People found it hard to believe that small places like Alexandrov could serve as traps. It never occurred to them that whole categories were being systematically wiped out. Everybody believed that he was the object of individual proceedings, and the stories about "bewitched places" (i.e., where you were more likely to be arrested) were dismissed as old wives' tales. We had already been warned in Moscow about a great round-up going on in Alexandrov, but we hadn't believed it. The only reason we didn't go there was that M. feared this "crazed borough," as he called it in one of his poems. "We couldn't find a worse place," he said. Furthermore, we heard that it was monstrously expensive to rent rooms there.
In Savelovo there were no former prisoners or exiles apart from us and a few common criminals who had come here to weather the storm of the current mass arrests. They were not a target of the great round-up, but they could always be thrown in for good measure if there was any danger of the "production quota" not being met. We got talking with one of these criminals in the tearoom and he gave us a very clear explanation of why Savelovo was preferable to Alexandrov or Kolomna: "If the mob all gathers in one place, they can be skimmed off like cream." He was wiser than all those gullible people sentenced under Article 58—many of them had been to a university in the old days and were firmly persuaded that nobody could be called to account twice for the same crime. And since they were not aware of having done anything wrong, they kept hoping they would be cleared ("It can't go on like this") but instead found themselves being taken away in the "Black Maria."
Between the years 1948 and 1953 I was again to witness one of these round-ups of former prisoners and exiles. It was in a sense a minor drama, without the mass graves and tortures so typical of our age. I was living at that time in Ulianovsk (Lenin's birthplace) and saw how it was swept clean of everybody who had previous convictions. Some of them were picked up straightaway, but others first had their residence permits canceled and were thus forced to move out somewhere beyond the hundred-kilometer radius. The most popular small town to which they went was Melikez. Among them was a violinist I knew who had once been a member of the Party and of the Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAMP), where he had dabbled in musical politics together with Briusov's sister. In 1937 he was sent to a camp and, after serving a sentence of eight or ten years, went to live in Ulianovsk at the end of the forties. Almost out of his mind with joy, and thinking the worst was now over—how many of us fell for this illusion!—he decided to start a new life. His previous wife and children having "disowned" him, he married a nice colleague of mine in Ulianovsk and got a job in the music school there. They had a son who was soon reaching for his father's violin, and his happy father was dreaming of making a violinist of him. He was always telling me that there was no greater happiness than to live for art, and he quoted the Marxist classics to this effect. Suddenly, when his little son was three years old, he was summoned to the militia station and told that his permit to reside in Ulianovsk had been rescinded, and that he must leave the city within twenty-four hours. I happened to visit him and his wife that same day, and I could see at once from their faces what had been done to them. From then on I was the only person they could confide in—such things had to be kept secret, otherwise the whole family was liable to suffer.
That same night the violinist left for Melikez, where he managed to rent a corner of a room and start making a little money by giving violin and piano lessons. But very soon they began arresting former camp inmates there, too. In small towns such news spread very quickly, since landladies could never resist telling their neighbors about the arrest of a lodger. These arrests meant that the local authorities had been ordered to clear the town of all "suspicious elements" that had gathered there. Everybody now rushed to leave the town, and the station was crowded with "refugees." My violinist friend managed to get out in time, and for the next two and a half years, right up to the death of Stalin, he kept permanently on the move, going up and down the Volga from one small town to another. In some places, already packed with refugees, he was not able to find a corner to live in, or the police refused to register him. Sometimes he managed to get a job teaching music in a local school, but wherever he went he always had to leave in a hurry the moment he heard they had started picking people up. In the course of these wanderings he sometimes passed through Ulianovsk and went to see his wife. But he could only do this at dead of night—if he had shown his face on the street in the daytime, the neighbors would have reported him immediately. He got very thin, developed a bad cough and constantly trembled with fear. After these visits he would set off once more with his violin to begin all over again in some new town. He once even went up to Moscow to complain to the Arts Committee, where he was still remembered, that the music schools were hiring people without any education while he, with all his qualifications, was unable to get work. They promised to help, but there were soon arrests in the small town where he was hoping to get a permanent job, and he had to flee as usual, without learning whether or not the Moscow officials had kept their promise.
After Stalin's death he was allowed, as an invalid, to return to his wife in Ulianovsk. He died at home, but he was never able to teach his son to play the violin—he didn't dare go near the boy for fear of infecting him with the ТВ he had caught while roaming the country to save his life.
Yet this violinist was comparatively lucky. His wife had been able to stay where she was and had not been dismissed from her work (this was because she had concealed their marriage, which had in any case not been officially registered); he managed to escape arrestthanks to his experience in recognizing the danger signals in time, and he was not Jewish—Jews were the most exposed at that period. His violin gave him the means of earning his daily bread—no more than this, but it kept him alive. He also had the advantage that musicians suffered less than members of other professions. Even so, it was only his tremendous stamina that saved him. Almost anybody else in his place would have waited to be picked up in Melikez on the principle that "you can't hide from them." His only reason for making such an effort to save himself was to be able to come home to die— even this is a great luxury in our conditions.
Looking at the fortunate violinist, I always wondered what would have happened to M.—who was about the same age—if he had survived and returned from the camps. If we had been able to foresee all the alternatives, we would not have missed that last chance of a "normal" death offered by the open window of our apartment in Furmanov Street.
hen I used to read about the French Revolution as a child, I
Voronezh was a miracle, and it was a miracle that brought us there. But such things happened only once.
63 Ordeal by Fear
often wondered whether it was possible to survive during a reign of terror. I now know beyond doubt that it is impossible. Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim—not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands—even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it—or at least it takes on a different form with them.
Who was it who dared say that we have no "lost generation" here? The fact that he could utter such a monstrous untruth is also a consequence of terror. One generation after another was "lost" here,but it was a completely different process from what may have happened in the West. Here people just tried to go on working, struggling to maintain themselves, hoping for salvation, and thinking only about their immediate concerns. In such times your daily round is like a drug. The more you have to do, the better. If you can immerse yourself in your work, the years fly by more quickly, leaving only a gray blur in the memory. Among the people of my generation, only a very few have kept clear minds and memories. In M.'s generation, everybody was stricken by a kind of sclerosis at an early stage.