Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “What if they don’t believe me?” I said.

  “Don’t drink with them, don’t mess with their women and do not take bribes.”

  “You doom me to complete stagnation.”

  Upon returning home, I spoke at an editorial briefing about my presentations, first of all, at the republican Central Committee. Nik-Nik immediately asked if Comrade Rasulov had attended the meeting.

  “The Second Secretary introduced me,” I said, “and mentioned that the pride of the Tajik people and the greatest scientist of the USSR, Bobojon Gahfurovich Ghafurov, had sent me to Dushanbe to brief the republican leadership on the current international situation.”

  “Did you sit next to him?” jeered Vlad S., the head of the book review department and secretary of our Party cell. He obviously had spent his lunch hour well, but we were holding this little secret sacred; after all, no one so far returned from lunch on all fours. Our team of fifteen men and women had no informers, except for Polyakov himself, of course, who couldn’t publicly imagine any deviation from the Party norms of decency under his leadership.

  “Yep,” I said. “I even addressed my words directly to him.”

  “You did the right thing,” Polyakov said, complimenting me.

  “My greatest achievement was my sixty-minute solo presentation on Tajik television.”

  All of them gasped. “Sixty minutes!?”

  “One short call from the republican Central Committee did it,” explained Polyakov to this band of naifs.

  “Rightly noted,” I said. “The charming TV presenter just informed the viewers that instead of some worthless movie they would admire me.”

  “Was she really pretty?” Vlad S. asked sternly.

  “I don’t know,” was my almost sincere response. “I looked at my thousands-strong audience.”

  “Lucky you, you didn’t hear their remarks,” he said.

  “Did they like your lecture at the KGB headquarters?” asked Nik-Nik.

  “Very much so, Nikolai Nikolayevich. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  He ignored my stupid joke. “Where else did you speak?”

  “At a gathering of local journalists and at a huge collective farm.”

  “Cotton growers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you tell them?” asked Vlad S.

  “Exactly what I told the KGB.”

  It was the gospel truth. The KGB and party officials have always believed that what Moscow lecturers were telling them was classified stuff intended only for the initiated. They would call it nonsense if some informant told them that farmers, workers, students, local lecturers and journalists were getting the same “inside story” about the moves and habits of some African and Arab politicians. That’s why I preferred lectures to closely controlled writing. In the lectures you could avoid some official lies and have more fun.

  “Tell us whether the cotton growers speak Russian or not?” asked our Party secretary.

  “No idea,” I said. “What’s the difference?”

  “Soviet cotton farmers are our national pride!” Nik-Nik said, and repeated another well-known slogan from Pravda, “Cotton is the white gold of the Soviet Union!”

  I reminded my audience of our childhood heroine Mamlakat, an eleven-year-old girl, whom Stalin had awarded the Order of Lenin after she learned to pick cotton with both hands. I had seen two pregnant women in the field who worked with both hands and could hardly resist the temptation to ask Polyakov if all the other women and children were unaware of the very existence of their second hands.

  Fortunately, he asked, “Did you read Pravda there every day?” but suddenly hurried somewhere without waiting for my answer. Everybody knew where he went: this apparatchik went to Ghafurov to report immediately of our success in Tajikistan. And I said to the door which slammed shut behind him, “No, Nicholai Nikolayevich, I read the newspaper Pravda Tajikistana in the Tajik language.”

  Vlad, choking with laughter, began to slide under his desk.

  I revealed details intended just for Ghafurov only when Vlad, Simon, and Ghafurov’s ghostwriter, Michael Kurgantsev, remained in the room: in the evening, while having tea on the hotel’s veranda, I was approached by the son of Tursun Uldzhabaev who was seated on the vacant throne of the first secretary of the Party now that Bobo had been sent to Moscow. The son, in prosecutor’s uniform, nervously looked around, pitifully stared in my eye and half-whispered, “My father—a true communist—a disciple of Bobojon Ghafurovich; he didn’t do anything wrong. Dishonest people framed him.”

  His daddy had been expelled from the Party two years before, and since then he had been a chairman of a cotton-growing farm. I told the young prosecutor that I didn’t know a thing about Tajikistan, never before had visited a cotton collective farm, and could not do anything for him.

  “Oh no! You can help! You’re a very intelligent and tactful person. That’s why you talk about cotton. Please tell Bobojon Ghafurovich,” he had pleaded, “that my father physically cannot live without the Party.”

  The explanation came after the Soviet Union’s collapse, in declassified documents of the 1961 Central Committee’s Plenary Session. The senior Uldzhabaev was guilty of “systematic falsification of accounting documents. The sale of cotton reported by him was fully falsified; these plans were never fulfilled.”

  A quarter-century after he was framed, Uldzhabaev was reinstated in the Party, most probably, with the blessings of liberal Michael Gorbachev, the last ruler of the USSR. Nobody could have foreseen the poor timing. Soon it became more fashionable for leaders of the Party to turn overnight into true Muslims and Orthodox Christians.

  SHORTLY I WAS IN Central Asia again. My wife and I arrived in Tashkent armed to the teeth—in my briefcase lay Ghafurov’s sealed letter to Sharaf Rashidov, the first secretary of the Uzbekistan’s Communist Party. All I knew was that it contained a personal request to help in the dissemination of our magazine in the republic with the third largest population in the country.

  I had never met a more beautiful and gentle man. He said in a soft voice, “Please tell Bobojon Ghafurovich that I appreciate his work and we’ll do everything in our power to promote your esteemed journal. My assistant”—he nodded toward the smiling man standing at the door—“will do all that’s necessary.”

  The impeccably polite assistant had already wished Irina, who was waiting for me in the reception area, a good time in Tashkent while her husband was busy with manly chores. My wife told him that she was struck by the faded bunches of grapes at the local farmers’ market. The grapes, stored in flat wooden boxes and richly covered with sawdust, survived for many months, until the spring. We could only dream of grapes in still-snowy Moscow.

  After that small talk, Irina dealt him a blow below the belt by suggesting that his Uzbek language was probably perfect. He spread his hands, “Alas, there was no time to learn.”

  She continued her provocation by suggesting that he probably read all novels written by Comrade Rashidov.

  “Of course, I did,” the assistant said. “In Russian. He’s a prolific novelist and a winner of multiple literary state prizes.”

  Irina wondered how such a hard working statesman could find time for writing.

  “He’s a genius,” said the assistant.

  This meant to me that Rashidov had more ghostwriters than Ghafurov.

  Typically, in all fifteen Soviet republics and their major cities, the first secretaries represented the main local ethnic group. Ethnic Russians had always been the second secretaries, their right hands. Not so in Tashkent. Here this Russian first secretary with his sleeves rolled up showing his powerful hairy forearms, was a God and a sultan. After I had expressed a desire to meet with the local intelligentsia, he summoned one of his aides. “Bring the lists of our intelligentsia,” said the secretary without using the word “please.”

  I could not help asking, “The lists? In the fourth largest Soviet city?”

  “Yes, we keep a hand
on the pulse,” the secretary graciously smiled. “Who do you prefer—engineering, humanitarian, or creative intelligentsia?”

  I preferred our readers and those who were interested in the problems of the Third World.

  “Will do,” the secretary said resolutely.

  “Realistically,” I asked, “when will it be possible to meet with our audience?”

  He looked at me kindly. “Realistically,” he said, savoring the word, “they can be rounded up quickly.”

  Soon three weighty folders were there before the secretary, one on top of the other. He laid both hands on the folders and asked the question that made me shudder. Party leaders and secret police officials had been asking this question over the many years of Stalin’s rule. They did it throughout the country, upon receiving Moscow’s quotas for catching spies, saboteurs, and traitors.

  He said, “Whom should we take?”

  For an average citizen this question had only one meaning, “Whom should we arrest?”

  In the evening, in the hotel, I still wondered how many times in the past Tashkent’s first secretary had asked this perennial question. Irina preferred to talk about beautifully coiffed pyramids made of small, smooth stones in our corridor restroom. A day later, there appeared a bucket of water, where these stones had to be thrown upon the conclusion of the procedure. With a cry “Historical progress! Glory to the Party!” Irina ran into our room with a question, “Why don’t they cut neat squares of your favorite newspaper?”

  “Do you want the citizens to wipe their bottoms with their leaders’ portraits right here, in a public place?” was my counter-question. “A list of these assholes would end up on the desktop of the First Secretary.”

  As far as I remember, toilet paper appeared in the Soviet Union about the same year that two Americans walked on the Moon.

  I had long been in the West when the whole country saw the portrait of First Secretary Rashidov of Uzbekistan in a mourning frame and read of the sudden death from a heart attack of this “prominent leader of the Party and the Soviet state.” Half a year later, in the summer of 1984, his cotton scam was exposed. A plenary session of the Uzbek Communist Party was held. All speakers, including secretary of the USSR’s Communist Party, Yegor Ligachev, exposed Rashidov as a corrupt despot who created a land of servility, sycophancy, and cronyism. The session unanimously decided to exhume his remains from a memorial erected in the center of Tashkent and rebury them in his village cemetery.

  Uldzhabaev’s offense in small Tajikistan looked like a childish prank compared to Rashidov’s armed robbery of the gold reserves of the country. Every year Tashkent reported to Moscow a cotton harvest of three million tons. In reality it was a million and a half at best. In political circles everyone believed that the former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, at that time secretary general, “advised” Rashidov to commit suicide.

  FOUR

  What to Do If You Know Many Russian Spies

  BEFORE ENTERING our large editorial room, the fellow knocked at the door. He looked like a soldier who recently completed his service.

  “I am Evgeni Biryukov,” he said and ceremoniously shook hands with his new colleagues.

  No one expressed the slightest surprise. The mousetrap has slammed shut, I thought; you’ll never get out of it. Nik-Nik had already informed us that from now on Asia and Africa Today would have a network of foreign correspondents and our duty was to help them. He did not mention their true boss—the KGB. Our editorial staff was happy—with such colleagues no one would dare close our magazine.

  “This desk is yours,” I said, pointing to a stack of our magazine’s issues. “Start reading. If you have any questions, ask.”

  Evgeni Biryukov did it diligently all day long, wrote something in his notebook, and did not ask a single question. I had no doubt, he had read it all before at the KGB headquarters.

  The next day Biryukov, our first correspondent to Tanzania, watched with interest as our art director and I put together the layout of a future issue. At the same time, I gently tried to find out what he knew about the country of his destination and whether he could for starters send us a photo essay about Dar es Salaam, the capital of the young republic. After all, he was trained to take pictures of military facilities.

  “Do you have a good camera?” I asked.

  He hesitated, apparently assuming that I was meddling in affairs that were none of my damn business. Then he understood the ridiculousness of the situation and said, “Of course.” Every Soviet child who read Soviet books and watched Soviet movies knew that spies had excellent cameras.

  Biryukov clearly believed that a photo essay did not require the ability to write.

  “Just don’t take pictures of savage rites,” I explained. “Personally, I’m not against them, but the sensitive censors won’t approve of it.”

  “What kind of rituals?”

  “Like the cutting or removal of external female genitalia with broken glass,” I said, trying to throw him off-balance.

  He winced.

  “It would be even better to write about the socialist ideas of President Nyerere.” I did not smile. “Interview him and ask which rural cooperatives he would suggest you visit. He’d love such a question.”

  To my delight, Biryukov knew something about Nyerere’s form of African socialism based on cooperative agriculture. I asked if he had ever visited Russian collective farms. He said, “I was born on one.”

  It seemed to me that Biryukov regretted having said that, either because he betrayed a state secret, or because he lied. I smirked inappropriately. “Maybe Julius Nyerere should have to first get to know our collective farms’ instructive experience. This might lead to some amendments to his socialist ideas.”

  Nothing changed in our correspondent’s face. I needed to learn from him how to do that.

  When he asked if we could help him with his article, I was delighted with his frankness and explained that the main thing for him was to write something that we were unable to see or hear. I promised to edit his stuff so that even he wouldn’t believe what a great writer he was. Biryukov was happy.

  Over three years he wrote a half-dozen stories, for which my schoolteacher would have given him a failing grade. But we made them readable. After all, they were signed by our correspondent in East Africa, and this made us look much better.

  The word was that before Evgeni Biryukov disappeared back into his underworld, he was awarded a military decoration for his work in Tanzania.

  Western secret services could not have ignored the fact that our not-very-important publication with its scrawny budget all of a sudden decided to have expensive foreign correspondents. But nevertheless, the KGB was careful. Our correspondents’ KGB bosses never came into direct contact with us. Yet, when their handlers were displeased with deathly silence of their boys, somebody from the Central Committee called with the same request: “Help your colleague.” Once or two times a year, they would stay in our editorial room for a week. The new colleagues had nothing to do at the office, but they stayed with us instead of vacationing somewhere at a Black Sea resort. It was part of their game.

  So, it became a routine—someone from the International Department of the Party Central Committee would notify the editor-in-chief or his deputy, or me on the phone, “Tomorrow a correspondent in such-and-such country will join your staff. Please help him.” After correcting grammatical mistakes, we would publish their trash. No one twisted our arms. But for some of their writings I wanted to kill them—there would have been a lesser threat to our heroic scouts from James Bond.

  Constantine Geyvandov was our second correspondent and quite logically worked on the other side of the continent, in Nigeria, its most populous country. Unlike the others, he was a journalist and a likeable guy. We had common friends, and during his vacation he expertly baked legs of lamb for some of us: Tom, now a Pravda correspondent in Western Africa; Primakov, when he wasn’t in the Arab world working for Pravda; and for me.

 
; Constantine would have taken part in our New Year’s Eve party in 1966, but he was in Nigeria. At the table were three Pravda reporters—my bosom buddy Tom Kolesnichenko; Yevgeny Primakov; Vitaly Zhurkin, correspondent in India; and Victor Kudryavtsev, Moscow Radio correspondent in Egypt—all of them rising stars in their mid-thirties. Primakov also brought with him the top radio commentator Valentin Zorin, known for his tireless bashing of American imperialism.

  At first, we celebrated this most popular holiday in full compliance with the long-established tradition. We saw off the old year, were having a good time, drinking wine and watching the best performers of the country. Five minutes before midnight, we listened to General Secretary Brezhnev, who, keeping in mind the apolitical nature of the event, only briefly mentioned in his televised address the many achievements of our country, the shining example for the entire world.

  Immediately after that, Kremlin Spasskaya Tower with its gleaming red star appeared on the screen, and holding up another glass of wine, we counted down with the deep strikes of its clock. With the last one it was every Russian’s duty to instantly empty his or her glass.

  The unexpected happened after this ritual. Valentin Zorin assumed a solemn air and proposed a toast to the health and leadership of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. Tom kicked me right away under the table and eagerly expressed his compassion, “Did you hurt yourself?”

  I produced a noisy “Ouch!” and “Yes, you…”

  In fact, I was entertained. Everybody else stood up with their glasses in hand and looked our direction expecting more inappropriate jokes, except Zorin, who did not belong to our little gang and looked at me with suspicion. Tom, with awfully strenuous effort, helped me to rise, and everybody drank to Brezhnev’s health. My hand was trembling from “pain,” and a good part of my liquor went into a nearby crystal vase with flowers.