At the beginning of the interrogation, M. noticed, the interrogator had behaved much more aggressively than toward the end. He even stopped describing the poem as a "terrorist act" and threatening that M. would be shot. At first he threatened not only M. with the firing squad but all his "accomplices" as well—that is, everybody who had heard the poem. When we later discussed this softening in the interrogator's attitude, we decided it had been brought about by the instruction to "preserve" M. I did not see Christophorovich in the early stage, when he had used threats against M., but I must say that at the interview his manner still seemed to me monstrously aggressive. But this is in the nature of the job—probably not only in our country.
The interrogator probed into M.'s feelings about the Soviet system and M. told him that he was willing to co-operate with any Soviet institution except the Cheka.
He said this not out of daring or bravado, but because of his total inability to be devious. I believe this quality of M.'s was a puzzle to the interrogator, one he could not fathom. His only explanation for such a statement, particularly when it was made to his face, would have been stupidity, but stupidity of this kind he had never encountered before, and he had a baffled look when he quoted M.'s words at our interview. M. and I recalled this detail at the height of the Yezhov terror, when Shaginian wrote a half-page article in Pravda saying how gladly persons under investigation unburdened themselves to their interrogators and "co-operated" with them at their interrogations. This she explained by the great sense of responsibility common to all Soviet citizens. Whether Shaginian wrote this article of her own free will or on instructions from above, it is something that should not be forgotten.
In their depravity and the depths to which they sank, some writers exceeded all bounds. In 1934 already Akhmatova and I heard that Pavlenko was telling people how, out of curiosity, he had accepted an invitation from Christophorovich, who was a good friend of his, to hide in a cupboard, or between double doors, and listen to one of the nighttime interrogations. In the interrogator's room I noticed several identical doors—far too many for one room. We were later told that some of these doors opened into cubby-holes, and others into emergency exists. Premises like these are scientifically designed in the most up-to-date fashion with the aim of protecting the interrogator against prisoners who might try to attack him.
According to Pavlenko, M. cut a sorry figure during his interrogation: his trousers kept slipping down and he had to hold them up with his hands; his replies were confused, incoherent and beside the point, he talked nonsense and was very nervous, squirming "like a fish in a frying pan." Public opinion here has always been conditioned to take the side of the strong against the weak, but what Pav- lenko did surpassed everything. No Bulgarin would ever have dared to do this. Moreover, in the official literary circles to which Pav- lenko belonged, it had been completely forgotten that the only thing with which someone in M.'s position could be reproached was giving false evidence to save his own skin; certainly he could not be blamed for being bewildered and frightened. Why are we supposed to be brave enough to stand up to all the horrors of twentieth- century prisons and camps? Are we supposed to sing as we fall into the mass graves? Face death in the gas chambers with courage? Travel cheerfully to prison in a cattle car? Engage our interrogators in polite conversation about the role of fear in poetry, or discuss the impulses that lead to the writing of verse in a state of fury and indignation?
The fear that goes with the writing of verse has nothing in common with the fear one experiences in the presence of the secret police. Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction. M. often spoke of how the first kind of fear had disappeared with the Revolution that had shed so much blood before our eyes.
21 Who Is to Blame?
he interrogator's first question was "Why do you think you
were arrested?" Receiving an evasive answer, he suggested M. try to think which of his poems might have led to his arrest. M. recited, one after another, "The Wolf," "Old Crimea" and "The Apartment." He hoped he could fob Christophorovich off with these, though any one of them would have been enough to send him to a labor camp. The interrogator knew neither "Old Crimea" nor "The Apartment," and copied both of them down. M. suppressed eight lines from "The Apartment," and it was in this truncated form that the poem later turned up among Tarasenkov's copies. Next the interrogator took a sheet of paper from a file, read out a description of the poem about Stalin and several lines of the text. M. admitted he was the author. The interrogator then asked him to recite the whole poem. When M. had finished he remarked that the first stanza in his copy was different, and he read out what he had:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches. All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.
M. explained that this was the first version. M. then had to copy the poem out in his own hand, and the interrogator put it in his file.
M. saw the copy produced by the interrogator, but could not remember whether he was actually allowed to hold it in his hand and read it. At that moment he was so flustered that he didn't know what he was doing. We cannot therefore be certain of the form in which the poem had been passed on to the police—whether in full or only partially, whether in an accurate copy or not.
Among the people who had heard it there were a number who could have memorized these sixteen lines even after hearing them only once. People who are themselves writers are particularly good at this, but they nearly always garble the text slightly, substituting one word for another or leaving something out. If M. had seen such minor changes, he would have known that the poem had been given to the police by someone who had only heard it recited, and he would thus have been able to clear the one person he had allowed to make a copy (in the first version, moreover). But M. did not have enough presence of mind to make this check. It was all very well for us to discuss later on in Voronezh what he should have done and how he should have behaved. I am always hearing accounts of how some bold spirit or other foxed his interrogator or gave him hell, but aren't these perhaps the product of reflections after the event?
There was another reason, too, for M.'s lack of initiative in this matter: he was by no means anxious to discover who the traitor was, even if he had the opportunity. We lived in a world where people were always being "hauled in" and asked for information about our thoughts and feelings. They summoned people who were compromised by their background or by psychological deficiencies, threatening one because he was the son of a banker or Czarist official, and promising favors or protection to another. They summoned people who were afraid of losing their jobs or wanted to make a career, those who wanted nothing and feared nothing, and those who were ready for anything. The object of all this was not just to gather information. Nothing binds people together more than complicity in the same crime: the more people could be implicated and compromised, the more traitors, informants and police spies there were, the greater would be the number of people supporting the regime and longing for it to last thousands of years. And when it is common knowledge that everybody is "summoned" like this, people lose their social instincts, the ties between them weaken, everybody retires to his corner and keeps his mouth shut—which is an invaluable boon to the authorities.
Once they played on Kuzin's feelings as a son by telling him: "Your mother won't stand it if we arrest you." To this he replied that he wished his mother would die, and the official was quite shaken by such heartlessness. (This was the same man who had threatened to start rumors that "we have recruited you, and you'll never be able to look people in the face again.")