However, in the evening we didn’t want to argue so much as to hear something interesting that might bring us closer together, and to talk in a spirit of fellowship.
One favorite subject of conversation was prison traditions, how it used to be in prison. We had Fastenko and were therefore able to hear these stories at first hand. What dismayed us most of all was to learn that it had previously been an honor to be a political prisoner, and that it was not only their relatives who stuck by them and refused to renounce them, but that girls who had never even met them came to visit them, pretending for that purpose to be their fiancees. And what about the once universal tradition of gifts for the prisoners on holidays? No one in Russia ever broke the Lenten fast without first taking gifts for unknown prisoners to the common prison kitchen. They brought in Christmas hams, tarts, and kulichi—the special Russian Easter cakes. One poor old lady even used to bring a dozen colored Easter eggs; it made her feel better. And where had all that Russian generosity gone? It had been replaced by political consciousness. That was how cruelly and implacably they had terrified our people and cured them of taking thought for and caring for those who were suffering. Today it would seem silly to do such a thing. If it was proposed today that some institution organize a preholiday collection of gifts for prisoners in the local prison, it would be virtually considered an anti-Soviet revolt! That’s how far we have gone along the road to being brutalized!
And what about those holiday gifts? Were they only a matter of tasty food? More importantly, those gifts gave the prisoners the warm feeling that people in freedom were thinking about them and were concerned for them.
Fastenko told us that even in the Soviet period a Political Red Cross had existed. We found this difficult to imagine. It wasn’t that we thought he was telling us an untruth. Somehow we just couldn’t picture such a thing. He told us that Y. P. Peshkova, taking advantage of her personal immunity, had traveled abroad, collected money there (you’d not collect much here), and then seen to it that foodstuffs were bought in Russia for political prisoners who had no relatives. For all political prisoners? And he explained at this point that the KR’s—the so-called “Counter-Revolutionaries”—engineers and priests, for example, weren’t included, but only members of former political parties. Well, why didn’t you say so right away? Yes, and then for the most part the Political Red Cross, except Peshkova, was itself liquidated and its staff imprisoned.
It was also very pleasant, on those evenings when one wasn’t expecting interrogation, to talk about getting out of prison. Yes, they said there had been astonishing instances when they did release someone. One day they took Z—v from our cell, “with his things”—perhaps to free him? But his interrogation could not have been completed so swiftly. Ten days later he returned. They had dragged him off to Lefortovo. When he got there, he had evidently begun to sign things very quickly. So they brought him back to us. “Now if they should just release you,” we would say to a fellow prisoner, “since your case, after all, isn’t very serious, as you yourself say, then you must promise to go see my wife and, to show you’ve done it, tell her, let’s say, to put two apples in my next parcel. . . . But there aren’t any apples anywhere right now, so tell her to put in three bagels. But then there mightn’t be any bagels in Moscow either. So all right, it will just have to be four potatoes!” (That’s how the discussion went, and then they actually did take N. off, “with his things,” and M. got four potatoes in his next parcel. Truly astonishing! It was more than a coincidence! So they had really let him go! And his case was much more serious than mine. So maybe soon . . . However, what really happened was that M.’s wife brought five potatoes, but one of them got crushed in her bag, and N. was in the hold of a ship en route to the Kolyma.)
And so it went. We talked about all kinds of things and recalled something amusing, and it was all very jolly and delightful to be among interesting people who were so different from those you used to spend your life with, and who came from outside your own circle of experience. Meanwhile the silent evening check-up had come and gone, and they had taken eyeglasses away and the light bulb had blinked three times. That meant that bedtime would be in five minutes.
Quick! Quick! Grab a blanket! Just as you never knew at the front when a hail of shells would begin to fall all around you, here you didn’t know which would be your fateful interrogation night. And we would lie down with one arm on top of the blanket and try to expel the whirlwind of thought from our heads. Go to sleep!
And at a certain moment on an April evening, soon after we had seen Yuri off, the lock rattled. Hearts tightened. For whom had they come? Now the jailer would whisper: “Name with ‘S’? Name with ‘Z’?” But the guard did not whisper anything. The door closed. We raised our heads. There was a newcomer at the door: on the thin side, young, in a cheap blue suit and a dark-blue cap. He had nothing with him. He looked around in a state of confusion.
“What’s the cell number?” he asked in alarm.
“Fifty-three.”
He shuddered a bit.
“Are you from freedom?” we asked.
“No!” He shook his head in a painful sort of way.
“When were you arrested?”
“Yesterday morning.”
We roared. He had a very gentle, innocent sort of face, and his eyebrows were nearly white.
“What for?”
(It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an answer.)
“Oh, I don’t know. . . . Nothing much.”
That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his own case always seemed especially nothing much.
“But anyway, what was it?”
“Well, you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian people.”
“Whaaat?”
(None of us had ever run into that sort of “nothing much.”)
“Are they going to shoot me?” His face grew longer. He kept pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off.
“Well, no, probably not,” we reassured him. “They don’t shoot anyone nowadays. They give out tenners—every time the clock strikes.”
“Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?” asked the Social Democrat, true to his class principles.
“A worker.”
Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly proclaimed to me: “You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that’s the mood of the working class!”
He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was nowhere else to go from there and nothing else to listen to.
But he was wrong.
“What do you mean, a proclamation? Just like that? Without any reason? In whose name was it issued?”
“In my own.”
“And who are you?”
The newcomer smiled with embarrassment: “The Emperor, Mikhail.”
An electric shock ran through us all. Once again we raised ourselves on our cots and looked at him. No, his shy, thin face was not in the least like the face of Mikhail Romanov. And then his age too . . .
“Tomorrow, tomorrow. Time to sleep now,” said Susi sternly.
We went to sleep, confident that the two hours before the morning bread ration were not going to be boring.
They brought in a cot and bedding for the Emperor, and he lay down quietly next to the latrine bucket.
* * *
In 1916 a portly stranger, an elderly man with a light-brown beard, entered the home of the Moscow locomotive engineer Belov and said to the engineer’s pious wife: “Pelageya! You have a year-old son. Take good care of him for the Lord. The hour will come—and I will come to you again.” Then he left.
Pelageya did not have the faintest idea who this man was. But he had spoken so clearly and authoritatively that her mother’s heart accepted his word as law. And she cared for her child like the apple of her eye. Viktor grew up to be quiet, obedient, and pious; and he often saw visions of the angels and the Holy Virgin. But, as he grew
up, these visions became less frequent. The elderly man did not come again. Viktor learned to be a chauffeur, and in 1936 he was taken into the army and sent off to Birobidzhan, where he was stationed in an auto transport company. He was not at all overly familiar or cheeky, and perhaps it was his quiet demeanor and modesty, so untypical of a chauffeur, which attracted a civilian girl employee. But the commander of his platoon was after the same girl and found himself out in the cold because of Viktor. At this time, Marshal Blücher came to their area for maneuvers and his personal chauffeur fell seriously ill. Blücher ordered the commander of the motor company to send him the best driver in the company; the company commander summoned the platoon commander, who immediately latched onto the idea of dumping his rival, Belov. (That’s the way it often is in the army. The person who deserves promotion doesn’t get it, and the person they want to get rid of does.) In addition, Belov was sober, a hard worker, and reliable—he wouldn’t let them down.
Blücher liked Belov. So Belov stayed with him. Soon Blücher was summoned to Moscow on a plausible pretext. This was how they separated the marshal from his power base in the Far East before arresting him. He had brought his own chauffeur, Belov, to Moscow with him. Having lost his boss, Belov then landed in the Kremlin garage and began chauffeuring, sometimes for Mikhailov (of the Komsomol), sometimes for Lozovsky or somebody else in the leadership, and, finally, for Khrushchev. He had a close view of things—and he told us a lot, too, about the feasts, the morals, the security precautions. As a representative of the rank-and-file Moscow proletariat, he was also present at the trial of Bukharin in the House of the Unions. Of all those for whom he worked, he spoke well only of Khrushchev. Only in Khrushchev’s home was the chauffeur seated at the family table instead of being put in the kitchen. Only there, in those years, did he find the simplicity of the workingman’s life preserved. Khrushchev, who enjoyed life hugely, also became attached to Viktor Alekseyevich, and in 1938, when he left for the Ukraine, he tried to get him to go along. “I would have stayed with Khrushchev forever,” said Viktor Alekseyevich. But for some reason he felt he should remain in Moscow.
For a while in 1941, before the beginning of the war, he was not employed in the government garage and, having no one to protect him, he was taken into military service. But because his health was poor, he was not sent to the front but to a labor battalion. First they went on foot to Inza, to dig trenches and build roads there. After his secure and prosperous life of the previous few years he found it painful to have his nose shoved in the dirt. He drank a full draft of grief and poverty there, and on every side he saw not only that people had not begun to live better before the war, but that they were deeply impoverished. Just barely surviving himself, and released from the service because of illness, he returned to Moscow and again managed to get himself a job as chauffeur for Shcherbakov,22 and after that for Sedin, People’s Commissar of Petroleum. But Sedin embezzled funds to the tune of 35 million and was quietly removed. And Belov was once again out of a job driving for the leaders. He became a chauffeur at an automobile depot, and in his spare time he used to moonlight with his car on the road to Krasnaya Pakhra.
But his thoughts were already centered elsewhere. In 1943 he had been visiting his mother. She was doing the laundry and had gone out to the hydrant with her pails. The door opened and a portly stranger, an old man with a white beard, entered the house. He crossed himself at the ikon there, looked sternly at Belov, and said to him: “Hail, Mikhail. God gives you his blessing!” Belov replied: “My name is Viktor.” “But,” the old man continued, “you are destined to become Mikhail, the Emperor of Holy Russia!” Just then Viktor’s mother returned and half-collapsed in fright, spilling her pails. It was the very same old man who had come to her twenty-seven years before. He had turned white in the meantime, but it was he. “God bless you, Pelageya, you have preserved your son,” said the old man. And he took the future Emperor aside, like a patriarch preparing to enthrone him, and announced to the astonished young man that in 1953 there would be a change in rule and that he would become Emperor of All Russia.23 (That is why the number of our cell, 53, shocked him so.) To this end, the old man told him, he was to begin to gather his forces in 1948. The old man didn’t instruct him as to how to gather his forces. He departed, and Viktor Alekseyevich didn’t get around to asking.
All the peace and simplicity of his life were lost to him now. Perhaps some other individual would have recoiled from the ambitious program, but Viktor, as it happened, had rubbed shoulders with the highest of the high. He had seen all those Mikhailovs, Shcherbakovs, Sedins, and he had heard a lot from other chauffeurs, too, and he had gotten it clear in his own mind that nothing in the least unusual was required—in fact, just the reverse.
The newly anointed Tsar, quiet, conscientious, sensitive, like Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the line of Ryurik, felt on his brow the heavy pressure of the crown of Monomakh. All around him were the people’s poverty and grief, for which he had not until now borne any responsibility. Now all this lay upon his shoulders, and he was to blame for the fact that this misery still existed. It seemed strange to him to wait until 1948, and, therefore, in that very autumn of 1943, he wrote his first proclamation to the Russian people and read it to four of his fellow workers in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum.
We had surrounded Viktor Alekseyevich from early morning, and he had meekly told us all this. We had still not fathomed his childish trustfulness—we were absorbed in his unusual story and—it was our fault—we forgot to warn him about the stoolie. In fact, we never even thought for one minute that there was anything in the naïve and simple story he had told us that the interrogator didn’t already know.
The instant the story ended, Kramarenko began demanding to be taken either to the “chief of the prison for tobacco” or else to the doctor. At any rate, they summoned him quickly. And as soon as he got there he put the finger on those four workers in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum—whose existence no one would ever have suspected. (The next day, returning from his interrogation, Belov was astonished that the interrogator knew about them. And that’s when it hit us.) Those workers had heard the proclamation and approved it all, and no one had turned in the Emperor! But he himself felt that it was too early, and he burned it.
A year passed. Viktor Alekseyevich was working as a mechanic in the garage of an automobile depot. In the fall of 1944, he again wrote a proclamation and gave it to ten people to read—chauffeurs and lathe operators. All of them approved it. And no one turned him in. (It was a surprising thing, indeed, that not one person in that group of ten had turned him in, in that period of ubiquitous stool pigeons! Fastenko had not been mistaken in his deductions about the “mood of the working class.”) True, in this case the Emperor had used some innocent tricks. He had thrown out hints that a strong arm inside the government was on his side. And he had promised his supporters travel assignments to rally monarchic sentiment at the grass roots.
Months went by. The Emperor entrusted his secret to two girls at the garage. But this time there was no misfire. These girls turned out to be ideologically sound! And Viktor Alekseyevich’s heart sank: he had a premonition of disaster. On the Sunday after the Annunciation he went to the market, carrying the proclamation with him. One of his sympathizers among the old workers saw him there and said: “Viktor, you ought to burn that piece of paper for the time being; how about it?” And Viktor felt clearly that he had written it too soon, and that he should burn it. “I’ll burn it right now! You’re right.” And he started home to burn it. But right there in the market two pleasant young men called out to him: “Viktor Alekseyevich! Come along with us!” And they took him to the Lubyanka in a private car. When they got him there, they had been in such a hurry and were so excited that they didn’t search him in the usual way, and there was a moment when the Emperor almost destroyed his proclamation in the toilet. But he decided that it would be the worse for him, that they would keep afte
r him anyway to find out where it was. And they straightaway took him in an elevator up to a general and a colonel, and the general with his own hands grabbed the proclamation from Viktor’s pocket.
However, it took only one interrogation for the Big Lubyanka to quiet down again. It turned out to be not so dangerous. Ten arrests in the garage of the auto depot and four in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum. The interrogation was turned over to a lieutenant colonel, who had a good laugh as he went through the proclamation:
“You write here, Your Majesty: ‘In the first spring I will instruct my Minister of Agriculture to dissolve the collective farms.’ But how are you going to divide up the tools and livestock? You haven’t got it worked out yet. And then you also write: ‘I am going to increase housing construction and house each person next to the place he works, and I am going to raise all the workers’ wages.’ And where are you going to find the money, Your Majesty? Are you going to have to run the money off on printing presses? You are going to abolish the state loans. And then, too: ‘I am going to wipe the Kremlin from the face of the earth.’ But where are you going to put your own government? What about the building of the Big Lubyanka? Would you like to take a tour of inspection and look it over?”
Many of the younger interrogators also stopped by to make fun of the Emperor of All Russia. They saw nothing except comedy in all this.
And it was not always easy for us in the cell to keep a straight face. “We hope you aren’t going to forget us here in Cell No. 53,” said Z—v, winking at the rest of us.
Everyone laughed at him.
Viktor Alekseyevich, with his white eyebrows and innocent simplicity and his callused hands, would treat us when he received boiled potatoes from his unfortunate mother, Pelageya, without ever dividing them into “yours” and mine”: “Come on, comrades, eat up, eat up!”
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 27
