In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  So Klykachev got to know the new Party organizer sooner and better than anyone. “The young” adopted his sarcastic nickname for Stepanov: “the Shepherd.” But it was thanks to Klykachev that relations between Stepanov and “the young” were not as bad as they might have been. “The young” were quick to realize that it made life much easier if the Party organizer was obviously not their man but an impartial stickler for rules and regulations.

  And what a stickler Stepanov was! Tell him that someone was to be pitied, that someone should be spared the full rigor of the law and shown clemency, and his brow, loftier since his hair had receded, would crease in pain and his shoulders slump as if an additional burden had been laid on them. Until, fired by the ardor of his faith, he found the strength to rise to his full height and turn on interlocutors right and left so sharply that little white squares, reflections of the windows, flashed in the leaden lenses of his spectacles.

  “Comrades! Comrades! What is this I hear? How can you talk that way? Remember! You must uphold the law at all times! Uphold the law, however hard you find it! Uphold the law with all your might! Only thus, only in this way, can you really help the person for whose sake you came close to breaking the law! Because the law is devised to serve society and mankind, though we often fail to realize this and in our own blindness seek to circumvent the law!”

  Stepanov, for his part, was pleased with “the young,” who showed a taste for Party meetings and Party criticism. He saw in them the nucleus of a sound collective, such as he always tried to create at each new place of work. The collective that failed to expose lawbreakers in its midst, the collective that sat mum through meetings, was a collective that Stepanov rightly considered unsound. Whereas if a collective, to a man, fell upon one of its members, the very one at whom the Party Committee had pointed a finger, that collective was in the eyes of Stepanov, and those above him, a sound one.

  Stepanov had many similar ideas, so firmly fixed in his mind that any departure from them was impossible. He could not, for instance, imagine a meeting that did not end with a tumultuous resolution castigating individual members and mobilizing the collective as a whole to break production records. He was particularly fond of “open” Party meetings, which non-Party people also attended on a “voluntary-compulsory” basis, only to be torn to shreds with no right to defend themselves or to vote. If before the vote was taken, pained or even indignant voices were heard asking, “What is this? A Party meeting? Or a criminal court?” Stepanov would peremptorily interrupt whoever was speaking, even the chairman; sprinkling a sedative powder on his tongue with a shaky hand (since his shell-shock, excitement made his head ache, and he always got agitated when the Party’s infallibility was under attack), he would walk into the middle of the room, directly under the ceiling lights, so that the large beads of sweat on his bald brow stood out, and say, “Are we to take it, then, that you are against criticism and self-criticism?” Then, emphatically flourishing his clenched fist as if hammering his thoughts into the heads of his listeners, he would explain that “self-criticism is the supreme dynamic law of Soviet society, the main engine of its progress! It is time you understood that when we criticize members of our collective, it is not with a view to putting them on trial, but to keep every member of staff in a state of creative tension every minute of the day! About this there cannot be two opinions, Comrades! Of course, not every kind of criticism is needed! What we need is businesslike criticism, meaning criticism that is not directed at tried and tested leading cadres! We must not confuse freedom to criticize with the freedom of petit bourgeois anarchism!”

  With which he withdrew to the carafe and washed down another powder with a swig of water.

  Thus was the triumph of the Party’s general line ensured. And the result was always that a sound collective, including members scourged and crushed by the resolution (condemning their “criminally slack attitude to their work” and their “failure to meet completion dates, bordering on sabotage”), unanimously voted for it.

  It sometimes happened that Stepanov, though so fond of extended and closely argued resolutions and though happily aware in advance of the line that speakers could be expected to take and the final verdict of the meeting, was short of time to draft a resolution in full beforehand. On such occasions, when the chairman called on Comrade Stepanov to present the draft resolution, he would mop his brow and bald patch and speak as follows:

  “Comrades! I have been very busy and have not had time to check certain circumstances, names, and facts. . . .”

  Or: “Comrades! The directorate sent for me today, and I have not yet been able to draft a resolution.”

  In either case, he would add: “ I ask you therefore to vote on a resolution in general terms, and I will attend to the details tomorrow, when I have time.”

  And the Marfino collective proved its soundness by raising its hands without a murmur, although it did not know (and did not ask) who exactly was to be lashed and who lauded in that resolution.

  The new Party organizer’s position was further reinforced by his avoidance of intimate relationships. Everyone addressed him respectfully as “Boris Sergeich.” He accepted this as his due but did not himself call anyone at the site by his first name and patronymic. Even in the heat of a desktop billiards match (the green baize was always in evidence in the Party Committee’s room), he would exclaim, “Put the balls up, Comrade Shikin!” or “Off the rail, Comrade Klykachev!”

  Stepanov did not much like people appealing to his better nature. He himself never appealed to anyone’s finer feelings. So that the moment he sensed dissatisfaction in the collective or resistance to his initiatives, instead of loud remonstrances or quiet permission, he took a large sheet of blank paper, wrote at the top in bold letters, “The below-mentioned comrades are required by such and such a date to . . .” do this, that, and the other, then ruled columns for “recipient’s name,” “serial number,” and “acknowledgment of receipt” and handed it to his secretary to take around. The comrades indicated read it, sputtered their fury over an impervious sheet of paper, and had no choice but to sign and, having signed, to do as they were bidden.

  Stepanov’s “release” from other duties was also release from wandering in the dark. The radio had only to announce that heroic Yugoslavia no longer existed, only the Tito clique, and within five minutes Stepanov would be explaining the Comintern resolution as cogently and confidently as if he personally had been pondering it for years. If anyone timidly called Stepanov’s attention to a contradiction between yesterday’s and today’s instructions, to gaps in the institute’s equipment, to the inferiority of Soviet apparatus, to difficulties with living accommodations, the “liberated” Stepanov simply smiled and his glasses gleamed because whoever it was must surely know what he was about to say: “Well, what can we do about it, Comrades? It’s a departmental muddle. But progress is undoubtedly being made, with this problem as with others. You won’t deny that, I’m sure!”

  Stepanov did have certain human weaknesses, though not very important ones. He liked being praised by his superiors, for instance, and being admired by ordinary Party members as an experienced leader. He enjoyed these tributes because they were no more than his due.

  He was also fond of vodka, but only if someone treated him or if it were served at a banquet, and he invariably complained, as he drank, that vodka was murder to one in his state of health. Which was why he never bought it himself or treated anyone else.

  These were perhaps his only faults.

  “The young” sometimes argued among themselves as to how “the Shepherd” should best be described. “My friends!” Roitman said, “he is the prophet of the bottomless inkwell. He is the soul of the rubber-stamped document. Such people are an inevitable feature of the transition period.”

  But Klykachev bared his teeth in a grin and said, “Simpletons! If we get within biting distance, he’ll gobble us up, shit and all. Don’t think he’s stupid. He’s learned what it’s all about in hi
s fifty years. Why d’you think every meeting adopts a motion tearing someone to pieces? He’s waiting for the history of Marfino, that’s why! He’s storing up scraps of evidence just in case. Whatever turn things take, any inspection team will be convinced that the full-time secretary gave repeated warnings and did his best to alert the public.” The treacherous Klykachev depicted Stepanov as a devious intriguer, who would stop at nothing to give his three sons a good start in life.

  Stepanov did indeed have three sons, who were forever asking their father for money. He had steered all three toward the History Department, knowing that for Marxists history is not a difficult discipline. His calculation looked sound enough, but he (like the state’s general education plan) had failed to allow for a sudden glut of Marxist historians: Supply greatly exceeded demand from schools, colleges, crash courses; exceeded demand in Moscow itself; then throughout the Moscow oblast; and finally everywhere this side of the Urals. When the first son graduated, instead of staying at home to support his parents, he left for far-off Khanty-Mansiisk. The second son was offered a post in Mongolia, and it seemed doubtful whether when the third son finished his studies, he would find anything nearer than the island of Borneo.

  Their father clung all the more tenaciously to his job and his little house on the outskirts of Moscow with his 0.12 hectares of garden, his barrels of sauerkraut, and his two or three porkers. For Stepanov’s wife, a stolid person, perhaps a little out of step with the times, fattening those pigs was her main interest in life, as well as a prop for the family budget. Sunday was the day she had chosen for a trip to town with her husband in order to buy a piglet. This operation (successfully accomplished) was why Stepanov had not come to work that day, although Saturday’s interview had left him ill at ease and impatient to be back at Marfino.

  That Saturday, in the Political Department, Stepanov had been given a shock. An official person, a very important one, round and rosy—there were roughly 280 pounds of him—in spite of the cares of office, had glanced at the spectacles mounted on Stepanov’s narrow nose and asked in a baritone drawl, “Ah, Stepanov, what are you doing about the Hebrews?”

  Stepanov pricked up his ears, unsure that he had heard correctly.

  “The Jews!” And (seeing that the other man still did not understand)—“the Yids, then.”

  Caught off balance and not daring to repeat that double-edged word, which not so long ago could earn you twenty years for anti-Soviet agitation and at one time get you put against a wall, Stepanov mumbled, “. . . Er . . . well. . . .”

  “Well, what are you thinking of doing about them?”

  But then the telephone rang, the important senior comrade lifted the receiver, and their conversation was at an end.

  Stepanov anxiously read through a whole bundle of directives, instructions, and guidelines there in the department, but the black letters on white paper carefully skirted the Jewish problem.

  All that Sunday, as they went to buy the pig, he thought and thought and clawed his chest in despair. Age had evidently dulled his wits. What a disgrace! An experienced Party worker like Stepanov fails to spot a major campaign in the making and even finds himself indirectly implicated in the intrigues of the enemy because that whole Roitman-Klykachev group. . . .

  Stepanov arrived at work on Monday morning not knowing what to think. After Shikin had said no to a game of billiards (Stepanov had planned to pump him), the full-time secretary, suffocating for want of instructions, locked himself in the Party Committee quarters and banged the balls around for two hours on end, occasionally jumping one of them off the table. The enormous bronze bas-relief on the wall—the heads of the Four Founding Fathers superimposed in profile—witnessed several brilliant shots with two or all three balls pocketed at once. But the silhouettes in bas-relief maintained their bronze impassivity. Three of the four each studied the nape of the genius in front, and not one of them suggested how Stepanov could avoid destroying a healthy collective and even reinforce it in the new situation.

  Exhausted, he heard the telephone ring at last and pounced on the receiver.

  The message was, first, that instead of the usual Party and Komsomol instruction classes that evening, he should assemble everybody for a lecture on “Dialectical Materialism: The Progressive Worldview,” to be given by a lecturer from the Oblast Committee. And, second, that a car was even then on its way to Marfino, with two comrades who would provide the appropriate guidelines for the campaign against kowtowing to foreign countries.

  The full-time secretary took heart, cheered up, doubled a ball into a pocket, and hid the billiards table behind the room divider.

  His spirits were further raised by the thought that the pink-eared piglet bought yesterday had eaten its swill eagerly, turning up its nose at nothing, both the night before and again that morning. There was reason to hope that it would fatten up quickly and cheaply.

  Chapter 79

  The Decision Explained

  ENGINEER COLONEL YAKONOV was in his office with Major Shikin.

  They sat conversing man-to-man, though they despised and detested each other.

  Yakonov liked using the words “We in the Cheka” at meetings. But to Shikin he was what he had always been, an enemy of the people who had traveled abroad, served a sentence, been pardoned, and even taken to the bosom of the Security Service, but was nonetheless not not guilty. The day must inevitably come when the Organs would unmask Yakonov and arrest him again. Shikin would be delighted to rip off those epaulets with his own hands! The diligent major with the head too big for his body was irked by the engineer colonel’s extravagant condescension and the lordly self-assurance with which he bore the burden of authority. Shikin, accordingly, always did his best to emphasize his own importance and that of the operations which the engineer colonel undervalued.

  On this occasion, he was suggesting that at the next general conference on “vigilance” Yakonov should report on security arrangements in the institute, severely criticizing their laxity. The conference could advantageously coincide with the relegation of unconscientious zeks to the camps and the introduction of the new secret logbooks.

  Engineer Colonel Yakonov felt exhausted after yesterday’s attack. There were dark pouches under his eyes, but his features had not lost their pleasing fullness. He nodded agreement as the other man spoke, but deep inside, behind all the barriers that no eye, except perhaps that of his wife, ever penetrated, he was thinking that this hoary-headed major, who had gone gray poring over reports by stoolies, was an obscene bug, that his activities were idiotically futile and his proposals invariably cretinous.

  Yakonov had been given a single month. In a month’s time his head might be on the block. He had to struggle out of the armor of command, break out of the shell of seniority, settle down in a quiet place with the plans before him, and think for himself.

  But the outsize leather chair in which he sat was negation enough; the engineer colonel must answer for everything but could take a hand in nothing. All he could do was pick up the receiver and sign papers.

  Then again, all that petty squabbling with Roitman’s group was taking too much out of him. It was a war he waged because he was forced to. It was not in his power to squeeze them out of the institute. He just wanted to enforce unquestioning obedience. Whereas they wanted to drive him out and were indeed capable of destroying him.

  Shikin was speaking. Yakonov’s gaze narrowly avoided him. His eyes were open, but mentally he had left behind the pudgy body in a tunic and made his way home.

  Home! My home is my castle! How wise the English are, the first to realize that truth. On your own little territory, only your own laws apply. Four walls and a roof reliably separate you from your beloved fatherland. Your wife’s gently smiling eyes greet you on your threshold. The merry chatter of little girls (alas, already fodder for a school that was itself like a stultifying government department) soothes and amuses you, wearied and badgered and harassed as you are. Your wife has already taught them both t
o prattle in English. She sits down at the piano and plays a tuneful Waldteufel waltz. Dinnertime and the after-dinner hours soon pass, you are on the threshold of night, but your house is free from pompous high-ranking idiots and spitefully captious young men.

  His working day comprised so much that was painful, so many humiliations, such desperate feats of self-control, so much administrative hustle that Yakonov had begun to feel his age, and if only he could, he would gladly have sacrificed his job and stayed at home, in his own cozy little world.

  Not that he was no longer interested in the world outside. He took a very lively interest in it. It would, he thought, be difficult to find in the history of the world a time more fascinating than our own. World politics was to him a game of chess played on a hundred boards simultaneously. But he had no wish to be a player, still less a pawn, the head of a pawn, the base of a pawn. . . . His ambition was to be a mere spectator, to savor the game at ease in his pajamas and old-fashioned rocking chair in a book-lined room.

  Yakonov was fully equipped for such a pastime. He knew two languages, and foreign radio stations vied with one another in supplying him with information. The Ministry of State Security received foreign journals before anyone else in the Soviet Union and distributed technical and military publications to its own institutes uncensored. And these publications all liked to slip in a little item on politics, on the coming global conflict, on the future political organization of the planet. . . . Rubbing shoulders with senior security officers, Yakonov couldn’t help hearing details unavailable to the press. Nor did he draw the line at translated books on diplomacy and espionage. And then, of course, he had a logical mind and well-honed ideas of his own. That was Yakonov’s game of chess: sitting in his rocking chair watching the East-West match and trying to divine the future from the moves they made.