“What’s wrong?” I asked, in alarm.
He answered simply:
“Kirov has been killed.”
“Who’s Kirov?”
“Remember, I pointed him out to you at the railway station in Leningrad.”
I did remember. I have an excellent visual memory. Though it’s true, I’d only seen Kirov very briefly in Leningrad that time.
Mirosha had a few days off once and we’d decided to splurge on a quick trip to Leningrad from Moscow: the “Red Arrow” there and back, and one day there to “live it up.” At the station Mirosha pointed to a man and whispered:
“Kirov, the Provincial Party secretary.”
Not very tall, with a pleasant face, he greeted us warmly and said:
“So, you’ve decided to come see our Leningrad?”
The head of the NKVD Directorate in Leningrad was Medved, and then Zaporozhets joined him there. We knew them both well from the sanatorium in Sochi. Filipp Medved was large and burly. Zaporozhets was tall and slender, became famous during the Civil War, was wounded in the leg, and so he walked with a limp. His wife Roza was a real beauty. They’d never been able to have kids, but there’d been a rumor that she was, finally, already in her fourth month. Every day she’d go on long walks in different directions—seven or eight kilometers one way and then seven or eight back—to get in shape and get strong for the birth.
“Killed?” I asked, astonished. “By whom?”
“The killer has been arrested. His name is Nikolaev.” And then he added, with a harsh laugh: “The Leningrad Chekists haven’t been doing their job too well, have they?”—as if to suggest that on his watch such a thing would never have happened. But he also seemed relieved that it had not happened in his district.4
According to Stalin’s adopted son, Artem Sergeev (who lived with his mother in Apt. 380 and turned thirteen in 1934), “nothing was ever the same again.” According to Sergeev’s close friend, Anatoly Granovsky (the son of the director of Berezniki Chemical Works, Mikhail Granovsky), “the news made a subtle change in everything. People suddenly started to act as though they had been told by their doctors that they suffered from a malignant growth which might, or might not be cancer. There was a general suspension of opinion and speculation. Men just waited. But it was soon established that the Trotskyites had done it. It was a name I was not very familiar with, except to know it indicated something despicable. I accepted what I was told and was prepared to forget the whole incident, little knowing what had been started by that single shot.”5
■ ■ ■
The scapegoat is a central figure in human life. A community that feels threatened identifies groups or individuals responsible for the crisis, casts them out by killing or expelling them, comes together healed and renewed, and attempts to forestall the next crisis by restaging the original event in ritual or else by wondering how it could have punished an innocent lamb (and trying to identify groups or individuals responsible for the delusion). Both the term and the practice seem to originate in sacrifice:
And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and for his house. And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.6
Both goats are scapegoats: both suffer for our sins and both serve as ransom to jealous gods and redemption for those who stay behind (“ransom” and “redemption” have the same root). In the Greek pharmakos ritual, maidens, children, or—more commonly—low-status men were, in times of crisis, given figs to eat and then driven out or killed. Many creation myths begin with the expulsion of the devil (or his trickster associates). Many heroic quests (including those of Adam, Moses, Paris, and Oedipus) begin as tales of ritual expulsion or infant exposure. For farming to take hold, Abel has to die. For Rome to be built, Remus and Romulus have to be abandoned and Remus has to be killed.7
Whichever came first—the act or the myth—human sacrifice is one of history’s oldest locomotives. Much of literature is about scapegoats: comedy is the story of expulsion from the point of view of society; tragedy is the same story from the point of view of the outcast. Comedy is about social reintegration: a temporary or illusory exclusion of the protagonists (by prigs, snobs, mobs, clowns, monsters, impostors, unjust laws, unseeing peers, and obdurate fathers) and their eventual redemption, accompanied by the conversion of some wreckers and the expulsion or execution of others. For David Copperfield to mature and for Mr. Micawber (the descendant of supernatural helpers and trickster-servants) to live “in a perfectly new manner,” Uriah Heep must go. A relatively recent—and particularly popular—variation on the scapegoat theme is the detective story, which Northrop Frye describes as “a ritual drama around a corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes over a group of ‘suspects’ and finally settles on one. The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated.” In the less optimistic version of the story, the hero gives up on society, reverses the meaning of the sacrifice, and chooses to exile himself (literally, like Chatsky in Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, or metaphorically, like the good soldier Svejk). In the cases of Noah, Lot, and Aeneas, the renewal of the world requires two sacrifices: one genocide and one exile.8
Tragedy (from the Greek for “goat”) focuses on the act of sacrifice and the figure of the scapegoat. Some tragic heroes—Oedipus, Macbeth, Anna Karenina—may be guilty; some—Joan of Arc, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Joseph K—may be innocent, at least in the eyes of the reader; and some—Iphigenia, Jesus, Romeo and Juliet—are programmatically innocent as well as willingly self-sacrificial, but that is not the point (as Job is told by the best authority on the subject). The plot of tragedy is much less concerned with the nature of the transgression than with the inexorability of the fall: goats and lambs go to the altar together, and Jesus was crucified next to two thieves, one penitent and one impenitent. Lambs and goats are ultimately interchangeable (Sophocles would have had no difficulty pointing to Jesus’s hubris). All outcasts are, by definition, redeemers, and vice versa. The villains of comedy—“Heeps of infamy”—may come back as tragic heroes, and tragic heroes may turn out to be innocent. Oedipus begins his life as an exposed infant and ends it as an outcast king. And so, in his own way, does Moses. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is about the traditional American scapegoating ritual: the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. But the interesting thing is that the alternative suspect and the main accuser are also traditional scapegoat figures: the mysterious recluse and the town drunk. The black man remains an innocent victim, the alternative suspect becomes a dragon-slaying hero, and the accuser is killed as an impenitent thief. All look familiar; the most famous town drunk in America is Huck Finn’s father.9
Flesh-and-blood scapegoats are associated with crises—from family disputes and boarding school fights to the Final Solution and the Global War on Terror. The victims tend to be deviants, outsiders, and possessors of dangerous knowledge: twins, priests, monks, cripples, healers, strangers, traders, moneylenders, noblemen, and old women, among others. They are accused of causing the crisis in general and of committing particular acts that threaten the sacred center of social life: rape, incest, arson, bestiality, cannibalism, iconoclasm, infanticide, contagion, blood sacrifice, food poisoning, and gratuitous murder. If the crisis persists, the accusations tend to snowball, as more communities and officials join the search for culprits. In the case of judicial persecutions, they snowball further, as creative interrogations and serial confessions help uncover large conspiracies by implicating the kins
men and associates of the original suspects. In the late 1620s and early 1630s, amid crop failures and continuing “wars of religion,” the witch trials in Bamberg, Bavaria, resulted in the burning of several hundred people, including most of the town elite.10 One of them, according to the minutes of the proceedings, was the town’s top official, Johannes Junius:
On Wednesday, June 28, 1628, was examined without torture Johannes Junius, Burgomaster at Bamberg, on the charge of witchcraft: how and in what fashion he had fallen into that vice. Is fifty-five years old, and was born at Niederwaysich in the Wetterau. Says he is wholly innocent, knows nothing of the crime has never in his life renounced God: says that he is wronged before God and the world, would like to hear of a single human being who has seen him at such gatherings [as the witch-sabbaths].
Confrontation of Dr. Georg Adam Haan. Tells him to his face he will stake his life on it [er wolle darauf leben und sterben], that he saw him, Junius, a year and a half ago at a witch-gathering in the electoral council-room where they ate and drank. Accused denies the same wholly.
Confronted with Hopffens Elsse. Tells him likewise that he was on Haupts-moor at a witch-dance; but first the holy wafer was desecrated. Junius denies. Hereupon he was told that his accomplices had confessed against him and was given time for thought.
On Friday, June 30, 1628, the aforesaid Junius was again without torture exhorted to confess, but again confessed nothing, whereupon, … since he would confess nothing, he was put to the torture.11
After five days of torture and “urgent persuasions,” Junius confessed to having been seduced by the she-devil, renouncing God, joining a large conspiracy, participating in witch dances, desecrating a holy wafer, and trying to kill his son and daughter (but killing his brown horse instead). On July 24, 1628, he wrote a secret letter to his daughter:
Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me. When I was the first time put to the torture, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, “Kinsman, how come you here?” I answer, “Through falsehood, through misfortune.” “Hear, you,” he says, “you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.” I said “I am no witch, I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses.” Now the chancellor’s son was set before me … and afterward Hoppfen Elss. She had seen me dance on Haupts-moor…. I answered: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it—God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.” And then came also—God in highest Heaven have mercy—the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.… Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony….
And this happened on Friday, June 30, and with God’s help I had to bear the torture…. When at last the executioner led me back into the prison, he said to me: “Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture will follow after another until you say you are a witch. Not before that,” he said, “will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another.” …
And so I begged, since I was in wretched plight, to be given one day for thought and a priest. The priest was refused me, but the time for thought was given. Now, my dear child, see in what hazard I stood and still stand. I must say that I am a witch, though I am not—must now renounce God, though I have never done it before. Day and night I was deeply troubled, but at last there came to me a new idea. I would not be anxious, but, since I had been given no priest with whom I could take counsel, I would myself think of something and say it. It were surely better that I just say it with mouth and words, even though I had not really done it; and afterwards I would confess it to the priest, and let those answer for it who compel me to do it…. And so I made my confession, as follows; but it was all a lie.…
Then I had to tell what people I had seen [at the witch-sabbath]. I said that I had not recognized them. “You old rascal, I must set the executioner at you. Say—was not the Chancellor there?” So I said yes. “Who besides?” I had not recognized anybody. So he said: “Take one street after another; begin at the market, go out on one street and back on the next.” I had to name several persons there. Then came the long street. I knew nobody. Had to name eight persons there. Then the Zinkenwert—one person more. Then over the upper bridge to the Georgthor, on both sides. Knew nobody again. Did I know nobody in the castle—whoever it might be, I should speak without fear. And thus continuously they asked me on all the streets, though I could not and would not say more. So they gave me to the executioner, told him to strip me, shave me all over, and put me to the torture. “The rascal knows one on the market-place, is with him daily, and yet won’t name him.” By that they meant Dietmeyer: so I had to name him too.
Then I had to tell what crimes I had committed. I said nothing.
… “Draw the rascal up!” So I said that I was to kill my children, but I had killed a horse instead. It did not help. I had also taken a sacred wafer, and had desecrated it. When I had said this, they left me in peace.
Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God….12
In the margins, he added: “Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the Chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Ursel, and Hoppfen Els—all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God’s name before they were executed…. They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was.”13
■ ■ ■
In the 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, amid the “culture wars” that centered on procreation, abortion, homosexuality, and the nature of the family, thousands of people were accused of raping and torturing small children. In 1983, in Kern County, California, two couples were sentenced to 240 years for tying up, chaining, and raping their children and selling them for sex. The following summer, several more people in the same county were sentenced to 273 to 405 years for drugging their children, hanging them from boards, and raping them repeatedly in the presence of strangers. In March 1984, seven teachers from the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County, were arrested for sexually abusing 360 children over the course of ten years. The accusations included drinking blood, eating feces, cutting babies into little pieces, and staging orgies in underground tunnels, graveyards, and air balloons. Over the next ten years, hundreds of child-care centers throughout the United States were accused of “ritual abuse.” Most cases began with an allegation by one parent and evolved into large campaigns involving multiple agencies. The only evidence was the children’s testimony and, in a few cases, the defendants’ confessions; no scars, films, graves, tunnels, bodies, or witnesses were ever produced. Most defendants never saw their accusers and were presumed guilty by the judges.14
As the day-care campaign unfolded, hundreds of adults began to accuse their parents of having abused them when they were children. In August 1988, the twenty-one- and eighteen-year-old daughters of the deputy sheriff and Republican Party chairman of Thurston County, Washington, Paul Ingram, suddenly remembered that their father had been regularly raping them since they wer
e little girls. Confronted by his colleagues in the police department, Ingram denied his guilt but added that, since his daughters would not lie about such things, “there must be a dark side of me that I don’t know about.” Several hours into his first interrogation, he confessed to having sexually abused both of them for many years. By May 1989, when his trial got under way, he had confessed to belonging to a large satanic cult whose members routinely murdered babies, drank blood, and raped humans and animals. By June 1993, more than four thousand US parents had been accused by their adult children of having molested them in the more or less remote past. About 17 percent of the accusations involved satanic-ritual abuse. A report by a prison official in Idaho, circulated to police workshops around the country, estimated that satanic cults sacrificed fifty thousand to sixty thousand people each year. In a speech delivered in 1988, the psychiatrist Benett G. Braun, who believed that about two hundred thousand Americans suffered from “multiple personality disorder” and that about one-fourth of them were victims of ritual abuse, described the satanic conspiracy as “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure.”15
The judicial campaign was accompanied by media reports about poisoned Halloween candy, child pornography networks, battered-women shelters, brainwashed cult members, secretly encoded rock songs, and thousands of missing children (depicted on milk cartons in every grocery store). Christian fundamentalists, anxious to protect home and family from the devil, and radical feminists, anxious to protect women and children from patriarchy, joined forces against an enemy that was both demonically possessed and legally liable.16 When Frank Fuster, the owner of a babysitting center in a Miami suburb, was convicted on fourteen charges of sexual abuse and sentenced to at least 165 years in prison, the Miami Herald editorial attempted to express its readers’ sentiments:
Few criminals in South Florida history have deserved a genuinely life-long prison sentence more than Frank Fuster Escalona. The man lurked at his Country Walk Babysitting Service like a venomous spider that has built a web to bring his victims near. He practiced gross sexual acts on small children entrusted by their parents to his care. He violated them systematically and over time, as a life style, not as a momentary aberration.… If these horrors had to be visited upon these tiny innocents, then the maximum positive results have been realized. Laws have been changed, victims comforted, parents emboldened, prosecutors strengthened, public consciousness raised. And the monster Fuster is destined to spend the remainder of his unnatural life deservedly caged.17
The House of Government Page 94
