M. told me that the interrogator's methods constantly betrayed the influence of stereotyped official procedure. Our authorities assumed that for each class and even sub-group of the population there were certain standard remarks that were often made in conversation. It is said that the research section of the Lubianka had compiled reams of such "typical" remarks. Christophorovich tried some of them out on M., for example: "You said to So-and-so that you would rather live in Paris than in Moscow." The theory was that M., as a bourgeois writer and ideologist of a dying class, must surely be eager to return to its bosom. The name of the person to whom he was supposed to have made such remarks was always a common one, such as Ivanov or Petrov (or, if need be, Ginzburg or Rabinovich). The guinea pig on whom this type of approach was tried out was supposed to quake in his shoes and begin frantically going over in his mind all the Ivanovs or Rabinoviches to whom he might have confided his dream of going abroad. In the eyes of Soviet law, such a dream was, if not an outright crime, at least an aggravating circumstance for which you could even be charged under some convenient article of the criminal code. In any case, an accused person's class nature was fully revealed by his ambition to go to Paris, and in our classless society, account must always be taken of one's class allegiance. . . . Another example of this kind of questioning was: "You complained to So-and-so that before the Revolution you earned much more by your writings than now." M. was obviously not to be caught out by such things. The whole approach was indeed crude, but they had no need of subtlety. Why bother? "Give us a man, and we'll make a case."
Christophorovich had been conducting the interrogation in preparation for a trial, as was implicit in his words "We have decided not to proceed with the case" and similar remarks. By our standards he had more than enough to go on, and a trial would have been a more natural outcome than what actually happened. The interrogator's approach was to seek an explanation for every single word in the poem on Stahn. He was particularly concerned to find out what had prompted the writing of it. He was flabbergasted when M. suddenly told him in reply to this question that more than anything else he hated fascism. M. had not intended to speak so frankly to the interrogator, and he blurted this out despite himself—he was by then in such a state that he just didn't care. As he was in duty bound to, the interrogator stormed and shouted, demanding to know what M. thought was fascist about our system. This question he repeated in my presence during the interview, but, astonishingly enough, he didn't pursue the matter when M. replied evasively. M. later assured me that there was something ambiguous about the interrogator's whole behavior, and that behind his blustering manner one could constantly sense his hatred for Stalin. I didn't believe M., but in 1938, when Christophorovich was also shot, I began to wonder. Perhaps M. had spotted something that a more balanced and worldly- wise person would not have seen—such people are always too conventional in their reasoning. It is difficult to believe that the mighty Yagoda and his awesome organization surrendered to Stalin without a struggle. In 1934, when M.'s poem was being investigated, it was widely known that Vyshinski was intriguing against Yagoda. In our incredible blindness—what better example of conventional reasoning?—we had eagerly followed the rumors of a struggle between the Prosecutor General and the head of the secret police, thinking that Vyshinski, a lawyer by training, would put an end to the excesses and terror of secret tribunals. To think that we believed this—we who knew what to expect from the Vyshinski of the trials in the twenties! For Yagoda's followers, however, and in particular for Christophorovich, it was clear that a victory for Vyshinski would do them no good at all, and, of course, they knew better than anyone else what tortures and humiliations to expect in their final days. When there are two groups fighting for the right to unlimited control over the fate of their fellow citizens, the losers are doomed to die, and perhaps M. really was able to read the secret thoughts of his iron-willed interrogator. But the extraordinary thing about those times was that all these "new people," as they killed and were destroyed themselves, thought that only they had a right to their views and judgments. Any one of them would have laughed out loud at the idea that a man who could be brought before them under guard at any time of the day or night, who had to hold up his trousers with his hands and spoke without the slightest attempt at theatrical effects —that such a man might have no doubt, despite everything, of his right to express himself freely in poetry. As we were to discover, Yagoda liked M.'s poem so much that he even learned it by heart— he recited it to Bukharin while we were still in Cherdyn—but he would not have hesitated to destroy the whole of literature, past, present and future, if he had thought it to his advantage. For people of this extraordinary type, human blood is like water and all individuals, except for the victorious ruler, are replaceable. The worth of any man is measured by his usefulness to the ruler and his henchmen. The skilled propagandists who help to rouse the people to expressions of enthusiasm for the leader deserve to be better paid than the rest. Our rulers may sometimes have bestowed favors on their cronies—they all liked to play the Haroun al Rashid—but they never allowed anyone to interfere in their business, or to have an opinion of his own. From this point of view, M.'s poem was a real crime—a usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the ruling powers reserved exclusively for themselves, whether they were enemies or friends of Stalin. This astonishing presumption has become second nature to our rulers. Your right to an opinion is always determined by your rank and status in the hierarchy. Not long ago Surkov explained to me that Pasternak's novel is no good because its hero, Dr. Zhivago, has no right to make any judgments about our way of life —"we" had not given him this right. Christophorovich was no more able to grant such a right to M.
Christophorovich referred to the poem as a "document" and to the writing of it as a terrorist "act." At our interview he said he had never before set eyes on such a monstrous "document." M. did not deny that he had read it to a number of people—eleven all told, including me, our brothers and Akhmatova. The interrogator had extracted their names one after another by going through all the people who came to see us, and it was evident that he really was very well informed about all those closest to us. At the interview M. told me all the names that had cropped up during the interrogation so that I could warn everybody concerned. None of them suffered, but they all got a terrible fright. I do not wish to give all the names here, otherwise someone may be tempted to speculate as to the identity of the traitor. Christophorovich was anxious to know how each of his listeners had reacted to the poem. M. insisted that they had all begged him to forget it and not bring ruin on himself and others. Apart from the eleven named during the interrogation, seven or eight other people, including Shklovski and Pasternak, had heard the poem, but the interrogator did not mention them, and they did not therefore figure in the case.
M. signed the record of his interrogation without even reading it over—something for which I gave him no rest during the next few years. Even the interrogator rebuked him for this in my presence. "I suppose he trusted you," I said angrily. In fact, I believe that in this respect there was no reason not to trust him: by our standards it was a perfectly real case, there was enough material for ten trials and therefore it would have made no sense to invent anything.