The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “And you’ll excuse, but what has Marr got to do with it?” came Sergey’s defence. “No one has been following Marr since 1950.”

  “Exactly,” Chimut-Dorzhev confirmed maliciously. “And why was it that particular year? Ah yes, the year Stalin published Marxism and Linguistics, in which he wrote that after all Marr’s theories had absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Yes, Stalin was a man full of good sense, and polished off Marr and all his followers. But now that everyone can say the first thing that comes into their heads, I have heard people arguing that Marr was a victim of Stalinism and we should start studying him again.”

  “Of course, of course,” Sergey lifted his shoulders and lit a cigarette. “They all deserve to be jettisoned, and let’s throw away the linguists along with the others, why not?”

  Tanya had finished slicing the onion and had arranged it around the herring; the potatoes were steaming in the tureen and some marinated shallots had appeared in a porcelain bowl. Chimut-Dorzhev put forks and glasses on the table, and then looked around with an air of satisfaction.

  “Well! Shall we start?”

  He went to the fridge, took out a bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap and poured out the first round.

  “What shall we drink to? Well, I have a debt to pay off: I slandered Sergey Mikhailovich’s studies. So let’s drink to philology!” They drank, and then the host, still chewing on some potato, turned to Tanya. “Now allow me to ask Tatyana Borisovna a few questions. She was talking earlier about her thesis, but she did not tell us anything about her work, how it is progressing, I mean. The purges… Today we speak of nothing else: they say we need to fill in the blank areas. But what exactly are you doing?”

  Tanya twisted her mouth. Were the shallots perhaps a little sharp? Or was she really irritated? Oleg was not sure.

  “But who’s interested in that? Why don’t you tell us about yourself, Aleksandr Ivanych?”

  “But no, my dear Tatyana Borisovna. We are interested; we are all interested. How do you set about studying something like that? But start at the beginning!”

  “How do you set… Well, like this,” Tanya started to speak grumpily. “You decide to study a particular trial. There was a trial of this kind in Baku in 1949. Very few remember it:

  Baku is not Leningrad, but there too we have a right man for the job: Bagirov – he used to drink with Beriya at the time of the Civil War and in 1937 he was in charge of the purges. In 1949, they discovered a conspiracy: some people wanted to kill Bagirov, it was said. They started to arrest and interrogate. Perhaps Bagirov was jealous of the guys in Leningrad, and wanted to set up his own ‘Baku affair’. But something must have gone wrong, or perhaps Moscow put on the brakes. In other words, they never got their magnificent public trial. The firing squads worked in secret and no one was released, but nothing was published in the newspapers. For us, this is a disaster, because it means that there are no transcripts.”

  “So what? Do Stalinist trials have transcripts?” Sergey interrupted.

  “Of course there are! Here in Russia, things were done properly – all in accordance with the law. They never sent anyone to their death without a piece of paper with rubber stamps and signatures. The transcripts are there, but only those from public trials can be consulted, while the investigative ones are all held by the KGB, and it is very difficult to see them.”

  “But can you get into the other archives? Just like that, as though it were a trifle: I would like to study the suchand-such trial… and they just throw open the doors?” enquired Chimut-Dorzhev, genuinely surprised. “No! They don’t throw the doors open, but they do leave an opening, and with your foot you can keep it open and eventually stick your nose in. And of course, you must never mention the trial. My thesis, for instance, is entitled, ‘Party Cadres in the Baku Region from 1945 to 1953’. Then there is some hope that they will give you the permits, but without the files on the preliminary investigations and hearings, you cannot understand anything about a trial.”

  “And so, what about 1949?” urged Chimut-Dorzhev.

  “So we don’t even know who was arrested and shot then, although I now know that they took nearly all the ruling group of the Regional Committee, almost all the Komsomol leaders, the Executive Committee of the Soviet, all the district secretaries except one, almost all the managers of the petroleum enterprises, and some others. I reconstructed the list on my own; it does not exist anywhere, or rather they’ll have it at the Baku KGB, as long as they haven’t burnt the transcripts of the interrogations or lost them – because these things happen.”

  “And tell me, Tatyana Borisovna, how did you recreate this list?”

  Tanya was no longer displeased; in fact she was animated and her eyes were shining as she began to explain.

  “It’s a dull job, which even a child could do. You start with the reports on the congresses; every four years they reelect the Central Committee, and there is a list of all the members. Then every two years, there is a regional conference that elects the Regional Committee. These two bodies include everyone who counts for something in the republic and Baku: the ministers, the heads of industries, the generals, the police and KGB cadres, the trade unionists and the academics. The lists are published every time in the newspapers. All you have to do is copy them, and every name has its own page in my notebook; that’s where I write all the information. Between 1945 and 1953, this means less than one thousand names; of these, the ones that really count are the members of the executive bodies – no more than a hundred of them – and I put these in a ring-binder which I always carry with me. I completed this work in a week: the dates of the congresses and conferences are public knowledge. Then, last summer, I went to Baku; I had permission to go into the Central Archive of the Republic, and there I found the shorthand records for everything. Who spoke, what they spoke about, who was applauded, and who was criticised. So I began to build up the information and gradually each page in the notebooks became a biographical sketch. Then I started to plunder, as we term it, the newspaper Bakinsky Rabochy, but this time day by day for the whole nine years. This is a never-ending job, but it is very important. This is the only way to understand. Every time you encounter a name, you go to the corresponding page and you make a note. The newspaper has everything: promotions, decorations, criticisms… Only the arrests and executions by firing squad are omitted, but when there is news about somebody every week up to, say, June 1949, and then suddenly there isn’t a single mention, you know what’s happened.”

  Everyone went quiet; Chimut-Dorzhev filled the glasses again. “Well, how about you, Sergey Mikhailovich? Would you like to tell us about your research? What can we say about verbs of motion?”

  Sergey became agitated, even discourteous. “No, but why? This evening we should be talking about history; the subject has not been exhausted. Pass me the herring, please… You have good vodka, Aleksandr Ivanovich… It’s history that this country needs, not linguistics.”

  “But earlier, you were saying, the monastery’s serfs…”

  Sergey got heated. “To hell with it! That history is, of course, of no use to anyone; it is too far in the past. But our history about what happened to Russia – about the mincer they put it through – that history did not start yesterday; it started, who knows, under Nicholas… Do you know what I have been rereading?” he continued fervently and was addressing Tanya. “Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be done? You remember the main characters? Vera Pavlovna, Kirsanov, Lopuchov… What modern personalities, and yet the book was written in 1862! If today you were to meet someone who lived and reasoned as they did, you would embrace them and say, ‘This is what we need in Russia now – at the end of the millennium! Every now and then, the author introduces other characters who think to themselves, ‘Yes, there are young people like that today.’ The reader, Chernyshevsky says, must not be surprised by such comments, because the action takes place in a period in which such people have really only just come into existence, while now there are mor
e and more of them every year, and they are acting together… So there were young people capable of living like that, and you would meet them wherever you went. And this is the paradox: when you’re reading the book and see them described like that, you are surprised by their modernity and cannot believe that such characters could be conceived in 1862, but actually they are typical characters of 1862, and today there is no one like that at all!”

  “Really,” Tanya said slowly. “There is nobody like that.

  But you know, Sergey, where Kirsanov and Lopuchov and Vera Pavlovna ended up?”

  Sergey looked at her and was mystified.

  “You don’t know where they ended up? Then I’ll tell you, Sergey: they took power.” Tanya was now whispering and the other three had difficulty in discerning her words. “They took power, and then started to kill each other, and all of it – absolutely all of it – was their own work …”

  Sergey put out his cigarette with a sudden and forceful gesture, “That’s not true! They weren’t the ones who took power! Or rather,” he became confused, “they took it, that’s true, but they didn’t keep it! They took the workers and peasants to power; they had promised it, and they kept their promise – and what next? The workers and peasants annihilated them. It came out that they were not, after all, quite ready for humanitarian socialism, and preferred the scientific one, but with no subtleties, à la russe! That was the mistake, I agree: but how could you not get it wrong in those conditions? It is far too easy to go around saying that the principles were also mistaken: everyone is saying it, but I’m not with them!”

  Tanya shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows, perhaps the principles were not mistaken. But we cannot close our eyes to history. We have to learn, Sergey, we have to learn… And what has to be learned is that they were full of good intentions, and were delightful and magnificent people, but they got everything wrong. You are right; if we were in their shoes, we too would have committed the same errors, and perhaps it is not fair to speak of errors, as what choices did they actually have? History is complicated, Sergey… it is never unambiguous… But the harm has been done, and it is precisely when you come up against a Lopuchov or a Vera Pavlovna and you think about what came after, that you should realise that in the end you can only come to one conclusion: the utter waste of it all… Take a look at the world we are living in: there are factories and machines and everyone is living well, but there are more believers than a hundred years ago, especially in the intelligentsia, and the army officers declare on television that they and the Church are the pillars on which Russia is built. Believe me, it’s just a question of time before we are back to the pogroms… We have gone back in time, and it has all been a terrible waste.

  We need to start all over again, and this should be enough to demonstrate that they got everything wrong, even if they had the best of intentions.”

  “Allow me, Tatyana Borisovna,” Chimut-Dorzhev suddenly interrupted. “I have listened with immense pleasure to your argument – yes, with genuine delight. You clearly are a historian and accustomed to thinking that you can study history and learn something from it. And this is what everyone wants, although each in his own way: Sergey Mikhailovich here and also that guy who spoke this evening in the cinema – that damn fool who writes to Ogonyok. Allow an old and impertinent philosopher to present you with another viewpoint. Briefly, I argue that you cannot study history, because human actions are indeed too complicated.

  By definition, every circumstance is influenced by an infinite number of other circumstances, which cannot be understood exhaustively. Even the hierarchy of such circumstances – and building this hierarchy is precisely the work of an historian, if I am not mistaken – is established in an entirely arbitrary and subjective manner; indeed the fact of establishing it is in turn subject to an infinite number of circumstances.”

  Chimut-Dorzhev could see from their eyes that they had not followed all of his argument, and he wanted to explain himself better.

  “In other words,” he exclaimed, losing his patience, “you spoke of the best intentions or of the errors that caused them to fail. I had the honour of being Molotov’s frequent guest when he was already retired. The days were long, and he had nothing to do. He went to see his granddaughter, and when he came home, he sat in front of the television or, in the summer, on a bench in the courtyard. When someone came to see him, he would love to chat. He remembered everything and felt guilty about nothing. You should have heard him when he was talking about how he organised the ‘voluntary’ union of the Baltic peoples with the USSR! The Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs arrived in Moscow, and he, Molotov, came straight to the point: You will not be able to return to Latvia until you have signed. When Estonia sent its Minister of Defence – God knows what the man was called, a general covered with braid – he told him exactly the same thing. He ordered the Cheka officers to monitor them and not to leave them alone for a second. In the end, they signed. We used to sit on a bench and enjoy the sun, and while the children were playing around us, Molotov would tell me this story and laugh, ‘We were forced into going to these excesses, and we didn’t do at all badly, in my opinion.’”

  Chimut-Dorzhev went silent and looked at Tanya, Oleg and Sergey in turn, and then filled their glasses with vodka.

  “That’s where the best intentions get you! But listen to this: this is him in talks with Hitler. Hitler, he said, was completely unexceptional, at least seen from the outside. He was a man who was very pleased with himself: a narcissist.

  But he was not the frenzied madman described in books and films. Indeed, according to Molotov, he was a very intelligent man, but an intelligence that was blunted by the absurdity of his initial idea. The first time they met, Hitler told him, ‘But what’s going on? Nondescript England – an unhappy island – is already master of half the world and wishes to take over the whole of it. We cannot permit this; it’s not right.’ ‘Of course,’ Molotov replied, ‘it is completely unacceptable; I am in agreement with you.’ At lunch, according to Molotov’s tale, the dictator confided, ‘We’re at war, and I won’t drink coffee because my people cannot drink coffee. I don’t eat meat as I am quite accustomed to exclusively vegetarian meals, and I don’t smoke or drink.’ And this is what Molotov told me – I remember every word, ‘I looked at him, and I found that I had next to me a rabbit who lived off herbs, an ideal man. Naturally I didn’t refuse anything at all, nor did his men, who ate and drank.’ Well?

  What do you think of that?” Chimut-Dorzhev gloated. “Isn’t that nicely put? ‘A rabbit who lived off herbs’. Molotov was a poet, and yet also full of repugnant cynicism! So? Every person is complicated, only in novels are characters consistent, while in reality we are all a collection of contradictions, without even realising it, because man was not made to be summarised in a formula. No, he was made to be capable of everything, according to whatever circumstances occur. And if you confront him with his inconsistency, he will shrug his shoulders and tell you that he had this or that reason to behave in such a manner, and then he won’t give it another moment’s thought. I am therefore in agreement with the definition you provided, but I would like to enlarge upon it: history is complicated, but it is also flat, like a carpet interwoven with an endless number of threads, so many that no one in the world could ever count them. It has only two dimensions, and does not experience any depth. That is the reason why I dare to dissent from the opinion that has just been defended with such feeling: Tatyana Borisovna, the study of history has absolutely no useful purpose.”

  “Just a minute, though,” Oleg finally joined in. He had been quiet up till then, as he had been hungry and Chimut-Dorzhev’s herring was damn good, and the onion was tasty too; this bachelor knew how to look after himself… Now however, he didn’t want to continue in his silence and look an idiot with nothing to contribute. “I am in complete agreement that studying history in order to learn something is a wasted effort; people never learn anything. They can, however, remember! Remembering in
order to punish those who deserve to be punished, for instance: it would be obscene to let some evil act disappear into oblivion!”

  “Well said. But this, you’ll forgive me Oleg Viktorovich, is not studying history. Even Khrushchev did this. For example, there was Dudintsev’s novel, Not by Bread Alone. It caused a sensation, and the press reaction was one of indignation. Khrushchev read it, did not approve, and brought it up at the Writers’ Congress. I remember that he took out this enormous, chequered handkerchief and made a knot in it. Then he said, ‘According to the proverb, you don’t kick a man when he’s down. But we’ll tie this knot as a reminder. One day we’ll get this handkerchief out and see how many knots there are.’ From then on, they left Dudintsev in peace.”

  “But it is not just this,” said Tanya firmly. “Put the matters of virtue and guilt to one side. But not oblivion. A free people must remember.”

  “Remember! But who remembers anything? The memory, you should know, is a strange little beast… And more generally, do peoples ever remember? They remember what they’re told to remember. Take a look at our own situation.

  They had us believing that we had this radiant past, and now they want us to believe that it was just a great mass of criminal acts. But that is not the case! I lived in Moscow during those years, from 1933 to ’39. We came from the countryside in search of work, first my brother who was a bricklayer, then my sister who found work as an unskilled factory worker, and then the whole family: eight people in a basement living in nightmarish conditions. Today the courageous critics of Stalinism consider the reconstruction of Moscow, which started precisely in that period, to be a crime, but for millions of simple people it was quite simply a benediction. Amongst our people, there was great support for the elimination of the old boulevards jammed with traffic, the widening of the streets, the destruction of churches that nobody knew what to do with and their replacement with schools, technical colleges and apartment blocks. Not far from our street, they knocked down the Sukharev Tower.