my wife and I were ten years younger than we were. We thought they were ten years older than they were.
Life began with harshness. Even for the married, the main form of family planning—in a society that had little room for big families—was abortion, legally unrestricted in the post-war USSR as the need for a vast conscript army receded. In 1990, there were 6.46 million abortions in the USSR and 4.85 million live births. Birth itself was an authoritarian ordeal, with the newborns snatched away from their mothers by scowling nurses in tall chefs’ hats, tightly wrapped like loaves, and denied breast or bottle until the set time came around. You could spot a maternity hospital by the strings hanging from the windows, bearing pathetic messages of love or need from wives to husbands. Those husbands were forbidden for days to visit their wives or babies and instead lurked, smoking glumly, on the weedy grass beneath the windows, waiting for a chance to catch sight of them.
Once the baby was home, married life quickly included the state as third parent, since salaries were carefully set so that it took two wages to pay for the basics of life. It was virtually unknown for any mother to stay at home to look after her children, who were placed very early in slovenly nurseries where they rarely died of the neglect they received, but were even more rarely given anything resembling a Western mother’s loving attention.
For the average citizen it was a life lived at a dismally low level materially, ethically, and culturally. The Soviet Union may have been a great power, but it was a great power that had diverted its resources into the hands of the state, with only the ruling elite spared the resulting dismal privations. Even the few available consumer goods were a risk to their owners. The chief danger in all lives came from badly built Soviet TV sets, famous for their habit of exploding and setting fire to the apartment, usually killing several people. But there were also collapsing balconies—Russian friends would always tut noisily and urge me to come back inside if I ever dared step onto mine—and mysterious holes in the sidewalk into which the elderly might easily tumble and break bones. Children’s playgrounds were obstacle courses of unreliable equipment, strewn with broken glass and plentifully equipped with jagged edges. Here we were, in the midst of real, existing socialism.
While tourists and distinguished visitors were taken to the ballet, ordinary male Muscovites (women wouldn’t have dared go there) patronized beer-bars so horrible that I could only wonder at the home life of those who used them. You took your own glass—usually a rinsed-out pickle jar—and a handful of brass coins worth a few pennies, along with some dried fish wrapped in old newspaper. You fed your coins into a vending machine, and pale, acid beer dribbled intermittently out of a slimy pipe into your jar. You then went to a high table, slurped your beer (which tasted roughly the way old locomotives smell), and crunched your fish, spitting the bones onto the floor. There was no conversation.
The alternative was to share a bottle of vodka (which could not be resealed once opened) in the street, a choice of evening that often led to the insensible drinkers freezing to death by the road. Special patrols quartered Moscow on winter nights, rescuing such people rather roughly. Those who had been awarded the Order of Lenin (a medal for major achievement) were allowed to go home afterward. Others were stripped of their clothes, flung into cells, prosecuted, fined, and reported to their employers.
I visited one of the special police stations that handled the drunks, and they showed me a dismal museum of the things Russians drank when they could not get vodka. Cheap Soviet after-shave, apparently, was bearable and intoxicating if drunk through cotton waste. A sandwich of black bread and toothpaste was mildly alcoholic if nothing else could be found. A popular and bitter jest told the story of a conversation in a drinker’s home after the state announced a rise in the price of vodka. “Daddy,” asks the child with hope in its heart, “will this mean you will drink less?” “No,” replies the head of the house-hold, “It means that you will eat less.” Compared with this desperate squalor, the meanest British public house and the most sordid American bar are temples of civilization and intellectual conversation.
There were several other features of life in Communist, atheist, humanist Moscow that impressed me, accustomed as I was to the ordered consideration, general culture, and good manners of a rich and stable Protestant Christian society. One was pointed out to me by a visiting descendant of exiles, whose grandparents had fled the city in the days of Lenin. He had even so been brought up in his American home speaking pure, good middle-class Russian, literary and elegant, that sounded, as he said, “like bells.” He told me how shocked he was to hear and read the coarse, ugly, slang-infested, and bureaucratic tongue that was now spoken in the city, even by educated professional people, and featured in its newspapers and on public notice boards. It was, he said, plainly a descent.
I was taken aback by a curious aspect of the Metro, Moscow’s enormous, never-resting and often workaday underground railway. Many of my journeys took place on remote lines or on modern sections, quite without the ornate glamour of the stations the tourists see. Because of the ferocity of the winters, the entrances to the escalators were guarded by heavy, stiff swing doors that were supposed to keep some of the heat in. I noticed that nobody ever held these doors open for those behind. As the habit of holding doors open for others was ingrained in me, I tried to defy this trend. Far from being delighted or impressed by my attempted courtesy, my Russian fellow passengers looked at me suspiciously, as if I were planning to play a trick on them. One even said in satirical tones, “You’re obviously not a Russian!”
A similar collapse of manners could be seen when a trolley-bus swung into the roadside to pick up passengers. I often used this means of transportation to get home or to voyage through the outer fringes of the capital. If you were well bundled up, it was reasonably easy to withstand the ruthless pushing, elbowing, and fury that erupted every time the creaking, steamed-up vehicle stopped and flapped its doors open. This was a civilized European city, not Africa, but at such moments it was hard to see the difference apart from the temperature.
It is absolutely true—I saw it many times—that traffic stopped dead when rain began to fall, as every driver fetched windshield wipers from their hiding place and leaped out to fit them to their holders. Any wipers left in place while the car was parked would be stolen as a matter of course. Petty theft of unsecured property was universal—and universally accepted as normal.
Yet, if you could penetrate into the small warm world of a Russian kitchen—where close friends and family gathered over smoked fish, black bread, and vodka to talk long into the night—you found an intense, civilized, and courteous society of immensely knowledgeable and well-educated people, quite capable of common decency once they were in a private society controlled and known by themselves. It was not that they were coarse and mannerless themselves. It was that they lived in a coarse and mannerless world, against which it was futile for the lone individual to fight.
I came to the conclusion—and nothing has since shifted it—that enormous and intrusive totalitarian state power, especially combined with militant egalitarianism, is an enemy of civility, of consideration, and even of enlightened self-interest. I also concluded that a high moral standard cannot be reached or maintained unless it is generally accepted and understood by an overwhelming number of people. I have since concluded that a hitherto Christian society that was de-Christianized would also face such problems, because I have seen public discourtesy and incivility spreading rapidly in my own country as Christianity is forgotten. The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seems to me to be a major part of it. I do not think I would have been half so shocked by the squalor and rudeness of 1990 Moscow if I had not come from a country where Christian forbearance was still well established. If I had then been able to see the London of 2010, I would have been equally shocked.
My experience in the Soviet Empire—the squalor, the stink, the harshness, incivility, and desperation—was a long prelude to a much worse brush with desolation. It was December 1992. I was sitting on a heap of cargo in a Russian-built, Russian-piloted transport plane on its way from Nairobi in Kenya to the Somali capital, Mogadishu. I was used to Russian behavior, and this gave me a sort of jaunty confidence. The load, mainly food, was intended for the bureau of a big international news agency. I and my photographer colleague John Downing had hitched a ride.
Mogadishu by this time was no longer a functioning capital. There were no commercial airport, no law, no police, no street-lights, no electricity, no normal telephones, no foreign embassies. Many other things were missing, too, as we were to find out. What I saw in the next few days has no specifically Christian religious message. The people of Mogadishu are Muslims, and my guess is that it would have been even worse if they were not. Their country has been cursed by the repeated interference of global superpowers, more interested in its strategic location than in its society. It just showed me a vision of how fragile our civilizations are, which is why I think it worth mentioning.
At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before. My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood—a cliché of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers. I saw no particular connection, at the time of my return to religion, between faith and the shape of society. I imagined it was a matter between me and God. The atheist Soviet Union, where desecration and heroic survival were visible around me, began to alter that perception. Mogadishu accelerated the process. I thought I saw, in its blasted avenues, its private safety and public terror, and its lives ruled by the gun, a possible prophecy of where my own society was headed—though for very different reasons. I still think this.
As with so many of these occasions, I need only to close my eyes and I am there again. The plane banks over the Indian Ocean and sinks rapidly toward the ground. There is the usual confused roar and bumping as we touch down, and powerful braking. The heap on which John and I are sitting, which had slid backward during take-off, now slides rapidly forward. (This is actually rather enjoyable, but I have never been able to take airline safety videos seriously since then.) We come to a halt.
The doors open onto a beautiful and golden late afternoon, with sunset clearly not all that far off. We clamber out, me in my polished black shoes and blue city suit—I have come here, at short notice and with no preparation, from an assignment in Jerusalem. John is better dressed for the occasion in his photographer’s bush gear, but encumbered with a gigantic early-model satellite phone (which will prove wholly useless during our entire stay) and the shiny boxes of his trade. Boys about thirteen or fourteen years old crowd around, all with beautiful high-boned Somali faces, asking, “You want bodyguard?” One, plainly a leader, has an AK – 47 with a pale-blue plastic stock. A man from the news agency has arrived to meet his load. He is the only friendly face and the only English-speaking person. “Do we want a bodyguard?” I ask him “Oh, sure,” he says. “If you don’t have guards, you’ll be dead and naked by morning.” I notice, at this point, that the sun is dipping rapidly toward the Western horizon.
John and I hire two of the boy bodyguards, using the international sign language of dollar bills. One of our protectors has an unidentifiable car with the upholstery stripped from its seats and no interior trim. (This is a form of transport that I have now grown quite used to, but that was new to me then.) The news agency man says that he is sorry he cannot help us, that his people have no space at all, but we should be able to find something in town. He waves goodbye. I have the impression he is astonished that we should have come here so totally unprepared, perhaps because I am also astonished about this. My newspaper, I think, has delusions of grandeur. When, a few days ago in Tel Aviv, I had dutifully offered to go, it had been an offer made for the sake of form, expecting to be refused, which it was. But someone has changed his mind, and here I am, trapped in Mogadishu by my own attempt to gain kudos without risk. There is going to be risk after all.
We cram ourselves into the car and lurch and jolt past the ruined arrivals terminal and into the city. There are wide avenues made of mud. There seem to be no trees, no shop fronts, no windows. There is a famine, and children not much younger than my bodyguards are dying, as I shall shortly see, in stinking huts and tents not far from me. There is still light, but it will not be for long. We call at various “hotels,” which are white-painted concrete but appallingly bleak and dingy. Only desperation would persuade me to stay in one, but even though I am in fact desperate, I cannot. They are full or boarded up or commandeered by unfriendly militias. We turn into a major avenue and are there confronted by one of the most fearsome things I have ever seen.
Drawn up in line ahead, stretching for perhaps half a mile in the level, melancholy light of the setting sun, are dozens of pick-up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun mounted on it and with eccentrically dressed men, like nightmare rock musicians—some with spectacularly tangled hair, some with black berets, all with hard, frightening faces—hunched behind the guns. These are the lawless militiamen of Mogadishu, and they are leaving town because the US Marines, in the first President George Bush’s last act before he leaves office, are coming to rescue Somalia from famine and anarchy.
Luckily these militiamen are too busy or preoccupied—or perhaps have chewed too much khat (the local intoxicating herb)—even to notice us, and they begin to roll away as we appear. They will be back in a few months, to mock the mighty power of the United States with their crude weapons and their limitless courage. They all know how to die, as we do not.
But still we have nowhere to sleep, no shelter for the night. Our child guards are bickering. They plainly have no advice or ideas. We drive, for lack of anything else to do, down street after street. Were it not for John’s reassuring presence and calm, I should by now be gibbering with fear instead of merely whimpering with apprehension. I am numb and desperate and unable to see how we are going to survive the night. My imagination, normally fertile, has tactfully shut down. If I could leave, I would leave. But there is now no way out.
Night in Mogadishu, in which we will be at the mercy of anyone who cares to threaten us, is fast approaching. And then it happens—our miracle. John sees, disappearing around a corner, a familiar back. We chase after it. He calls out, and a face turns. It is an old friend from Sarajevo. Thanks to this unbelievable coincidence, we are reluctantly given places in a compound with a German TV crew, who quite reasonably object to having to share their camel stew, water filter, and generator with these improvident Englishmen, but—having made their disapproval known—let us in. I fall asleep that night, on bare concrete, hopelessly tired after thirty-six hours of travel and panic, with the sound of gunfire and screams in the middle distance, presumably coming from the people who have not found safety.
In the next few days we toured the city and witnessed the majesty of an amphibious operation, with irritable Navy SEALS hiding in the coastal bushes and furious at being spotted and spoken to, and soldiers in landing craft yelling, “Get out of the way!” as their craft surged onto the moonlit shore, exactly where a Pentagon press officer had told the entire press corps to stand. We saw the dying, who were so familiar from TV that it was shockingly without impact, although the stench that comes with famine, and which TV does not transmit, was not so familiar. (I was struck with an absolute certainty that TV does desensitize us to horror, and I have never since believed anyone who argued otherwise.) But above all, we saw the city, still functioning in a barbaric, prehistoric way and run by clans, each controlling its little territory, the only sources of power in a land without a government.
By this time we had acquired a translator, a scholarly and courteous young man whose concern for our safety was touching, given the great risks he ran himself. We became aware of this when we were stopped at a roadblock and our guide was clearly in a state of great fear, sweating visibly and trying not to tremble. Our bodyguards (who were not in the same clan as the translator) did the talking, and we were eventually waved through. When we were a safe distance away, we found out what had been going on. The guards were too interested in the white foreigners to notice that the interpreter was a member of a hated rival clan. He was quite convinced that they would identify him and shoot him. He had seen such things.
What did we see? The road surface had dissolved to mud and rubble. The sidewalks had crumbled. The buildings were all in some way damaged or defaced. There was no traffic as such. Most people were armed, with the unarmed giving way to the lightly armed and the lightly armed giving way to the heavily armed. Society had broken down into the most basic unit of trust and obligation—which in this Muslim culture, with its permissive attitude to the marriage of first cousins, was the clan.
Some sort of economy functioned. The bundles of khat leaves were delivered. Gasoline could be bought from roadside dumps. Meat could be obtained, and sorghum. Our dollars were valid without question. The powerful had satellite phones and TVs, big American or Japanese cars, electricity generators, and water filters, shielded from view behind walls twelve feet high. This was all new to me, but it would not have its full impact until a week later, when I managed to get out of that awful place.
Safely back in London, I was shown old pictures of Mogadishu as it had been a few years before. The lineaments of the great wide avenue where I saw the armed trucks were just discernible. But where I had seen mud, gangs, and wreckage, there were Italian-style pavement cafes, smart cars in orderly lines, a white-gloved policeman directing the traffic, well-dressed and prosperous people passing by, even a telephone box, and of course, modern shops and civilized-looking hotels. This was the familiar world that I was used to, and in a short time it had become the miserable urban desert in which I had rightly feared for my life. I am sure nobody ever set out to get from the one to the other. But they had done so all the same and in a very short time.
Together with the experience of Soviet society, this venture convinced me that my own civilization was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable and that I was obliged to try to protect it. When you have seen a place from which the whole apparatus of trust, civility, and peace has been stripped, you are conscious as never before of the value of these things—and more curious than ever about their origins, not in wealth or power, but in the mind of man and in the better angels of his nature.
1I describe this episode more fully in my book The Broken Compass (London: Continuum Books, 2009).