Peter Hitchens: Why Christmas in the USSR was great | SpectatorTV

join the party go to spectator.co.uk and get your first month absolutely free so peter you've written a wonderful piece for the christmas issue this year talking about your first christmas spent in the ussr in 1990 and also the last christmas at the uss arsenal can you tell us about your experience well we had to try and make something of it we were there living in in moscow i was correspondent time i arrived in the city in in june and was living illegally in an extraordinary flat uh which belonged to the communist party central committee uh with the breitner family on the other side of the courtyard uh but we really were deprived of an awful lot of things that you would normally expected at christmas time we couldn't we didn't particularly want to import uh british type food and stuff like that we were trying to live as far as possible as if we were genuinely living there and all this was mainly down to mrs hitchens who went out and bought all these astonishing things for us to eat including the ingredients of an entirely soviet christmas pudding from all the then parts of the of the soviet empire and the most marvelous goose which she found she bought from an old woman sitting on a corner from whom she could probably also have bought a bag of magic beans if she'd asked nicely and that the resulting christmas dinner though it was quite complicated eating it because christmas day at the western christmas day in moscow was not at all any kind of feast day and the the the congress of people's deputies was busy meeting in the kremlin and all kinds of news was happening uh was the most extraordinary christmas dinner we ever had and probably the best so i thought it would be nice to recount how in the middle of all this uh turmoil which there was a lot of uh we managed to have for a few brief hours something approaching christmas in that extremely uh intimidating and enormous thrilling but rather frightening city it sounds like mrs hitchens very much saved the occasion there peter but your seven-year-old daughter didn't seem to enjoy it as much um you say she lost her trust in santa claus that year well she was a bit disappointed because she put down the usual list of stuff and i think she she probably thought being as how we were in a cold snowy place it would get uh it would get there quicker and more reliably but the the presents when she opened them all had this sort of slightly 1930s look funny coloured things with dangerous corners and lumps on them because mr sitchins had again gone out to the extraordinary jetski mia the children's world department store which in those days stood right next to the kgb headquarters and bought what she could but it didn't look like anything she'd asked for so she immediately realized that uh that father christmas had let her down quite badly and obviously this was a blow but she had to put up with all that kind of thing anyway so it was all part of her growing up that's brilliant um and robert um you were there in 1973 for christmas for student exchange so presumably you didn't have a very resourceful wife to help you make the day go well i mean how was it for you well i was a bachelor i was in a student hostel in leningrad and christmas wasn't even recognized very publicly by the uh soviet authorities in that period and it was grim yeah it was a grim time it was a grim day for a person who thought it was christmas day to go out on the street and uh not be greeted by someone or not being able to greet someone who knew it was christmas so all of my colleagues had uh had gone to moscow for christmas because i got there not having a visa until the last moment because i was studying uh lenin uh and um so i was marooned there and feeling pretty sorry for myself so what did you end up doing all day i went i i booked up god it was it was really clunky in those days to get a telephone call back to the uk you had to book it a month sorry a week beforehand and go to a telephone kiosk bank in the center of the city uh where you would um have a 20-minute slot uh to talk to your family or you have to pay for it and so on uh it was all very it was it was like going into a hospital i'm not a very good hospital at that no did you i assume you had some cockroaches for company i mean the kind of place you put up they always supplied plenty of cockroaches in the soviet union for and and rats as well if you put cockroaches in there the cockroaches in the hotels did you ever get kicked out of hotels because they had a cockroach day and you the cockroaches would be fumigated and then you'd be allowed in that i had some very weird hotel experiences in the soviet union but that wasn't one of them the the best was of being was was discovering that my assistant had been run up all through the night on the hour every hour by someone from the kgb posing as a prostitute offering her services to my female assistant and she'd said to her in her perfect rush and look you're ringing the wrong room it's we've swapped rooms it's my boss you want a proposition and the woman said no no no these are my orders i have to ring this number all night so she got it well that was that was the weirdest hotel but uh but never a no cockroach day plenty of multiple cockroach days but never a day when they they claimed to be getting them out uh and rats as well i mean it was it was a lot of squalor uh but we were we were fantastically spared from most of this because of this extraordinary place we lived in it it was uh marvelous of 14-foot ceilings and oak parquet floors and chandeliers because it we've got it from a member of the nomin clutura in an illegal let and the bloc committee had come around to complain that we were there and then when they'd seen the children they'd done that thing which russians do when they see children and god completely soft heart and said okay you can stay but that's that's how he managed to hold on to it but so we were spared an awful lot of the horrors of soviet life while we lived in that place it was one of the nicest places i've ever lived actually lovely views river one side kremlin up to the university the other and uh i'd say the whole the feeling of being in moscow very powerful the really big event was new year's eve when leonid brezhnev uh the general secretary of the party gave um gave his annual speech and he absolutely ceaselessly uh burbled on it seemed and and and it was the the first time that the soviet students in the same hostel started to show some sort of tittering disrespect for their great uh their great leader it was so embarrassing because he couldn't he couldn't even read read his own speech and this was in uh 1973 this was nine years before he died so um he was already in a bad way yeah he was he was a figure of fun for a long time there was a thing called soviet rock where people would play the the 33 rpm records of his speeches and they pushed them forward with their fingers to the applause uh and it was a great joke but it was uh it was a long and tragic period but he he was gone by the time we were living in the block but his family was still there we couldn't park our car on the on that side of the courtyard because all these ferocious grandmas would come out and drive you away if you came too close the andropov family also was still there it was uh it was it was marvelously privileged and you didn't have any trouble with crime [Laughter] well peter actually you know because of the year that you were there what was that like as the ussr was disintegrating around you did it feel like that at the time and were you protected from the elements of the politics side of things we we didn't know it was going to end so soon i mean i've gone there obviously to witness the end of it and to see what would happen that was the whole idea but we didn't know how quickly it would come and we didn't know how it would come and a lot of very dark things happened after that christmas anyway a few days later after christmas i was in vilnius when the kgb went mad and started massacring people and and then of course yanaiff the awful drunk who who'd become vice president during that christmas uh was the leader of the putch which happened in august and i was there in the same block in august when the tanks came down the street that we didn't know how it was going to it was completely thrilling it was quite frightening but in in a sort of controlled way you felt although you were right on the edges of european civilization you didn't really know what sort of government it was it wasn't that totally alarming thing you can get in in countries where there is utter chaos you felt that deep down underneath there was a desire for order of some kind and that you were you were fundamentally safe i don't think i would have been able to take children there otherwise but it was thrilling exhilarating terrifying uh and i wouldn't have missed it for the world robert you were there that year too in december what was that like would you agree with peter's analysis i do indeed i mean it for soviet watchers uh it was thrilling yeah and frightening uh at the same time a little uh memory comes back to me now of going into one of these big stores that they had in in uh central moscow in december 1990 and it was a dairy supermarket and there were 15 or so smartly dressed uh young women standing behind the counters and in this dairy supermarket there was absolutely not even a half liter of milk wow and i remember thinking then this can't this this mighty soviet state with all of its nuclear weapons with all of its pretensions to summit uh diplomacy it it can't last it must be soon on its knees uh it was a really dramatic moment for me i remember that i could buy a little packet of tea in the dairy supermarket but there's no butter no yogurt no milk no all that stuff all that stuff you had you if you'd go around the back to the to the the black the children you've recorded the black exit you you would have been able to buy that stuff or of course do what we did which was we we this is without resorting to hard currency uh if you pay to pay over the odds and rubles there were very good markets where as i say we bought the fantastic ingredients for the christmas pudding and the wonderful dried fruits coming up from by the caspian sea because they were in the center of this this great empire people would struggle up uh with suitcases full of raisins and whatever it was and sell them for a tiny profit but people they're fantastically elaborate black market systems a friend of mine used to swap uh vodka which she bought in moscow for chickens which a friend of hers provided from riga and she'd put them on the overnight sleeper and with a with a fee to the sleeper attendant and that's how she got her chickens that's how people were getting things the shops it's true had nothing in them but it what was amazing was how people survived even so uh of course the system was as you rightly said collapsing but it the funny thing was in moscow particularly there were if you had any kind of money or contacts you could uh get your way around a lot of it and the back exit was crucial to all these things as well and robert um you and peter have both hinted at this but the soviet state was not exactly naturally friendly to the idea of christmas um can you tell us about the ways in which um you know the ussr tried to eradicate these traditions um throughout its regime yeah well right from the start it was a militant atheistic state so they wanted rid of religion and they wanted rid of uh christmas so uh they found it impossible to do that i think they did a survey of the red army in the second world war 20 years later and they found that half the soldiers still believed in god uh so it wasn't so easy to get rid of uh christian or muslim or jewish uh belief so what they tended to do was to have their own ceremonies have their own rituals and they had one for granddad frost instead of santa claus actually lenin had his own christmas tree you know uh came from a lutheran background originally so he his family had the sort of german idea like the british now have of of the christmas tree but they never got rid of never succeeded in getting rid of the great religious faiths and and it was in 1990 going back in the late 80s and early 90s that that the soviet authorities finally said we must have some degree of religious tolerance and garbage off among his achievements was to impose this on on a communist party whose members had been brought up to to to renounce all all all metaphysical uh magic as it was called um so it was a huge huge um huge change from say 1973 when the the churches were locked up they were dank they were dreary and usually it was only old women who were creeping into them because they had nothing to lose young people who did so had everything to lose they had their whole careers to lose well it sounds like an incredibly unique um experience for for you both to have had considering that the ussr is no longer here um peter and robert thank you so much for joining spectator tv [Music] you

Channel: The Spectator

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Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021

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Peter Hitchens, the shame of the family.