The car stopped in the Kitaigorod district.* Our reason for going there, if I remember rightly, was to call at the Central Rest Homes Bureau to tell them our day of departure so they could arrange for horses to be sent to meet us at Charusti on the Murom railroad. Sa- matikha was twenty-five kilometers farther on from there.
Fadeyev got out of the car and gave M. a warm farewell embrace. M. promised to come and see him when he got back. "Yes, yes—you must," Fadeyev said as we parted. His elaborate farewell and oddly gloomy air made us feel uneasy. What was wrong? Everybody had more than his fair share of troubles in those years, so there was nothing all that surprising about it. Elated by our first windfall in Moscow—fancy the Union of Writers being so kind to us!—we never for a moment thought that Fadeyev's gloom might somehow be connected with M.'s fate and Andreyev's refusal to help—a terrible sentence in itself. Fadeyev, with all his experience and excellent understanding of Party affairs, could not have failed to see this.
And why, incidentally, was he not at all worried about talking to us in front of his chauffeur? Nobody ever did this. Under our system of surveillance, the chauffeurs of prominent officials always reported on their employers' every word and gesture. I happen to know that after Stalin's death, when Surkov took over the running of the Union of Writers, the first thing he did on being given Fadeyev's car was to refuse it on some idiotic pretext—saying it was too old or the wrong make—and get rid of the chauffeur that came with it. Evidently, in the new climate after Stalin's death, he hoped to avoid constant eavesdropping. Surely Fadeyev was not so fanatically certain of his immunity that he took no account of the "ears of State" in his car? Or was it, rather, that he had already given his assent to the fate prepared for M. and could therefore look bright- eyed at his chauffeur as he spoke with the untouchable in the back seat? Liuba [Ehrenburg] has told me that Fadeyev was a cold and cruel man—something quite compatible with emotionalism and the ability to shed a tear at the right moment. This became very clear, according to Liuba, at the time of the execution of the Yiddish writ-
* A district in the center of Moscow.
ers.[26] Then also it was a case of tearful farewell embraces after he had signified his formal agreement to their arrest and liquidation—even though the Yiddish writers, unlike Mandelstam, were his friends.
But, unfamiliar as we were with the ways of officialdom in this irrational country of ours, we were just baffled by such duplicity, and certainly didn't understand how on earth a writer could behave like this, even if he held a high post in the writers' organization. We still didn't realize the extent to which people had been corrupted, nor did we know that heads of departments were always required to countersign lists of their subordinates who had been arrested, and were thus deliberately made party to their destruction. In 1938, however, this particular function would have been carried out by Stavski rather than Fadeyev—or so people say. The trouble is that we cannot be certain about anything: the past is still wrapped in mystery, and we still do not really know what they did to us.
Less than a year later, during a party in Lavrushinski Street to celebrate the award of the first Government decorations to be given to writers, Fadeyev learned about the death of M. and drank to his memory with the words "We have done away with a great poet." Translated into Soviet idiom, this meant: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
This is not quite the end of Fadeyev's involvement in our story. Shortly before the end of the war I had a chance encounter with him as I was going up to the Shklovskis' in the elevator. I was just about to close the door and press the button when the doorwoman shouted that someone else was coming—I waited a moment, and in walked Fadeyev. He did not greet me, and, being used to this kind of thing, I simply turned away so as not to embarrass a man who didn't want to recognize me. But as soon as the elevator started to move, Fadeyev bent down to my ear and whispered to me that it was Andreyev who had signed M.'s sentence. Or at least that is how I understood the sense of his words, which were roughly: "The business with Osip Emilievich was handled by Andreyev." Then the elevator stopped and Fadeyev got out. I did not yet know about the three- man tribunalst which operated then, and had imagined that sentences were passed only by the secret police. I was therefore puzzled by this reference to Andreyev. I also noticed that Fadeyev was a little drunk.
Why did he speak to me like that, and was he telling the truth? It is possible that in his fuddled brain the memory of our last conversation in his car simply sparked off an association with Andreyev, whom he had mentioned to us then. But he may have been speaking the truth. I know from the letter of the secret-police official who killed himself in Tashkent that Andreyev was one of the direct agents of Stalin's terrorist policies and came to Tashkent to brief the secret police on the "simplified interrogation procedures" required at the "new stage." [27]
But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence—in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the other world. It was also because we were all so well disciplined that we took part in the killing of our own kind and justified ourselves by reference to "historical necessity." The St. Bartholemew massacre lasted only one night—perhaps the cutthroats responsible for it boasted of their heroic deed to the end of their days—yet it has remained in human memory forever. The humanist ideas of the nineteenth century—no matter how ill-founded and specious they may have been—had nevertheless become ingrained in our minds, and though there is never any lack of hired killers, one cannot help wondering what old revolutionaries, dedicated as young men to the service of mankind, must have thought as they sacrificed their humanist principles to "historical necessity." And is it conceivable that people will not learn from our example?
Though I can be certain of nothing, I feel that when he gave us a lift in his car Fadeyev already knew what was going to happen to M., and, what is more, that he at once understood the reason for M. being sent to a rest home not belonging to the Union of Writers.