Muffled by the thick stone of the Lefortovo or the Butyrka—the constant crackle of rifle and pistol shots: nine grams of lead in the chest or the back of the head for the thousands, for the tens of thousands of innocents discovered to have committed “especially vicious acts of espionage or terrorism.”
And those builders of the new world who were still free kept on trying to divine: “Will they, won’t they?” Everyone was waiting for a knock on the door in the night, the whisper of car tires outside the building, and then a sudden silence.
And so, in chaos and absurdity, in the madness of false accusations, the generation of the Civil War disappeared. New days began, and new actors appeared on the stage...
19
Mekler, Lev Naumovich...He had used to wear size forty-five shoes and a size fifty-eight suit from the Moscow Tailoring Combine. And now he had been sentenced under Article 58: betrayal of the Motherland, terrorism, sabotage, never mind a few other things.
He had not been shot, probably because he was one of the first to be arrested. At that time death sentences had not been handed out with such freedom.
Stumbling, squinting shortsightedly and distractedly, he had gone through all the circles of the prison and camp hell. He had not perished because an inner fire—the faith that had consumed him since adolescence—had protected him from scurvy and from malnutrition, from bitter winds and from nights when the temperature fell to forty degrees below zero. Nor had he died of dysentery; nor had he perished when a barge packed with prisoners sank in the Yenisey.
He had not had his throat cut by the common criminals. He had not been tortured to death in a punishment cell or beaten to death during interrogation. He had not been shot during a mass purge, at a time when every tenth prisoner was being shot.
Where had this powerful flame of fanaticism come from? How had it appeared in this son of a sad, sly shopkeeper from the shtetl of Fastov? How had it sprung up in a young man who had studied in a commercial school and who had been brought up on the Golden Library and on the adventure stories of Louis Boussenard? What had instilled him with this hatred of capitalism? Neither he nor his father, after all, had spent years down mines or in factories filled with smoke and dust.
Who or what had given him the soul of a fighter? The example of Zhelyabov and Kalyaev? The wisdom of The Communist Manifesto? The sufferings of the poor next door?
Or had these coals been smoldering deep in the millennial abyss of heredity, ready to burst into flame in the struggle against Caesar’s soldiers or against the Spanish Inquisition, in the hunger and intellectual frenzy of Talmud Torah schools, in a shtetl’s attempt to defend itself during a pogrom?
Maybe it was indeed these thousands of years of humiliation, the anguish of exile in Babylon, the humiliations of the shtetl, the poverty of the Pale of Settlement, that had engendered the frenzy for justice that had forged the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler?
His inability to adapt to everyday life evoked both mockery and admiration. To some there had seemed something saintly about this Komsomol leader in torn sandals, in a calico shirt with an open collar, with nothing on his head but his curly hair—and he had seemed no less saintly as a regimental commissar wearing a torn leather jacket and a peaked Budyonny helmet with a red star that had faded as if from loss of blood. And he had been no less unshaven and ragged when, as commissar of justice for the entire Ukraine, he had gotten out of his car in a tattered raincoat with missing buttons and walked, in winter, to his office.
He had seemed helpless, as if not of this world, but there were some who remembered listening reverently to him during stormy meetings at the front and then following him into the fire of Wrangel’s machine guns.
He was a preacher, an apostle, a soldier of the world socialist revolution. For the sake of the Revolution he was ready, without a second thought, to give up everything—his life, the love of a woman, all those nearest and dearest to him. The only thing it was impossible for him to give up was happiness—since nothing could have brought him more happiness than to go to the stake for the Revolution, to sacrifice for her everything on earth that a human being holds dear.
The future world order seemed to him infinitely splendid, and for its sake Mekler was ready to employ the most pitiless violence.
He was, essentially, someone kindhearted. If a mosquito was sucking his blood, rather than crushing it with a slap of the hand, he would send it on its way with a delicate flick of his fingers. If he caught a bedbug on the scene of the crime, he would wrap it in a piece of paper and carry it outside.
What distinguished his service to the Revolution and the good of humanity was his lack of pity for suffering and his readiness to shed blood.
In his revolutionary purity he imprisoned his father and testified against him before the Cheka. And when his sister begged him to defend her husband, who had been arrested as a saboteur, he turned his back on her cruelly and sullenly.
In his meekness he was pitiless toward those who held the wrong views. To him the Revolution seemed helpless and childishly trustful—surrounded as she was by treachery, the cruelty of the wicked and villainous, the filth of those who wished to corrupt her.
And so he was pitiless toward the enemies of the Revolution.
On his revolutionary conscience there was only one stain. Without telling the Party, he had given help to his old mother, the widow of a man who had been shot by the organs of justice. And, after her death, he had paid for her to be given a religious funeral; that had been her last, pathetic wish.
His vocabulary, his way of thinking, his actions all sprang from one and the same source: the books written in the name of the Revolution, the justice and morality of the Revolution, the poetry of the Revolution, and the strategy of the Revolution—her marching soldiers, her visions, her songs.
It was through the eyes of the Revolution that he looked at the stars in the sky and at birch leaves in April; it was from her most sweet cup that he drank the charm, the potion of first love; it was in the light of her wisdom that he understood the battle in ancient Rome between patricians and slaves, the struggle between landowners and serfs, the class warfare between factory owners and the proletariat. The Revolution was his mother, his tender beloved, his sun, his destiny.
And now the Revolution had put him in a cell in the Lubyanka and knocked out eight of his teeth. Swearing obscenely and calling him a mangy Yid, stamping on him with officer’s boots, she had demanded that he, her son, her beloved apostle, should confess himself to be her secret and mortal enemy, her would-be poisoner.
He did not, of course, renounce the Revolution. During conveyor-belt interrogations that went on for a hundred hours his faith did not waver for even a moment; his faith did not waver when he lay on the floor and saw the polished toe of a box-calf boot beside his blood-filled mouth. The Revolution was coarse, obtuse, and cruel as she interrogated him under torture; she was enraged by the loyalty, by the meek patience of the Old Bolshevik, Lev Mekler.
This rage was the rage of a man trying to drive away a mongrel who won’t stop following at his heels. First he quickens his steps; then he shouts at the dog and stamps his feet; then he shakes his fist at the dog and throws stones at it. The dog runs away, but when, a hundred yards farther on, the man looks around, he sees the now crippled dog hurriedly limping after him—as determinedly faithful as ever.
And what the man finds most abhorrent of all is the look in those doggy eyes—so meek, so sad and loving, so fanatical in their devotion.
The dog’s love enrages its master. The dog sees this rage and cannot understand it. The dog cannot understand that, while committing an unprecedented injustice, the master wants, at least a little, to appease his conscience. The dog’s meekness and devotion have been driving him insane. He hates the dog for this love more than he ever hated the wolves against which the dog once defended the house of his youth. He is hoping, through his coarse brutality, to put an end to this love.
Shocked by this sudden, inexp
licable cruelty, the dog keeps on following the master.
Why? Why?
And the dog cannot understand that there is nothing absurd or senseless about this sudden hatred; the dog cannot understand that everything is real and rational.
This hatred is normal and predictable; it is an expression of a clear, mathematical logic. To the dog, however, it seems like a spell of madness. It all seems wild and senseless, and the dog even feels anxious on the master’s behalf. The dog wants to rescue the master from his blindness—for the master’s sake, not for its own. And the dog loves the master and therefore cannot leave him.
And the master understands now that the dog is not going to leave him. The master knows now that the only thing he can do is to strangle the dog or shoot it.
And in order that this execution—this execution of a dog that adores and idolizes him—should not weigh on his conscience or evoke the disapproval of his neighbors, the master decides that this dog must be turned into an enemy, into an artificial enemy. Let the dog confess, before dying, that it wished to tear its master to pieces.
It is easier to kill an enemy than to kill a friend.
In that first house, after all—in the house he built in his youth in the midst of gloomy and deserted ruins, in the house where he once prayed with a pure heart—the dog was his friend and guard, his inseparable companion.
So let the dog confess that it was in cahoots with the wolves.
And in its death agony, as it is being choked with a rope, the dog looks at its master with meek love, with a faith equal to that which led the first Christian martyrs to their deaths.
And the dog never understood one very simple thing: its master had left that house of prayer and youthful intoxication and moved into a building of granite and glass, and his village mongrel had begun to seem an absurdity, a burden. More than a burden—a danger. Which was why he killed it.
20
The years passed, the dust and the fog cleared, and it became possible to make out what had happened. What had once seemed like chaos or insanity, like self-destruction, like a chain of absurd coincidences, what had once driven people out of their minds because it seemed so mysteriously and tragically senseless—all this gradually became recognizable as the clear, distinct attributes of the new reality.
The fate of the generation of the Revolution now ceased to seem mystical and extraordinary and began to seem entirely logical. And Ivan Grigoryevich felt able, at last, to understand his country’s new fate—the fate that had been built on the bones of that generation.
The Bolshevik generation had been formed in the days of the Revolution, in the days when the ideal of a World Commune held sway, when people took part in inspired, hungry, voluntary working Saturdays. That generation took on its shoulders the legacy of the World War and the Civil War—chaos, famine, typhus, anarchy, crime, and banditry. Through Lenin’s lips it proclaimed that there was a party that could set Russia on a new path. Without hesitation, it accepted the legacy of hundreds of years of Russian despotism, during which dozens of generations had come and gone, knowing no rights except that of a master to do as he pleased with his serfs.
Under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik generation dissolved the Constituent Assembly and destroyed the democratic revolutionary parties that had struggled against Russian absolutism.
The Bolshevik generation did not—in the context of bourgeois Russia—believe in the value of individual freedom; it did not believe in the value of freedom of speech or of freedom of the press.
Like Lenin, it saw as irrelevant nonsense the freedoms of which the intelligentsia and many revolutionary workers had long dreamed.
The young State destroyed the democratic parties, clearing the way for Soviet construction. By the end of the 1920s, these parties had been liquidated. Men who had been imprisoned under the Tsar were either back in prison or carrying out forced labor.
The year 1930 saw the total collectivization of agriculture.
Not long after this the ax was raised yet again. This time, however, it was on the generation of the Civil War that the ax fell. A small part of this generation survived, but its soul, its faith in a World Commune, its romantic and revolutionary strength disappeared with those who were destroyed in 1937. Those who were left, those who went on living and working, managed to adapt to the new time and its new people.
The new people did not believe in the Revolution. They were the children not of the Revolution but of the new State that the Revolution had created.
The new State had no need of holy apostles, of frenzied, possessed builders, of faithful disciples. The new State no longer even needed servants; it needed employees. And the State’s only misgiving with regard to these employees was that they did, on occasion, turn out to be very petty-minded indeed—and thieving rascals into the bargain.
Terror and dictatorship swallowed up their creators. The State, which had seemed to be a means, had now proved to be an end in itself. The people who had created this State had seen it as a means of realizing their ideals. It turned out, however, that their dreams and ideals had been a means employed by a great and terrible State. The State was no longer a servant but a grim autocrat. It was not the people who needed the Red Terror of 1919. It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants—most of the people, after all, were peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks. Nor was it the people who destroyed the workers’ right to strike or the peasants’ right to sow what they chose. It was not the people who added huge taxes to the price of consumer goods.
The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.
21
It was strange. When Ivan Grigoryevich remembered the year 1937, and the women who had been sentenced to hard labor because of their husbands; when he recalled Anna Sergeyevna’s account of total collectivization and the famine in the Ukrainian countryside; when he thought about the laws according to which workers were sent to prison for getting to work twenty minutes late and peasants were sentenced to eight years in the camps for hiding a few grains of wheat; when Ivan Grigoryevich pondered these things, it was not a man with a mustache, not a man wearing a military tunic and boots, whom he saw in his mind’s eye. No, it was not Stalin he saw in his mind’s eye, but Lenin.
It was as if Lenin’s life had not come to an end on January 21, 1924.
Now and again Ivan Grigoryevich wrote down his thoughts about Lenin and Stalin in a school exercise book left behind by Alyosha.
All the victories of the Party and the State were associated with the name of Lenin. But Lenin also seemed responsible for all the terrible cruelties that had been carried out in the country.
The tragedies of the countryside, the year 1937, the new bureaucracy, the new bourgeoisie, forced labor—all of these found their justification in Lenin’s revolutionary passion, in Lenin’s speeches, articles, and appeals.
And little by little, over the years, Lenin’s features changed. The image of the young student called Volodya Ulyanov, of the young Marxist who went by the name of Tulin, of the Siberian exile, of the revolutionary émigré, of the political writer and thinker called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; the image of the man who had proclaimed the era of the world socialist revolution; the image of the creator of a revolutionary dictatorship in Russia, the man who had liquidated every revolutionary party in Russia except the one that see
med to him the most revolutionary of all; the image of the man who had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, which represented every class and party of postrevolutionary Russia, and who had created soviets where only revolutionary workers and peasants were to be represented—this image changed. Features familiar from portraits changed; the image of the first Soviet head of state changed.
Lenin’s work continued—and as it acquired new features, so the image of the dead Lenin acquired new features.
Lenin was an intellectual. His family belonged to the working intelligentsia. His brothers and sisters belonged to the revolutionary movement. His elder brother, Aleksandr, became a hero and holy martyr of the Revolution.
The writers of memoirs all say that, even as the leader of the Revolution, as the creator of the Party, as the head of the Soviet government, he remained someone modest and simple. He did not smoke or drink and, in all probability, he never in his life cursed and swore at someone in truly foul language. There was a student purity about his idea of leisure: music, the theater, books, walks. He always dressed democratically, almost as if he were poor.
The little Volodya who was so loved by his mother and sisters, the young man who listened to the Appassionata and read and reread War and Peace, the young man who wore a crumpled tie and an old jacket and sat in the gallery of the theater—can this really have been the man who founded a State that chose to adorn the chests of Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Merkulov, and Abakumov with its highest honor, with his very own Order of Lenin?
On the anniversary of Lenin’s death the Order of Lenin was awarded to Lydia Timashuk. Was this an indication that Lenin’s cause had dried and withered—or that it was truly triumphing?