Perhaps his own home would still be as unchanged as the town streets and the stream?
It would be at the next turn of the road. For a moment it seemed to him as if an improbably bright light, brighter than any light he had ever seen, had flooded the whole earth. A few more steps—and in this light he would see his home, and his mother would come out toward him, toward her prodigal son, and he would kneel down before her, and her young and beautiful hands would rest on his gray, balding head.
He saw thickets of thorns and hops. There was no house and no well—only a few stones shining white amid dusty grass that had been burned by the sun.
Here he stood—gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, yet still the same as ever, unchanged.
1955–63
Notes
All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions By far the largest public organization in the Soviet Union, it served as an umbrella organization for the various individual trade unions.
did all the plowing An allusion to a proverbial fly who has been sitting for some time on the horn of an ox. When another fly asks him where he has been, he replies, “We’ve been plowing!”
makhorka The very coarsest, strongest tobacco.
first among equals During the nineteenth century these words were used with regard to the relationship between Russians and other Slav nationalities, especially Serbs. During and after the 1930s they were applied, semi-officially, to the relationship between Russians and other Soviet nationalities.
Vanya The most common affectionate form of Ivan.
candidate’s dissertation A kandidatskaya dissertatsiya is the equivalent of a PhD. A doktorskaya dissertatsiya, here translated as “doctorate,” is an even higher degree.
vitalism This is the doctrine that the functioning of a living organism is determined by a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces. Such a way of thinking was, of course, unacceptable to the guardians of the “scientific materialism” that was the Soviet orthodoxy.
Killer Doctors On January 13, 1953, some of the most prominent doctors in the USSR were accused of taking part in a vast plot to poison members of the political and military leadership. Pravda reported the accusations under the headline VICIOUS SPIES AND KILLERS PASSING THEMSELVES OFF AS DOCTORS AND PROFESSORS . Stalin evidently intended these accusations to serve as a prelude to a vast purge of Jews. Only Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1953, prevented this purge from being carried out. The preparations for the affair of the Killer Doctors began at least a year in advance. Early in 1952, after the death in Moscow of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsan, Stalin said, “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, Choibalsan...die so quickly! We must change the old doctors for new ones.” Later that year, perhaps in response to this remark, Mikhail Ryumin, deputy minister for state security, alleged that the Jewish professor Yakov Etinger had, under the pretense of treating Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, set out to kill them. When his superior refused to believe the story, Ryumin went over his head directly to Stalin, who immediately suspected a wider conspiracy to kill off the Soviet leadership.
Short Course The Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) was published in 1938. Between then and 1953, more than forty-two million copies of the book were issued in sixty-seven languages. Most often referred to simply as The Short Course, it was seen as the encyclopedia of Marxism; it is notable for the frequency with which Lenin and Stalin are repeatedly mentioned in the same phrase, as if the two names were inseparable. Stalin supervised and heavily edited the work but himself contributed only one section of chapter 4, about dialectical and historical materialism. After the Second World War, however, he claimed sole authorship of the work.
All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries The organization, founded in 1925, that was responsible for all cultural and scientific exchanges and contacts with other countries.
Khodynka A mass panic occurred on Khodynka Field in northwest Moscow during festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar. This resulted, according to official sources, in the death of 1,389 people.
the scroll of his life Grossman is alluding to a line from a short poem by Pushkin, “Memory” (1828): “Memory silently unrolls before me its long scroll.”
Lubyanka A large square in central Moscow where the headquarters of Soviet state security (regardless of its many changes of name) has been located since 1920. Like all headquarters buildings of the Soviet state security organizations, it contained an internal pre-trial prison, invisible from outside.
Moscow Trials A series of show trials of real and imagined political opponents of Stalin. The first trial, of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and fourteen other Left Deviationists, was held in August 1936; all the defendants were sentenced to death. The second trial, in January 1937, was of seventeen lesser figures; thirteen were shot and the remaining four sent to labor camps. The third trial, in March 1938, was of Nikolay Bukharin, former head of the Communist International; Aleksey Rykov, a former prime minister; and nineteen other Right Deviationists. All the leading defendants were executed. Andrey Vyshinsky was the chief prosecutor at all three trials. The most terrible year of Stalin’s purges has always been seen as 1937, and this may have led Grossman to forget that the trial of Bukharin and Rykov was in fact held in early 1938.
weekly parcel of food The pay differential between members of the Soviet elite and ordinary workers was less than in most societies. For the main part, the elite received their payments in kind. One of their many privileges was to be provided regularly with food that it was impossible to obtain in ordinary shops.
War Communism The economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1921. All industry was nationalized; all private enterprise was illegal; workers were shot for going on strike; grain and other products were requisitioned from the peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population. The requisitioning of grain led to what was, in effect, a second civil war: the peasants grew less and less grain, and the Bolsheviks resorted to ever increasing violence in order to extort from the peasants what little grain they had grown. Together with the severe drought of 1921, this war between city and country resulted in a serious famine and the death of three to ten million peasants. After an uprising in March 1921 by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the relatively liberal New Economic Policy, which lasted until 1928.
Higher Academic Council The panel of scientists then responsible, on behalf of the Academy of Sciences, for making decisions on appointments and higher degrees.
“Indians” Jacques Rossi, who spent time in the Gulag, writes: “A crowded barracks is hot, like in India, even during winter, and virtually everyone is half naked. Some are hot and others have lost all their clothes in card games.” ( The Gulag Handbook [New York: Paragon House, 1989], 141.)
the “thieves” and the “bitches.” Russian criminals were in a position of considerable power in the camps, and they lorded it over the political prisoners. They referred to themselves as “thieves” and strictly observed a so-called thieves’ code ( vorovskoy zakon ) that, among other things, strictly forbade any collaboration with the authorities. Thieves who violated this code and collaborated with the authorities were known as “bitches.”
“engineer saboteurs” The first important show trial in Stalin’s Soviet Union was the Shakhty Trial in 1928. A group of engineers in the north Caucasus town of Shakhty was accused of conspiring, with foreign support, to sabotage the Soviet economy. This marked the beginning of the use of accusations of sabotage—an accusation made only too often during the purges of the 1930s.
six-month city passport From late 1932 until the 1960s, collective-farm workers did not have the right to an internal passport. This meant that they had little more freedom of movement than they had had as serfs.
He washed the old man’s feet From “The Grandfather” (1870) by Nikolay Nekrasov. The grandfath
er is one of the Decembrist rebels who, hoping to install a constitutional monarchy, took part in a failed coup against Nicholas I in December 1825. Like Ivan Grigoryevich, the grandfather has just returned from years of exile and forced labor in Siberia.
“without right of correspondence” During the purges, when a prisoner was executed, his relatives were usually told that he was being sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence.”
realm of form—during these last decades it has taken over the realm of content A key Stalinist axiom was that culture should be “national in form and Socialist in content.” Nikolay Andreyevich is—very perceptively—pointing out that this principle has now been superseded.
Black Hundreds A reactionary, militantly antisemitic movement in Russia in the early twentieth century.
the Siege The Siege of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to January 1943, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established. The siege, however, was not totally lifted until January 1944; it was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history.
shared with two chance companions It was customary for drunks to gather in threesomes in alcohol shops, pay for a bottle of vodka together, and then share it on a park bench or in the main entrance of some nearby building.
laurel-crowned horseman The Bronze Horseman is the usual name for a famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great, unveiled in 1782. Peter the Great sits heroically on horseback, his arm pointing toward the River Neva; his horse, rearing at the edge of a cliff, is trampling a serpent under its back hooves. The Bronze Horseman is also the title of one of Aleksandr Pushkin’s masterpieces, a narrative poem written fifty years later, in 1833. The hero of this poem is Yevgeny, a young clerk whose sweetheart is drowned when the Neva overflows its banks. Yevgeny shakes his fist at The Bronze Horseman and curses Peter the Great for founding the city somewhere so vulnerable to flooding. The statue comes alive and chases Yevgeny through the city. The poem’s central theme is the conflict between the needs of the State and the needs of ordinary citizens.
I have a passport That is, an “internal passport,” which Ivan Grigoryevich would have received on his release.
classified as a kulak Peasants were classified as poor peasants ( bednyaki ), who had no property of their own; middle peasants ( serednyaki ), who owned property but did not employ hired labor; and rich peasants, or kulaks, who both owned property and employed hired labor. During collectivization, the kulaks were deported en masse. According to data from Soviet archives, more than 1.8 million kulaks and family members were deported in 1930 and 1931; nearly 500,000 of these appear to have died or escaped before reaching the camps or labor colonies that were their destination. Nearly 400,000 kulaks and family members are said to have died between 1932 and 1940.
“Push that which is falling!” A sarcastic allusion to Nietzsche: “But I say: what is falling, we should still push! Everything today—it is falling, it is falling apart: who would hold it up? but I—I would still push it...” ( Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Wayne [New York: Algora Publishing, 2003], 161.)
stand “almost side by side” The learned informer is quoting a famous line of the Futurist poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930). In his “Jubilee Poem” written for the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, Mayakovsky declares that, since his own name begins with M and Pushkin’s with P, he and Pushkin will, in the eyes of posterity, be standing “almost side by side.”
the word “Man” In the last act of Maksim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths, Satin says: “M-A-N! That is magnificent! That has a...proud sound! We must respect man! Not pity him...not humilate him with pity. We must respect him!”
Intourist Throughout the Soviet Union all hotels, restaurants, and other facilities for tourists were managed by Intourist. Intourist restaurants were, on the whole, superior to other restaurants, and they were open only to foreigners and to members of the Soviet elite.
Tsarskoye Selo The small town outside Petersburg that, from the late eighteenth century, was the main summer residence of the Russian tsars.
application for a pension Soviet soldiers or officers taken prisoner by the Germans were considered suspect. Most of them were sent to the camps on their return to the Soviet Union. Widows only received pensions if there was documented evidence that their husbands had died on the battlefield. The Soviet defeats of the first months of the war were so swift, and so catastrophic, that such evidence was seldom recorded.
footcloths These were lengths of cloth wound around the foot and ankle. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century these were far more common in Russia than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they were less common, worn mainly in the army and in the camps.
Putilov Factory By 1917, this factory, which produced both artillery and rolling stock for the railways, was the largest in Petrograd. It had strong revolutionary traditions; a strike there in February 1917 was part of the chain of events that led to the February Revolution and the Tsar’s abdication. After the October Revolution it produced the first Soviet tractors; after the assassination of Kirov in 1934, it was renamed the Kirov Factory.
sentenced under Article 58 That is, as a counterrevolutionary.
labor day A labor day is the equivalent of the average amount of work that—supposedly—could be performed by one person in the course of a working day. This amount of work—for example, plowing a hectare of land or threshing a ton of grain—would often, in fact, take several days to carry out. At the end of the season the income of the collective farm in money and kind was shared according to the number of labor days each member had to his credit. (Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 176–77.)
a cook can govern the State Lenin was popularly believed to have said, “Every cook must learn to govern the State” or even “Every cook can govern the State.” What Lenin in fact wrote, in an article published in 1917, “Will the Bolsheviks Retain Government Power?”, is more or less the opposite: “We know that an unskilled laborer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.”
quick-witted Newtons In his “Ode on the Anniversary of the Accession to the Throne of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna” (1747), the poet Mikhail Lomonosov expresses the hope that the Russian Earth will give birth to “her own Platos and quick-witted Newtons.”
zeks People sentenced to a term in a labor camp were known as zeks, an abbreviated form of the word zaklyuchenny, meaning “someone who has been confined.”
Greens Participants in a peasant rebellion in the Tambov Province under the leadership of Aleksandr Antonov, a Socialist Revolutionary. At the rebellion’s peak in late 1920, the Green Army numbered as many as fifty thousand.
A vast world with its own language The best dictionary of camp language, Jacques Rossi’s The Gulag Handbook, runs to 610 pages.
even under armed guard Grossman wrote Everything Flows at a time when there was almost no reliable published information on such topics as the Gulag, Collectivization, and the Terror Famine. Given his dependence on oral sources, it is remarkable how little he has got wrong. Here, however, he seems to have been seduced by legend. There are references in Gulag memoirs to small groups of predatory female criminal convicts, and to men in some camps not seeing a woman for years, but I know of no other reference to camps where men never set foot.
chifir This is an ultra-strong tea (about fifty grams of tea per cup, and boiled rather than brewed). This was used as a narcotic and was greatly prized by the camp criminals.
remain faithful to illusions they had dreamed up Cf: “In the Kengir special camp, there were prisoners…who developed elaborate relationships with people they had never met. Some actually married one another across the wall that divided the men’s and women’s camps, without ever meeting in person. The woman stood on one side, the man on the other; vows were said, and a prisoner priest recorded the ceremony on a piece of paper.” (Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of t
he Soviet Camps [New York: Doubleday, 2003], p. 317.)
Butyrka A pre-trial investigative prison, the largest prison in Moscow. At the height of the purges around twenty thousand prisoners were kept there.
“58–6–12.” She has been sentenced under Article 58, Sections 6 and 12. Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code related to “counterrevolutionary activity” in general, Section 6 to “espionage,” and Section 12 to “failure to report counterrevolutionary activity.”
Arbat The name of an important street in central Moscow, and also of the fashionable, bohemian quarter around this street.
Mukha Clearly a nickname. The word means “a fly.”
camp barracks It is likely that much of Grossman’s information about women in the Gulag came from the philosopher Tatyana Nikolaevna Gornstein. Like Grossman, she was born in Berdichev. Arrested in 1937, she survived the camps thanks to her “privileged” work as a nurse in a camp hospital. She was released soon after Stalin’s death. Tatyana Menaker, a second cousin of Grossman, remembers Gornstein telling her about “the mathematicians, poets and philosophers who had begged her to preserve their manuscripts as they lay on camp beds dying from scurvy, diarrhoea and dysentery.” [Personal correspondence from Tatyana Menaker.]
Magadan The capital of Kolyma Province, an area of northeastern Siberia that was, in effect, one vast labor camp.