Savitsky was taken to Moscow, where he was imprisoned for a time in the Lubyanka, the imposing headquarters of the NKVD/KGB. The full extent of how badly the Eurasianist movement had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence was brought home to him there, during the interrogations, when he was shown evidence against himself which had clearly been prepared by people inside the movement – people whose identities he knew and whom he had trusted. ‘He couldn’t see the names, but he could recognize the handwriting’, according to Ivan. Though Savitsky never divulged whose handwriting he had seen, one of the informants was very likely to have been Arapov.
After being held in the Lubyanka for some months, Savitsky was sent to a work camp in Mordovia, in central Russia. Little detail is known of his ordeal, and he would not speak of it on his return. But he was almost certainly tortured under interrogation, convicted of some bogus crime and transported in an unheated cattle car to his gulag, to spend the next ten years felling trees. Strangely, he seemed to bear little ill will towards his homeland. He was unutterably homesick and desperate for any reunion with Russia, even if that was in prison:
For a while, his family was able to receive regular updates from Savitsky’s sister, who lived in Moscow and was able to visit him in the gulag fairly regularly. But after 1948, such visits became impossible: she worked at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and after that year all academy personnel were forbidden from making contact with foreign countries or citizens, including, in this case, her brother.
From 1948 to June 1955, the family had no word of the elder Savitsky, and did not even know whether he was dead or alive. Finally, in June 1955, one General Chernavin visited the family in Prague and, hands shaking, produced a letter from Savitsky, who had been released from the camp. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev embarked on reforms and by 1955 had released most political prisoners. Savitsky was in the town of Potma, at a rest home, awaiting transport back to Prague. The letter had been written on the eve of Easter, 1955:
Christ has risen, my dear Vera, Nika and Vanya. I am writing you this letter to congratulate you on the coming great celebration, and give you some news about myself, and receive some news from you.
He wrote that he had been let out on 7 April. In further letters, he revealed that after an operation in 1953 he had been unable to do manual labour, and had been given the job of camp librarian. In what may have been the ultimate manifestation of Stockholm syndrome, he was also thinking about exchanging his Czech citizenship for Soviet. Finally, in January 1956, he was able to travel back to Prague, where he was met by his wife and two sons, who were now in their twenties. He was clean-shaven, emaciated and slightly stooped. He began working again, as a translator on the magazine Soviet Czechoslovakia.
Prague, which in the interwar years had sparkled with intellectual vigour, was now a communist country, with no chance of fostering open intellectual exchange. All the academics Savitsky had once enjoyed so much were now either dead or had emigrated. The one bright spot was when Jakobson visited once in 1956 to attend a linguistics conference. He was by now teaching at Harvard, and was making quite a name for himself with theories of ‘markedness’ and ‘linguistic universals’; but politically it was very touchy for him. Jakobson had been investigated as a communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the witch-hunt congressional committee set up by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The first thing Jakobson did when he visited the Savitsky household was to place a pillow over the telephone.
Savitsky was rescued from his boredom and despair by a chance letter from Matvey Gukovsky, a scholar he had met in Mordovia. Gukovsky wanted to put Savitsky in touch with someone – a fellow camp survivor with an abiding interest in steppe peoples; someone who shared his Eurasianist views; someone with an unmistakable and exalted surname, with whom he could share some of his lifetime of scholarship and some of his tragedy. This man was a historian by the name of Lev Gumilev.
PART II
CHAPTER FIVE
REQUIEM
Being the subject of one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century must be both an honour and a burden. Particularly the latter, if the subject is your own imminent death.
It was 1937 and the height of Stalin’s terror when Lev Gumilev was arrested in Leningrad in his dormitory room and shipped to an arctic labour camp. For 17 months, his mother, the renowned Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, waited in lines and wrote countless letters beseeching police officials to inform her of the fate of her son. Her struggle is immortalized in the poem ‘Requiem’, her most famous work.
‘Requiem’ was written for all the mothers (and other women) whom Akhmatova met in the wintry streets outside police offices in Leningrad, wearing peasants’ felt boots to keep their feet from freezing, waiting to send parcels or receive news of their loved ones who had not come back from work one day, or who had been bundled into black NKVD cars in the middle of the night and never returned. The poem, which alternates between elegy, lamentation and witness, culminates in its most famous stanzas – possibly the most famous lines written in Russia in the past century: