So we went on, nursing a sense of our own inadequacy, until the moment came for each of us to discover from bitter experience how precarious was his own state of grace. This could only come from bitter personal experience, because we did not believe in other people's. We really are inadequate and cannot be held responsible for our behavior. And we are saved only by miracles.
24 Journey to Voronezh
O
ur documents were made out and stamped by the most influential institution in the Soviet Union, and we were authorized to buy tickets for reserved seats in the military booking office. This was an unheard-of privilege in those days, when all the railroad stations and piers in the country were besieged by sullen, grimy mobs who had to wait for weeks on end to buy a ticket. It looked as though a whole people were on the move or being evacuated. At the pier in Perm, exhausted and ragged people with blackened faces had encamped in whole families, or perhaps tribes, sitting on bundles and piles of rags next to their wooden trunks with crude lacquer patterns on them. All over the riverbank, charcoal fires were glowing in pits dug in the sand where they were making a stew for their children. The grown-ups chewed crusts of bread which they carried with them in bags—bread was still rationed at that time and they had stored up these iron reserves for the journey. Collectivization had uprooted vast hordes of people and they were roaming the country, desperately searching for somewhere to live and still sighing for their boarded-up huts.
Strictly speaking, these were not dispossessed kulaks—those had long ago been deported to new places—but marginal groups who had fled in panic and were now wandering aimlessly—anything to get away from their native villages. We have seen many forced mass migrations and several voluntary ones: during the Civil War, during the famines in the Volga region and the Ukraine, during collectivization, wartime evacuation. Right up to the last war, the railroad stations were still crowded with uprooted peasants. After the war, people again began to wander in search of food and work, but on a smaller scale. Every family in which an able-bodied man had survived was desperate to find a place where there was bread and a demand for labor. Sometimes they traveled in organized fashion— that is, going to jobs for which they had been hired beforehand. But, finding that things were no better elsewhere, they tried to get back home again or move on to some new place. Every mass deportation —whether of whole classes or ethnic groups—was accompanied by waves of voluntary migration. Children and old people died like flies.
Mass deportation is something quite new, for which we have the twentieth century to thank. Or perhaps the conquering despots of ancient Egypt or Assyria? I have seen the trains taking bearded peasants from the Ukraine and the Kuban, and the closed cattle cars transporting prisoners to the forced-labor camps of eastern Siberia. Then there were the trainloads of Volga Germans, Tartars, Poles, Estonians . . . And again cattle cars with prisoners for the camps— sometimes more of them and sometimes less, but never ceasing. The departure of the former aristocracy from Leningrad was a little different. Coming after collectivization, this was the second of the mass deportations. In 1935 Akhmatova and I went to the Paveletski station to see off a frail woman with three small boys who was being exiled to Saratov. They were not, of course, going to be given a permit to live in the town itself—people as helpless as this were expected to make out as best they could in the country somewhere. The station presented the usual sight—it was impossible to move in the milling throng, but this time the people were sitting not on bundles, but on quite respectable-looking trunks and suitcases still covered with old foreign travel labels. As we pushed our way through to the platform, we were constantly greeted by old women we knew: granddaughters of the Decembrists,* former "ladies" and just ordinary women. "I never knew I had so many friends among the aristocracy," said Akhmatova. "Why all the fuss about them? Why should Leningrad be cluttered up with them?" said the nonparty Bolshevik Tania Grigoriev, the wife of M.'s younger brother, Evgeni.
I have read somewhere that in the history of all nations there is a time when people "wander in body and spirit." This is the youth of a nation, the creative period of its history that affects it for many centuries and sets its cultural development in motion. We also appear to be wanderers, but will our migration bring the fruits promised by the philosopher? Our ordeal has been too great for us to keep our faith in these fruits, yet I cannot say that the answer to the question is "no." We have all, from top to bottom of society, learned something, even though we have destroyed our culture in the process and reverted to savagery. Still, what we have learned is very important.
* Noblemen who attempted to overthrow the Czar in December 1825.
We traveled from Cherdyn to Kazan by river steamer, but had to change in Perm. This meant a wait of twenty-four hours. We could not get into a hotel because M. had no identity papers—they had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. Identity papers are the privilege of the city dweller. Peasants do not have papers and are hence barred from the hotels, as are townspeople in our sort of plight. In any case there is never any room in the hotels, even for ordinary citizens with papers.
It was impossible to sit down anywhere on the pier because of the vast number of migrants. We wandered around the town all day until we were totally exhausted. We sat on benches in the town park with its sparse shrubs and were surprised to see how pale the children were, even though they were from the better-off families of the city. We remembered how struck we had sometimes been by the sallow skin of the children in Moscow—this was always so during each of the successive famines. The last time had been in 1930 when we returned from Armenia to Moscow just after they had put up prices and not long before rationing and special stores were introduced. This was the price Moscow was paying for collectivization. By the time we left Moscow, things had greatly improved, but Perm still looked in frightful shape. We got a meal in a restaurant, but had to hurry over it because there was a line at each table—there was no food in the stores, and it was possible to get some kind of a meal only at the restaurants.
As he grew more tired, M. also became more and more worked up, and I was sure his illness would come back. These two journeys —the one under guard to Cherdyn, and now this one to Voronezh— only made his morbid condition worse. That night, as we continued to wander the streets, he kept wanting to go to the inquiry window at the MGB * building "to talk about my case." When he finally did so, the officer on duty would not listen. "Go away . . . people like you are coming here all the time." At this M. suddenly came to his senses. "That damned window is like a magnet," he said, and we went back to the pier. In Akhmatova's phrase, these were still comparatively "vegetarian" times, but the "magnet" already had a great hold on everybody's mind. Was there nobody who was not bothered by thoughts of interrogations, trials and shootings? There may have been a few such blissful people among the very young.
The steamer arrived in the middle of the night. With the tickets we had bought in the military booking office, feeling not like exiles
* MGB: Ministry of State Security—i.e., secret police.
but more like pampered proteges of the country's most feared institution, we made our way through the murmuring crowds and were almost the first to board. The crowd followed us with envious and hostile glances: the ordinary people take a poor view of privilege, and this crowd on the pier at Perm could not know why we had been able to buy our tickets without waiting in line. In our times, when it has often been possible to obtain one's daily bread only by special favor, hatred for the privileged has grown particularly intense. For at least ten out of the first forty revolutionary years we had rationing, and even in the supply of bread there was no egalitar- ianism—some got next to nothing and others more than enough. As my brother Evgeni explained to us in 1930 when we returned from Armenia, "We have a famine, but things are done quite differently nowadays. They've divided everybody into categories, and we all starve, or eat, according to rank. Everybody gets just as much as he deserves." Then I remember a young physicist—this was after the war—saying to his startled mother-in-law as he ate a steak which had been bought in the special closed store to which his father-in-law had access: "It's very good, and what makes it particularly nice is that other people can't get it." People were proud of their ration category and of their other rights and privileges, and carefully concealed the amount of their earnings from their inferiors. By an irony of fate, we were traveling on tickets bought in the booking offices for the most privileged, and this aroused universal envy. Yet at the same time we did not look at all like members of the elite, and this only increased people's resentment of us.