What use are medals, decorations, honors and titles bestowed on us by the state? My own country has many of these, but few of them are as much use as the Soviet Union’s old Order of Lenin. This, I discovered one long ago winter, had one truly worthwhile benefit. It will take me a moment to explain it.
On freezing nights in Communist Moscow, a special detachment of the city’s militia (the nearest they had to a police force) scoured the capital’s snowdrifts, dark lanes, and icy parks, looking for the prone or supine figures of drunks who had passed out on the street. If they did not find them in time, these men would certainly die. This, in those days, was a major job. If you wanted to spend the evening drinking in the Soviet metropolis, and many Muscovites did, there were not many options. Bars, as we understand them, were rare and horrible. The one I visited for research purposes was decorated in grayish blue and bluish blue, and lit by those flickering ceiling boxes that make anywhere feel like a morgue. Its floor was half an inch deep in slopped beer and discarded fish bones, and its clientele were not so much morose as desperate.
You brought your own container, usually a washed-out pickle jar, and fed five kopecks (a sum of money now too small to calculate) into a slot machine, which slowly dribbled some sour yellow fluid from a length of slimy pipe into your jar. I have said elsewhere that it tasted much as you might expect a streetcar to taste, if you had boiled it first. And so it did. You then produced from your pockets the newspaper-wrapped portion of nameless dried fish which you had brought with you, and you crunched and slurped until you admitted that it was time to go home, to the tiny flat reached up a stinking staircase or via a quaking, scribbled-on, urinated-in elevator which was what home meant then to most Soviet citizens. It is no surprise that many preferred the al fresco option, despite its risks, or perhaps because of them. This was to purchase a half-liter bottle of vodka, and go in search of someone to share it with in the thrillingly cold open air.
Now, after a few months of Soviet life I looked pretty much like everyone else, bundled spherically in my winter gear, especially once I had been splashed with winter mud by enough passing cars. I was more than once approached by a citizen anxious to share his blessings with me. He would use a curious and rather sinister signal, two fingers tapped against the throat. I never accepted, as I was worried about what might happen when the first bottle ran out and foresaw all kinds of possible trouble beyond that. But it meant, “I have vodka, will you share with me?” I should mention one detail: The standard vodka bottle of the time was sealed with a top which could not be re-closed once open. It was expected by everyone that it would be finished in one session.
Vodka, I should say, was something of a luxury. Anti-alcohol campaigns had made it scarce and expensive, and hideous dangerous moonshine concoctions, under the general title of “Samogon” (self-made) were worryingly common. In desperation, some fastidious drinkers would suck Soviet perfume or aftershave through cotton waste, knowing that the alcohol content was high even if it tasted funny and was a strange colour. I was told about, but never tried, the Red Army toothpaste sandwich, in which a large serving of U.S.S.R. toothpaste was clamped between two slices of black bread. It was alleged that this achieved some sort of fermentation, and might provide a kick if all else failed.
Well, however it began, this open air refreshment often ended with a grown man snoring by the roadside in the filthy slush. And the special militia vodka squad went round all night picking up these victims and taking them to special sobering stations. There, they would not die, but might wake up the next morning wishing they were dead. This would not just be because of their hangovers, but also because the militiamen would inform their employers, making it likely that they would lose their jobs and spiral down to the lower depths. Persistent offenders also faced fines and even prison.
But here is the point of this story. If you had the Order of Lenin, awarded for some notable contribution to the Soviet Fatherland (the late Leonid Brezhnev had eight of them), you were simply given a breakfast of black bread and tea, and sent on your way with a smile. Say what you like, but that is a useful honor. Alas, it was discontinued when the Leninist state crumbled in 1991. Something tells me that (to snatch an example of a U.S. award at random) the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching doesn’t carry any such privilege. Nor, as far as I know, do the lower or higher ranks of the French Légion d’honneur, or of my own country’s Orders of the British Empire, the Bath (my personal favorite), the Garter, or of St Michael and St George.
I have none of these decorations and gongs and don’t expect to receive any. Indeed, I like to think I would refuse one if it came my way. I would probably do so because it was too minor, but would of course pretend that it was because I was incorruptible, as I believe several people do every year. This is supposed to be secret, but it often comes out somehow. Or you can send your medal back, in protest at something or other.
More interesting are the knighthoods which have been hilariously bestowed on people known to me, people I have known too long and too well to regard as knights, at least with a straight face. In truth it does not matter much if someone is a knight or not. I expect the title makes it easier for them to book restaurant tables, but that seems poor recompense for publicly accepting baubles from the government.
The same could be said of some people known to me who have in recent years become barons, the most junior title in the House of Lords, to which my only response has been, “what . . . him?!” or, alternatively, “what . . . her?!” These awards do not provide the holders with land, or a manor, though you can have a coat of arms made. But they do come with seats in Parliament, access to some reasonably pleasant bars and dining rooms, and a comforting allowance, and are therefore possibly worth having. I began to think that if such people could be barons and baronesses, then I should by now be at least a Viscount. So irritated was I by this that some years ago I put myself forward in a sort of public lottery, to be what was called a “People’s Peer.” The idea was that the chosen ones would speak for parts of the country which had few voices in our high councils. I thought my support for, and liking for socially conservative, Christian causes might get me in. What a fool I was. The seat for the “people’s peer” went to a person called Elspeth Howe, alas no longer with us after a lifetime of service to respectable causes. She was already called Lady Howe thanks to being married to an ennobled politician who had been one of Mrs. Thatcher’s soppiest Cabinet ministers. Lady Howe’s general tendency may be summed up by the fact that she was for some years the Deputy Chairman of something called the Equal Opportunities Commission. She was distantly related to our current Queen Camilla. She was a people’s peer in the way that a People’s Republic is a people’s republic. I have no doubt that the people she spoke for rejoiced at her appointment. But in general I thought the episode was a joke at the people’s expense. I was sorely tempted to try Jacobinism for a while afterwards.
But all such wounds heal, and (as I do like a good gloat) I have quite enjoyed the way in which the House of Lords has come down in the world since then, crammed as it is with ever more undistinguished placemen and women and obviously doomed to be replaced with an even more hideous elected Senate utterly in the hands of the party machines. Even its catering facilities are on the slide, if a recent visit as a guest is any guide.
So what am I left with after a lifetime of doing exactly what I wanted to do, something which, in the case of actors, leads to titles awarded for “services to the theatre”? I might get an obituary or two when I die, but then again I might not, or the last newspapers which publish these things could die before I do. Anyway, I shan’t see these articles unless I fake my own death (an unappealing idea) and would doubtless be annoyed by their mistakes if I did. But I am listed in Who’s Who, a thick red volume of people supposed to be in some way distinguished. This is a thing you cannot buy and which has nothing to do with the state, which is a sort of recognition. But nobody reads it except those who are in it, and most of them are just looking up their own entries.
Well, the other day I came up with an idea. One of the griefs of modern Britain is that it has a semi-official press regulator, in my view a national shame in itself. It is called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (I.P.S.O.). During the Covid panic, this body decided to sanction me for expressing an opinion about the effectiveness of face masks against the virus. It claimed that this opinion was an inaccuracy, but I won’t go into all that again. There is a website where the case may be studied. The great thing is that in all that vast desert of submission and conformism, I have an actual written record of my dissent. So I went to the editors of Who’s Who and asked that, in the bit where my career and achievements are listed, and where my medals, knighthood and peerage would be listed if I had any, they would place the words “sanctioned by IPSO,” and the date.
They hummed a bit and hawed a bit, but to their credit they agreed, and now, as of a few weeks ago, there it is in the book, my only honor. It is better by miles than an Order of Lenin, but it won’t help me if I am found drunk in a gutter by the police.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday.
