by Victor Serge
Botkin described his journey to the West. “It’s good to speak freely,” he said once. It seemed to him that he had finally understood the singular pleasure of living in the Western countries, even though—with their lights burning bright into the night, their pretty women, their parliaments, their newspapers full of crime stories, their chronic unemployment, the little, old tug boats of the Thames—they reminded him of great liners steaming towards shipwreck. “Can you imagine, Ivanov, that in London or Paris you can talk anywhere, to anyone, about anything, just as we are talking? You pay two francs at a kiosk on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and you can buy the Bulletin of the Opposition, all the bulletins of all the oppositions in the world if you like, in every language. Imagine . . .”
“No,” answered Ivanov, “I can’t imagine it. I’ve never been abroad and I hadn’t yet reached the age of consciousness when there was still freedom within the Revolution. In a few years, when all the old people who went through the Tsar’s prisons are dead, no one among the seventy million citizens of the Union will be able to imagine what freedom of thought is. People will have to be crazy in order to escape the fixed ideas stamped on their brains by mechanical stencils.”
Botkin’s gaze ranged over the heath, looking for something on which to rest his eyes. There was nothing. The hills on the horizon were flat. “Technological progress will become impossible,” said the engineer. “Why did it become impossible in ancient society? Because slavery . . .”
Ivanov shrugged his shoulders. “No. It’ll all explode one fine day. Deep inside man there will always be . . .”
“Then you believe in the irrational?”
“I believe in the proletariat.”
Botkin’s photographic memory enabled him to reconstruct almost word for word what he had secretly read in the West. Invisibly, across the silence of the heath, the entire contents of his notebook, revitalized, entered Ivanov’s mind. The Communist laughed, quietly, without apparent reason. So this is how ideas cross borders!
Ivanov spent half of his days in his glassed cubicle at the statistics office composing messages inscribed with a drawing pen on slips of tissue-paper the width of postage stamps and several times longer, in perfectly formed characters that could only be deciphered with a magnifying glass. One message for the deportees in Semipalatinsk, Central Asia; another for those in Kansk, Western Siberia; a third for those in Chernoe, Black-Waters, in the North. “Dear Comrades, the fate of the Revolution is being decided at each hour. We think for millions of silent proletarians.” No one will ever know how these messages got out, carried by the mail-planes of the penitentiary; nor what miracles of ingenuity enabled them to arrive at their destination. They were received in Semipalatinsk, the city of the sands, on torrid days under a sun of blazing coals; in Kansk, a station on the Trans-Siberian, on days of bright-blue frost; in Chernoe one spring morning on a steppe sown with pale buttercups.
* * *
It’s good to be alive.
Let us agree that these events, taking place on totally different levels of creation, have no perceptible relationship. But the fact is that myriad buttercups covering the plains with a golden powder had opened precisely as Comrade Fedossenko was arriving that morning. His being was entirely open, like those flowers, to a mute felicity. It is necessary to use the word being, when speaking of him. It would be totally incompatible to speak of his soul, or even of his mind, although the cerebral mechanism of a higher vertebrate endowed with speech, with thought up to a certain point, even with ‘historic consciousness’ (to use his own expression), functioned quite efficiently inside his cranium. This was wide, round and flattened at the temples. A being thick in all respects: bones, muscles, jaws, brows, and occupying a massive rank in the universe. The Regional Centre’s Ford wound its way, hours on end, through vast landscapes over which the light was ascending, on which golden buttercups were opening. Squarely seated in his warm winter coat bearing brand new insignia, sewn on the night before last, Comrade Fedossenko inhaled the still-cold air of the pure spaces.
The Ford, at which people gaped wonderstruck, made one last turn around Lenin Square, opposite the church with the broken dome, before parking in front of the Security building. The sentry presented arms. Fedossenko saluted back exactly like the People’s Commissar for Defence in the newsreels: with a brief, incomplete, yet clearly delineated movement, arm raised, hand curved eight inches from his cheek. Careless familiarity, firmness, discipline, that’s what I’m like, citizens. Let us model ourselves after Climentii Efremich Vorochilov, the ex-steam-fitter from Lugansk, the inflexible People’s Commissar, the man of iron. And long may he live!
If Fedossenko had been in the habit of talking to himself, it would have sounded like a Party meeting. But he wasn’t. When he was alone, he either worked, going over reports in his memory, or pursued his professional studies, through correspondence courses, or rested without thinking about anything, satisfied with himself, with his well-run administration, with the established order, with the triumphant building of socialism. At this point, he was emerging from a strange lethargy haunted by depressing dreams which were unworthy of him. Listen.
Every night men wearing grey-leather belted overcoats hanging down to the snow, men with horsey backsides, went about their duties, always the same, always different. They went down into cellars, climbed rickety stairs in the pungent smell of rooms heated with cow-dung. They made their way under miraculous moonlit skies (nothing is that simple), through shimmering fields of snow, without lifting their heads towards the huge halo ringing the moon with blue radiance. They dictated reports, filled out forms, annotated files, transmitted orders, carried out sentences. But in reality they were sleep-walking, like the whole dictatorship, like the whole earth. And the one-hundred-thirty or one-hundred-seventy thousand workers in the special camps (no one knows the exact figure), who were digging through heaths, through swamps, through granite, through forests, through islands, through the inland fjords of Karelia, digging the Baltic-White Sea Canal so that the red squadrons of Kronstadt in the next war will be able to reach the emerald highway of the Arctic without having to sail around Scandinavia; these one-hundred-thirty or one-hundred-seventy thousand convicts undergoing re-education through labour were sleepwalking too, numbed with the cold, while they dynamited chunks out of the mountains of the legendary Trans-Onega, Za-Onegie. To complete the Plan—law, commandment, faith, punishment, pride, the Plan—they attacked the hard, frozen earth along the seacoast of Pomorie with pick and shovel, with excavating machines, with the furious, relentless hands of intellectual mystics, of technician-saboteurs, of farmers snatched from their farms for having over-bountiful harvests, of pilfering or bungling workers, of orthodox priests, of unlucky officials, of corrupt Communists, of authentic counter-revolutionaries and of even more authentic victims.
They worked by night as well as by day, under the light of floodlamps, in bursts of driving snow, barely seeing in the moving whiteness which kept burying everything, burying them with their machines, their leaders, and even the shadow of their pre-eminent leader, thrice decorated, over-decorated, Heinrich Grigorievich Yagoda, he who walks two steps behind the Leader of Leaders at celebrations. The work sites, for which the blizzards contended at every minute, were set ablaze with the light of torches and flood lamps so that at dawn Comrade Fedossenko, in charge of the sector, might write in his report: “Today the shock brigades surpassed the plan for the day’s work by 38%. Two men were injured by an excavating machine, six fell sick . . .” Fedossenko, like an angry Peter the Great scouring the docks of his New Holland in the mud of a future Saint Petersburg; Fedossenko, his grey overcoat sweeping through the snow, his leather straps, his revolver, his broad tanned face under his astrakhan hat, his centaur’s neck; Fedossenko forged through the biting cold, the snow, the wind, the night, the suffering, the inner despair of his brigades, punishment and reward on his lips—merciless punishment, immediate reward: disciplinary battalions, double rations, extra correspo
ndence—I am recommending you for the expected discharge (all you have to do is survive!); Fedossenko of the Special Political Administration (GPU) of Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan, Transcaspia, three thousand miles from here, on the banks of the great inland sea whose waters, the saltiest in the world, are warm and heavy. He himself was here to expiate a serious offence, a crime (let’s use the word) for which he was halfway pardoned on account of his merits as an ex-cavalry man of the invincible ‘Gai’ Division—and his more recent merits in various repressions. This memory still sometimes filled his skull with damp heat. “I’m a strong man, you see—a bronze Bolshevik, but I can’t completely dominate my instincts,” he told his superiors, standing at attention in front of them, without blushing, but dying of shame in his heart!
Listen. He had drunk. The evening was blazing over the flat, pearly-hued sea. He was stifling in the low room darkened by the Bokhara carpets on the walls. He rang. “Have Miriam, the waitress at the club, arrested. Lock her up in the cellar for three hours—alone—and have her brought to me at ten o’clock.” He, himself, spent the next three hours locked in his own room alone, his heavy eye seeing nothing but Miriam, absent, locked in two floors below. At ten o’clock, the phosphorescent sea grown dark, Miriam entered, a prisoner. The dark carpets hung around them like a song of Bokhara accompanied by an irritating grating of strings. Miriam, her thin eyebrows winglines against the sky, was trembling. Her lips trembled, her glance trembled. Something elusive trembled deep in her eyes, in the corners of her lips, on the tips of her breasts veiled by a cotton print. Miriam—tall, white, broader through the shoulders than through the hips. “Don’t be afraid, my beauty,” said Comrade Fedossenko, whose tongue was thick but whose speech was distinct. “You have nothing to fear. Drink.” He handed her a glass of muscatel. “Drink. I’m telling you to drink, understand.” She drank. “Get undressed.”
“You have no right, Comrade Chief . . .”
What could those trembling words do—and what is right? Here the images became confused. It was necessary to drive them away, they became tormenting. For the crime against the Party ethic—part-ethika, the law, duty, the regulations of the Service—the undeniable crime remained intoxicating, the only moment in a life which was worth its full weight of eternity; and there was no more crime, no victim. It was just, right. It was the working of natural law, since he had the power, represented order, was appointed by his superiors, was deserving, rewarded according to his merits.
Why cry about it? Let old women who still wear black veils up to their eyes sob at the outrage and tear their cheeks with their nails. What is necessary is to act, to write. Miriam, lips sealed, careful and stealthy as a cat, waited for nights and for days before sneaking away at the hour when shadows lengthened across the cooling earth, behind the caravanserai bereft of caravans, into the booth of Saadi, public stenographer, poet, physician, seer. For all knowledge is but a poem. Every poem expresses a charm and charms cure and poets see. Saadi knew verses for every circumstance in several languages—Turkish, Arabic, Iranian—verses by the other Saadi, by Firdosi, his own verses and those of the Poet Without Name who has travelled the trails of Iran since the reign of Iskander a thousand years ago.
The old man, whose glance held a dark benevolent warmth, saw Miriam’s embarrassment. He took both her hands like a father, like no father had ever taken them, received from her unclenched little fist a green three-rouble-piece which he polished with his finger before putting it away, and asked: “Someone has hurt you? Offended you, little girl? Tell me everything before God who listens to us and I will write your complaint so well that the men with leather coats and hearts of stone will be moved by it. I will write your love so prettily that the man with the heart of flesh will cry from tenderness thinking about you. But I see, O one like unto a cool stream, that someone has hurt you.”
Turbaned, covered with old, faded silks, he slowly shook his sparse beard of white threads through which the old leather of his sunken cheeks was visible. Miriam spoke to him without shame, simply, her face closed—closed over a bottomless anger, without tears, without words, without gestures. An anger like a thirst, but to slake that thirst it would have been just to kill without anger. Old Saadi wrote out twenty intricate—yet very clear—lines in his beautiful calligraphy on the back of a page by Leon Nicolaievich Tolstoy, torn out of a book whose unintelligible title was written in a tongue of infidels: The Kreutzer Sonata. On the wrapping-paper envelope (Saadi made them himself, and someone had to steal him the grey sheets from the store reserved for Security), Saadi wrote “To the Esteemed Citizen-Chief of the Complaints Bureau at the Editorial Office of Izvestia, central organ of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets of the USSR, Moscow, Tverskaya Street.”
“Do not, my wounded gazelle, send this letter from here. Have it cross the sea and let it be posted at the great city beyond the sea, at Baku, and then be silent. The flowers of the fields keep silent even when an ass tramples them; but the flowers of the fields spring up again, the sun of Allah shines for them, while an ass will never be more than an ass, ichak . . .”
Miriam left feeling relieved, tying her shawl under her chin with a determined gesture. For a moment she was all alone in the deserted alley lined by yellow clay walls which led towards the low dome of a tomb. Slender, erect, bearing her silent anger with deadly pride. Her letter was opened among many others in Moscow, the capital of the universe, under a high casement-window in a square building in the style of Le Corbusier. Presses were humming faintly in the basement, typewriters were devouring despatches from all over the world, linotype machines were moulding official texts into shiny lines of type, one by one. On the telephone, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was smiling at one of the Secretary General’s secretaries, who was dictating the ideas for tomorrow’s editorial to him: “No indulgence toward the double-dealing capitalist States with their democratic pretentions. We refuse—you understand, Nikolai Ivanovich, we refuse to prefer them to the fascist States. You must emphasize democratic hypocrisy.” His face tense, Nikolai Ivanovich agreed into the receiver, even repeating the slogans—and he thought it was absurd, pure cretinism, a policy of ruin; that he would go see Alexis Ivanovich Rykov that very evening. They must not gamble with the fate of the Republic like this. We must deliberate, we must reflect upon this. While his mind was formulating the phraseology of the editorial he had been ordered to write taking care not to lay himself open to malicious interpretation, he was simultaneously formulating the opposite, correct thesis: “In our behaviour toward other powers, we must not neglect their domestic regimes, the conditions they impose on the working class.”
At the Complaints Bureau, in one of the offices on the same floor, an ambitious young careerist, recently selected by the Central Committee of Youth to study at the Central Journalism Institute, was pouring over old Saadi’s calligraphy. He remembered that the Chief of the Political Administration Department of State Security for Transcaspia was believed to have had ties with the Rightists. If this young prodigy, gifted in the secondary but indispensable roles of political intrigue, had by chance devoted his talents to astronomy, he would by the age of twenty-two have learned the signs, interdependencies, solsticial motions, and exact locations of almost all the stars down to the seventh magnitude. But the only constellations he knew so thoroughly were those of the “apparatus”: the subtle links between hidden interests, friendship, marriage, complicity, and ideology, connected by imaginary lines invisible to the ordinary eye. He, therefore, immediately perceived that G, a member of the Party since 1907, having sponsored Comrade N, Chairman of a local Cheka, during the creation of the Red Cavalry at Tambov in 1920, could hardly be extraneous to the advancement of B, Chief of Police Forces in Transcaspia. He, in turn, was related by the marriage of his sister to M, Deputy-Commissioner of the Post Office and Telegraph Service and belonged for these two reasons to the coterie of the Right. This man Fedossenko, Chief of the Service at Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan, today accused of rape and abuse of a
uthority, had been appointed by R, was in his confidence, and would thus compromise him in the case of an investigation. R would compromise B. Through B, the affair would reach as far as N, still a Deputy Member of the Central Committee, and end up by bespattering G, who was reputed unimpeachable. “A conscience,” thought the young prodigy scornfully. He tossed the grey envelope into the basket for “serious cases to investigate” and this gesture, between cigarettes, interrupted Fedossenko’s advancement. It caused the burly fellow to be swept away by a cold wind, from the borders of the burning desert of Kara-Koum and the mountains of Tschil-Mamet-Koum, lilac-pink in the evening, to the convict labour construction sites of Trans-Onega, Za-Onegie.
At the construction sites of the North, Fedossenko found Klavdia, servant of the administrative personnel. She was a pale, little Siberian girl, twice convicted for illegal alcohol sales: one rouble for a little glass pulled out of her petticoat pocket for the ragged fellow who has only that one rouble. Klavdia obeyed. She was born to obey as he was born to command. She would never complain. Fortunately, for this time he might have got six millimetres of pointed steel in the back of the neck by order of his superiors. Thin and tidy, crafty, good-tempered, with pearls in the depths of her eyes, she filched half his rations without him daring to complain about it—at least so long as she still pleased him. Later, he would see if it was worth it. It wasn’t love, once glimpsed fleetingly in the midst of a criminal act. And it wasn’t happiness either: that comes from success.
