Everything Flows (18 page)

T
hree weeks
went by and Anna Sergeyevna went to the hospital. As they said goodbye, she said to Ivan Grigoryevich, “Happiness doesn’t seem to be our fate in this world.”

In the afternoon, while Ivan Grigoryevich was out at work, Anna Sergeyevna’s sister came and took Alyosha away, to live with her in her village.

Ivan Grigoryevich came back to an empty room. It was very quiet there. Although he had lived his whole life alone, it seemed that he had never before felt the full weight of loneliness.

That night he did not sleep; he was thinking. “...doesn’t seem to be our fate in this world...” The only light seemed to be in his distant childhood.

Now that happiness had looked him in the eyes, now that it had breathed on him, he weighed up his life with great acuteness, evaluating all that had befallen him.

It was painful indeed to realize that he was powerless to save Anna Sergeyevna, that he could do nothing to ease the last sufferings that had already begun for her. Strangely, he seemed to find comfort for his grief in thinking about the decades he had spent in camps and prisons.

He was trying to understand the truth of Russian life, what it was that linked past and present.

His hope was that Anna Sergeyevna would return from the hospital and he would tell her all he had recalled, all he had thought, all he had understood.

And she would share with him the burden, and the clarity, of understanding. This was the consolation for his grief. This was his love.

I
van Grigoryevich
often thought about his months in the Lubyanka, and then in the Butyrka.

He had been three times in the Butyrka, but it was the summer of 1937 that he remembered best. Then he had been in a fog, half unconscious, and it was only now, seventeen years later, that the fog had lifted. Only now could he make out what had happened.

The cells in 1937 had been packed—hundreds of prisoners in a space intended for a few dozen. In the sultry heat of July and August people had been pressed close against one another on the bedboards, dazed and soaked with sweat; it was possible to turn over at night only if they all did it together—at the word of the cell elder, a former commander of a Red Army cavalry division. To get to the
parasha
—the latrine barrel—they had to walk over bodies, and the newcomers to the cell, who slept right next to the
parasha
, were known as “parachutists.” Sleep—in this cramped and stifling closeness—was more like some kind of swoon, like the delirium of typhus.

The prison walls had seemed to be quivering, like the walls of a boiler that was almost bursting from some vast internal pressure. All night long the Butyrka was humming and throbbing. Outside in the yard cars were delivering new loads of prisoners—all deathly pale as they looked around this great prison kingdom. And there was the roaring of huge Black Marias, taking other loads of prisoners away: for further interrogation in the Lubyanka, to be subjected to torture in the
Lefortovo
, to the Krasnopresenskaya transit prison, or to be loaded directly onto a transport for Siberia. If the guards called out to a prisoner, “With your belongings!”, then he knew he was leaving for a camp, and everyone would say their goodbyes to him. The brilliantly lit corridors were full of the shuffling of prisoners’ feet and the clanking of the guards’ weapons. Prisoners were not allowed to meet. If two escort guards were coming down a corridor toward each other, one would quickly shove his prisoner into one of the cupboard-like boxes that were to be found at regular intervals along the corridor walls. Then he had to wait in the dark until the other prisoner had passed.

The cell windows were covered by thick wooden panels, and light from outside penetrated only through a narrow slit. The prisoners reckoned time not by the sun or the stars but by the prison’s internal schedule. The electric lights burned twenty-four hours a day with merciless brightness; it was as if all the terrible, stifling heat came from them, from their white incandescence. Ventilators hummed night and day, but the torrid air from off the July asphalt brought no relief. At night the air you breathed seemed like layers of hot felt stuffed inside your lungs and head.

Early in the morning prisoners who had been interrogated during the night were brought back to their cells. Some collapsed in exhaustion on the bedboards; some sobbed and groaned; some sat there without moving, staring in front of them with wide eyes; some rubbed their swollen feet and feverishly recounted what they had been through. Some were so weak that they had to be dragged into the cell by the guards. Others—who had been subjected to continuous interrogation for days on end—were taken on stretchers to the prison hospital. When they were in the investigator’s office, prisoners remembered their stifling, stinking cell with fondness, longing to be back among the kind, exhausted faces of their bedboard neighbors.

These thousands, these tens of thousands of people—secretaries of district and provincial Party committees; military commissars; heads of political sections; commanding officers of regiments, divisions, and entire armies; captains of ships; agronomists; writers; livestock specialists; officials from the Commissariat of Foreign Trade; engineers; ambassadors; Civil War partisans; public prosecutors; chairmen of factory committees; university professors—included representatives of all the social strata suddenly flung up to the surface by the Revolution. Beside the Russians there were Belorussians, Ukrainians, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews, Armenians, Georgians, slow deliberate Latvians, Poles, and people from Central Asia. Whether they had previously been soldiers, workers, peasants, schoolboys, students, or artisans, all of them had taken part in the Revolution and the Civil War. They had smashed the armies of Kornilov and Kaledin, of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel, and had poured in their thousands from the most remote towns and villages into the very heart of Russia, into the heart of a country that had become a wasteland. The Revolution abolished all kinds of restrictions—the
numerus clausus
, property qualifications, various aristocratic privileges, the
Pale of Settlement
—and hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life, from Jewish shtetls and from towns and villages all over Russia, took charge of committees, organs, and soviets of every kind: of
district and provincial
Chekas
; of
RevKoms
,
UKoms,
and
GubProdKoms
; of
KomBeds, PolitProsvets,
and
SovNarKhozes
.
They began to build a State such as the world had never seen. Cruelty, murders, deprivations of every kind—all this was of no account. It was, after all, being carried out in the name of Russia and laboring humanity, in the name of the happiness of the working people.

Then came the 1930s. The young men who had taken part in the Civil War were now in their forties, with graying hair. The time of the Revolution, of Committees of the Poor, of the first and second congresses of the Comintern was their youth; it was the happiest, most romantic period of their life. They now worked in offices with telephones and secretaries; they had exchanged their military tunics for jackets and ties; they traveled about by cars and had consultations with famous doctors; they had learned to appreciate good wines and the joys of holidays in spa towns like Kislovodsk; but, in spite of all this, the days of pointed Budyonny helmets and leather jackets, of millet porridge, of boots full of holes, of the world commune and ideals of unbounded, planetary scope—those days remained the high point of their lives. It was not for the sake of dachas and cars of their own that they had built a new State. This new State had been built for the sake of the Revolution. It was in the name of the Revolution and of a new Russia, free of landowners and capitalists, that sacrifices had been exacted, acts of cruelty committed, and blood shed.

The generation of Soviet citizens that disappeared in 1936 and 1939 was not, of course, monolithic.

The first to disappear were the fanatics, the destroyers of the old world, those whose verve and zeal, whose devotion to the Revolution was embodied in the hatred they bore to its enemies.

They hated the bourgeoisie, the nobility, the petits-bourgeois, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist Revolutionaries—all of them traitors to the working class. They hated the prosperous peasantry; opportunists of every kind; former Tsarist officers being taken on to serve as ‘military specialists’ in the Red Army; mercenary bourgeois art; venal university lecturers who had sold out to the bourgeoisie; dandies who wore ties; doctors engaged in private practice; women who powdered their noses and strutted about in silk stockings; foppish, reactionary students who only pretended to support the Revolution; priests and rabbis; engineers with cockade caps; poets who, like Fet, wrote decadent little verses about the beauty of nature. They hated Karl Kautsky and Ramsay MacDonald. They did not read Bernstein, but to them he seemed an appalling figure, although his notorious evolutionary-socialist formula, “The goal is nothing, movement is everything,” turned out, in the end, to have encapsulated their fate.

They destroyed the old world and longed for a new world, but they did not build this new world themselves. The hearts of these people—people who made the earth stream with blood, people who hated so many different things and with such passion—were childishly innocent. They were the hearts of fanatics, the hearts—perhaps—of madmen. They hated for the sake of love.

They were the dynamite that the Party used to destroy the old Russia, to make space for the foundation pits of grandiose new constructions, for the granite of a new State.

Soon after these people, the first builders appeared. Their zeal was directed to the creation of a Party and State apparatus, to the construction of plants and factories, to the laying of roads and railways, to the digging of canals, to the mechanization of Soviet agriculture.

These were the first “Red merchants,” the fathers of Soviet cast iron, of Soviet calico, of Soviet airplanes. Not noticing whether it was day or night, not noticing the Siberian cold or the heat of the Kara-Kum desert, they dug the foundations and raised the walls of new Soviet skyscrapers.

Gvakhariya, Frankfurt, Zavenyagin, Gugel...

Among these were some few who died a natural death.

And then there were the Party leaders who built up and governed the various Soviet national republics, territories, and provinces: Postyshev, Kirov, Vareikis, Betal Kalmykov, Faizulla Khodzhaev, Mendel Khatayevich, Eikhe...

Not one of these died a natural death.

They were vivid, brilliant people: orators; connoisseurs of books, poetry, and philosophy; lovers of hunting, feasting, and drinking.

Their telephones rang all day and all night; their secretaries worked in three shifts; but unlike the fanatics and dreamers these men knew how to enjoy life. They enjoyed spacious, sun-filled dachas; they enjoyed hunting mountain goats and wild boar; they enjoyed long, merry Sunday dinners; they knew how to appreciate Armenian cognacs and Georgian wines. They no longer wore leather jackets in winter, and the gabardine of their Stalin-style soldier’s tunics was more expensive than woolen cloth from England.

What was remarkable about these men was their energy, their strength of will, and their complete inhumanity. All of them—those who loved nature, those who loved poetry and music, those who loved feasting and drinking—were inhuman.

They had no doubt that the new world was being built for the people. It did not trouble them that it was the people themselves—the workers, the peasants, the intelligentsia—who constituted the most insuperable obstacle to the building of this new world.

Sometimes it seemed that the powerful energy with which these leaders of the new world were endowed—their iron wills and their capacity for boundless cruelty—was being expended to only one end: to force half-starving people to work with never a day off, beyond their strength, for beggarly pay, while being quartered in primitive barracks and paying every possible kind of tax, levy, loan, and assessment on a scale never before seen in history.

But men were building what no man needed. All of these projects—the White Sea canal, the arctic mines, the railways constructed north of the Arctic Circle, the vast factories hidden in the Siberian
taiga
, the superpowerful hydroelectric power stations deep in the wilderness—were of no use to anyone. It often seemed that these factories, these canals and artificial seas in the desert were of no use even to the Soviet State, let alone to human beings. Sometimes it seemed that the only purpose of these vast constructions was to shackle millions of people with the shackles of labor.

Marx, Lenin (his greatest prophet), and Stalin (their great successor and developer of their work) all saw the primacy of economics over politics as the most fundamental truth of their revolutionary doctrine.

And not one of these builders of a new world gave any thought to the fact that by building vast factories that were useless to human beings and often to the State as well, they were overturning Marx’s thesis.

The State created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin was founded not on economics but on politics.

It was politics that determined the content of Stalin’s five-year plans. Every one of Stalin’s actions—as well as those of his Soviet of People’s Commissars, his
GosPlan
or State Planning Committee, his People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, his People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, his Committee for Grain Procurements, his People’s Commissariat for Trade—constituted an absolute triumph of politics over economics.

The builders of the new world did not think—as during the Civil War—that they were accomplishing a World Revolution, constructing a Universal Commune. But they believed that
Socialism in One Country
, in a new, young Russia, was at least the dawn of the day of universal socialism.

And then came 1937—and the prisons were filled with hundreds of thousands of people from the generation of the Revolution and the Civil War. It was
they
who had defended the Soviet State—they were both the fathers of this State and its children. And now it was
they
who were being taken into the prisons they had built for the enemies of the new Russia. They themselves had created the new order and endowed it with terrible power—and now this terrible chastising might, the might of dictatorship, was being unleashed against
them.
They themselves had forged the sword of the Revolution—and now this sword was falling on
their
heads. To many of them it seemed as if they had entered a time of chaos and insanity.

Why were they being forced to confess to crimes they had never committed? Why had they been declared enemies of the people? Why were they being cast out from the life they had built, the life they had defended in battle?

It seemed mad to them that they were being equated with those whom they hated and despised, with those they had destroyed as fanatically and mercilessly as if they were rabid dogs.

In the prison cells and camp barracks they found themselves beside Mensheviks whom they had failed to finish off, beside former factory owners and landowners.