by James Cook
I flicked on the overhead light, and she stood there, picking at her shawl, and refusing to look at me. I said, “Who are you? Don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you.”
“What are you doing here?” Tania said, appearing in the doorway behind me. “You have no right. This is government property. You’re in violation of the law just being here.”
The old woman tottered and swayed, and I thought she was going to fall.
I said again, “Don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you.”
“I had to come back before they were all gone,” she replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“The children—you cut through the children. I had to come back one more time.”
Tania wanted to call the night porter or the police and get rid of her, but I calmed Tania down and helped the old woman to a chair.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Vera Ostrovsky, Citizen Faust. I was the mistress of this house. We built it, my husband and I, and lived here for forty years bringing up our family.”
“Get rid of her,” Tania kept saying. “There’s no reason we have to put up with her.”
“I want to hear,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
The woman’s alarm had passed. “Those are my children,” she said. “Andrei, Nina, and Aleksandra. This was their playroom, and every year we had their faces painted on the wall. You can see them growing up before your eyes. And then the revolution broke out, and we lost everything. My son was killed in the civil war, and my daughters—I don’t know what happened to them. We sent them to our place in the country, but it burned, and we never saw them again. I came here to take one last look.”
I was about to suggest that we could leave the pictures, but Tania said, “I’m sick of all this, I’m going to bed.” I told the old woman she could come back and look at them again. She disappeared down the curving staircase and, as far as I know, never came back.
We got into an argument about that, Tania and I. The woman deserved whatever she got, Tania said. She was part of the system that had oppressed the Russian people for a thousand years. The privileged classes. Capitalist oppressors.
“Maybe so. But you can believe that and still feel for her loss.”
“When did she ever feel for the working people who were being ground to death by the system?”
“I haven’t any idea. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, but she may have.”
I was tired of hearing it all again, at three o’clock in the morning, and I turned away from her and went to sleep.
When we first knew each other, I had always thought that Tania’s ideological commitment had more to do with her own insecurity than with any intellectual conviction. Her grandparents after all had been members of the nobility, and though her father and grandfather had been involved in both the 1905 revolution and the Bolshevik movement the past no longer offered much protection for anyone. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were already in exile, and within a decade most of the remaining founders of the revolution would be dead, including Tania’s father, the general, Boris Churnuchin. But over the years, Tania changed, or if she did not, my comprehension of her did.
During the last months of her pregnancy, we were apart far more often than we normally were. Getting the aspirin business up and running occupied much of my time, took me into parts of Russia that were alien to her, and put me in contact with people she didn’t want to know, so our social engagements tended to be purely social. I was happy enough about that.
Tania had no more intention of taking on herself the dog work involved in maintaining our daily life than she had of sitting around with other women of her age and condition. In those days, it cost virtually nothing to hire people to work for you if you had the money. You hired somebody to stand in line to buy food, clothing, and other necessities and we hired people who were going to see Tania through her delivery and take care of the child after its birth.
I was never comfortable with such people as I have never been comfortable with servants. You could not delude yourself into thinking you were loved. The mass of people hated us for the special privileges we enjoyed, hated us even when they thought we were Russian, hated us even more when they discovered we were foreigners.
I remember one late summer afternoon we had gone off in the Rolls with Manny and Yelena for a spin in the countryside. It was an open car, long, sleek, with leather upholstery and wide running boards. We found ourselves on a muddy back road, driving behind a peasant in a large four-wheeled oxcart. The cart was filled with manure, the odor was rank, stifling, and Manny began blowing his horn, yelling to the driver to pull out of the way.
The peasant was a large burly man. He sat on a high seat at the front of the cart, and every once in a while would flick his whip at the animals to urge them onward. There was no place to turn off, but that didn’t stop Manny from sounding the horn, shouting, and driving forward so that the bumper just touched the turning wheels of the cart. Yelena and Tania viewed the whole thing with a great deal of laughter.
The cart reached a passing point in the road finally, and the peasant pulled over. Manny gunned the car, pulled ahead, and as we passed I sensed that the farmer was on his feet in the cart. Suddenly something landed in the car, in Yelena’s lap—a fork full of manure. Yelena shrieked, and when Manny realized what had happened, he slammed on the brakes, leaped out, and began tearing back down the road, screaming at the farmer, threatening to have him shot, to call the secret police. I ran after him, pulling him back into the car, and we drove on. Somehow I persuaded Manny to forget the whole thing.
That was the day that Tania’s water broke, and the following morning our twin daughters were born, Katerina and Maria. Tania had never looked more beautiful, and my heart welled up with an unspeakable joy.
The following summer the government held the first of what would become known around the world as the demonstration trials. Stalin was continuing to consolidate his power, and decided to demonstrate that the nation was beset by an organized network of spies and saboteurs and to make an example of a group of forty or fifty managers in the coal industry. Though they had apparently done nothing especially reprehensible other than try to operate with a minimum of interference from the central government, they were nonetheless charged with a long list of high crimes and misdemeanors, as we would have put it back in the U.S.—funneling funds to the former owners of the mines, sabotaging mining machinery in order to disrupt the nation’s fuel supply, wasting the industry’s capital on defective machinery, and preparing to deliver the mines into enemy hands in the event of war.
Tania wanted me to attend the trials so that I could help her interpret what was going on for our journalist friends, Barnes of the Herald Tribune, Chamberlin of the Monitor, Gene Lyons of the United Press, and I suppose even Walter Duranty of the New York Times. These trials were not the sort we were used to back home. Innocence and guilt had already been decided. They were public exhibitions, confessions of high crimes against the state to alert the people to the dangers that threatened them on all sides.
The trials were held in the Hall of Nobles in Trades Union House—the place where Lenin had lain in state. It was a setting befitting the gravity of the proceedings. There were columns lining the perimeter of the room, immense crystal chandeliers dropping like tears from the ceiling and at the front of the room behind the podium a great swirl of red banners and the gold seal of the hammer and sickle. Red guards stood with their bayonets at the ready around the room, and the judges, three of them, clad in black business suits like American undertakers, sat on a raised dais behind the witness box.
The trials made me sick. Day after day one hapless manager after another would confess the crimes he had committed against the state and go on to accuse his fellow workers of even greater ones. It got even worse than that. I would never claim that the Fausts were a warm loving family, but I was chilled by the handsome young boy who mounted the podium into a blaze of light and began te
stifying against his father. I can still hear his voice ringing in the room: “I denounce my father as a traitor. I accuse him of being an enemy of the Soviet people. I demand the severest penalty for his crimes. I reject him and the name he bears forever and henceforth shall no longer call myself by his name.”
Such denunciations became familiar later on, in Germany as well as Russia, but in those days they were a shocking violation of all that the human family has ever held dear.
I stopped attending the trials after the appearance of a mining engineer named Constantine Skorutto. He had been accused of conspiring with enemy agents to undermine the Soviet Union, but unlike most of the others he had, from the beginning, insisted on his innocence. He had never betrayed his country or the Soviet people. He had never conspired with his coworkers. But that morning when he settled into the witness box, peering behind thick glasses into the dazzling spotlight, he began confessing his guilt, reciting a rambling litany of his crimes of thought and deed, association and conspiracy. Suddenly a voice rang out in the chamber, a woman’s voice, his wife’s, crying out, “Kolya darling, you promised not to lie. Don’t lie. You know you are innocent.”
It was as if he had been hit with an electric shock. His body jerked, and he peered into the blaze of light, twitching, transfixed, immobilized like a deer caught in your headlights.
The room was thrown into an uproar. Skorutto’s wife was quickly removed from the hall and the session abruptly suspended. A moment later, the guards carried Skorutto away, hanging limply between their arms, his feet dangling behind him on the floor.
When the tribunal resumed an hour or so later, Skorutto was himself again. His head held high and his voice steady, he retracted his earlier confession. He had always been a loyal Russian, loyal to his country, to his fellow workers, to the ideals of the party. He had been afraid, he said, he felt threatened, intimidated, but he was mistaken.
The judge began to question him, and as he did Skorutto began to shrink before our very eyes. No, he had not been mistreated, no, nobody had hurt him, nobody had done him any bodily harm, but you didn’t believe him. Not with that haunted look on his face, those distracted eyes, and he finally broke into uncontrollable tears. The guards escorted him out of the hearing room again.
They rushed him back to Lubianka prison, that medieval eight-story building off Red Square where the GPU had its headquarters. The following day Skorutto was back, once again calm, self-possessed, and in a dead listless voice he delivered a long list of the crimes he had committed, as if he had never claimed anything else, and the state was finally content.
I was not there for his final confessions. I heard about it from Tania. They sentenced him to death.
After that I decided I would never attend such a trial again and Tatiana did not attempt to dissuade me. But that would not have been necessary in any case. All the later trials were held behind closed doors, hidden from the public and the shocked conscience of the world.
There are some things too terrible to look upon, and I had seen enough not to want to see more. That winter I spent in the mountains, I used to take a sleigh every once in a while and drive five miles or so down a logging road through the woods to a bluff overlooking the river Tura. Most of the year, the river was broad, silvery, almost soundless, but in the spring it became a rushing torrent, and you could hear it even before you came out of the woods onto the bluff.
A quarter of a mile way, there was a village that had been abandoned some time before, a casualty of the revolution or the civil war, I didn’t know which. The log houses with their elaborately carved window frames were tumbling down, the roofs gaping under the weight of the snow, the animal pens and barns empty and desolate, and the picket fences that once surrounded the gardens beginning to fall down. The snow-capped chimneys were still intact, but the huge stacks of firewood had already begun to decay. In the treetops, there were always crows nesting, cawing, waiting, waiting for something.
The last time I went there, it was late spring, and the river was in flood. The muddy water swirled and twisted at the base of the bluff, and there were shapes in the water, humpy ones, that bobbed and floated in the turgid stream, swirled, twisted, changed direction. I couldn’t tell what they were.
When I got to the village, the roar of the water was hushed, the way it is when it floods, turning swift-rushing and oily. I crossed the village square to the waterside. The stream had eaten away at the bank, and I looked down and saw death everywhere—the remnants of human bodies, bones, flesh, shapes under tunics anid coats and boots, human remains, scattered, stacked like logs in the mud.
You knew at once what must have happened, the trench driven into the soft earth by the river bank, the villagers lined up, maybe in rows, maybe singly, and shot, killed, so that they fell into the trench. It was an image that was to haunt an entire generation in another country, another place, but I first looked on it there, beyond the mountains at the heart of the northern world. There were more bodies in the riverbank, and the stream kept tugging at them, trying to carry them away.
I didn’t know what to do. You felt you ought to do something, and I who believed in nothing found myself asking what gods there might be to have mercy on the monsters who had done such a thing.
I never went there again.
Nobody in the mining camp remembered what had happened except Issakai, our guide when we climbed the mountains. “It was during the civil war,” he said. “Some of the villages at the foot of the mountains supported the Reds, some the Whites, arid I heard that horsemen rode into the village one day and rounded up all the people who lived there, men, women and children, sick, old and blind. Everybody was killed. They lined them up at the far end of the village square and shot them.”
“And who dug the trench they were buried in?”
“They dug it themselves. They bought themselves a few more minutes or hours of life, and then it was over. There were some villagers who escaped. They supported the horsemen.”
“Helped them slaughter the rest of the villagers, you mean, bury the dead.”
“People did what they had to,” he said.
“And who did this?” I asked. “The Red Guards?”
“How would I know?” he said. “I was not there. The same thing happened in a dozen villages along the river, sometimes by one side, sometimes by another. It was a terrible time. You heard the stories of horsemen strangling the villagers with their bare hands to save bullets. But I would never do such a thing. There’s not enough strength in these hands to do such a thing. I would not. Never.”
I didn’t like to think about it. But I did. Sometimes, whenever I thought of Katya, or an aging tribesman strangling his neighbors to save bullets, or listened to a son betray his father or accuse himself of treason. It’s one memory I would gladly never recover.
iv
That spring, Tania spent most of her time on preparations for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, coming up in July. The Comintern was the umbrella group for the fifty or sixty national communist parties around the world, and a small army of people began arriving in April, not only delegates, but aides, assistants, and hangers-on. Tania was put in charge of managing the American contingent.
She had her hands full with the Americans. “You know how they are,” she said. “They won’t do anything they’re told. They don’t go to meetings when they’re supposed to, they don’t show up for breakfast when they’re told do, and they’re up all night boozing in the café bar at the Lux.”
At the time, everyone in Moscow behaved as if the fate of the world depended on what the Comintern decided about a whole raft of measures, none of which matter any more, if they ever did. Stalin was taking command of the communist movement worldwide, and the meeting was designed in part to make that clear to everyone everywhere. The Russian Communist Party and its interests were now the central concern of all the other parties around the world, even if those interests seemed contrary to those of the workers in the individua
l countries involved.
We threw a reception at Red House for the U.S. delegation, and invited everybody we knew of any consequence in the foreign press and the diplomatic corps, along with a handful of the more agreeable bureaucrats. The Americans were a very nervous group. Stalin had got Bukharin and Kamenev to join with him in ousting Trotsky and Zinoviev, the revolution’s founding fathers, from the party. Now he was preparing to chuck out Bukharin himself. But he played a cat-and-mouse game, first kicking Bukharin out of the party and then reinstalling him as chairman of the Comintern’s executive committee. The American party headed by Ben Gitlow, Jay Lovestone, and Bert Wolfe had always supported Bukharin in the past, and so Stalin had approached Bill Foster, who headed a rival faction of the party, for help in getting Bukharin out of the way. The cat was conceivably playing with all kinds of mice.
The American delegates seemed stunned that in Moscow party politics were at least as Byzantine as they were in New York and that power, not the interests of the working classes, was all that really mattered to anybody. I have no idea why they were surprised. Power was all that had ever really mattered in New York as well.
It wasn’t Russian politics that mesmerized most of the delegates, however, but the manner in which the communist elite lived and conducted their lives—the limousines that carried them around Moscow, the luxurious apartments and mansions they housed themselves in, and the imperial style they assumed in carrying out party matters. Characteristically, they were especially shocked when they were offered for their sexual diversion not party members but prostitutes.
I remember standing in the ballroom at Red House listening to Ben Gitlow, the party’s executive secretary, going on about all the stuff Pop had collected over the years. The house was crammed with his treasures—every blank wall, every flat surface—paintings and artifacts, ikons and religious objects, silver and Fabergé eggs, and on and on. I could only look at him aghast when he said, “Have you ever been to our offices on Union Square? They’re the pits.”
