27. Ibid., p. 83.
28. Ibid., p. 79.
29. Ibid., p. 81.
30. Ibid., p. 524.
31. Ibid., p. 82.
32. lbid., p. 296.
33. Ibid., p. 500.
34. Ibid., p. 507.
35. Ibid., p. 513. (My italics.)
36. Ibid., p. 507.
37. In order to temper the reader’s indignation against this leechlike snake, Yakulov, we should point out that by the time of Kosyrev’s trial he had already been arrested and was in custody. They had found a case to take care of him. He was brought in to testify accompanied by convoy, and we are certainly entitled to hope that he was shot soon afterward. (Today we are surprised: How did things reach such a pitch of illegality? Why did no one mount an offensive against it?)
38. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 14.
39. Oh, how many themes we have here! Oh, where is Shakespeare? Solovyev passes through the walls, flickering shadows in the cell, Godelyuk recants with failing hand. And all we hear about the years of the Revolution in our plays and our films is the street singing of “Hostile Whirlwinds.”
40. Krylenko, Ope cit., p. 522.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 337.
43. Ibid., p. 509.
44. Ibid., pp. 505–510. (My italics.)
45. Ibid., p. 511.
46. Ibid.
47. lbid., p. 14.
48. But accuser Krylenko saw no difference whatever between Samarin and Rasputin.
49. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.
50. lbid., p. 81..
51. Firguf, a former guards officer of the Tsar’s household cavalry, who had “suddenly undergone a spiritual conversion, given all his goods to the poor, and entered a monastery, but I do not in fact know whether he actually did distribute his goods to the poor.” Yes, and if one admits the possibility of spiritual conversion, what then remains of class theory?
52. But which of us doesn’t remember similar scenes? My first memory is of an event that took place when I was, probably, three or four: The peaked-heads (as they called the Chekists in their high-peaked Budenny caps) invaded a Kislovodsk church, sliced through the dumbstruck crowd of worshipers, and, in their pointed caps, went straight through the altar screen to the altar and stopped the service.
53. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.
54. The Patriarch cited Klyuchevsky: “The gates of the monastery of the Saint will shut and the ikon lamps will be extinguished over his sepulcher only when we shall have lost every vestige of that spiritual and moral strength willed to us by such great builders of the Russian land as Saint Sergius.” Klyuchevsky did not imagine that the loss would occur almost in his own lifetime. The Patriarch asked for an appointment with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in the hope of persuading him not to touch the holy monastery and the relics . . . for after all the church was separate from the state! The answer came back that the Chairman was occupied in discussing important business, and that the appointment could not be arranged for the near future.
Nor for the distant future either.
55. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 34.
56. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, p. 48,
57 V. I. Lenin i A. M. Gorky (V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky), Moscow, Academy of Sciences Publishing House, 1961, p. 263.
58. Ibid.
59. Lenin, fourth edition, Vol. 26, p. 373.
60. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 54.
61. Ibid., p. 38.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 17.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., p. 8.
66. He would soon cut his own throat.
1. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 381.
2. Ibid., pp. 382–383.
3. Sobraniye Uzakonenii RSFSR (Collection of Decrees of the R.S.F.S.R.), 1922, No. 4, p. 42.
4. Pravda, December 17, 1922.
5. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 433.
6. Ibid., p. 434.
7. Ibid., p. 435.
8. Ibid., p. 438.
9. Ibid., p. 458.
10. The provincial trials of the SR’s took place even earlier, such as the one in Saratov in 1919.
11. Published in Paris in 1922, and in the Soviet Union in samizdat in 1967.
12. See the articles entitled “Tserkov i Golod” (“The Church and the Famine”) and “Kak budut izyaty tserkovnye tsennosti” (“How the Church Valuables Will Be Requisitioned”).
13. I have taken this material from Ocherki po Istorii Tserkovnoi Smuty (Essays on the History of the Troubles of the Church), by Anatoly Levitin, Part I, samizdat, 1962, and from the stenographic notes on the questioning of Patriarch Tikhon, Trial Record, Vol. V.
14. In other words, like the Vyborg appeal, for which the Tsar’s government had imposed sentences of three months’ imprisonment.
15. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 189.
16. Ibid., Vol. 39, pp. 404–405.
17. Ibid., Vol. 45, p. 190.
18. The fact that their efforts in defending it were very feeble, that they were beset by hesitations, and that they renounced it right away is another matter. For all that, their guilt was no less.
19. And it had indeed been a failure, although this did not become clear immediately.
20. In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outlying areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine, the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all declared themselves to be governments after the Council of People’s Commissars had declared itself to be the government.
21. The title of “prosecutor” had by now been restored to him.
22. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 183.
23. And what hadn’t those chatterboxes said in the course of a lifetime?
24. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 236. (What lingo!)
25. It was evidently all right to shoot the other hostages.
26. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 251.
27. Ibid., p. 253.
28. Ibid., p. 258.
29. Ibid., p. 305.
30. Ibid., p. 185.
31. Ibid., p. 103.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 325.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 238.
36. Ibid., p. 322.
37. Ibid., p. 326.
38. Ibid., p. 319.
39. Ibid., p. 407.
40. Ibid., p. 409.
41. Many hypotheses were advanced about his return. Only a little while ago, a certain Ardamatsky, a person obviously connected with the archives and personnel of the Committee for State Security, published a story which, despite being adorned with pretentiously inflated literary gewgaws, is evidently close to the truth. (The magazine Neva, No. 11, 1967.) Having induced certain of Savinkov’s agents to betray him and having deceived others, the GPU used them to set a foolproof trap, convincing Savinkov that inside Russia a large underground organization was languishing for lack of a worthy leader! It would have been impossible to devise a more effective trap! And it would have been impossible for Savinkov, after such a confused and sensational life, merely to spin it out quietly to the end in Nice. He couldn’t bear not trying to pull off one more feat and not returning to Russia and his death.
42. And we, silly prisoners of a later Lubyanka, confidently parroted to one another that the steel nets hanging in the Lubyanka stairwells had been installed after Savinkov had committed suicide there. Thus do we succumb to fancy legends to the extent of forgetting that the experience of jailers is, after all, international in character. Such nets existed in American prisons as long ago as the beginning of the century—and how could Soviet technology have been allowed to lag behind?
In 1937, when he was dying in a camp in the Kolyma, the former Chekist Artur Pryubel told one of his fellow prisoners that he had been one of the four who threw Savinkov from a fifth-floor window into the Lubyanka court yard! (And there is no conflict between that statement and Ardamatsky’s recent account: There was a low sill; it was m
ore like a door to the balcony than a window—they had picked the right room! Only, according to Ardamatsky, the guards were careless; according to Pryubel, they rushed him all together.)
Thus the second riddle, the unusually lenient sentence, was unraveled by the crude third “riddle.”
The story ascribed to Pryubel could not be checked, but I had heard it, and in 1967 I told it to M. P. Yakubovich. He, with his still youthful enthusiasm and shining eyes, exclaimed: “I believe it. Things fit! And I didn’t believe Blyumkin; I thought he was just bragging.” What he had learned was this: At the end of the twenties, Blyumkin had told Yakubovich, after swearing him to secrecy, that he was the one who had written Savinkov’s so-called suicide note, on orders from the GPU. Apparently Blyumkin was allowed to see Savinkov in his cell constantly while he was in prison. He kept him amused in the evenings. (Did Savinkov sense that death was creeping up on him . . . sly, friendly death, which gives you no chance to guess the form your end will take?) And this had helped Blyumkin acquire Savinkov’s manner of speech and thought, had enabled him to enter into the framework of his last ideas.
And they ask: Why throw him out the window? Wouldn’t it have been easier simply to poison him? Perhaps they showed someone the remains or thought they might need to.
And where, if not here, is the right place to report the fate of Blyumkin, who for all his Chekist omnipotence was fearlessly brought up short by Mandelstam. Ehrenburg began to tell Blyumkin’s story, and suddenly became ashamed and dropped the subject. And there is a story to tell, too. After the 1918 rout of the Left SR’s, Blyumkin, the assassin of the German Ambassador Mirbach, not only went unpunished, was not only spared the fate of all the other Left SR’s, but was protected by Dzerzhinsky, just as Dzerzhinsky had wanted to protect Kosyrev. Superficially he converted to Bolshevism, and was kept on, one gathers, for particularly important assassinations. At one point, close to the thirties, he was secretly sent to Paris to kill Bazhenov, a member of the staff of Stalin’s secretariat who had defected, and one night he succeeded in throwing him off a train. However, his gambler’s blood, or perhaps his admiration of Trotsky, led Blyumkin to the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, where Trotsky was living. He asked Trotsky whether there were any assignments he could carry out for him in the Soviet Union, and Trotsky gave him a package for Radek. Blyumkin delivered it, and his visit to Trotsky would have remained a secret had not the brilliant Radek already been a stool pigeon. Radek brought down Blyumkin, who was thereupon devoured by the maw of the monster his own hands had suckled with its first bloody milk.
1. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 54, pp. 265–266.
2. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 437.
3. And the members of the tribunal were the old revolutionaries Vasilyev-Yuzhin and Antonov-Saratovsky. The very simple folk sound of their family names inclines one to a favorable reaction. They are easy to remember. And when suddenly, in 1962, obituaries of certain victims of repression appeared in Izvestiya, whose signature was at the bottom? That of the long-lived Antonov-Saratovsky!
4. Pravda, May 24, 1928, p. 3.
5. Izvestiya, May 24, 1929.
6. And it is quite possible that this failure of his was held against him by the Leader and led to the symbolic destruction of the prosecutor—on the very same guillotine as his victims.
7. Protsess Prompartii (The Trial of the Promparty), Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo (Soviet Legislation Publishing House), 1931.
8. Ibid., p. 452.
9. Ibid., p. 488.
10. Ibid., p. 325.
11. Ibid., p. 365.
12. Ibid., p. 204.
13. Ibid., p. 202.
14. Ibid., p. 204.
15. Ibid., p. 425.
16. Ibid., p. 356.
17. Who drew that arrow for Krylenko on a cigarette pack—was it not drawn by the same hand that thought up our entire defense strategy in 1941?
18. Protsess Prompartii, p. 356. This was not intended as a joke.
19. Ibid., p. 409.
20. Ibid., p. 437.
21. Ibid., p. 228.
22. Ibid., p. 354.
23. Ibid., p. 452.
24. Ibid., p. 454.
25. Ivanov-Razumnik, Tyurmy i Ssylki (Prisons and Exiles), New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1953.
26. Ramzin has been undeservedly neglected in Russian memories. In my view, he fully deserved to become the prototype of a cynical and dazzling traitor. The Bengal fire of betrayal! He wasn’t the only such villain of this epoch, but he was certainly a prominent case.
27. Protsess Prompartii, p. 504. And that is how they were talking here in the Soviet Union, in our own country, in 1930, when Mao Tse-tung was still a stripling.
28. Ibid., p. 510.
29. Ibid., p. 49.
30. Ibid., p. 508.
31. Ibid., p. 509. For some reason, the main thing about the proletariat is always, believe it or not, sensitivity. Always via the nostrils.
32. He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his consolation, he has been granted a personal pension for his revolutionary activity! What monstrosities exist in our country.
33. One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers’ group in the War Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Minister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr long-termers of Gulag. I do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from 1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in Spassk Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.
34. He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff, who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.
35. All the information here comes from Volume 41 of the Granat Encyclopedia, in which either autobiographical or reliable biographical essays on the leaders of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) are collected.
36. The only one he defended was Yefim Tseitlin—but not for long.
37. See what a wealth of information we are deprived of because we’re protecting Molotov’s noble old age.
38. Nor did it shake the “Future Central Committee” either.
39. Your own blood, too, is going to flow soon, Klyugin! Caught in the Yezhov gang of gaybisty, Klyugin will have his throat cut by the stool pigeon Gubaidulin.
40. Generally speaking, he was wrong just on this one point.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 84
