In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Chapter 76

  Favorite Profession

  SECURITY OPERATIONS at the Marfino establishment were subdivided between Major Myshin, godfather of the prison, and Major Shikin, godfather on the production side. Belonging as they did to different government departments and drawing their salaries from different paymasters, they were not rivals. But indolence prevented them from collaborating; their offices were in different buildings and on different floors, security operations are never discussed on the telephone, and since they were equal in rank, each of them thought it would demean him to take the initiative and pay his respects to the other. So they continued to work on men’s minds as they always had, one of them by night, the other by day, without meeting for months on end, although they both spoke in their quarterly reports and plans of the need for close coordination of security operations at Marfino.

  Reading Pravda one day, Major Shikin lingered over the headline of an article: “The Profession He Loves.” (The article was about an agitator who loved nothing in the world so much as explaining things to people: explaining to workers the importance of raising productivity, to soldiers the need to sacrifice their lives, to electors the correctness of the policies of the Communist and Non-Party Bloc.) Shikin liked the phrase. He, too, he decided, had made the right career choice; he had never in his life felt drawn to any other profession, he loved the one he had chosen, and it loved him.

  Shikin had gone through the GPU training school, then the diploma courses for investigators, but he had done very little investigation in the strict sense and could not really call himself an investigator. He had worked as a security officer in the transport network. He had been used by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs as a special scrutineer of hostile votes cast in “secret” elections to the Supreme Soviet. During the war he had been in charge of military censorship on one of the fronts, had served on a repatriation commission, then in a camp for returning prisoners of war, after which he had helped to organize the deportation of the Greeks from the Kuban to Kazakhstan, and finally he had become senior security officer in the Marfino Research Institute.

  This was the profession that Shikin dearly loved. And which of his comrades-in-arms did not?

  It was not a dangerous profession. In every security operation superior force was ensured: two or three armed officers to a single enemy, neither armed nor forewarned, and often half awake.

  It was, however, well paid. Officers had access to the best special shops. They lived in the best apartments (confiscated from convicts). They drew higher pensions than army officers. They took their vacations in first-class resorts.

  It was not exhausting work. There were no production norms. True, friends had told Shikin that in 1937 and again in 1945 investigating officers had worked like cart horses, but he had never been rushed off his feet and couldn’t quite believe it. There were good spells when you could doze at your desk for months on end. The style of work in the Ministries of the Interior and State Security was nothing if not leisurely. The natural leisureliness of all comfortable people was supplemented by the leisureliness officially prescribed as the best means of psychological pressure on a prisoner to get a statement out of him: the unhurried sharpening of pencils, the careful selection of pens and paper, the patient recording of all sorts of superfluous details and officially required data. The leisureliness of the work had a most beneficial effect on the nerves of the Chekists and accounted for their longevity.

  The routine of operational work was no less precious to Shikin. It was essentially a form of stocktaking, pure and simple (making it a manifestation of one of socialism’s most fundamental characteristics). An interview was never just that; it had to be rounded off with a written denunciation, a signed protocol, an undertaking not to make false depositions, not to divulge confidential matters, not to leave the district, an acknowledgment of notification. . . . What this work required was precisely the patient attention to detail and methodical habits that were such a distinctive feature of Shikin’s character. Without them you could only create chaos with all those bits of paper, instead of classifying them and filing them so that you could put your hand on any item at any time. (Shikin, being an officer, could not perform manual tasks such as filing official papers, so this was done by a special confidential secretary, a lanky, weak-sighted woman borrowed from the main prison office.)

  But what Shikin liked most of all about his work was the power it gave him over other people, the feeling of omnipotence, and the aura of mystery.

  Shikin was flattered by the respect, indeed the awe, which he inspired in colleagues who, although themselves Cheka men, were not security operations officers. They were all, Engineer Colonel Yakonov included, bound to give Shikin an account of their activities on demand, whereas he was accountable to none of them. As he went up the broad, carpeted main stairway—dark-featured, with close-cropped graying hair, carrying a large briefcase under his arm—girl lieutenants in the Ministry of State Security shrank bashfully from him, though there was plenty of room, and hastened to greet him first, and Shikin was proudly conscious of his importance and uniqueness.

  If anybody had told him—but nobody ever did—that he had earned the hatred of others, that he was a tormentor of other people, he would have been genuinely indignant. He had never been one to inflict pain for pleasure or for the sake of it. He knew, of course, that such people existed. He had seen them on stage and in films, sadists with a passion for torturing people, inhuman monsters, but they were always either White Guardists or fascists. Shikin was only doing his duty. His only aim was to ensure that nobody did or thought anything harmful.

  One day a bundle containing 150 rubles was found on the main staircase of the sharashka, which was used by both free employees and zeks. The two lieutenants, both technicians, who found it could neither conceal it nor surreptitiously try to find the owner, precisely because there were two of them. So they handed their find over to Major Shikin.

  Money dumped on a staircase used by zeks, who were most strictly forbidden to have money—this was an event of the highest political significance! Shikin, however, did not make a big thing of it. He simply put up a notice on the stairway: “Whoever has lost 150 on the stairs can reclaim them from Major Shikin at any time.”

  It was not a small sum. Yet such was the respect and awe felt by all for Shikin that days and weeks went by, and nobody came forward to claim this tiresome item of lost property. The notice faded and gathered dust, one corner came unstuck, and in the end somebody’s blue pencil added a postscript in block letters: “Choke on it, you dog.”

  The duty officer tore the notice down and took it to Shikin. For a long time afterward he took walks around the laboratories looking for a pencil with the right shade of blue. Shikin did not deserve the crude insult. He had absolutely no intention of pocketing the money. What he really wanted was for the person concerned to come forward so that an example could be made of him and the case discussed in detail at conferences on vigilance.

  But of course the money could not simply be thrown away! So two months later, the major presented it to the lanky maiden with the walleye who filed his papers once a week.

  Shikin had been a model family man until the devil tripped him up and shackled him to this secretary. Her thirty-eight wasted years showed in her face, her legs were thick and ugly, she stood head and shoulders above him, . . . but he had discovered in her something he had never experienced before: He could hardly wait for her weekly visit. When he was moved to temporary quarters while his office was under repair, he couldn’t help himself and so far forgot the need for caution that two prisoners, a carpenter and a plasterer, overheard them and even saw them through a crack. It got around, and the zeks chuckled among themselves over their spiritual director. They even thought of writing to Shikin’s wife; only they didn’t know the address. Instead, they denounced him to his superiors.

  They did not succeed, though, in toppling the senior operations officer. Major General Osko
lupov gave Shikin a dressing-down, not because of his liaison with the secretary (that was between her and her principles), nor yet because this liaison was conducted in office hours (since Major Shikin had no fixed office hours), but only for letting prisoners find out about it.

  ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, Major Shikin arrived at work a little after 9:00 a.m., although nobody would have said anything if he had not turned up till lunchtime.

  Opposite Yakonov’s office on the third floor, there was a niche, or lobby, with no electric lighting, in which two doors faced each other, one to Shikin’s office, one to that of the Party Committee. Both doors were upholstered with black leather, and neither bore any inscription. The proximity of these two doors facing each other in the dark lobby was very convenient for Shikin: Curious eyes could not be sure which door people were sneaking through.

  As he approached his office on this occasion, Shikin met Stepanov, the secretary of the Party Committee, a thin, unhealthy man with opaquely glittering glasses. They shook hands, and Stepanov quietly asked him in. “Comrade Shikin!” (He never called anyone by his name and patronymic.) “Step inside, and we’ll knock the balls about a bit!”

  This was an invitation to play on the miniature billiards table in the Party Committee’s office. Shikin did sometimes go in and bang the balls about, but a lot of important business awaited him, and he declined with a dignified shake of his silvering head.

  Stepanov sighed and went off to chase the balls around by himself.

  Shikin entered his office and placed his briefcase tidily on his desk. (His papers, all secret or top secret, had to be kept in a safe and never left the room, but he would not have made much of an impression walking around without a briefcase. He used it to carry home copies of Bonfire, Crocodile, and Around the World. (Subscribing to them himself could have cost him a kopeck or two.) Then he took a stroll along the carpet, paused at the window, and turned back toward the door. It was as if his thoughts had been waiting there in his office for him, lurking behind the safe, the cabinet, the sofa; and now they crowded around all at once, demanding attention.

  So much to be done! So much to be done.

  He rubbed his graying crewcut with both hands.

  For a start, he had to review an innovation to which he had given many months of thought. Yakonov had sanctioned it, and the laboratories had been instructed accordingly, but it was not yet operating smoothly. The new rule required staff to keep secret logbooks. Thorough examination of security precautions in the Marfino Institute had convinced Shikin—and he was very proud of his discovery—that as yet there was no real secrecy in the place. Yes, there were man-high steel safes in every room (the loot from Lorenz AG had included fifty of them). Yes, all secret and semisecret documents were locked up in these safes for the lunch break, the supper break, and the night. But there was a fatal oversight: Only finished and half-finished work was locked up. The flashes of inspiration, the preliminary hypotheses, the tentative conjectures that held most promise for the future and could be seen as next year’s work in embryo were as yet not locked away. An adroit spy with some technical knowledge would only have to get through the barbed-wire fences into the prison precinct, find a bit of blotting paper with one of those drawings or diagrams in a trash can somewhere, then make his way out of the precinct again, and American intelligence would be looking over the shoulders of the researchers. Nothing if not conscientious, Major Shikin had once made Yegorov the yardman examine the whole contents of the trash can in the yard. They had found two soggy scraps of paper stuck together by snow and ash on which nonetheless traces of diagrams were clearly visible. At the risk of dirtying his hands, Shikin held this bit of trash by its corners and carried it to Colonel Yakonov’s desk. Yakonov had no escape! So Shikin’s project for the introduction of personal secret logbooks was adopted. Suitable ledgers were promptly obtained from the ministry’s stockrooms. Each had two hundred pages, numbered, perforated, and bearing wax seals. These logbooks were to be distributed to everyone except the fitters, the turners, and the yardman. Nothing was to be written down except on the pages of a personal logbook. There was another important innovation here besides the elimination of dangerous rough drafts: The thought processes of personnel were open to inspection! Since dates had to be entered daily, Major Shikin could check whether this or that prisoner had done much thinking on Wednesday and how many new ideas he had had on Friday.

  Two hundred fifty such logbooks would be an additional 250 Shikins, one of whom would hover importunately over each prisoner. Prisoners are always cunning and lazy; they always try to avoid work if they possibly can. You can check up on a manual worker by looking at his output. Checking up on an engineer or scientist is not so easy, but that was where Shikin’s innovation came in! (Such a pity that there are no Stalin Prizes for security operations officers.) This was the day chosen to verify that a logbook had been handed to each prisoner and that entries were being made.

  Another of Shikin’s chores for the day was to complete the list of prisoners to be transferred in the near future and to find out exactly when the transport would be available.

  Shikin was also preoccupied with an ambitious affair he had initiated but that had made little progress so far—“the Case of the Broken Lathe.” The mounting of a lathe had been cracked while a dozen prisoners were lugging it from Laboratory No. 3 to the workshops. The investigation had been going on for a week, and something like eighty pages of evidence had been recorded, but the truth of the matter was as elusive as ever; none of the prisoners concerned was new to the game.

  It was also necessary to investigate the origin of the book by Dickens, as Doronin had reported, prisoners in the semicircular room were reading, especially Abramson. Summoning Abramson, an old lag, for questioning, would be a waste of time. The thing to do was to call in the free personnel he worked with and throw a scare into them by pretending that Abramson had confessed.

  Shikin had so much to do today. (And of course he didn’t know yet what news his informers would have for him! Didn’t know that he was going to have to look into that insulting parody of Soviet judicial procedure, “The Trial of Prince Igor.”) A despairing Shikin rubbed his temples and brow vigorously, calling this unruly throng of thought to order.

  Uncertain where to begin, he decided to go among the masses, or, in other words, to patrol the hallway in the hope of meeting an informant, who would by a twitch of the eyebrows indicate that he had something urgent to report, something that couldn’t wait for his scheduled visit.

  But the moment he reached the duty officer’s desk, he heard him talking on the telephone about some new group.

  He couldn’t believe it! Such indecent haste! Setting up a new group on Sunday, in his absence?

  The duty officer told him all about it. It was a nasty blow! The vice minister had turned up, various generals had turned up, and Shikin had not been there! He had never felt so aggrieved. The vice minister might think that Shikin did not worry himself sick about security! Besides, he should have been there to warn them in time not to include that accursed Rubin in such an important group—that double-dealer, that utter fraud, who swore that he believed in the victory of Communism, yet refused to become an informant! And then, that beard he wore, the scoundrel! A symbol of defiance! He should be forcibly shaved!

  Making haste slowly, taking careful little steps in his little boy’s shoes, ox-headed Shikin made for Room 21.

  There were, however, ways of dealing with Rubin. Just the other day he had put in another of his applications to the Supreme Court for a judicial review. It was in Shikin’s power to accompany the petition with a laudatory report on Rubin or a nasty, negative one, as on previous occasions.

  The door of Room 21 was blank, without glass panes. The major pushed the door, but it was locked. He knocked. He heard no footsteps, but the door opened slightly, and Smolosidov’s forbidding black forelock filled the aperture. Seeing Shikin, he did not budge; nor did he open the door any wider.

 
“Morning,” Shikin mumbled.

  Smolosidov took half a step back but continued to bar the way. He crooked a finger at Shikin, who squeezed into the narrow opening and looked where he was pointing. A small piece of paper was pinned to the other panel of the door, inside.

  LIST OF PERSONS WITH ACCESS TO ROOM 21

  1.Deputy Minister of State Security Selivanovsky.

  2.Head of Department Major General Bulbanyak.

  3.Head of Department Major General Oskolupov.

  4.Head of Group Engineer Major Roitman.

  5.Lieutenant Smolosidov.

  6.Prisoner Rubin.

  By order of the Minister of State Security Abakumov

  Shikin, overawed, stepped back into the hallway.

  “I would . . . er . . . just like a word with Rubin,” he whispered.

  “Can’t be done,” Smolosidov whispered back.

  And closed the door.

  Chapter 77

  The Decision Taken

  CHOPPING WOOD IN THE FRESH MORNING AIR, Sologdin reviewed his decision of the night before. Ideas unchallenged by a sleepy mind cannot always stand the light of day.

  He had lost count of the logs he had chopped, forgotten that he was swinging an ax. He was thinking.

  But the inconclusive debate with Rubin prevented him from thinking clearly. Arguments that would have floored Lev last night crowded his mind now that it was too late.

  But what vexed him, what galled him most, was the absurd turn the debate had taken; it was as if Rubin had won the right to judge Sologdin’s behavior and in particular the step he must take today. He could delete Lyovka Rubin’s name from the scroll of friendship but could not strike out the challenge he had delivered. It lingered . . . and it rankled. It threatened to rob Sologdin of credit for his invention.

  Yet, on the whole, the debate had been well worthwhile, as debate always is. Praise opens a safety valve, reduces internal tension, and so is always harmful to us. Whereas abuse, however unfair, serves as much-needed fuel for a man’s boiler.