Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In St Petersburg I glimpsed the hope and decency of Soviet communism

In St Petersburg I glimpsed the hope and decency of Soviet communism

It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly. Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a 50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow. In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist ideal.

My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight. Around this time there is a tight cluster of departures from St Petersburg to Moscow. Along an almost ruler-straight railroad across flat marshes and forests, the journey of some 500 miles can be accomplished without hurry by overnight trains taking about eight hours — time to get a good night’s sleep — and the sleeper services on Russian railways are clean, comfortable and cheap. So a clutch of trains leave within a short time of one another and chase each other down the track, arriving in Moscow in time for breakfast.

Railwaymen the world over are conservative. Probably some of the last and most recalcitrant of the shattered communist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union are still in post across the network, working for the Russian railways as if glasnost and perestroika had never happened; and at the station in St Petersburg it showed. The Soviet architecture had been treated with respect. The decor remained pristine Marxist-Heroic. The undisciplined tide of cheap billboarding, commercial fly-posting and Tannoyed advertising messages which is engulfing the once ordered streetscapes of Russian cities as glum austerity yields to glum anarchy — Russia is becoming a sort of gloomy Brazil — seemed to have been held back at this station’s gates.

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