by Masha Gessen
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MAY 1956
At 7:45 in the morning Ruzya is getting ready to leave work. Not physically ready, mind you—even though leaving early or arriving late for work no longer carries a criminal penalty, as it did in Stalin’s time, she still would not risk her job for anything—but mentally ready, slowly detaching and relaxing. The Americans are done for the night, which, from their perspective, followed an uneventful day. Though foreign correspondents are not nearly so isolated as they were just two years ago, most of them still do not have a sense of the city, do not know that it is buzzing with an event of monumental proportions. An Italian film festival opened in Moscow yesterday. In a city of millions, only a few hundred will be able to attend each day—and these will be only the carefully selected, the well connected, the preternaturally lucky—but everyone is talking about it. Some pass around lists of films with brief synopses and musical, otherworldly names: Mario Matolli, Federico Fellini, Renato Castellani, Sophia Loren. Each star, each director, sounds like a genius and a beauty. Ruzya wonders briefly whether the Italian correspondents realized the magnitude of the event on which they surely reported yesterday, during the day shift. No, of course they did not. They could not know.
It is another ten minutes to the end of her shift when the secretary walks in with an envelope. A late dispatch? An early one? In an envelope?
“The Italian correspondents brought this for you,” the secretary mumbles, and disappears back behind the door.
The envelope is unsealed—to save the secretary the trouble of steaming it open. There is a small piece of thin cardboard—a ticket to the morning show at the festival. There is no note.
No, of course she cannot go. The Italian correspondents have no doubt planned it so that they would be sitting on either side of her. Everyone wants to see the censor, and the censor cannot be seen. But the movie has to be seen. What are the stakes, after all? She is no longer afraid of the cattle cars. If the secretary reports her, if she is caught at the movie theater, if the Italians brag of their invention, she could lose her job. This is a great price to pay for seeing a movie. Is it too great?
In the two hours before the morning show begins, Ruzya walks to the movie theater, taking a circuitous route, stopping at several food stores, pausing to think on the Big Stone Bridge over the Moscow River, where she plans her steps in detail. She will wait in the large foyer until the film is about to begin and will slip into her seat once the lights go down. She will slip out before they go back on. She will not take off her beret. She will look at the screen and never to the sides.
She does exactly as she has planned. She never forgets the curious correspondents at her sides; she does not loosen her coat or take off her hat, even as she starts to sweat; and she gets up and leaves without looking back at the film’s last frames.
She will always remember that movie—Federico Fellini’s La Strada—as the best film she ever saw. For days and weeks she will remember the moment when she left the theater, as Anthony Quinn, the crude circus performer Zampanò, who let his one true love get away, walks off into the sea.
She recalls and rehearses the story of Zampanò’s life as she makes her way home and, once there, while she gets ready for bed and goes to sleep. She will tell it to Yolochka tonight, when they go for their walk. How tense these walks make her. She invented them as an antidote to Yolochka’s reading. Her daughter reads everywhere, all the time: in class, holding her book half under the desk; at home after she goes to bed, huddling under her blanket with a flashlight; in the reading room at the library, where she goes after school and stays till closing. She is regularly caught reading and punished for it: her teachers summon Ruzya to school; her grandmother Eva takes away Yolochka’s flashlight; Ruzya herself goes to libraries and demands that her reading-room membership be revoked. Yolochka just finds another library to join, locking Ruzya into a hopeless chase. Soon she is also going to reading groups and young writers’ groups. Ruzya has wasted hours trying to explain that this dusty habit of reading all day is unhealthy, that she is resorting to desperate measures only to make sure her little girl gets some fresh air.
Ruzya felt sure Yolochka would develop some terrible disease that afflicted sedentary children and this would mean that she, her mother, had failed. The nightly walks were her attempt at compromise: if Yolochka insisted on going to the library every day, then she would have to accompany her mother on a walk every night. Yolochka submitted in wounded silence at first, and Ruzya struggled to find topics or stories that would make their wanderings along the crooked, dimly lit streets enjoyable. But what could she, with her top-secret job and precious little free time, tell her well-read daughter? She talked about the theater, mostly, the shows she attended with friends; her thirteen-year-old listened sullenly, dropping occasional comments that made Ruzya suspect she did not know theater as well as her daughter did. Then one day Yolochka suggested she could recite some poetry to her mother, and Ruzya heard poems she had never known—by Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova. Yolochka seemed to have memorized entire books; she recited them every time now when they went outside, sometimes shifting between poets in such a way that they seemed to be talking to one another, other times literally going through an entire poetry collection from memory.
Ruzya will sleep until about seven in the evening. Then she will dress and have breakfast and wait for Yolochka, who will be home from the library for their date at eight. They will go outside, and Ruzya will tell her daughter that she went to the movies this morning—yes, in the morning, yes, alone; you would not believe what I saw: a Fellini film at the Italian festival; yes, the one the whole city is talking about. Then she will tell her everything: what it looks like, how it is shot, and, most important, the story line. And, of course, how good the actors are. She will be offering something of value to her daughter, who will take away to her friends some much-sought-after information from the fascinating, inaccessible Italian film festival.
MARCH 8, 1956
A wispy boy in a short jacket stands in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Ruzya takes the roses—they are short-stemmed and, it seems, countless, the bouquet coming apart in her arms, looking like it will separate into so many flowers she will never be able to put it back together—and thanks the boy, not even attempting to look like she ever expected to take delivery of a bunch of red roses. A note on a small, official-looking card informs her that “from now, whatever happens, you will always receive a bouquet of roses on International Women’s Day.”
Inside four months she will marry the author of that note, the tall, elegant, square-jawed Semyon Zenin, a writer and a talker. He showed up barely a week ago, announcing himself with a businesslike phone call: he claimed he wanted to take German lessons. He had been referred by a friend of hers—no big surprise, since all her friends knew she was in perpetual need of additional income. But this friend, as it turned out, was playing matchmaker from the start. She prepared for a first lesson, but he took her to a restaurant instead, and he talked. Later she will learn that friends say, “Zenin with two shots of vodka inside him is not yet a talker, and Zenin with four shots inside him is no longer a talker.” He ordered precisely three shots, drank the vodka fast, and talked all night; she was hooked.
It has been fourteen years since she was widowed. And oh, there have been men. Her first postwar romance, that desolate affair with the married colonel, dragged on for years, but ultimately she thawed enough to love. There was Alexander, a boy eight years younger than she, who climbed in through her bedroom window at night and proclaimed undying love for two years. But his mother, an aging Austrian Jew obsessed with the idea of returning home—she would eventually succeed in 1961, after nearly thirty years’ efforts—would not hear of taking on an older woman with a child, and so Alexander ultimately retreated. There has been love and conflict and drama that she has sworn not to tell her granddaughter about, at least not until after this book has been published. But now here
is Semyon, fourteen years older than she, a man, not a boy, a survivor whose wounds do not embarrass him: he turns them into stories.
Unlike Ruzya, he had an adult life before the war. A Jew, and a believer like Samuil—incredibly, this one, too, admires secret-police founder Dzerzhinsky, and, incredibly, this holds a certain nostalgic charm for her—Semyon became a member of the Komsomol in the 1920s and an “ideology worker” in the 1930s. He was an editor at Izvestia, the country’s second-largest newspaper, under the direction of Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s once-ally and occasional critic. Izvestia of the mid-thirties was one of the last bastions of revolutionary romanticism, though by then one had to be highly discerning to read any criticism between the lines of Bukharin’s articles. Bukharin’s staff included several old Bolsheviks—participants in the revolution, a breed already endangered by Stalinist purges. The topic at which the editors hammered away most tirelessly was the inevitability of a war with Germany and the intrinsically evil nature of Hitler’s regime. Bukharin himself wrote of its “beastly bullying, oppression, violence and war.” A paranoically insightful reader may have perceived parallels between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, but Semyon, even from his vantage point inside the editorial offices, did not see this.
Bukharin was arrested in February 1937. He would star in the grandest of Stalin’s show trials, in which he and eighteen others were convicted of numerous acts of terror and espionage. Every night, it seemed, the police came for someone who worked for Izvestia, until the offices were decimated. Every night Semyon waited for them. They never came for him. A year went by. Every day in March 1938 Semyon did his bit to get the reports on the trial ready for the morning paper; every day moved the trial closer to its inevitable conclusion, until, in the wee hours of March 13, all nineteen defendants were sentenced to death. Two days later they were shot. More arrests followed. Once again Semyon waited for his turn, and still it did not come. Why? Semyon knew himself not to be a snitch. He could not explain his luck, and he lost his mind.
Ultimately, Semyon had to be confined. Disconnected and disoriented, he watched from inside the psychiatric ward as Stalin proclaimed friendship with Hitler’s Germany and moved to divide Poland between the two countries. Semyon agreed with his doctors that he could not go back into the world outside: it no longer made any sense. Until, that is, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. It was the first event that seemed to belong in the world as Semyon knew it. He set about writing petitions to be allowed to volunteer for the front, and sometime later, after all the sane and healthy men had been used up and the military opened up to the insane, the infirm, and the very young, Semyon’s petitions were granted.
He remade himself as a soldier. He dug in outside of Moscow; he held fast while the Red Army was on the defensive; and he marched forward as it began to attack, moving westward and turning into a marauding, raping mob. After four years, he still was not sure he was equipped to return to the confusing world of peacetime Russia, and so he stayed in the war, working to set up the new order in Soviet-occupied Vienna.
Accomplished, healed, finally sure of himself, he went back to Moscow, anticipating something of a hero’s welcome—only to find that the country was now divided into the Jews and the non-Jews, and he was once again on the wrong side of the divide. He had no one here—that much he had prepared himself for—and he was no one but an unemployed and unemployable Jew with a history of mental illness, questionable political affiliations, and some pretty funny ideas about the way the world ought to work.
He tugged at every string he found until someone got him a low-level job at a film studio. He climbed up the ladder there slowly, hanging on by his fingernails to each successive step. Life gradually began taking shape when he found a wife, a younger Russian woman—and lost all semblance of order again when he discovered, by absurd accident, that his wife was setting him up to be arrested as a “rootless cosmopolitan.” Apparently it was the apartment she was after, and Semyon cut his losses, leaving the apartment with her in it.
So here he is now, a man who truly is a rootless cosmopolitan, a man thrice reinvented and somewhat the worse for wear, living in a medium-size square room off Gorky Street. Will she marry him? He says he will bring her roses every year on Women’s Day. She will. He will not.
MARCH 1956
A handwritten notice glued to the wall in their shared office announced an extraordinary meeting of the department’s Party organization. So now the entire department—eight people, including the two typists, all of them, including Ruzya, Party members—are gathered for the meeting. Ruzya has a hopeful inkling of what this is about. Some of the correspondents’ dispatches in the last few days have contained fishing references to a secret Khrushchev speech at the Party congress now under way—references apparently intended to gauge the censors’ reaction. Ruzya has been checking the stories against the official text of Khrushchev’s opening report—a mostly dull speech that contained an intriguing mention of Stalin’s and his cohorts’ overreaching while in power, but also praised Stalin for conquering “the enemies of the people.” Rumor of the existence of a second speech seeped out a week or so after this text was released, and Ruzya has the idea that the meeting they have been called to is related to the secret speech and will therefore be worth remembering so she can retell it to her friends who are not in the Party: she is thinking, of course, of Ester. She clears her throat and prepares to listen. Her colleagues project a uniform look of strained enthusiasm, as though they expected to have to struggle to stay awake over the next couple of hours.
The secretary of their Party organization, a pudgy bespectacled man Ruzya has rarely seen, removes a thick stack of typing paper from his fat brown briefcase. “The speech of Comrade Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress will be read aloud in its entirety today,” he announces. There is more shifting in the room; a couple of people cough preventively, as before a performance at the philharmonic.
There will be dead, stunned silence in the next hours as the reader relentlessly, with short breaks only to take drinks of water or turn the page, traces three decades of terror and betrayal. He reads letters and reports received by Stalin—alternately dry and impassioned accounts of torture and treachery. A spine broken during interrogation. A former ally pleading for intervention from the very man who has ordered him killed. And then there is more. Stalin is blamed for the Soviet Union’s failure to prepare for the Nazi invasion. And he was wrong—a criminal—to deport several ethnic groups to Siberia at the end of the war. And the Doctors’ Plot was a lie and a crime engineered by Stalin himself, as was virtually everything that happened in this country between 1924 and 1953. Ruzya feels herself shudder: for years she has said this, if not in so many words, and she has thought it for much longer. But to hear the truth being broadcast in the colorless voice of a Party functionary to a roomful of people who would have reported you for saying something like this just a few hours ago—this is thrilling and sickening at once. She gives no thought to why the information is finally being released. She does not care what has moved Khrushchev to break open the past: his conscience or his desire to shore up his own power. That this is happening at all—she feels like the walls of this building should be shaking in outraged disbelief. She wants to get out of this room, with its thick, astonished tension, and she wants to stay to soak in every word. Of course, this is not a choice: she cannot break Party discipline and she cannot leave even when the meeting runs on past its announced time, past all sorts of working hours, and the image of Yolochka cooped up in some dusty reading room starts to gnaw at Ruzya.
The streets are long empty by the time the reading finishes and the department’s Communists file out of the building in an orderly fashion, a few silent, a couple straining to chat about summer camp for children or tomorrow’s weather. No one dares talk about what they just heard. Elsewhere in Moscow, the readings of Khrushchev’s secret speech to Party members are proceeding in their different ways. Some organization
s hold long discussions. The Party members in the Writers’ Union hold a three-day meeting with confessions and mea culpas, tears and rants, and even suggestions for changing the way things are done—suggestions that, in another couple of years, will sound naively dangerous. No such floodgates have been opened at Glavlit, where everyone will continue to fear everyone else and where Khrushchev’s speech, like any other document originating with the authorities, will, in every professionally censorious brain, be processed into a set of guidelines on how best to tread the Party line. Ruzya walks alone, clasping her hands together through the pockets of her coat, as though to hold the joy close, to make sure she transports it whole until it can be shared.
The three years between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s speech had changed Ruzya’s job in ways she had never dared dream. Her job description and the mechanics of her job remained essentially the same: she was still required to quash anything that did not simply paraphrase Soviet newspaper articles. But the sense of inhabiting a gradually imploding space lifted as soon as the Doctors’ Plot was debunked, and from that point on her world began to expand. The correspondent corps, which had become skeletal by the early 1950s, grew quickly. Journalists began to arrive—from Poland, Italy, Hungary, Sweden, Romania, the world. All of them had to be censored. So the censors began to cram languages. At first all six of the department’s “political editors” were herded into a room in Glavlit’s main building (it would have been more logical, of course, to hold the sessions at the Central Telegraph, but there seemed no way to clear the teachers for entry), but only two of the censors proved capable of learning languages by shorthand. So Ruzya and Margarita, a dowdy middle-aged woman Ruzya tried but never managed to like, were left to study together. It was exhilarating, even if Hungarian never did stick. For the first time since she joined Glavlit in 1943, Ruzya felt like she could just simply like her job—not because it gave her financial security or the occasional rides in a chauffeured Volga, but because she enjoyed what she was doing. Some days she even thought that the undeniably positive aspects of her work—she and her colleagues did, after all, help keep Soviet military secrets secure—might outweigh the negative. It was an easy delusion to entertain: she was learning so much more and banning so much less than before. But there would come a day, in 1956, when she had to admit that hers was, as her father had put it, “a gendarme’s job”—when she felt it with a clarity that was perhaps more terrible than ever before.
