And it is perhaps here, or hereabouts, that we can find an explanation for one of the questions that most bewildered people in 1937. Why was it necessary, in the course of destroying innocent people who were devoted to the Revolution, to elaborate detailed scenarios, false from beginning to end, of their involvement in entirely imaginary, nonexistent conspiracies?
By torturing them for days, weeks, months, and sometimes even whole years, the security organs compelled poor, tormented accountants, engineers, and agronomists to take part in theatrical productions, to play the roles of villains, foreign agents, terrorists, and saboteurs.
To what purpose? Millions of people have asked themselves this question millions of times.
Sudeikin, after all, organized his theatrical productions in order to deceive the Tsar. But Stalin did not need to deceive the Tsar; he was the Tsar.
Yes, yes, of course...But all the same, Stalin was trying to deceive the Tsar. He was trying, through his theatrical productions, to deceive a Tsar who, in spite of everything, against Stalin’s own will, still lived in the secret dark of his soul. An invisible sovereign was still living there—an invisible sovereign was still living in all the places where non-freedom appeared to have triumphed undisputedly. Stalin was terrified of this Tsar, and of this Tsar alone, until the end of his days.
Stalin was unable, in spite of all the millions he killed, to do away with freedom. He was unable, until the end of his days, to do away with the freedom in whose name the February Revolution had flared up.
And so the Asiatic despot living in Stalin’s soul tried to deceive freedom. Despairing of doing away with freedom once and for all, he tried to outwit freedom, to pull the wool over the eyes of freedom.
25
Just as Lenin’s work did not die in 1924, so Stalin’s work lived on after his death.
The State without freedom, the State built by Stalin, still lives. The apparatus of power—heavy industry, the armed forces, the security organs—is still in the grip of the Party. Non-freedom still reigns, unshakable, from the Pacific Ocean to the White and the Black seas. Theater still penetrates every aspect of life. There is still the same system of elections; the workers’ unions are as shackled as ever; the peasants are still without internal passports, without even the freedom to move; the intelligentsia of a great country—still producing talented work—is still confined to the servants’ room, from where one can hear the hum of its chatter. Government is still simply a matter of issuing commands, of pressing on buttons, and the power of the supreme controller is still unlimited.
Much, of course, has changed—inevitably and irrevocably.
The State without freedom has entered its third phase. It was founded by Lenin. It was constructed by Stalin. And now phase three has begun: the State, as an engineer might say, has been put into operation.
Much that was necessary during the period of construction has ceased to be necessary. The time to demolish the little old houses that happened to stand on the site of the new building has passed; the time to destroy or deport the inhabitants of all the old dwellings has passed.
The new skyscraper is inhabited by new tenants. There are, of course, still imperfections, but there is no need to go on employing the extermination methods of the late, great builder, the old boss.
The skyscraper’s foundation—non-freedom—is as unshakable as ever.
What will come next? Is this foundation really so unshakable?
Was Hegel right? Can everything that is real really be rational? Is the inhuman real? Is the inhuman rational?
The power of the people’s revolution that began in February 1917 was so great that not even the dictatorial State was able to stifle it. And while the State was proceeding, for its own sake, down its cruel and terrible path of growth and accumulation, it was, without knowing it, bearing freedom within its womb.
In deep darkness, in deep secrecy, freedom was coming to be. A river that swept away everything in its path, a river that had become the one reality for everyone, was thundering across the earth’s surface. The new national State that was the sovereign of every living breath and the sole owner of countless treasures—of factories, of nuclear reactors, of every last field in the country—was celebrating its victory. The Revolution seemed to have taken place solely for the sake of this State, for the sake of its thousand years of triumphant power. Nevertheless, the sovereign of half the world was not simply a gravedigger of freedom.
In spite of the genius of Lenin, the inspired creator of a new world, freedom was coming to be. In spite of the limitless, cosmic violence of Stalin, freedom was coming to be. It was coming to be because human beings were still human beings.
It was man who carried out the revolution of February 1917; it was man who constructed skyscrapers, factories, and nuclear reactors at the new State’s command—and there is no way out for man but freedom. Because even while constructing a new world, human beings remained human beings.
***
Ivan Grigoryevich felt and understood all of this—sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely.
No matter how vast the skyscrapers and powerful the cannon, no matter how limitless the power of the State, no matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and—as such—will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free. No, not everything that is real is rational. Everything inhuman is senseless and useless.
It did not surprise Ivan Grigoryevich that the word “freedom” had been on his lips when he was sent to Siberia as a young student, and that this word was still alive in him, still present in his mind, even today.
26
He was alone in the room, but in his mind, in his thoughts, he was talking to Anna Sergeyevna:
“Do you know? At the very worst times I used to imagine being embraced by a woman. I used to imagine this embrace as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everything I had been through. It would be as if none of it had ever happened. But it turns out that it’s you I have to talk to, that it’s you I have to tell about the very worst time of all. You yourself, after all, talked all through that night. Happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can’t share with anyone else—the burden I can share only with you. When you come back from the hospital, I’ll tell you about that hardest hour. It was a conversation in a prison cell, at dawn, after an interrogation. One of my cell mates—he’s no longer alive, he died soon afterward—was called Aleksey Samoilovich. I think he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. But he frightened me, I found his mind very frightening. Not because it was evil—an evil mind is not really frightening. His mind wasn’t evil, but indifferent and mocking; he mocked faith. He appalled me but, more important, he also attracted me. It was as if I were being sucked in, and I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make him share my faith in freedom.
“His life had gone badly for him, but then there was nothing particularly special about it. It was no different from the lives of many other people. He had been accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda—Article 58, Section 10, the most common accusation of all.
“But he had a powerful mind. The flow of his thoughts was like a great wave. Sometimes it would sweep me away. Sometimes I would tremble, as the earth can tremble when a wave breaks.
“I was brought back to my cell after being interrogated. What a list one could make of techniques of violence: burning at the stake, prisons, today’s prison fortresses the size of a provincial capital, and the labor camps themselves. The original instruments of capital punishment were a hemp rope and a club that crushed your head; nowadays, though, an executioner just turns on the master switch and does away with a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. There’s no need now to raise an ax. Our age is an age of supreme violence on the part of the State—supreme violence against the individual human being. But in this lies our strength and our hope. It is the twentieth century
that has shaken Hegel’s principle of the rationality of the world historical process, of the rationality of everything that is real. After decades of troubled debate, nineteenth-century Russian thinkers came to accept this principle, but now, at the height of the State’s triumph over human freedom, Russian thinkers in padded camp jackets are overturning Hegel’s principle and proclaiming this supreme principle of universal history: ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
“Yes, yes, yes, at this time of the total triumph of inhumanity it has become clear that everything created by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future; it will leave no trace.
“This is my faith, and with it I returned to my cell. And Aleksey Samoilovich said, as he often did, ‘Why try to defend freedom? Long ago it was indeed seen as the law of progress, the meaning of progress. Now, however, it’s entirely clear that there is no such thing as historical evolution. History is simply a molecular process. Man is always equal to himself, and there is nothing that can be done with him. There is no evolution. There is one very simple law, the law of the conservation of violence. It’s as simple as the law of the conservation of energy. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It does not disappear or diminish; it can only change shape. It can be embodied in slavery, or in the Mongol invasion. It wanders from continent to continent. Sometimes it takes the form of class struggle, sometimes of race struggle. From the sphere of the material it slips into religiosity, as in the Middle Ages. Sometimes it is directed against colored people, sometimes against writers and artists, but, all in all, the total quantity of violence on earth remains constant. Thinkers mistake its constant chaotic transformations for evolution and search for its laws. But chaos knows no laws, no evolution, no meaning, and no aim. Gogol, our Russian genius, sang of a flying troika— and in the flight of this troika he saw Russia’s future. Russia’s future, however, turned out to lie not in Gogol’s troika of horses but in our faceless Soviet troikas: in the NKVD troikas that sentence men to be shot, in the village troikas that compiled lists of kulaks, in the troikas that expelled young people from universities, in the troikas that denied ration cards to an old woman they considered a “former” person.’
“There this man was, sitting on the bedboards, shaking an admonitory finger at Gogol: ‘You got it wrong, Nikolay Vasilyevich, you didn’t understand our Russian troika, you didn’t see it clearly enough. Human history is not a matter of flying troikas but of chaos, of the eternal transformation of one kind of violence into another. The troika flies, but everything round about is motionless and frozen. Man, above all, is motionless; his fate is motionless. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. And the troika flies on—and what does it care about Russian grief? And what does Russian grief care about the troika? What does Russian grief care whether the troika is flying or whether it’s come to a standstill?
“‘And in any case it’s not Gogol’s troika signing death warrants somewhere here in this building but our very own troika —our very own NKVD troika.’
“And I’m lying half dead on the bedboards, and the only thing alive in me is my faith: my belief that human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that the history of life—from the amoeba to the human race—is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that life itself is freedom. And this faith gives me strength, and I keep turning over in my mind a precious, luminous, and wonderful thought that has been hidden in our prison rags. As if with my hands, I keep exploring this thought: ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
“Aleksey Samoilovich hears me out, half alive as I am, and says, ‘That’s just a comforting lie. The history of life is the history of violence triumphant. Violence is eternal and indestructible. It can change shape, but it does not disappear or diminish. Even the word “history,” even the concept of history is just something people have dreamed up. There’s no such thing as history. History is milling the wind; history is grinding water with a pestle and mortar. Man does not evolve from lower to higher. Man is as motionless as a slab of granite. His goodness, his intelligence, his degree of freedom are motionless; the humanity in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?’
“And, you know, it felt as if nothing in the world can be worse than all this. I’m lying on the bedboards and, dear God, I start to feel an anguish that is more than I can bear—all from talking to one very clever man. It feels like death, like an execution. Even breathing feels more than I can bear. I want only one thing: not to see, not to hear, not to breathe. To die. But relief came from a quite unexpected direction. I was dragged off again to be interrogated. They didn’t give me time to get my breath back. And I felt better, I felt relieved. Freedom, I knew again, is inevitable. To hell with troikas that fly, thunder, and sign death warrants. Freedom and Russia will be united!
“You can’t hear me. When will you come back to me from the hospital?”
On a winter’s day Ivan Grigoryevich accompanied Anna Sergeyevna to the cemetery. He did not have the chance to share with her all that he had recalled, all that he had thought through, all that he had noted down during the months of her illness.
He took all her things to the village, spent a day with Alyosha, and returned to the workshop.
27
In the summer Ivan Grigoryevich traveled to the seaside town where, beneath a green hill, his father’s house had stood.
The train went right along the shore. During a short stop, Ivan Grigoryevich got out and looked at the green-and-black water. It was always moving, and it smelled cool and salty.
The wind and the sea had been there when the investigator summoned him for interrogations during the night. They had been there while a grave was being dug for a prisoner who had died in transit. They had been there while guard dogs barked beneath the barrack windows and the snow creaked beneath the boots of the guards.
The sea was eternal, and the eternity of its freedom seemed to Ivan Grigoryevich to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigoryevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle, nor would its thundering, splashing freedom care about him when he ceased to live. No, he thought, this is not freedom. This is astronomical space come down to earth, a splinter of eternity, indifferent, always in motion.
The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.
After passing the night in the station, he set off early in the morning toward the house. An autumn sun was rising in a cloudless sky, and it was impossible to distinguish it from a spring sun.
The silence around him was deserted and sleepy. He felt such an intensity of emotion that it seemed as if his heart, which had endured everything, would be unable to endure it. The world became divinely still; the dear sanctuary of his childhood was eternal and immutable. His feet had long ago trodden these cool cobbles; his child’s eyes had gazed at these rounded hills now touched by the red rust of autumn. He listened to the noise of the stream, on its way to the sea amid watermelon rinds, gnawed corncobs, and other town detritus.
An old Abkhazian man, wearing a black sateen shirt girded by a thin leather belt, was carrying a basket of chestnuts toward the bazaar.
Ivan Grigoryevich might perhaps, in his childhood, have bought figs and chestnuts from this same unchanging old graybeard. And it was the same southern morning air—both cool and warm, smelling of the sea and of the mountain sky, of roses and of garlic from the kitchens. And the same little houses with closed shutters and drawn curtains. And behind these shutters were sleeping the same children—children who had never grown up—and the same old men as forty years ago, still not gone to their graves.
He came out onto the main road and began to climb the hill. There was the sound of the stream again. Iv
an Grigoryevich could remember its voice.
Never before had he seen his life as a whole—but now here it was, lying there before him.
And, seeing his life, he felt no resentment toward anyone.
All of them—those who had prodded him with their rifle butts as they escorted him toward the investigator’s office, those who had subjected him to long interrogations without letting him sleep, those who had said vile things about him at public meetings, those who had officially renounced him, those who had stolen his camp ration of bread, those who had beaten him—all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to. They had not wanted to do evil to him.
They had betrayed, slandered, and renounced because there had been no other way for them to survive. And yet they were people; they were human beings. Had these people wanted him to be making his way like this to his abandoned home—old, alone, and without love?
People did not want to do evil to anyone, but they did evil all through their lives.
All the same, people were people, they were human beings. And the wonderful, marvelous thing is that, willingly or unwillingly, they did not allow freedom to die. In their terrible, distorted, yet still-human souls, even the most terrible of them looked after freedom and kept it alive.
He himself had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, no political party, and he had no disciples.
Why had his life been so hard? He had not preached; he had not taught; he had simply remained what he had been since birth—a human being.
The mountainside opened out before him. From the other side of the pass appeared the tops of oak trees. He had walked there as a child, searching in the half dark of the forest for traces of the Circassians and their vanished life: fruit trees gone wild, remnants of what had once been a fence around a house.