The artist В., a man of absolute purity whom we all loved, always used to arrive late for these interviews—nobody dared cut them altogether, even though they were unofficial and generally arranged on the telephone, as in a Kafka novel. When they rebuked him for being late, B. would say: "I always fall asleep when I have trouble." A woman friend of mine, in the twenties when she was still a pretty young girl, used to be stopped on the street and hauled off by police agents—as though they were staging a new abduction of Europa. There was nothing they wouldn't do.
They generally invited people for these interviews not to the Lu- bianka, but to apartments specially allotted for the purpose. The uncooperative were kept for hours on end and urged to "think again." No secret was made of all this—it was an important element in the general system of intimidation, as well as being a good way of testing a person's "loyalty." The stubborn became marked men and were "dealt with" as opportunity arose. The cooperative, on the other hand, were helped in their careers, and whenever there were dismissals or purges, they could count on the good will of the personnel department.
The way in which people reacted to proposals to cooperate depended on their generation. The older people suffered if they were merely panicked into signing an undertaking not to divulge anything about the interview. Of all my friends only Zoshchenko ever refused to sign such a statement. Younger people did not even understand what was wrong about this. They preferred to stall by saying: "If I were to learn anything, I'd come and tell you, but I never hear anything—I never go anywhere except to work." This is the sort of boast made by people who refused to "cooperate"—a word with a very wide meaning in this country. But what percentage refused?
There's no way of knowing. Presumably their number increased in periods when the terror slackened off. Apart from people who were forced into cooperating, there were hosts of volunteers. Denunciations poured into every institution on a quite unmanageable scale. Before the Twentieth Congress I heard an inspector of the Ministry of Education address a meeting at the Chuvash Teachers' Training College, where I was then working, and ask the staff to stop writing denunciations, warning them that anonymous ones would no longer be read at all. Can it be true that they no longer read anonymous denunciations? I find it hard to believe.
Because of this system of "interviews," people developed two kinds of phobia—some suspected that everybody they met was an informer, others that they might be taken for one. Quite recently a certain poet was moaning to me that he had no copies of M.'s poems. When I offered him a copy of one of them, he was horrified in case I might get the idea that he was asking for it on behalf of the Lu- bianka! S., when I offered him the same poem, thought it his duty to inform me that for decades the secret police had been calling him in and harassing him. In 1934, when M. and I were in Voronezh, I was visited by X., who was gloomy and upset. "Tell me," he said, "that it wasn't me." He had come to find out whether we regarded him as the person responsible for M.'s arrest. He had not even heard the poem about Stalin, and was a good friend. When I told him what we thought of him, he was enormously relieved.
We often stopped people who talked too freely by saying: "Good God! What are you doing? What will people take you for if you talk like that?" And we were always being advised not to meet people at all. Misha Zenkevich, for example, told me I should not allow anyone into the house unless I had known him all my life, to which I always replied that even such friends might have changed into something different. This is how we lived, and this is why we are not the same as other people.
An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism. What value can such people have as witnesses? The elimination of witnesses was, indeed, part of the whole program.
22 The Adjutant
W
e got to know Dligach in the middle twenties in Kiev when a group of young journalists there managed to talk the dim- witted editor of a local newspaper into publishing a few articles by M. This would have been quite out of the question in Moscow. Dli- gach's wife, a limpid blonde of a type M. always found touching, had gone to the same school as I. They lived not far from my parents, and we often met them on our visits to Kiev. A few years later Dligach turned up in Moscow to work, like M., on the newspaper Moscow Komsomol. He didn't get on very well and, as a provincial, was given a hard time by his Moscow colleagues. One day he came to us, beaming all over his face, to say he had at last had a piece of good luck: he had found on the floor a letter written by one of his enemies, an editor of the newspaper. It was a typical letter from a village youth who had come to the town to earn his living. He sent greetings to his friends and neighbors, and told his mother that, thank God, he was on good terms with his superiors, would soon settle in a more permanent way, get some kind of award and a room to himself, after which he would invite one of his younger brothers to join him and help him get on his feet as well.
The letter was a perfectly human one in which the young man talked about his personal interests in a way unbecoming to someone occupying an official position on a Komsomol newspaper. What was worse, he mentioned God—something no Komsomol official could afford to do. Even such hackneyed expressions as "thank God" were regarded as a concession to religion. It was clear that the youth was leading a double life, and talked two different languages. At what point do people switch from bureaucratic and ideological jargon to ordinary everyday speech? Our leading playwright was always longing to write a play about this linguistic dualism and the critical moment at which people pass from one idiom to the other. "When does it happen, out on the street or only at home?" he would ask, itching to start work. But, being a man of the older generation, he never went ahead with it. Many years later another writer,* much younger, dealt with this question in a story about a meeting of a village Soviet, when the kolkhozniks started speaking in official jargon the moment the chairman rang his bell.
* See the note on Alexander Yashin in the Appendix.
Dligach intended to make full use of his find to expose his enemy to the higher authorities. He had come to us to brag about his good luck, and he showed the letter to M. M. snatched it from him and threw it into the stove.
Dligach's behavior was typical of that period—the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. In their struggle for ideological purity, the authorities did everything to encourage "fearless unmaskers" who, "without respect for persons," showed up "survivals of the old psychology" in their colleagues. Reputations were pricked like soap bubbles, and the "unmaskers" quickly climbed the ladder of promotion. Every official who moved up the scale in those years was bound to use this method at least once—that is, "unmask" his immediate superior, as the only way of taking his place. Dligach might have found his letter very useful in this way, but, to our surprise, he agreed with M.'s comment on his behavior and left us more in sorrow than in anger after his hopes for a better future had gone up in smoke in our stove. But perhaps he really was angry, because we didn't see him again for several years.
He reappeared at our apartment in Furmanov Street in the winter of 1933-34. He was brought to us by Dinochka, a tiny actress, scatterbrained but very nice, whom we had inherited from Yakhontov. We remembered the letter and Dligach thanked M. for having saved him from doing such a despicable thing. He now quickly gained our confidence; the old business of the letter was forgiven and forgotten as something that any youngster might have done in those years: how could one hold such a thing against him for the rest of his life?