In Europe

talking to his superiors on the field telephone.
    The average Soviet citizen wanted nothing more than to lead a normal life, but in this perfectly achievable society that, too, was in store for almost no one. The daily chore of shopping was ‘a survival tactic’. At the end of the 1930s, the police in Leningrad reported a line of some 6,000 people before a single shoe store. The housing shortage in the cities was reminiscent of that in London, Vienna and Berlin fifty years earlier. Most Soviet citizens lived cooped up in flats with one family, and sometimes two, to each room. A third of all Moscow's flats were not connected to the public sewers.
    Most forms of distribution no longer had anything to do with money, so words such as ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ soon disappeared. People spoke of ‘organising’ and ‘getting hold of’, products were not sold but ‘issued’. Major and minor bosses rewarded their vassals with better housing, extra food and other favours. Everyone had a ‘patron’, even if it was only the accountant of the kolkhoz, the floor supervisor, the newspaper editor or the party boss of the neighbourhood committee. In this way, life in a city like Moscow was ruled by an immense barter system of services and services in return, a sort of gigantic clearing house that did not officially exist, but in which every citizen was involved.
    When I first visited Leningrad in 1990 – then, too, a time of long lines and bitter poverty – that jargon still existed. You went out to buy bread, but came across a big line at the greengrocer's and came home with a giant pot of sour pickles. Because you never knew what the shops would have, you took a shopping bag (an
avozka
, meaning a ‘perhaps-bag’) wherever you went. The couple in whose house my colleague and I camped out lived in one and a half rooms, almost filled with a table, a bed and a dog. Both of them survived thanks to three jobs, plus a kitchen garden and aid packages from their parents in the provinces. Our hostess was able to get hold of a new pair of shoes: ‘organised’ for herby a friend for whom she had done some translating. Our host had his car repaired: through a friend at a travel agency, he had been able to arrange two airline tickets for the boss at the garage. The friend at the travel agency had been favoured in turn with a couple of music cassettes we had brought with us. In that way, everything fitted together.
    That system was called
blat
(protection), and it was the lubricant of society. If there was no way for you to get something – from train tickets to building materials – by normal means, you went
blat
, you sought out a few contacts, you pulled a few strings. Thanks to their little gardens and to these ‘leaks’ in the official economy, Soviet citizens were able to survive. As one of them wrote in 1940: ‘To have no
blat
is the same as having no civil rights, the same as being robbed of all your rights.’
    Despite all these concerns, many people experienced the 1930s as a special period. ‘We were young Soviets,’ Anna Smirnova had told me in St Petersburg, still with a certain pride. The boundless optimism during the first five-year plan was not simply a matter of inflated propaganda. Most Russians truly believed that a better future lay just around the corner, and that the hardships were only a temporary phase on the road from a ‘backward’ past to a ‘modern’ future. They saw Moscow filling up with monumental buildings, they saw a fairy-tale-like metro system being built, factories rising everywhere, all harbingers of the new age. Stalin was not the only one convinced that almost everything between heaven and earth was ‘achievable’; the vast majority of his subjects felt exactly the same way.

    An interesting travelogue has been handed down to us from the 1930s, written by André Gide. In those years Gide was at the height of his literary fame. He was seen as the aesthetic and critical arbiter of the French people. Like many intellectuals he became enamoured of ‘the experiment without precedent’ taking place under Stalin's leadership, and he had defended the Soviets in numerous public debates. That was why this literary star was invited to visit the Soviet Union, along with several other authors. The trip took place in June 1936 – Gide arrived in time to attend Maxim Gorky's funeral – and his report,
Retour de l'URSS
, was published in November. During those few months, Gide's politics made