by Masha Gessen
By this time one of the secret-police handlers, who must have arrived just before Ruzya did, informed her that nothing was to be cleared. Nothing, of course, meant nothing, not even dispatches that repeated the TASS cable word for word—there was a small stream of those coming from correspondents willing to try anything to get something out under their names. So Ruzya did nothing. She did not fiddle; she did not read; she did not attempt to occupy herself with some neglected organizing task. She sat back and dreamed. It was the oddest kind of daydream, coming as it did in the middle of the night, and conjuring only what she knew to be the absolute truth. He was dead. The monster, the tyrant, the murderer, dead, dead, dead. In a different setting she might have danced for joy. Here she let herself luxuriate in a knowledge that needed no elaboration to be possibly the best news she had ever heard.
Just before eight o’clock she was told to start working. Twenty-four hours of the same story followed. Even as she grew tired, Ruzya made the pleasurable mental note that reporting the death of Stalin was quickly becoming routine. Before she left work, she was handed a pass that allowed her to walk on Gorky Street. She called home from the pay phone just outside the Central Telegraph; Yolochka said she would have no school today but that the teacher had told Ruzya to come in and see her urgently.
Out on Gorky Street, the roar of engines and the hum of the distant crowd are disconcerting, but her joy refuses to abate. Ruzya heads for the large Yeliseyevskiy food store on the other side of the street: while everyone else is in a paroxysm of mourning, or at least agitation, Ruzya intends to celebrate by shopping for food. She buys all the things she cannot find when the usual crowds fill the stores: salmon caviar, beef tongue, and smoked sturgeon.
In a few days, after Moscow goes back, tentatively, to its routine ways, Ruzya will go to see Yolochka’s teacher, who will take Yolochka’s desecrated textbook from some hiding place in her desk and tell Ruzya to talk to her daughter and buy her a new textbook. She will mean that surely this kind of thing—implying, in effect, that Stalin’s death was a joyous holiday—could land the mother in jail and her child in a special orphanage for the offspring of “enemies of the people.” Ruzya will thank her and smile, taking the book. The teacher will take this smile as a sign of gratitude and an acknowledgment of Ruzya’s uncommonly good luck. It will in fact be the fear lifting.
MARCH 7, 1953, 3 P.M.
Ester can see the cold even before she feels it as she nears the glass doors of her office building. The people outside—there must be thousands in Pushkin Square—have telltale red ears, and the men have a white coating over their five o’clock shadows. She tries to pull her coat closed over her belly and steels herself for the cold and the crowd outside. She does not remember being so protective of her body when she was carrying Sasha. Nor does she remember being so tired, so weighed down and so clumsy, waddling on her swollen feet, or so impatient to get to the finish line. By her count, she is eight months pregnant, and this time she is counting the days.
She had always thought she would have a large family. Her father had seventeen brothers and sisters, and her mother had nine, and those aunts and uncles produced lots of cousins, so Ester’s parents’ three-person unit always seemed like an oddity in the family (or, for that matter, in the town). Even as she half-consciously reaped the benefits of being an only child—her mother’s undivided love, her father’s unconditional devotion—she made plans to live her life differently. But it must have been very soon after Sasha was born that she knew she wanted no more children with Boris. This was not a heartrending realization—after all, she had not wasted time trying to convince herself she loved him—more a sense of disappointment that seemed to have been there, and growing, from the day she agreed to marry him. It grew until she was certain she wanted a divorce; he was just as certain he did not. She worked on him and on devising the means to leave someone who refused to be left, trying to figure out a way around the naked fact that she and Bella and Sasha had no place to go. She tried to have an affair and failed. The disappointment grew. And then, not that long ago, no more than a year, she realized that if she were going to have more children, it would have to be with Boris. She got pregnant almost right away, proving that she was, after all, still in control of her life.
She steps out onto the sidewalk, intending to walk along its inner edge until she can get to Gorky Street, just half a block away, and find a way to get across to the other side, where her apartment building stands. She touches the wall of the building with her right arm as she walks, like a blind person; this creates a buffer zone between her and the wall, against which she is afraid of being pushed. The crowd is so thick it seems jammed in places, where the force pushing down toward Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street has met resistance, or perhaps where someone failed to walk fast enough or—she wonders if this might be the case—fell down. Not that she is surprised so many people are willing to risk bruises or worse to see the monster in state, but an awful kind of irritation is rising through her as she pushes against the tide of these people, humiliated and duped by the man even in death.
As she nears the corner of Gorky Street, she has to push away from the wall and walk into the sidewalk. She immediately feels that walking is more difficult. She puts her arms out, hands in front of her belly, but the tide is pushing against her. She turns right and left, and too late she thinks of turning around to join the tide: she cannot. I am going to be trampled, she realizes. A gloved hand, with a thick covering of black hair between the glove and the sleeve, comes over and between the shoulders of two of the people about to trample her and grabs her forearm. She pushes back instinctively, forcing the hand away from her belly, and the hand yanks hard and again, and pulls, refusing to yield, until Ester is wedged somehow between those two shoulders. She closes her eyes for a second, feels herself twirling, and then a tall unshaven man in a square black cap is shouting at her: “What are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
“Go home, you idiot!” The man has not let go of her hand, and now he is pulling her along Gorky Street, away from the crowd. “Go home!”
“I am!” she shouts back, and adds, “Thank you.”
Sasha was reasonably happy to have to stay home with his grandmother today, but the full meaning of staying home really seeped in only a couple of hours ago. His mother had told him as he was going to sleep the night before that he could not, under any circumstances, go outside. He slept late. He read after breakfast, a thick brown book about microbes, which failed to keep his attention. He switched to his favorite, The Three Musketeers, but after a couple of hours he began to feel restless. He listened to the radio, a sequence of speeches and morbid pronouncements. He started in on his grandmother. He just wanted to go take a look, just one look at whatever he was not supposed to see out there on the street. Finally Bella relented, and now he is waiting downstairs as she makes her slow way. She has told him he will have to hold her hand constantly, and they will only just go outside the courtyard onto Gorky Street and turn back. Just a peek: she has taken him literally, as she usually does.
As they walk through the yard and into the huge stone archway, the howl gets louder and clearer. When they are out on the sidewalk, Bella giving him the agreed-upon minute before they have to turn back, the noise is unbearable. The awful minute seems to last forever. The black cars and olive green trucks moving through this part of the street are blowing their horns. A bigger noise is coming from a distance: the city’s factories are blowing their horns. The city is screaming. This is the sound of fear.
The despot engendered as much fear in death as he had in life. The announcement of his passing hypnotized the country, spreading ever wider the mass hysteria that had characterized the past decades. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were trampled in the streets leading to the Hall of Columns. Their bloodied bodies were carried endlessly, it seemed, past Ruzya’s basement windows. There appear to have been a number of trampling incidents: in courtyards off Dmitrovka; in Pushkin Square, w
here the stranger saved Ester; and in Trubnaya Ploshad, a square at the foot of two steep hills, which saw people, some of them already dead, rolling down to a stop in the square, which had turned into a round pool of blood. This despite the fact that Moscow had been closed off, as were some of the central streets, in order to limit the number of people trying to get to the body. The number of desperate mourners doomed all attempts at crowd control, inept as they were.
Like a family that has lost a violent and all-powerful father, households across the Soviet Union went into deep, obsessive mourning—even though hundreds of thousands of these families had lost someone to the Gulag. Former prisoners describe the grief that descended on camps whose occupants had been put there by Stalin. The intelligent, the insightful, the educated, succumbed. The Soviet Union’s most admired dissident, Andrei Sakharov, then still a loyal servant of the regime, recalled falling into an altered state in the days following Stalin’s death. “In those days I veered far off the path, as they say,” he wrote. “In a letter to [my wife] Klava—intended for her eyes only, naturally—I wrote, ‘I am under the impression of a great man’s death. Thinking about his humanity.’ … Very soon I came to blush when recalling those words. How to explain their appearance? I still cannot understand it fully. I already knew a lot about the terrible crimes—arrests of the innocent, torture, hunger, violence. I could not have thought of those responsible with any emotion other than outrage and disgust. Of course, I was far from knowing everything and connecting what I knew into one cohesive picture. And somewhere in my subconscious there was the idea, impressed on me by the propaganda machine, that major historical events make cruelty unavoidable. Additionally, I was certainly affected by the general atmosphere of mourning, the emotional awareness of everyone’s susceptibility to death. In short, it appears, I was more impressionable than I would have liked to think.”
There were very, very few people in the entire country who felt consciously happy in the days of early March 1953. Ester and Ruzya were among them. Being Jewish certainly helped: it meant that for the preceding two months, following the arrests of the Jewish doctors, they had felt perched at the edge of a precipice. In Ester’s case, her non-Communist upbringing played a key role: unlike her peers, she had never had to liberate herself from the Stalinist ideology they had swallowed as children. In Ruzya’s case, the ten years she spent inside the censorship agency, with plenty of time to think about the nature of the bans and the banned, had cemented her difference from the mourning masses. Whatever small part of her may still have believed when she was a schoolgirl, or during her brief life with Samuil the believer, had long since died. Now she felt only one thing: glee.
When the messenger rang the doorbell in the early morning of March 6, Ruzya’s mother came out into the hallway, wrapped in a sleepy gray shawl. “Comrade Stalin has died, and Comrade Solodovnik must report for work,” the man at the threshold announced, and Eva burst into tears. My mother is an idiot, Ruzya noted to herself with a cruel midnight clarity. Two days later she went to the theater with a good friend from school. “How terrible that he is dead,” the friend said, for no one talked of anything else then. Ruzya exploded. “What are you saying?” she said. “Dead is a tyrant, the executioner of hundreds of thousands.” She did not know then that his victims numbered in the millions, but she had her friend convinced in three minutes flat. But she had to trust her friend to make the arguments: it would be another three years before it was safe to engage in this kind of discussion in public.
Ester and Ruzya—three years into their fast friendship by this point—may have bonded even more through their shared joy, but what each felt was different. Ester was profoundly optimistic, nearly convinced that death itself was a form of revenge and certain that justice was now within reach. Ruzya’s joy was a form of detachment, a way of separating herself from her weeping colleagues and sobbing mother. This very detachment is part of what makes her remarkable. The distinguishing characteristic of her generation—the trait that made them the Komsomol’s most devout members, Stalin’s most loyal soldiers, and much later, in the case of a very few, the dissident movement’s founders and guiding lights—was its ongoing profound engagement with the country. Sakharov, in trying to decipher why he was so moved by Stalin’s death, finally concluded that the main reason was that he “felt a part of the same mission that, it seemed to me, Stalin had undertaken: creating the might of the country so that it may live in peace following a terrible war.”
In 1936, at the dawn of the Great Terror, André Gide wrote in his book Return from the USSR (where it was banned for its fairly harsh criticisms of Soviet life), “I do not think there is any place other than the USSR where one can feel with such force that one belongs to humanity. Despite the language barrier, I have never felt myself to be more of a comrade and a brother.”
But after ten years of working to safeguard the country’s secrets and its image, Ruzya did not feel she was part of a community of “brothers”—with the qualified exceptions of one of her own three brothers, Boba and the high-school gang, and Ester. Even they, though, were separated from her by the secrets she carried around. Several members of the gang, like many others of their generation, would later go through the wrenching process of finally disengaging from a society and a regime that had fooled them, imprisoned them, humiliated and sacrificed them. In the 1970s their peers would invent the term internal émigré—a sort of double entendre that perfectly described the state of having escaped the country by finding refuge inside one’s own head. Ruzya achieved this state much earlier than most, while she was working at Glavlit, staying sane and sure, thanks to no one but herself and one or two perceptive foreigners she would never meet. Detachment was her best defense—and a radical position to have staked out in the forties and fifties.
So while Ester celebrated, all but dancing with Bella in the narrow hallway of their apartment, Ruzya felt a more private, calm kind of joy, rooted in the certainty that now things would not get worse. For a woman who had been stalked by a nightmare about cattle cars, this was a happy time.
APRIL 4, 1953, 3 A.M.
“Unlawfully arrested by the former minister of state security of the USSR without any legal basis.” Ruzya rereads the phrase in the morning’s Pravda to make sure she understands it correctly. Yes, it says the Kremlin doctors were “unlawfully arrested without any legal basis.” That their confessions were obtained through “unacceptable means.” That the state is releasing them! That their “accomplices” are also being released! And that Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the woman who originally denounced the doctors and went on to star in the case, is being stripped of her Order of Lenin—because, it says, it was “incorrectly awarded.”
“That bitch, that animal, that lowlife!” Ruzya whispers her Timashuk litany, but the last insult comes out kind of crumpled, uninspired, because the woman, Ruzya realizes, is no one now, and she does not warrant this kind of attention. Less than a month after Stalin’s death, the case against the doctors is over. And it is all Ruzya can do not to shout out or drum a victory beat on her desk—do something, anything, that is never done. She has sat alone in this room through so many nights and so many news stories, but this is the first time she has been one-on-one with good news. She is on the night shift, so it will be at least an hour or two before the first of the correspondents come in and she can find a reflection of her joy in the notes they pass from the other side of the wall. She picks up the phone and dials Batsheva’s number: her mother-in-law, she knows without thinking about it, is the person who would most love to know.
A sleepy, creaky voice answers on the sixth ring. It is Ida, the tiny old lady whose room is closest to the tall table with the heavy black telephone. What am I doing, Ruzya gasps as she quickly puts two fingers down on the telephone hook. It’s three o’clock in the morning!
APRIL 4, 1953, 5 P.M.
A huge woman moves down Gorky Street in a drunken waddle. Days from giving birth and on her way home from work, Ester is sobe
r, of course: she is simply unhinged by the day’s news. The release of the doctors—thirteen of the original fifteen arrested; two have already died—seems to her much more than justice partially restored to a few. It feels like manna from heaven, joy to the world, a miracle. She walks down the too-wide sidewalk scanning the faces of other pedestrians, and when she spots the dark kinky hair and the prominent noses of Jews, she offers a tentative smile that, in most cases, leads directly to a hug. Her momentary acquaintances end up embracing her belly more than her self, but this strikes her as appropriate: she is bringing her child into a world that just might be livable.
Though they will spend an hour and a half on the phone tonight, right now Ruzya and Ester do not embrace; they are moving in opposite directions on sidewalks on different sides of Gorky Street, and they do not see each other across the eight-lane road. After working a double shift, Ruzya is going to Batsheva’s to pick up Yolochka. In her rush, she answers the smiles she encounters with a perfunctory wave. Not that she is oblivious to the meaning of the stories she has been reading all day, but all that work and all that emotion have left her drained and withdrawn into a haze. It is only when she finally arrives at Batsheva’s and the older woman runs up to embrace her in the hallway that Ruzya realizes the source of all that friendliness was the good news of the day: it does, after all, affect not just her little family unit but all the hundreds of thousands of Jews in this country.
As the older woman’s bulk moves out of the way, Ruzya spots the tiny Ida behind her. “It was you who called last night, wasn’t it?” the old lady asks.
“Yes.” Ruzya prepares to apologize, but Ida cuts her off.
“You could have told me. I would only have been grateful.” Within weeks of the end of the Doctors’ Plot accusations and, with it, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, Ruzya was inducted into the Communist Party, quickly and without fanfare. Someone in the Glavlit Party organization restarted the process that had been stalled for five years; someone else quickly wrote her recommendation; the whole event had the feel of an inconsequential transaction.
