John Miller: All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening. Hodgson Press, 2010. 324 pp.
Journalist John Miller adopts the pose of a man who, though he works hard, also takes things easy, loudly renouncing any pretensions to profundity. After arriving in Moscow in January 1960, he spent the next 40 years filing stories for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph and enjoying life in the metropolis. Without ever having believed in the fairy-tale version of the Soviet Union – indeed, he writes about its demise without a hint of nostalgia – he was not just susceptible to Russia’s attractions, he clearly loved being there.
What makes his memoir enjoyable is the way his personality radiates from every page. Miller is a fount of anecdotes, all told with the smooth polish that comes from repetition. He adopts an intimate, gossipy tone, as though yielding to his fans in the pub by recounting his best adventures one more time. (Among the longer entries in the index is the one for “Vodka.”) One suspects that a few of the tales might have undergone some embellishment for effect, as he treats us to another light-hearted rendition of what it was like in the Soviet capital so many years ago, living with a pet rabbit in an apartment infested by bedbugs and cockroaches, with the odd guest dropping in uninvited. Cheers!
It comes as no surprise that Miller was well-connected, hobnobbing with visiting stars such as Kim Novak. His best yarns, though, involve the fate of the true believers who went to the USSR hoping to help build socialism, only to end up enduring conditions that proved drab at best. The most famous, of course, were the members of the Cambridge spy ring who managed to defect. At the funeral of one of them, the notorious Guy Burgess, Miller ended up helping bear a wreath presented by the Communist Party of the USSR. “I would have been very uncomfortable if it had been from the KGB.” (pg. 60)
Later he badgered Burgess’s fellow spies Donald Maclean and Kim Philby for interviews, which they refused with rapidly diminishing politeness. On one occasion in April 1969, after having made a thorough pest of himself, he did manage to arrange for a photographer friend of his to snap a picture of Philby walking down Gorky Street, the city’s main drag. (That picture, like all the others reproduced here, is presented full page – a welcome change from the usual practice.)
Like any gifted raconteur, Miller is not overly troubled by niceties such as historical accuracy. The KGB, for instance, never actually gave Philby “a general’s rank,” though Philby himself was not above spreading that particular tale among those he thought gullible. (pg. 123) No matter – no one could possibly read more than a page of this book and come away with the impression that the author is some stickler who is pedantically trying to set the record straight.
Miller is in his element when he can provide background information on the many colorful characters he knew, among them the first translator of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Yet another true believer, Ralph Parker started out as a Times correspondent in Eastern Europe who traveled on a wartime convoy to Murmansk, fell in love there and married a Russian woman. Once he settled down in Moscow, he produced hackwork such as: “The Soviet Union – an Example for All the World.” The one time he stuck his neck out was when he tackled Ivan Denisovich – “Parker saw it was worth translating into English and that he might pick up some hard currency to pay for his imported scotch and trout from Helsinki.” (pg. 125) He enlisted Miller to help him out when it came to translating the crude Russian oaths sprinkled through the text. Miller later was thankful that he had done so without attribution, since Solzhenitsyn was none too pleased with the result, complaining that his book had been “mauled into English by the pot-boiling parasite, R. Parker.” (pg. 126)
Finally, what about that title? As the author tells it, “there is a scene in ‘I’m All Right, Jack,’ the classic British trade-union satire and Boulting Brothers film box-office success of 1957, where Peter Sellers, a tragi-comic shop steward, by the name of Fred Kite, is talking about the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise. His young lodger, Windrush, listens patiently and asks if he had ever been to Russia. ‘No, not yet,’ Sellers replies. His eyes glaze. ‘I’ve always wanted to though… all them cornfields and ballet in the evening.’ – It is a memorable line, encapsulating a Sellers-Kite view of the Soviet Union once quite commonly held by people who were intelligent enough to have known better.” (Preface, xiii)
Favorite quotations:
On getting in the wrong line at Soviet passport control: “Woe betide being trapped in a queue behind a family, because after their humblest and most personal possessions were gone through on the grounds they might be national treasures, their passports and visas were minutely examined in the apparent belief they could be forgeries.” (pg. 4)
“While the Russians were lovely people and disarmingly kind in their private lives, once they put on a uniform – and it seemed as though most of them did – or stepped into a job in which they dealt with the public, so they became as brusque and as rude as any ill-tempered traffic warden.” (pg. 8)
On the Cambridge spies: “At the end, Burgess was probably the loneliest man in the Soviet Union. He never saw Maclean[,] and Kim Philby, who had recruited him and to whom he was much closer, had only just arrived after fleeing from Beirut, and the KGB was keeping him under wraps. The other ‘grey men’ thought him a slob, a bore and an appalling establishment name-dropper, and, of course, he didn’t like Russians because they couldn’t talk about the Reform Club and the bars of London.” (pg. 54)
“When a journalist was marked down for expulsion, he had better beware. The means at the authorities’ disposal were many and varied. The Soviet press did what it was told: newspapers could libel you without any fear of a comeback and take your articles apart, misquoting or taking them out of context, and you could do nothing about it.” (pg. 114)
Another long-time foreign correspondent, Bob Evans, has written a review with an insider’s perspective at www.thebaron.info, the house organ for Reuters.
Bibliographical note: The title page does not reveal where the publisher, Hodgson Press, is located. A search of their website reveals that it is a print-on-demand outfit in Kingston upon Thames that “was set up to cater for the needs of the specialist-interest reader and author.” A fair number of the titles on their not very extensive list deal with Russia.
Among other works Miller has co-authored with more traditional publishers, there are two of related interest: The Cruellest Night: Germany’s Dunkirk and the Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (with Ronald Payne, 1979) and The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia 1918-1920 (with Christopher Dobson, 1986).
Also mentioned in the text of All Them Cornfields… are:
“Another book he [Burgess] once showed me was a modest volume about his flight with Maclean.” (pg. 56f) This is likely Anthony Purdy and Douglas Sutherland: Burgess and Maclean, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), 182 pp.
Ralph Parker was author of a “vicious, shoddy little book” (pg. 125). This was probably Moscow Correspondent (London: F. Muller, 1949), 304 pp.
Another ex-pat journalist in Moscow was Wilfred Burchett, who “admits this [his sympathies with the Chinese Communists, etc.] in his memoirs, while saying he became fed up with living and working in Moscow after eight years because of the almost totally negative attitude and lack of respect towards foreign journalists.” (pg. 129) – see Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, 1981, reprinted 2006.
© Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 