uring out two days in Leningrad we stayed overnight at Akhmatova's place, where everybody did their best to cheer M. up. They even called in Andronikov, then still in the bloom of youth, to show off his party tricks to M. In the evening we sat at the table, drinking toasts and talking. We all knew what we were about to go through, but nobody wanted to cast a shadow on the few moments left to us. Akhmatova seemed at ease and in high spirits, her husband Punin was quite boisterous and laughed a good deal— but I noticed that his left cheek and eyelid twitched more than ever.
The next day we went to see Stenich, the man whom Blok called a "Russian dandy." Among the Soviet writers he had the reputation of a cynic, but that may have been because they were so afraid of his sharp tongue. Like Andronikov, Stenich also liked to put on little acts for his friends, but his were very different. In the mid-twenties his star turn had been to talk about how much he feared and loved his superiors—so much so that he liked nothing more than to help the director of Gosizdat* on with his coat. This was rather coldly received by his fellow writers, who preferred to dismiss Stenich as a cynic reveling in his own servility rather than recognize themselves in the portrait he held up to them.
Stenich had begun by writing verse. In Kiev in 1919 he had run a kind of literary night club (called The Junk Room) in which he recited his rhymed burlesques. Many people still remembered his lines on "The Council of People's Commissars in Session," which had a genuine satirical bite, unlike the usual stuff turned out to order on topical themes. He soon stopped writing poetry himself, but he retained a great love for it. He might have become a brilliant essayist or critic, but the times were not auspicious, and he was now simply a kind of man-about-town who frittered away his time in gossip. He also did a few translations which were regarded as models of the art of prose translation. He was a man with a great feeling for language and literature and an acute sense of the modern age—this he managed to convey in his translations of American writers.
He greeted M. with embraces. When M. told him what we had come for, Stenich sighed and said that most of the writers were away just now, though some were out at their dachas. This made it # The State Publishing House.
more difficult to raise money for us. But his wife, Liuba, was more encouraging, and said she would go out to Sestroretsk. After lunch she put on a stylish hat and set off. Stenich insisted we stay until her return. Several people looked in on us there, including Akhmatova and Volpe—the same Volpe who had been dismissed as editor of Zvezda for publishing M.'s "Journey to Armenia," including the final part about King Shapukh who was granted "one extra day" by the Assyrian. This ending had been forbidden by the censorship. For us, this short time with Stenich was like King Shapukh's "one extra day."
Liuba returned with her booty: a little money and some clothing. Among the other things were two pairs of trousers, one very large and the other exactly M.'s size. We took the very large pair back to Savelovo and gave them to the criminal we had got to know—the one who had said that in such places as Alexandrov people of his kind were "skimmed off like cream." M. was never able to keep a second pair of trousers—there was always somebody whose need was even greater. At that time Shklovski also belonged to the category of people who possessed only one pair of trousers, and his son Nikita could expect no better from life. His mother once asked Ni- kita what he would do if a good fairy granted him one wish. Without a moment's hesitation he replied: "Get trousers for all my friends." In our conditions a man was better judged by his readiness to give a pair of trousers to a less fortunate friend than by his words —let alone by his articles, novels, or stories. From my observations, Soviet writers are a thick-skinned lot, but in the presence of Liuba Stenich it was not easy to refuse to help an exiled fellow writer.
The day we spent with Stenich seemed calm and peaceful, but reality kept breaking in. Stenich was friendly with the wife of Diki, and both she and her husband had been arrested. Stenich was now waiting his turn, and was worried about how Liuba would get on when she was left alone. In the evening the phone rang, but when Liuba picked up the receiver there was no sound at the other end. She burst into tears—we all knew that the police often checked in this way whether you were home before coming for you. However, nothing happened that evening, and Stenich was not arrested until the following winter. As we said goodbye on the landing, he pointed to the doors of the other apartments and told us when and in what circumstances their occupants had been taken away by the police. He was the only person on two floors who was still at liberty—if it could be called liberty. "Now it's my turn," he said. The next time we came to Leningrad, Stenich had been arrested, and when we went to see Lozinski, he was very frightened. "Do you know what happened to your Amphitryon?" he asked. He thought that Stenich had been picked up because of the day we had spent with him, and we had to leave Lozinski at once, before we even had time to ask him for more money.
I think he exaggerated the extent to which our secret police went in for ordinary detective work. They were not in the least bit interested in real facts—all they wanted were lists of people to arrest, and these they got from their network of informers and the volunteers who brought them denunciations. To meet their quotas, all they needed were names of people, not details about their comings and goings. During interrogations they always, as a matter of routine, collected "evidence" against people whom they had no intention of arresting—just in case it was ever needed. I have heard of a woman who heroically went through torture rather than give "evidence" against Molotov! Spasski was asked for evidence against Liuba Ehrenburg, whom he had never even met. He managed to send word about this from the forced-labor camp, and Liuba was warned—apparently Akhmatova passed on the message to her. Liuba could not believe it: "What Spasski? I don't know him." She was still naive in those days, but later she understood everything.
In the torture chambers of the Lubianka they were constantly adding to the dossiers of Ehrenburg, Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoi, and others whom they had no intention of touching. Dozens, if not hundreds of people were sent to camps on a charge of being involved in a "conspiracy" headed by Tikhonov and Fadeyev! Among them was Spasski. Wild inventions and monstrous accusations had become an end in themselves, and officials of the secret police applied all their ingenuity to them, as though reveling in the total arbitrariness of their power. Their basic principle was just what Fur- manov had told us at the end of the twenties: "Give us a man, and we'll make a case." On the day we had spent at Stenich's apartment, his name was almost certainly already on a list of persons due to be arrested—his telephone number would have been found in Diki's address book, and no further information about him was needed.
The principles and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police work or with security. The only purpose of terror is intimidation. To plunge the whole country into a state of chronic fear, the number of victims must be raised to astronomical levels, and on every floor of every building there must always be several apartments from which the tenants have suddenly been taken away. The remaining inhabitants will be model citizens for the rest of their lives—this will be true for every street and every city through which the broom has swept. The only essential thing for those who rule by terror is not to overlook the new generations growing up without faith in their elders, and to keep on repeating the process in systematic fashion. Stalin ruled for a long time and saw to it that the waves of terror recurred from time to time, always on an even greater scale than before. But the champions of terror invariably leave one thing out of account—namely, that they can't kill everyone, and among their cowed, half-demented subjects there are always witnesses who survive to tell the tale.