Tatiana Vasilievna kept a cow—she told us she could never have brought up her children on her husband's wages, and it was the cow that saved them. The whole family had long since become "proletarian," and this cow was their only remaining link with village life. They bought hay from collective farmers and the bargaining was always done around the samovar. Drinking tea with them, Tatiana Vasilievna heard a great deal about collectivization and life in the kolkhozes with its production targets and "labor-days." [23] Once, having seen her guests out and still flushed from her conversation with them, she came into our room and started telling us how her eldest son had been sent out, as a young Komsomol, to help in the mass deportation of the kulaks. He had been away quite a long time, and when he returned he said nothing to his parents and would not reply to any of their questions. "Who knows what he was doing out there? Goodness knows what I brought him up for." As she talked with the collective farmers, she kept wondering what her eldest son might have been involved in. Her husband tried to calm her by saying "They're all the same nowadays, Mother, so why should you get all worked up like that?"
We soon noticed that, for all their common sense about what was going on, our hosts had no patience with any kind of political struggle or activity. "Why did they get mixed up in all this? They were earning good money before, weren't they?" the old man said as he read about the show trials in Pravda: he disapproved of the very fact that the victims of these trials had involved themselves in some kind of political activity. But for us, the horrifying thing was that nobody had lifted a finger to prevent Stalin from seizing power. On the contrary, they had all helped him to pick off the others one by one. The old man remembered how the defendants had been "in the old days" and he suspected that they had been "meddling," as he put it. Both he and Tatiana Vasilievna approved of M. because they regarded him as a passive victim who had nothing to do with the regime and had simply got into trouble for writing things. They would not have been so upset if their sons had kept clear of politics, had nothing to do with the ruling group and "stuck to their own class." Any kind of resistance seemed to them futile and dishonest. They always referred to it as "meddling." In Kalinin we took part for the first time in elections.[24] Taken aback by the way in which they were held, M. did not know what his attitude toward them should be. At first he tried to look on the bright side by saying: "This is only the beginning—when people get used to the idea, everything will be normal." But later he said he could not possibly take part in this farce. Our hosts reasoned with him, saying, "You can't swim against the tide" and "Why should you be different from others? If everybody else votes, so will we." But their final and most telling argument was: "Don't get on the wrong side of them or you'll never hear the end of it." This was all too true, particularly for people in our position. So we all went to vote: they at six o'clock in the morning, as they had been told at the factory, and we a little later, after breakfast.
If Tatiana Vasilievna was law-abiding, it was not because she respected the law—on the contrary, she took a very dim view of it— but because of her general philosophy of life. She thought her first duty was to survive as best she could, and to this end it was essential, in her view, to avoid all needless activities. The idea of sacrificing oneself for an idea, or dying for it, would have seemed the height of absurdity to her. Her watchword was that they were "little people" who should not stick their necks out. We even sensed a certain standoffishness in this attitude: while the people "up top" fought and murdered each other, trading on the name of the proletariat (which she was so conscious of belonging to), they, as workers, would have nothing to do with it and kept their hands clean. Their business was to live and work, while the others went to the devil in their own sweet way. But there was nothing religious about her, and she never went to church (though she kept lamps lit before the ikons, as her parents had done before her).
There were times when M. and I even seemed, in Tatiana Vasi- lievna's eyes, to be part, in a very small way, of the harebrained "upper crust." This was whenever she suspected that we were lacking in the will to live. Reading some horribly cynical or grotesque item in the newspaper, M. would frequently exclaim: "We are finished!" He first said this when he showed me Stalin's famous comment on Gorki's tale "The Girl and Death." It was reported in the press that Stalin had written in his copy of the book: "This thing is more powerful than Goethe's Faust. Love triumphs over Death." M. also said "We are finished!" as he showed me an illustrated magazine with a picture on the front cover of Stalin stretching out his hand to Yezhov. "Where else," M. gasped, "would the head of the State have himself photographed with the chief of his secret police?" But the worst thing about it was the expression on Yezhov's face. As M. said, "Look, you can see there's nothing he wouldn't do for Stalin." Once, at the table, Tatiana Vasilievna read out Stalin's speech at a graduation parade of army cadets when he drank a toast to "the science we need" and denounced "the science we do not need." These words were ominous: if there was a science that was not needed, then it would be uprooted and destroyed. This time, when M. pronounced his usual "We are finished," Tatiana Vasilievna and her husband were very cross with us: "You're always talking about being finished. You'll bring it on yourself yet. You ought to think about living, instead. Why don't you learn from us? We manage to live, don't we? Just keep out of things and you'll be all right." As M. summed it up: "Man's first duty is to live."
After M.'s arrest I came back to the sturdy frame house on the outskirts of Kalinin to get the basket full of manuscripts I had left there. When they heard of M.'s arrest, Tatiana Vasilievna and her husband were so upset that I broke down in tears myself. Tatiana Vasilievna, usually so undemonstrative, put her arms around me and said: "Don't cry: you'll be like the saints." And the old man added: "Your husband could never have done harm to anyone. If they're arresting people like him, things must be really bad." They both said they would tell their sons about it so they would know whom they were serving and bowing down to. "Only they won't listen to us," the old man suddenly sighed. His sons were "Stalin's Falcons"—exemplary airmen of the type so accurately portrayed by Solzhenitsyn in the person of Zotov. There certainly was no point in telling them anything—they personified the ideas that then ruled the world. Now, in the middle of the sixties, they are the fathers who complain all the time about their sons—the grandchildren of Tatiana Vasi- lievna's generation. They are rejected both by their parents and by their children, who have formed an alliance against them. In this connection I remember a meeting on a train with another relic of "Stalin's empire." This one, unlike the other one I have already described, was all for the Twentieth Congress. This was because he had been in trouble under Stalin—he hadn't exactly been arrested, but it had been a near thing. Now he was enjoying his retirement on a good pension as a former Party official. Not to spend his time in idleness, he had taken on the job of giving political instruction in a Leningrad technical college. As one teacher to another, he began to tell me his troubles. On one election day he had come to the college early to get all the students out to vote, but none of them wanted to. He said they should take an example from people like himself who had "made the Revolution" and told them he had got up at the crack of dawn to go and vote. To this they replied that nobody had asked him to make a revolution and that people had been better off before. This had left him speechless, and the whole of his "revolutionary" claptrap had been to no avail. "What can you make of these young people nowadays? How do you cope with them?" I told him in all honesty that I got on well with them and they never made trouble for me. These are, in effect, Tatiana Vasilievna's grandchildren— though sometimes I wonder whether they have anything in their heads apart from their negative attitude toward everything. . . .