In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  What made Stalin terrifying was that any slip in dealing with him was like mishandling a detonator: You would do it only once in your life; there was no chance to correct it. What made Stalin terrifying was that he never listened to excuses; he did not even make accusations. One end of his mustache twitched slightly, and sentence was passed somewhere inside there, but the condemned man was not informed of it; he went peacefully on his way, was arrested that night and shot before morning.

  Worst of all was when Stalin said nothing and you were left to torment yourself with conjecture. If Stalin threw something heavy or sharp at you, stamped on your foot, spat at you, or blew hot tobacco ash in your face, his anger was not final; it would pass! If Stalin was rude and abused him, even in the most obscene language, Abakumov rejoiced; that meant that the Boss still hoped to reform his minister and to go on working with him.

  By now, of course, Abakumov realized that excess of zeal had carried him too high for comfort; he would have been safer lower down. Stalin was always pleasant and affable when he talked to peripheral people. But you couldn’t break out of the inner circle; there was no way back.

  All you had to look forward to was death. Of natural causes. Or . . . best not to mention it.

  So whenever he reported to Stalin, Abakumov lived in fear of being found out.

  What if it became known that he had used his position in Germany to line his pockets? That thought alone kept him shivering in his shoes.

  At the end of the war Abakumov had been head of SMERSH (the “Death to Spies” organization). All counterespionage units in all front-line army groups came under his command. For a time it was possible to enrich yourself undetected. To help finish Germany off completely, Stalin adopted Hitler’s idea of permitting those at the front to send parcels home. Fight for the honor of the motherland? Fine. For Stalin? Better still. But shouldn’t the fighting man be given some personal, material interest in victory? Say, the right to send home the spoils of war, rankers five kilograms a month, officers ten, generals a pood?* (This gradation was fair, because a soldier’s pack must not weigh him down on the march, whereas a general always has his car.) But the counterespionage network was in a much more advantageous situation. It was out of reach of enemy shells. It was safe from enemy bombers. SMERSH’s life was lived just behind the front line, in the zone that was no longer under fire but not yet invaded by treasury officials. Its officers were shrouded in a cloud of secrecy. Nobody would dare inquire what they had put in a sealed freight car, what they had removed from a sequestered estate, what their sentries were there to guard. Trucks, trains, and airplanes carried off the riches amassed by SMERSH’s officers. Lieutenants shipped out thousands, colonels hundreds of thousands, and Abakumov raked in millions.

  He did not, of course, imagine for a moment that gold, even deposited in a Swiss bank, would save him if he lost his ministerial post or if the regime he served collapsed. But he could not watch his subordinates getting rich while he took nothing for himself. Such self-denial was more than flesh and blood could bear. So he sent out search parties, one after another. Even two cases full of men’s suspenders were more than he could resist. He looted automatically, like a man under hypnosis.

  This treasure of the Nibelungs brought Abakumov not affluent ease but the constant dread of exposure. None of those in the know would dare denounce the all-powerful minister, but the merest chance might destroy him. He had derived no benefit from what he had taken, but he could hardly declare it to the Ministry of Finance now!

  He had arrived at 2:30 a.m., but at 3:10 he was still pacing the waiting room restlessly, with his big empty notebook in his hand, faint with fear, and with those telltale burning ears. Only one thing could make him happy now: that Stalin would feel overworked and unable to see him. Abakumov was afraid that he would be punished for the secret telephone. He did not know what lie to tell next.

  At last the heavy door slowly opened, halfway. Quietly, almost on tiptoe, Poskryobyshev stepped into the gap and speechlessly beckoned. Abakumov followed, trying not to put his big broad feet down heavily. He inserted his trunk into the next half-open door, steadying it with one hand on the polished bronze handle.

  He paused on the threshold and said, “Good evening, Comrade Stalin! May I come in?”

  He had foolishly forgotten to clear his throat, so that his voice sounded hoarse and insufficiently obsequious.

  Stalin was writing at his desk, in a tunic with gilded buttons and several rows of ribboned medals but without epaulets. He finished a sentence and only then raised his head to look at the new arrival with owlish malignity. Without speaking.

  A very bad sign! Not a word.

  And he resumed his writing.

  Abakumov closed the door behind him but dared go no farther without a nod or gesture of invitation. He stood with his long arms hanging straight at his sides, bending slightly forward, a respectful smile of greeting on his fleshy lips, but his ears were aflame.

  No one had used this simplest of interrogator’s ploys, greeting a man’s entry with hostile silence, more often than the Minister of State Security. But familiar as it was, when Stalin received him like that, Abakumov was ready to collapse in terror.

  In Stalin’s night study, a small, low-ceilinged room, there were no pictures or ornaments, and the windows were tiny. The low walls were oak-paneled, and a few bookshelves ran along one of them. The desk stood near to but clear of one wall. There was a record player with a radio in one corner, with records on a set of shelves beside it. Stalin enjoyed listening to his old speeches in the night hours.

  Abakumov waited, bent double in supplication.

  Yes, he was completely in the hands of the Leader, but up to a point the Leader was in his hands, too. Just as in battle, if one side advances too impetuously, the armies interlock, each outflanks the other, and you cannot be sure who is surrounding whom, so here: Stalin had locked himself (and the whole Central Committee) into the State Security system; everything he wore, ate, drank, sat on, lay on was provided by MGB people, and the MGB alone now guarded him. So that in some freakish ironical sense, Stalin was Abakumov’s subordinate. Only it was not very likely that Abakumov could successfully assert his authority first.

  Bowed low, the hefty minister stood and waited. While Stalin went on writing. Whenever Abakumov entered that room, Stalin would be sitting and writing like that. It was as though he never left the spot, never stopped writing, imposingly, authoritatively, so that every word that flowed from his pen at once hardened into history. A desk lamp shed light on his papers; the rest of the room was only faintly lit by concealed overhead lights. This time Stalin paused occasionally, leaned back in his chair, and squinted sideways at the floor. He gave Abakumov a dark look, as though he were trying to hear something, although there was not a sound in the room.

  Where does it come from, that commanding manner, that way of endowing every little movement with significance? The finger movements, the gestures, the raised eyebrows, the intent gaze, were no doubt those of the young Koba. But in him none of this had frightened people; no one had read into these movements a terrible meaning. Only when holes enough had been made in the backs of heads did people begin to see in the Leader’s slightest movement a hint, a warning, a threat, an order. Noticing other people’s reactions, Stalin started observing himself, discerned the latent menace in his gestures and glances, and began consciously cultivating them so that they became still more predictable in their effect on those around him.

  At last Stalin looked grimly at Abakumov and showed him with a jab of his pipe where he was to sit.

  Abakumov sprang happily to life, stepped lightly forward, and sat down, but only on the front half of the chair. He was not at all comfortable, but it would be easier to stand up should he need to.

  “Well?” asked Stalin brusquely, glancing at his papers.

  The moment had come! He must take care now not to lose the initiative.

  Clearing his throat with a little cough, Abakumov b
egan speaking rapidly, almost enthusiastically. He would curse himself later for his verbose eagerness to please, for the reckless promises made in Stalin’s office, but he could not help it. It was always the same: The more unfriendly the reception, the rasher Abakumov was in his assurances to the Boss—and the more extravagant his promises.

  The beauty of Abakumov’s nocturnal reports, their main attraction for Stalin, was that they always uncovered some very important and widely ramified hostile group. Abakumov never turned up to report without the news that some such group had been rendered harmless. As usual, he had such a group (at the Frunze Academy) in readiness and could fill much of the time with details.

  But he began by describing progress (real or fictitious he did not know himself) in the preparations to assassinate Tito. He said that a time bomb would be put on board Tito’s yacht before it sailed for Brioni.

  Stalin looked up, stuck his dead pipe in his mouth, and made it gurgle twice. He showed no further interest, but Abakumov, who could sometimes read his chief’s mind, felt that he had hit the spot.

  “What about Rankovich?” Stalin asked.

  Of course, of course! They must choose a moment when Rankovich, Kardelj, Moshe Pijade—the whole gang—could be blown sky-high together! According to his calculations it was bound to happen no later than next spring! (When the bomb went off, the yacht’s crew would die as well, but the minister did not mention this trivial fact, and his interlocutor did not inquire.)

  But what were his thoughts as he sat blowing into his pipe and staring at his minister expressionlessly over his pendulous nose?

  Not, of course, the thought that the Party he led had been born rejecting terrorist acts against individuals. Nor yet the thought that he himself had thrived on terrorism all his life. Breathing noisily into his pipe and staring at that overfed, rosy-cheeked bullyboy with the burning ears, Stalin was thinking what he always thought when he saw subordinates so mettlesome, so ready for anything, so eager to please. Indeed, it was not so much a thought as an instinctive reaction: How far can this man be trusted today? And with it, automatically: Has the time come to sacrifice this man?

  Stalin knew very well that Abakumov had lined his pockets in 1945. But he was in no hurry to punish him. It suited Stalin that Abakumov was what he was. Such men were easier to manage. In the course of a lifetime Stalin had found that the people to be treated with the greatest caution were men of principle, so-called, like Bukharin. They were the nimblest of tricksters, difficult to trip up.

  But even the transparent Abakumov was no more to be trusted than anyone else on this earth.

  Stalin had not trusted his own mother. Nor God. Nor his Revolutionary comrades. Nor the peasants (you couldn’t trust them to sow and get the harvest in unless you forced them). Nor the workers (who wouldn’t work unless norms were set for them). Still less did he trust the engineers. He had not trusted his soldiers and generals to fight without punitive battalions and security detachments to cut off their retreat. He never trusted his henchmen. He had not trusted his wives and mistresses. Even his children he had not trusted. And he had always been proved right!

  There was one man he had trusted, and only one, in a life free of trust and mistakes. In the eyes of the world, that man had seemed so firm in friendship and in enmity, he had swung around so sharply and held out his hand in friendship. This was no windbag; this was a man of action!

  And Stalin had believed him!

  That man was Adolf Hitler.

  Stalin had looked on with approval and malicious glee while Hitler dismembered Poland, France, Belgium, while his planes blackened the skies over England. Molotov came back from Berlin in a fright. There were intelligence reports that Hitler was concentrating troops in the East. Hess fled to England. Churchill warned Stalin that he was about to be attacked. Every rook on the aspens of Belorussia and the poplars of Galicia screeched warnings of war. Every market woman in Stalin’s own country prophesied war from one day to the next. Stalin alone was unperturbed. He went on sending trainloads of raw materials to Germany and did nothing to fortify his frontiers, for fear of offending his colleague.

  Hitler he had believed!

  And this faith had very nearly cost him his head.

  Which was one more reason why he now believed absolutely nobody!

  Abakumov could have answered this overbearing distrust with bitter words but dared not utter them. Stalin shouldn’t have played at Trojan horses! He shouldn’t have sent for that fathead Popivoda to discuss anti-Tito pamphlets. Shouldn’t have turned down those splendid fellows handpicked by Abakumov to kill the bear, men who knew the language, knew the country’s ways, even knew Tito by sight. Stalin shouldn’t have turned them down after a look at their dossiers (anybody who’s lived abroad is not one of us); he should have trusted them and given them the job. Abakumov himself was angered by this inertia.

  But he knew his Boss! You must devote a proportion of your powers to his service, more than half but not the whole. Stalin would not tolerate open noncompliance. But excessively efficient performance he hated; he saw in it an insidious threat to his uniqueness. Nobody but he must know or understand or do things perfectly!

  So Abakumov, like the other forty-five ministers, kept up a show of exertion in ministerial harness but pulled with only half his shoulder power.

  Just as Midas turned all that he touched to gold, so Stalin turned all that he touched to lead.

  Today, though, Stalin’s face brightened as Abakumov proceeded with his report. After a detailed account of the proposed bomb blast, the minister went on to report arrests at the Ecclesiastical Academy, then with minute particularity the business at the Frunze Academy, then the results of espionage in South Korean ports.

  Duty and common sense demanded that he should now report the telephone call to the American Embassy the day before. But he could say nothing. He could assume that Beria or Vyshinsky had already reported it. It might be best to behave as if he had not yet been told of it himself. It was precisely because Stalin trusted nobody and encouraged duplication that every draft animal pulled half-heartedly. For the moment it would pay him not to be in a hurry with promises to find the culprit with the aid of the new technology. He was doubly afraid to use the word “telephone” just then; it might remind Stalin of the secret telephone. Abakumov even tried not to look at the telephone on the desk, in case his eyes drew the Boss’s attention to it.

  Stalin was obviously trying to remember something right then! Perhaps the secret telephone! His brow puckered in deep folds, his fleshy nose tensed, he stared hard at Abakumov (the minister did his utmost to look honest and guileless), but he could not remember! The thought half glimpsed slipped back into a black hole. The creases in his gray brow relaxed impotently.

  Stalin sighed, filled his pipe, and lit it.

  “Oh, yes!” The first puff had reminded him of something, but something incidental, not the important thing he had been trying to recall. “Is Gomulka under arrest?”

  Gomulka had recently been dismissed from all the posts he held in Poland, missed his footing and slid into the abyss.

  Abakumov confirmed that Gomulka had indeed been arrested, rising slightly from his chair in his relief. (Stalin had in fact been informed earlier.)

  Stalin pressed a button on his desk to switch from the overhead light to several wall-lights. He rose and began to pace the floor, puffing at his pipe. Abakumov understood that no further report was required and that instructions would now be dictated. He opened the big notebook on his knees, got out his pen, and prepared to write (the Boss liked his words to be taken down immediately).

  But Stalin walked over to the record player and back, puffing away, without saying a word, as though he had completely forgotten Abakumov. His gray, pockmarked face grew grim in a tortured effort to remember. Looking at him in profile as he passed, Abakumov saw that the Boss’s shoulders were bowed, that his back was hunching, which made him appear smaller than he was, quite small in fact. Abakumov found
himself conjecturing (he usually suppressed such thoughts in this place, in case the Highest somehow sensed them) that the Boss would not live another ten years. He was going to die, and although it might not be very wise of him, Abakumov wanted it to be soon; for all of them, Stalin’s henchmen, it would surely be the beginning of an easier, freer life.

  Stalin meanwhile was depressed by yet another lapse of memory; his head was refusing to work for him! On the way here from his bedroom he had been thinking of one particular question he needed to ask Abakumov, and now he had forgotten it. Helplessly, he tried frown after frown, struggling to remember.

  Then suddenly he threw back his head, looked at the top of the opposite wall, and remembered, not what he needed to remember now but what he had been unable to remember two nights ago in the Museum of the Revolution, much to his annoyance at the time.

  . . . It had happened in ’37. Before the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, when so much had changed in the way it was presented, he had decided to inspect the exhibition for himself and make sure that they had gotten nothing wrong. In one room, the one in which a huge television set now stood, the scales suddenly fell from his eyes, and he saw high up on the wall facing him big portraits of Zhelyabov and Perovskaya. Their faces were bold, fearless, their gaze implacable: They called on all who entered to “kill the tyrant.”

  The gaze of the two “People’s Will” leaders went through him, like two arrows through his throat. He recoiled, he croaked, he choked, and, choking, pointed a shaking finger at the pictures.

  They were taken down at once. And in Leningrad the first holy relic of the Revolution, the wreckage of Alexander II’s carriage, was removed from the museum.

  Beginning that very day, Stalin ordered refuges and safe apartments to be built for him in various places, sometimes riddling whole mountains with passageways, as on the river Kholodnaya. Losing his taste for life in the middle of a thickly populated city, he had ended up in this out-of-town villa, this low-ceilinged night office close to his bodyguard’s orderly room.