Stalin's Moscow was thus recast as an imperial city - a Soviet Petersburg - and, like that unreal city, it became a subject of apocalyp-tic myths. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (1940), the Devil visits Moscow and brings its cultural temples crashing down; Satan descends on the city in the person of a magician called Woland, with a band of sorcerers and a supernatural cat called Behemoth. They cause havoc in the capital, exposing it as morally corrupt, before flying off from the Sparrow Hills, where Napoleon (that other devil) had first set his sights on the city. Flying off with them was a young Moscow girl called Margarita, who had sacrificed herself to Woland so as to redeem her beloved Master, the author of

a suppressed manuscript about Pontius Pilate and the trial of Christ. As their horses leaped into the air and galloped upwards to the sky, Margarita 'turned round in flight and saw that not only the many-coloured towers but the whole city had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been'.¹³¹

And yet throughout the twentieth century Moscow was still 'home'. It was still the mother city it had always been, and, when Hitler attacked it in the autumn of 1941, its people fought to defend it. There was no question of abandoning the city, as Kutuzov had abandoned it to Napoleon in 1812. A quarter of a million Muscovites dug last-ditch defences, carted food to the soldiers at the front and cared for the injured in their homes. With one last desperate effort the Germans were pushed back from the city's gates - a spot still marked today by a giant iron cross on the road from Moscow to the Sheremetevo airport. It was not the Soviet capital but Mother Moscow which was saved. In the words of Pasternak:

A haze of legend will be cast Over all, like scroll and spiral Bedecking gilded boyar chambers And the Cathedral of St Basil.

By midnight denizens and dreamers Moscow most of all is cherished. Here is their home, the fount of all With which this century will flourish.¹³²

4

overleaf: A typical one-street village in central Russia, c. 1910

1

In the summer of 1874 thousands of students left their lecture halls in Moscow and St Petersburg and travelled incognito to the countryside to start out on a new life with the Russian peasantry. Renouncing their homes and families, they were 'going to the people' in the hopeful expectation of finding a new nation in the brotherhood of man. Few of these young pioneers had ever seen a village, but they all imagined it to be a harmonious community that testified to the natural socialism of the Russian peasantry. They thus convinced themselves that they would find in the peasant a soul mate and an ally of their democratic cause. The students called themselves the Populists (narodniki), 'servants of the people' (the narod), and they gave themselves entirely to the 'people's cause'. Some of them tried to dress and talk like peasants, so much did they identify themselves with their 'simple way of life'. One of them, a Jew, even wore a cross in the belief that this might bring him closer to the 'peasant soul'.¹ They picked up trades and crafts to make themselves more useful to the peasantry, and they brought books and pamphlets to teach the peasants how to read. By merging with the people and sharing in the burdens of their lives, these young revolutionaries hoped to win their trust and make them understand the full horror of their social condition.

Yet this was no ordinary political movement. The 'going to the people' was a form of pilgrimage, and the type of person who became involved in it was similar to those who went in search of truth to a monastery. These young missionaries were riddled with the guilt of privilege. Many of them felt a personal guilt towards that class of serfs - the nannies and the servants - who had helped to bring them up in their families' aristocratic mansions. They sought to free themselves from their parents' sinful world, whose riches had been purchased by the people's sweat and blood, and set out for the village in a spirit of repentance to establish a 'New Russia' in which the noble and the peasant would be reunited in the nation's spiritual rebirth. By dedicating themselves to the people's cause - to the liberation of the peasantry from poverty and ignorance and from the oppression of the gentry and the state - the students hoped to redeem their own sin: that of being

born into privilege. 'We have come to realize', the prominent Populist theoretician Nikolai Mikhailovsky wrote, 'that our awareness of the universal truth could only have been reached at the cost of the age-old suffering of the people. We are the people's debtors and this debt weighs down our conscience.'²