was not good at drawing practical conclusions from his theory.
"He hasn't written anything rash, has he?" I said no—just a few poems in his usual manner, nothing worse than what Bukharin knew of already. It was a lie, and I still feel ashamed of it. But if I had told the truth, we should not have had our Voronezh "breathing-space." Should one lie? May one lie? Is it all right to lie in order to save someone? It is good to live in conditions where one doesn't have to lie. Do such conditions exist anywhere? We were brought up from childhood to believe that lies and hypocrisy are universal. I would certainly not have survived in our terrible times without lying. I have lied all my life: to my students, colleagues and even the good friends I didn't quite trust (this was true of most of them). In the same way, nobody trusted me. This was the normal lying of the times, something in the nature of a polite convention. I am not ashamed of this kind of lying and I misled Bukharin quite deliberately, out of a calculated desire not to frighten off my only ally. How could I have done otherwise?
Bukharin said that M. could not have been arrested for slapping Tolstoi in the face. I replied that people could be arrested for anything. What could be more convenient than Article 58 of the Criminal Code,[2] which was always applied to everything?
My account of Tolstoi's threats and the phrase "We'll teach him to strike Russian writers" had their effect. He almost groaned. Probably this man who had known the Czarist jails and believed in revolutionary terror as a matter of principle had at this moment a particularly keen premonition of what lay in store for himself.
I went to see Bukharin frequently during those days. His secretary, Korotkova, described by M. in his "Fourth Prose" as a "squirrel who chews a nut with every visitor," greeted me every time with an affectionate and frightened look and immediately went in to announce me. The door of the office was at once flung open and Bukharin ran out from behind his desk to meet me: "Anything new? Nor have I. Nobody knows anything."
These were our last meetings ever. On the way from Cherdyn to Voronezh I went to Izvestia to try and see him again. "What terrible telegrams you've been sending from Cherdyn," Korotkova said and disappeared into his office. When she came out again, she was almost in tears. "Nikolai Ivanovich doesn't want to see you—because of some poem or other." I never saw him again. Later on he told Ehren- burg that Yagoda had recited the poem on Stalin by heart to him, and this so frightened him that he gave up his efforts. By then he had done everything in his power, and we had him to thank for getting a revision of M.'s sentence.
A visit to Bukharin took no more than an hour, but the general process of "going the rounds," trying to get people to intervene, meant running around the city the whole day long. The wives of arrested men (even after 1937 men far outnumbered women in the jails) all trod a well-beaten path to Peshkova in the "Political Red Cross." The only real point in going there was to talk and unburden oneself, thus creating an illusion of activity that was quite essential in these periods of anxious waiting. The "Red Cross" had no influence whatsoever. Very rarely it would forward a package to a prisoner in a labor camp or notify relatives of the result of a trial or a death sentence carried out. In 1939 this strange institution was abolished and the last link between the prisons and the outside world was thus cut. The very concept of assistance for political prisoners is, of course, quite incompatible with our system: one only has to think of the number of people who have been sent to forced labor and solitary confinement just because they were acquainted with others arrested before them. The closing down of the "Political Red Cross" was hence perfectly logical, but it meant that the relatives of prisoners now lived only on rumors, some of them deliberately put about to frighten us.
The "Red Cross" had been headed by Peshkova from the very beginning. However, I went not to her, but to her deputy, a brilliant man called Vinaver. His first question was: What was the rank of the senior police agent who had gone through the papers in our trunk? I now learned that the higher the rank of the senior agent during such searches, the more serious the case and the worse the
d '
fate in store for the victim. Since I had not known at the time about this form of divination, it had not occurred to me to note the stripes on the man's uniform. Vinaver further told me that material conditions "inside" were not at all bad—the cells were clean and the prisoners well fed: "The food is probably better than what we eat at home." I didn't have to explain to Vinaver that one would rather starve and be free, and that there was something unbearably ominous about this "civilized treatment" in prison. He knew and understood this just as well as I did. A little later he told me what to expect in the future, and he turned out to be right. He had enormous experience and knew how to draw the proper conclusions from it. I wentto see him regularly and always kept him informed of developments. I didn't do this only to have the benefit of his advice, but rather from the need to maintain contact with one of the last people in those confused times to keep a sense of law and to fight stubbornly, if vainly, against the use of brute force.
hmatova also played her part in all these moves. She managed
Though he did, in fact, have some good advice for me as well. It was he who told me to persuade M. to take things as easily as possible, not asking for a transfer to another place, for example, or drawing attention to himself in any way—in other words, to keep mum and show no signs of life at all. "Don't sign any more pieces of paper. The best thing is to let them forget all about you." In his view, this was the only way to save oneself, or at least to keep alive a little longer. Vinaver could not follow his own advice because he was already far too exposed. He disappeared during the terror of 1937. There are rumors that he lived a double life and wasn't what he seemed to be. I do not believe this and never will. I hope his name will be cleared by posterity. I know that stories of this kind are put around by the secret police themselves to compromise people who have fallen foul of them. Even if there are documents in the archives that show him in a bad light, this would still not be proof that he betrayed his visitors to the police. Even if Peshkova was led to believe Vinaver had been attached to her as a police spy, that is no reason for us to believe it. It is easy enough to fabricate documents; people signed the most incredible statements under torture, and nothing would have been easier than to put alarming ideas about police spies and provocateurs into the head of an old woman like Peshkova. But how will the historians ever get at the truth if every minute grain of it is buried under huge layers of monstrous falsehoods? By this I mean not just the prejudices and misconceptions of any age, but deliberate and premeditated lies.
7 Public Opinion
to get an interview with Yenukidze, who listened to her carefully but said not a word. Next she went to Seifullina, who at once rushed to the phone and rang a friend of hers in the secret police. His only comment was: "Let's hope they don't drive him out of hismind—our fellows are very good at it." The next day this "friend in the secret police" told Seifullina that he had made inquiries, and that it was better not to get involved in the case. When she asked why, he didn't reply. Seifullina was discouraged—as we always were, beating a hasty retreat when advised not to "get involved" in some case or other.
This is an extraordinary feature of our life: none of us ever submitted petitions and pleas, expressed our opinion about something or took any other action before finding out what people thought "at the top." Everybody was too conscious of his helplessness to try and assert himself. "I can never get anywhere with these things," Ehrenburg used to say in explanation of his refusal to help people over such matters as pensions, housing or residence permits. The trouble was that though he could ask for favors, he could never insist. Nothing could make things easier for the powers-that-be. Any initiative from below can be halted by the mere hint that it will meet with disapproval "at the top." Both the middle and the higher reaches of the bureaucracy turned this attitude to their advantage and declared certain questions "untouchable." From the second half of the twenties the "whisper of public opinion" became fainter and fainter until it ceased to be the prelude to action of any kind. All cases involving somebody's arrest were, needless to say, "off limits," and only relatives were supposed to try and do anything about them —that is, visit Peshkova and the office of the public prosecutor. It was quite exceptional for an outsider to involve himself in activity on behalf of a prisoner, and anybody who did deserves all due credit. Since M.'s poem had given cause for offense to the most awesome person in the land, there was very good reason to keep right out of the whole business. I was grateful to Pasternak, therefore, when he volunteered to help. He came to see me with Akhmatova and asked me whom he should approach. I suggested he see Bukharin, whose attitude to M.'s arrest I already knew, and Demian Bedny.