Friends, as a matter of fact, did try not to leave their friends in a bad spot. They had their own unspoken understanding: at least to arrange favorable conditions for friends. (This was the case, for example, with Colonel I. Y. Vorobyev in the Marfino Special Prison, and with the same V. N. Ilin who was in the Lubyanka for more than eight years.) Thanks to this caste spirit, those arrested singly, as a result of only personal shortcomings, usually did not do too badly. And that was how they were able to justify their sense of immunity from punishment in their day-to-day work in the service. But there were several known cases when camp Security officers were tossed into ordinary camps to serve out their sentences. There were even instances when as prisoners they ran into zeks who had once been under their thumb and came off badly in the encounter. For example, Security officer Munshin, who cherished a particularly violent hatred toward the 58’s in camp and had relied heavily on the support of the blatnye, the habitual thieves, was driven right under the board bunks by those very same thieves. However, we have no way to learn more details about these cases in order to be able to explain them.
But those gaybisty—the State Security officers—who got caught in a wave were in very serious danger. (They had their own waves!) A wave is a natural catastrophe and is even more powerful than the Organs themselves. In this situation, no one was going to help anyone else lest he be drawn into the same abyss himself.
The possibility did exist, however, if you were well informed and had a sharp Chekist sensitivity, of getting yourself out from under the avalanche, even at the last minute, by proving that you had no connection with it. Thus it was that Captain Sayenko (not the Kharkov Chekist carpenter of 1918–1919, who was famous for executing prisoners with his pistol, punching holes in bodies with his saber, breaking shinbones in two, flattening heads with weights, and branding people with hot irons,14 but, perhaps, a relative) was weak enough to marry for love an ex-employee of the Chinese Eastern Railroad named Kokhanskaya. And suddenly he found out, right at the beginning of the wave, that all the Chinese Eastern Railroad people were going to be arrested. At this time he was head of the Security Operations Department of the Archangel GPU. He acted without losing a moment. How? He arrested his own beloved wife! And not on the basis of her being one of the Chinese Eastern Railroad people—but on the basis of a case he himself cooked up. Not only did he save himself, but he moved up and became the Chief of the Tomsk Province NKVD.15
The waves were generated by the Organs’ hidden law of self-renewal—a small periodic ritual sacrifice so that the rest could take on the appearance of being purified. The Organs had to change personnel faster than the normal rate of human growth and aging would ensure. Driven by that same implacable urgency that forces the sturgeon to swim upriver and perish in the shallows, to be replaced by schools of small fry, a certain number of “schools” of gaybisty had to sacrifice themselves. This law was easily apparent to a higher intelligence, but the bluecaps themselves did not want to accept the fact of its existence and make provision for it. Yet, at the hour appointed in their stars, the kings of the Organs, the aces of the Organs, and even the ministers themselves laid their heads down beneath their own guillotine.
Yagoda took one such school of fish along with him. No doubt many of those whose glorious names we shall come to admire when we come to the White Sea Canal were taken in this school and their names thenceforward expunged from the poetic eulogies.
Very shortly, a second school accompanied the short-lived Yezhov. Some of the finest cavaliers of 1937 vanished in this one. (Yet one ought not to exaggerate their number. It did not by any means include all the best.) Yezhov himself was beaten during his interrogation. He was pitiful. And Gulag was orphaned during this wave of arrests. For example, arrested with Yezhov were the Chief of the Financial Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Medical Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Guard Service of Gulag (VOKhR),16 and even the Chief of the Security Operations Department of Gulag, who oversaw the work of the camp “godfathers.”
And later there was the school of Beria.
The corpulent, conceited Abakumov had fallen earlier, separately.
Someday—if the archives are not destroyed—the historians of the Organs will recount all this step by step, with all the figures and all the glittering names.
Therefore, I am going to write only briefly about Ryumin and Abakumov, a story I learned only by chance. I will not repeat what I have already written about them in The First Circle.
Ryumin had been raised to the heights by Abakumov and was very close to him. At the end of 1952, he came to Abakumov with the sensational report that Professor Etinger, a physician, had confessed to intentional malpractice when treating Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, with the purpose of killing them. Abakumov refused to believe him. He knew the whole cookery and decided Ryumin was getting too big for his britches. (But Ryumin had a better idea of what Stalin wanted!) To verify the story, they arranged to cross-question Etinger that very evening. But each of them drew different conclusions from his testimony. Abakumov concluded that there was no such thing as a “doctors’ case.” And Ryumin concluded that there was. A second attempt at verification was to take place the following morning, but, thanks to the miraculous attributes of the Nighttime Institution, Etinger died that very night! In the morning, Ryumin, bypassing Abakumov and without his knowledge, telephoned the Central Committee and asked for an appointment with Stalin! (My own opinion, however, is that this was not his most decisive step. Ryumin’s decisive action, following which his life hung in the balance, was in not going along with Abakumov earlier. And perhaps in having Etinger killed that same night. Who knows the secrets of those courtyards! Had Ryumin’s contact with Stalin begun earlier perhaps?) Stalin received Ryumin, set in motion the “doctors’ case” and arrested Abakumov. From that point on it would seem that Ryumin conducted the “doctors’ case” independently of and even despite Beria! There were signs before Stalin’s death that Beria was in danger—and perhaps it was he who arranged to have Stalin done away with. One of the first acts of the new government was to dismiss the “doctors’ case.” At that time Ryumin was arrested (while Beria was still in power), but Abakumov was not released! At the Lubyanka a new order of things was introduced. And for the first time in its entire existence a prosecutor crossed its threshold—D. Terekhov. Imprisoned, Ryumin was fidgety and subservient: “I am not guilty. I am here for no reason.” He asked to be interrogated. As was his custom, he was sucking a hard candy at the time, and when Terekhov rebuked him for it, he spat it out on the palm of his hand. “Pardon me.” As we have already reported, Abakumov roared with laughter: “Hocus-pocus!” Terekhov showed him the document authorizing him to inspect the Internal Prison of the Ministry of State Security. Abakumov brushed it away: “You can forge five hundred of those!” As an organizational “patriot,” he was principally offended not by being in prison but by this encroachment on the power of the Organs, which could not be subordinate to anything in the world! In July, 1953, Ryumin was tried in Moscow and shot. And Abakumov remained in prison! During one interrogation he said to Terekhov: “Your eyes are too beautiful. I am going to be sorry to have to shoot you!17 Leave my case alone. Leave it while you still have time.” On another occasion Terekhov called him in and handed him the newspaper which carried the announcement of Beria’s exposure. At the time this was virtually a cosmic upheaval. Abakumov read it and, with not so much as the twitch of an eyebrow, he turned the page and started to read the sports news! On another occasion, during an interrogation in the presence of a high-ranking gaybist who had, in the recent past, been his subordinate, Abakumov asked him: “How could you have permitted the investigation of the Beria case to be conducted by the prosecutor’s office instead of by the MGB?” (Everything in his own domain kept nagging him.) He went on: “Do you really believe they are going to put me, the Minister of State Security, on trial?” The answer was “Yes.” And he replied: “Then put on your top hat! The Organs are finished!” (H
e was, of course, too pessimistic, uneducated courier that he was.) But when he was in the Lubyanka, Abakumov was not afraid of being tried; he was afraid of being poisoned. (This, too, showed what a worthy son of the Organs he was!) He started to reject the prison food altogether and would eat only eggs that he bought from the prison store. (In this case, he simply lacked technical imagination. He thought one couldn’t poison eggs.) The only books he borrowed from the well-stocked Lubyanka library were the works of, believe it or not, Stalin! (Who had imprisoned him.) But in all likelihood this was for show rather than the result of any calculation that Stalin’s adherents would gain power. He spent two years in prison. Why didn’t they release him? The question is not a naïve one. In terms of his crimes against humanity, he was over his head in blood. But he was not the only one! And all the others came out of it safe and sound. There is some hidden secret here too: there is a vague rumor that in his time he had personally beaten Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law Lyuba Sedykh, the wife of Khrushchev’s older son, who had been condemned to a punishment battalion in Stalin’s time and who died as a result. And, so goes the rumor, this was why, having been imprisoned by Stalin, he was tried—in Leningrad—under Khrushchev and shot on December 18, 1954.18 But Abakumov had no real reason to be depressed: the Organs still didn’t perish because of that.
* * *
As the folk saying goes: If you speak for the wolf, speak against him as well.
Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood?
It is our own.
And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.
I remember my third year at the university, in the fall of 1938. We young men of the Komsomol were summoned before the District Komsomol Committee not once but twice. Scarcely bothering to ask our consent, they shoved an application form at us: You’ve had enough physics, mathematics, and chemistry; it’s more important to your country for you to enter the NKVD school. (That’s the way it always is. It isn’t just some person who needs you; it is always your Motherland. And it is always some official or other who speaks on behalf of your Motherland and who knows what she needs.)
One year before, the District Committee had conducted a drive among us to recruit candidates for the air force schools. We avoided getting involved that time too, because we didn’t want to leave the university—but we didn’t sidestep recruitment then as stubbornly as we did this time.
Twenty-five years later we could think: Well, yes, we understood the sort of arrests that were being made at the time, and the fact that they were torturing people in prisons, and the slime they were trying to drag us into. But it isn’t true! After all, the Black Marias were going through the streets at night, and we were the same young people who were parading with banners during the day. How could we know anything about those arrests and why should we think about them? All the provincial leaders had been removed, but as far as we were concerned it didn’t matter. Two or three professors had been arrested, but after all they hadn’t been our dancing partners, and it might even be easier to pass our exams as a result. Twenty-year-olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.
It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task. Our decision even ran counter to our material interests: at that time the provincial university we attended could not promise us anything more than the chance to teach in a rural school in a remote area for miserly wages. The NKVD school dangled before us special rations and double or triple pay. Our feelings could not be put into words—and even if we had found the words, fear would have prevented our speaking them aloud to one another. It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “You must!” And your own head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.
This came from very far back, quite likely as far back as Lermontov, from those decades of Russian life when frankly and openly there was no worse and no more vile branch of the service for a decent person than that of the gendarmerie. No, it went back even further. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.
Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? Nowadays, of course, I can console myself by saying that my heart wouldn’t have stood it, that I would have objected and at some point slammed the door. But later, lying on a prison bunk, I began to look back over my actual career as an officer and I was horrified.
I did not move in one stride from being a student worn out by mathematics to officer’s rank. Before becoming an officer I spent a half-year as a downtrodden soldier. And one might think I would have gotten through my thick skull what it was like always to obey people who were perhaps not worthy of your obedience and to do it on a hungry stomach to boot. Then for another half-year they tore me to pieces in officer candidate school. So I ought to have grasped, once and for all, the bitterness of service as a rank-and-file soldier and remembered how my hide froze and how it was flayed from my body. But did I? Not at all. For consolation, they pinned two little stars on my shoulder boards, and then a third, and then a fourth. And I forgot every bit of what it had been like!
Had I at least kept my student’s love of freedom? But, you see, we had never had any such thing. Instead, we loved forming up, we loved marches.
I remember very well that right after officer candidate school I experienced the happiness of simplification, of being a military man and not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived, that was accepted in our military milieu; the happiness of forgetting some of the spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood.
We were constantly hungry in that school and kept looking around to see where we could grab an extra bite, and we watched one another enviously to see who was the cleverest. But most of all we were afraid we wouldn’t manage to stay in until the time came to graduate and receive our officer’s insignia. (They sent those who failed to the battle for Stalingrad.) And they trained us like young beasts, so as to infuriate us to the point where we would later want to take it out on someone else. We never got enough sleep because after taps, as punishment, we might be forced to go through the drill alone under the eyes of a sergeant. Or the entire squad might be routed out at night and made to form up because of one uncleaned boot: there he is, the bastard, and he’ll keep on cleaning it, and until he gets a shine on it you’re all going to stay standing there.
In passionate anticipation of those insignia, we developed a tigerlike stride and a metallic voice of command.
Then the officer’s stars were fastened on our tabs. And only one month later, forming up my battery in the rear, I ordered a careless soldier named Berbenyev to march up and down after taps under the eyes of my insubordinate Sergeant Metlin. (And do you know, I had forgotten all about it until now. I honest
ly forgot about it for years! Only now, seated in front of this sheet of paper, have I remembered.) Some elderly colonel, who was an inspector, happened to be there, and he called me in and put me to shame. And I (and this after I’d left the university!) tried to justify my action on the grounds that it was what we had been taught in school. In other words, I meant: What humane views can there be, given the fact that we are in the army?
(And the more so in the Organs.)
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
I tossed out orders to my subordinates that I would not allow them to question, convinced that no orders could be wiser. Even at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human being. Seated there, I heard them out as they stood at attention. I interrupted them. I issued commands. I addressed fathers and grandfathers with the familiar, downgrading form of address—while they, of course, addressed me formally. I sent them out to repair wires under shellfire so that my superiors should not reproach me. (Andreyashin died that way.) I ate my officer’s ration of butter with rolls, without giving a thought as to why I had a right to it, and why the rank-and-file soldiers did not. I, of course, had a personal servant assigned to me—in polite terms, an “orderly”—whom I badgered one way or another and ordered to look after my person and prepare my meals separately from the soldiers’. (After all, the Lubyanka interrogators don’t have orderlies—that’s one thing you can’t say about them.) I forced my soldiers to put their backs into it and dig me a special dugout at every new bivouac and to haul the heaviest beams to support it so that I should be as comfortable and safe as possible. And wait a minute, yes, my battery always had a guardhouse too. What kind of guardhouse could there be in the woods? It was a pit, of course, although a better one than those at the Gorokhovets division camps which I have described, because it had a roof and the man confined got a soldier’s ration. Vyushkov was imprisoned there for losing his horse and Popkov for maltreating his carbine. Yes, just a moment, I can remember more. They sewed me a map case out of German hide—not human, but from a car seat. But I didn’t have a strap for it, and I was unhappy about that. Then all of a sudden they saw some partisan commissar, from the local District Party Committee, wearing just the right kind of strap—and they took it away from him: we are the army; we have seniority! (Remember Senchenko, the Security officer, who stole a map case and a dispatch case?) Finally, I coveted that scarlet box, and I remember how they took it away and got it for me.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 19
