Wreathed in flame, smoke, and steam, a vast cauldron was bubbling, groaning, and gurgling—and there were many people who imagined that they alone understood what was going on in its chaos. Many imagined that they alone knew how the stew had been cooked and who would be eating it.
In his soldier’s boots, Ivan Grigoryevich was once again standing before the divinely barefoot, laurel-crowned horseman. He had used to pass this way thirty years ago; then too the bronze Tsar had been full of might. In Peter the Great he had, at last, met a familiar figure.
Never, neither thirty years ago nor one hundred thirty years ago, when Pushkin had brought his humble protagonist to this square, had the wondrous Tsar seemed as great as he did today. No power in the world was vaster than the power he had gathered to himself and to which he had given expression—the majestic power of a wondrous State. This power had grown and grown. It now reigned over fields and factories, over the writing desks of poets and scholars, over sites where new canals and dams were being built, over quarries, sawmills, and timber forests; it was able, in its great might, to control both the vastness of space and the secret depth of the hearts of enchanted human beings who willingly offered up to it the gift of their freedom, even of their wish for freedom.
“ Sankt Peterburg, sanpropusnik, Sankt Peterburg, sanpropusnik,” Ivan Grigoryevich began repeating to himself. This silly jingle, linking the old capital’s old name with the camp reception barracks where newly arrived prisoners were strip-searched, shaved, washed, disinfected, and deloused, seemed somehow to express a link, a bond between the great horseman and the camp vagabond.
Ivan Grigoryevich spent his nights at the railway station, in the room for passengers in transit. He was spending only one and a half or two rubles a day, and he was in no hurry to leave Leningrad.
On the third day he bumped into someone he knew, someone he had remembered many times during his years in the camps.
They recognized each other straightaway—even though Ivan Grigoryevich now bore no resemblance to the third-year student he had once been, even though Vitaly Antonovich Pinegin, now wearing a gray raincoat and a felt hat, also looked very different from the young man of thirty years ago who had gone about in a worn student jacket.
Seeing the stunned look on Pinegin’s face, Ivan Grigoryevich said, “What is it? Did you think I was dead?”
Pinegin spread his hands in bewilderment. “Well, someone did tell me ten years ago that you had, you know...”
His alert, intelligent eyes were looking deep into the eyes of Ivan Grigoryevich.
“Don’t worry,” said Ivan Grigoryevich. “I’m not a ghost, nor, which would be far more unpleasant, am I a fugitive. Like you, I have a passport and everything else.”
This made Pinegin indignant. “When I meet an old comrade,” he said, “it’s not his passport that interests me.”
Pinegin had risen a long way in the world but he was still a good fellow, not someone to stand on ceremony.
Not for a moment, whether he was talking about his sons, or whether he was saying, “You’ve changed a great deal, but I recognized you at once,” did Pinegin take his eyes off Ivan Grigoryevich; his eyes were greedy, fascinated.
“So then,” said Pinegin. “There you are. What else should I tell you about?”
“ What you should really tell me...” For a moment, Pinegin froze—but no, Ivan Grigoryevich had not really said anything of the kind.
“But you haven’t told me anything about yourself,” said Pinegin. Once again he waited. Would Ivan Grigoryevich say, “ I don’t need to—you know more than enough already. Yes, you had more than enough to say about me when there were people wanting to know. ”
But Ivan Grigoryevich said nothing. He just shrugged his shoulders.
And Pinegin suddenly realized: Vanya knew nothing, and it was impossible for him to know anything. It was all just nerves, his poor nerves...Why hadn’t he chosen some other day to send his car in for service? He’d been thinking about Ivan not long ago. One of his relatives, he had thought, might get him posthumously rehabilitated. Ivan would be transferred from the category of dead souls to that of living souls. And now here the man was, in broad daylight—Ivan, Vanya, Vanechka! He had done thirty years in the camps, and in his pocket, probably, was a document with the words, “Due to lack of evidence.”
He looked again into Ivan Grigoryevich’s eyes and understood, once and for all, that Ivan knew nothing. He began to feel ashamed of his heart tremors, of his cold sweat, of how close he’d been to gibbering out something stupid.
And his certainty that Ivan would not spit in his face, would not hold him to account—this new certainty filled Pinegin with light. With a kind of gratitude that even he himself could barely understand, he said to Ivan, “Listen, Ivan. Let’s just be straightforward, like true workers. My old man, after all, was a blacksmith. Maybe you need money? Please, believe me, as a friend, with all my heart.”
Without a word of reproach, Ivan Grigoryevich looked with alert, sad curiosity into Pinegin’s eyes. And just for one second—but not for two—Pinegin felt that he could sacrifice everything. He could sacrifice his decorations and honors, his dacha, his position of power and authority, his beautiful wife, his brilliant sons now studying nuclear physics—anything not to sense the look of those eyes on him.
“Well, Pinegin, all the best!” said Ivan. And he walked off toward the railway station.
7
Who is guilty? Who will be held responsible?
This question needs thought. We must not answer too quickly.
Here they all are: expert reports from lying engineers and literary critics; speeches denouncing enemies of the people; intimate conversations and confessions made to a friend—transformed into the reports and denunciations of informers and stoolies.
These denunciations were the prelude to an arrest; they were at hand throughout the investigation; they largely determined the verdict. These megatons of denunciatory falsehood served, it seems, to establish the lists of who was to be classified as a kulak , who was to be deprived of their passport and the right to vote, who was to be deported, who was to be shot.
At one end of the chain were two people at a table, drinking cups of tea and chatting. Next, in cozy lamplight, someone cultured and educated composed a report; or perhaps an activist gave a frank and straightforward speech at a meeting of the collective farm. And at the other end of the chain were crazed eyes; damaged kidneys; a skull pierced by a bullet; gangrenous, pus-oozing toes that had been bitten by the frost of the taiga ; scurvy-ridden corpses in a log hut that served as the camp morgue.
In the beginning was the word...That is truly so.
So what is to be done with these informer-murderers?
Here is one who has been released after twelve years in the camps. He has shaking hands and the sunken eyes of a martyr. We’ll call him Judas I. It has been rumored that, long ago, he behaved badly under interrogation. Some of his friends refuse to greet him if they pass him on the street. Those who are a little more intelligent are polite to him when they meet, but they do not invite him back home. Those who are still more intelligent—and more generous and understanding—invite him into their homes but are careful not to let him into their hearts.
All of these friends have dachas, savings accounts, medals and decorations, cars. He, of course, is thin, and they are plump—but they did nothing bad under interrogation. Or rather, they were not in a position to do anything bad—they were not interrogated. They were lucky; they had never been arrested. In what way are these plump men morally superior to this thin man? He too could have been plump; they too could have been thin. Was their fate determined by some law, or by chance?
He was someone quite ordinary. He drank tea, ate fried eggs, visited the Moscow Arts Theater, liked to talk to his friends about books he had read. Sometimes he was kind and generous. He was, admittedly, nervous, high-strung; he had no confidence in himself.
And they put the heat on him. They di
d not merely shout at him; they beat him; they made him eat salted herrings while giving him nothing to drink; and they threatened him with execution. But still, what he did was a terrible thing: he slandered an innocent man. Admittedly, the man he slandered was never arrested—while he himself, forced into being a slanderer, did twelve years of forced labor and came back barely alive, a broken man, a pauper, on his last legs. But the fact remains: he committed slander.
Let us not judge hastily. Let us give serious thought to this case.
And now, here is Judas II. This man never spent so much as a day in prison. He had a reputation for being clever and eloquent—and then people came back from the camps, more dead than alive, and said that he had been a regular informer for the security organs. He had helped to destroy many people. For many years he had conducted heart-to-heart conversations with his friends and then handed in written reports to the authorities. His testimonies were not extorted from him by torture; on the contrary, he himself took the initiative, deftly and inventively leading his friends to speak about dangerous matters. Two of the men he slandered never returned from the camps; one was sentenced by a military tribunal and shot. The survivors returned with lists of illnesses, each of which on its own—even by the commission’s demanding standards—would entitle a man to full invalidity benefit for the rest of his life.
In the meantime he had acquired a paunch—and a reputation as a gourmet and a connoisseur of Georgian wines. And he understood about culture: he was a collector, among other things, of rare editions of old poetry.
But let us not hurry. Let us think before we pronounce judgment.
Ever since childhood he had been frightened out of his mind. In 1919 his wealthy father had died of typhus, in a concentration camp. His aunt was married to a general, and the two of them had emigrated to Paris. His elder brother had fought for the Whites. He had lived in terror; terror had lived inside him. His mother had trembled when she spoke to a policeman, when she spoke to the building manager—or to the senior tenant in their communal apartment, or to officials from the city soviet. Every hour of every day he and his family had sensed their class inferiority, their class depravity. At school he himself had trembled before the secretary of the Party cell; sweet, pretty Galya, the leader of the school’s Young Pioneers, had always seemed to look on him with revulsion, as if he were an untouchable, a worm. He was terrified that she might notice the adoring look in his eyes.
And at this point one begins to understand. This man had been hypnotized, enchanted by the might of the new world. He was like a little bird, unable to look away, captivated by the dazzling gaze of something new, brilliant, and all-embracing. He so much wanted to become a part of it all, to be favored. And the new world had taken him in. The poor little sparrow had not so much as let out a cheep, had not so much as fluttered his wings when the dread new world had said it needed his mind and his charm. He had offered his all on the altar of the Fatherland.
All this, of course, is true. Nevertheless—what a bastard! While he was denouncing others, he did not forget to look out for himself. He ate delicacies; he basked in the sun. And yet...he was terribly defenseless—the kind of man who really shouldn’t be let out anywhere without a nanny, without a loving wife to look after him. How can a man like him be expected to cope with a force that had conquered half the world, a force that had turned an entire empire inside out and upside down? This man, remember, was all trembling and delicate; he was like fine lace. You had only to touch him in some wrong way—and he would seem lost and confused, his eyes full of misery.
And this deadly swamp viper had insinuated itself into the confidence of many people—and brought them great suffering.
And the people he destroyed were people like himself—kind, reserved, intelligent, timid people, his own oldest friends. He alone had the key to them; he was, after all, a man of real understanding, a man who had wept many times over Chekhov’s story “The Bishop.”
All the same, let’s wait, let’s think. Let’s not condemn him without thinking.
And here is a new comrade: Judas III. He has a hoarse, clipped voice—the voice of a boatswain. His gaze is calm and searching. He has the assurance of a master of life. One moment he may be entrusted with ideological work, another moment with the management of agriculture. His answers on official forms, his answers to questions about his past and his social background, are impeccable, white as snow; they gleam with their own light. His relatives are all machine-tool operators or the poorest of poor peasants.
In 1937 he wrote more than two hundred denunciations at one go, without a second thought. The list of his victims is varied: commissars from the time of the Civil War; a poet and songwriter; the director of a foundry; two district Party committee secretaries; an old engineer (not a Party member); one newspaper editor and two publishing-house editors; the director of a special “closed” canteen; a philosophy teacher; the director of a “political enlightenment office”; a botany professor; a handyman employed by the superintendents of a block of apartments; two officials from a district agricultural administration office...It is impossible to list all of them.
All his denunciations were directed not against “former” people but against people who were truly Soviet; his victims were Party members, men who had fought in the Civil War, activists. He specialized in the more fanatical Party members, gleefully slashing them in the face with his deadly, razor-sharp words.
Few of these two hundred returned. Some were sentenced and executed and shot; others put on “wooden jackets” after dying of malnutrition or being shot in the course of camp purges. Some returned, physically and emotionally mutilated, to drag out their free existence as best they could.
For him 1937 was a time of victory. This sharp-eyed young lad had been poorly educated and everyone around him seemed superior to him, both as regards their general level of knowledge and as regards their heroic past. How could he ever compete with those who had initiated and carried out the Revolution? And yet—the mere touch of his hand was enough to bring down dozens of men covered in revolutionary glory.
From 1937 onward his ascent was vertiginous. He turned out to be imbued with grace, with the most precious essence of everything most new and necessary.
With him, at least, everything seems to be cut-and-dried. It was by walking over other men’s bones that this man became a deputy and a member of a Party committee.
But no, no. One should not be in too much of a hurry. One needs to think carefully, to understand everything before pronouncing judgment. For he too did not know—he knew not what he was doing.
Speaking in the name of the Party, his mentors once said to him, “We’re in trouble. We are surrounded by enemies. These men pretend to be tried-and-tested Party members, members of the prerevolutionary underground, men who fought in the Civil War—but they are enemies of the people, secret agents, provocateurs...” The Party had said to him, “You are young and pure. I trust you, my son. Help me—otherwise I shall perish. Help me to conquer the forces of evil.”
Stamping its Stalinist boots, the Party had shouted at him, “If you show the least indecision, you will prove that you are no different from these degenerates—and I will grind you to dust. Remember, you son of a bitch, that hut with no chimney, that black hut where you were born! It is I, the Party, who am leading you toward the light. Revere loyalty and obedience! It is the great Stalin, your father, who gives you the order: ‘Tally-ho! Hunt them down!’”
No, no, he was not settling personal scores.
A Komsomol member from the country, he did not believe in God. The faith that lived in him was another faith: faith in the mercilessness of the chastising hand of the great Stalin. In him lived the unhesitating obedience of the believer. In him lived a blissful timidity before a powerful force, before this force’s great guides and leaders: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. A foot soldier of the great Stalin, he acted on Stalin’s orders.
Naturally, he did also feel a biological hostility, a
n instinctive secret loathing for the generation of intellectual and fanatical revolutionaries it was his role to hunt down.
He was carrying out his duty, he was not settling scores—but it was also out of an instinct for self-preservation that he wrote his denunciations. He was acquiring a substance more precious than gold or land: the trust of the Party. He understood that in Soviet life the trust of the Party was everything: power, honor, authority. And he believed that his lies served a higher truth: in his denunciations he could glimpse this Truth.
But can he be blamed when even better men than he were unable to make out what was a lie and what was the truth, when even pure hearts were powerless before the question: What was good and what was evil?
He believed, or rather, he wanted to believe—or rather, he couldn’t not believe.
In some ways he disliked his dark work—except that it was his duty! And then again, in other ways his terrible work was attractive, seductive, intoxicating. “Remember,” his mentors used to tell him, “that you have neither father nor mother, neither brothers nor sisters. You have only the Party.”
It was a strange, troubling feeling: thoughtless obedience, far from rendering him powerless, endowed him with a terrible power.
In his curt, imperious voice, in his cruel eyes—the eyes of a military commander—you could sometimes sense a very different nature that lay hidden inside him: a crazed, stupefied way of being that had been nourished by centuries of Russian slavery, of Asiatic despotism...
But here too we must stop and think. It is a terrible thing to condemn even a terrible man.
And here we have a new comrade: Judas IV.
He lives in communal apartments; he is a minor to middling official; he is a collective-farm activist. But whoever he may be, his face is always the same. Whether he is old or young, whether he is ugly or a ruddy-faced giant of a Russian warrior, it is always easy to recognize him. He is a philistine, always greedy to acquire, fanatically devoted to his own material interests. His fanaticism—a fanaticism he displays in regard to the acquisition of a sofa bed, a bag of buckwheat, a Polish sideboard, imported textiles, or construction materials that are in short supply—is equal in its intensity to the fanaticism of a Giordano Bruno or Andrey Zhelyabov.