"Justice has triumphed!" was how Tania put it when we met shortly afterward in Moscow.
"Why did your father allow himself to be listed as a 'personal
* A non-hereditary status automatically awarded for certain types of public service under the Czars.
nobleman'?" I asked. "You only had to give half a rouble as a bribe not to have that entered in documents."
"My father didn't give bribes, on principle," Tania replied coldly.
Maria Nikolayevna and I couldn't help winking at each other: neither of us could suppress the slightly malicious thought that Grigo- riev, inveterate "progressive" though he was, had not been averse to styling himself a "nobleman" and had made use of his right to do so as a university graduate.
We knew beforehand what sort of reception we should get at Siverskaya Street and were relieved to find that Evgeni Emilievich was not at home. He arrived only late at night, and in the morning we had our usual battle with him over M.'s father. He demanded that we take the old man away because he was an intolerable burden for the whole family and was dragging them all down with him. M. didn't argue with his brother. Since he was an early riser, he had already done what he had come here to do—that is, see his father and Tatka. As soon as Evgeni Emilievich started talking about the old man, we said goodbye and started to leave. Only then did Tania ask why we had come to Leningrad. When we explained as best we could, she was astonished and said: "I don't understand why two grown people cannot find a way of earning their living." When I pointed out that all means of livelihood were in the hands of the State and hence unavailable to those considered "unworthy," Tania spoke scathingly of "panic" and "tales invented by the intelligentsia." Like Marietta Shaginian, she was deaf to all talk of the mass arrests now taking place. When I mentioned the case of Yenukidze to her, she made the comment I have already quoted. There was something quite inflexible about her which made one think of the august forerunners she might have modeled herself on: the women of Sparta, the mother of the Gracchi, or the women terrorists of the "People's Will." As we left, I said, "If your Bolsheviks turned into Fascists overnight, you wouldn't even ntoice." She said this could never happen.
This was M.'s last meeting with his father and with Tatka. As for Tania, he was just amused by her. "What do you expect? She's a nonparty Bolshevik," he said. This term was coming into usage at the time and everybody holding a good job was referred to in this way —and behaved accordingly. People like Tania were swiftly promoted in their work right up to the highest levels at which "non-Party Bolsheviks" were allowed to serve. They constituted the so-called "democratic intelligentsia" which Stalin had now said should be given every support in Soviet institutions. They looked remarkably similar to the self-sacrificing radicals of pre-revolutionary times— except that now they were needed by the State and were considered the mainstay of a good family life.
I met Tania again more than twenty years later when she and Evgeni Emilievich came to see me at the Shklovskis'. Needless to say, I asked her how she had reacted to the Twentieth Congress. Before she could say anything, Evgeni Emilievich answered for her. According to him, she had been very upset at first and wanted to know "why all this fuss about past history?" When Khrushchev visited Leningrad, she couldn't bear to look at him—he had passed her car in his on the Nevski Prospekt and, "would you believe it, she turned her head away!" Soon, however, Tania had changed her tune and admitted that there had been "excesses" and then, of course, there was the dialectic. . . .
In 1938, choosing a moment when Tania and Evgeni Emilievich were not at home, I went to see M.'s father just before his death. He was overjoyed to see me. He believed that M. and I might save him from his poverty, loneliness and the terrible disease of which he was dying. I could not bring myself to tell him of M.'s arrest. Shortly after this, Evgeni Emilievich took him to hospital, where he died of cancer. The doctors sent a cable to the second son in Moscow, but he arrived only in time for the funeral. The hospital staff told him that nobody had come to see the old man and he had died alone. I couldn't help remembering Tania's story about how her grandmother had died when she and her sisters were children—the old woman had gone off to her room as quiet as a mouse and died without any fuss, not wanting to upset her granddaughters. Tania was always repeating this story, and Maria Nikolayevna assured me that she did so for the benefit of M.'s father and herself. Both of them in fact died without causing any trouble to Tania and Evgeni Emilievich—the old man in the hospital during the summer, while Tania was at the dacha, and Maria Nikolayevna during the blockade. Tatka also died in a hospital—in Vologda, where she came after the blockade had been broken and a road out of the city was opened up. Her aunt, Sarra Lebedeva, was with her when she died. The day before her death, Tania came and took away her clothes—at that time everybody lived by bartering things for bread, and Tania thought it perfectly all right to exchange Tatka's poor rags for bread for herself and her son. This seems rational enough, but, as Sarra Lebedeva told me, it meant there was nothing to bury Tatka in.
People can be reduced to such straits that they are stripped of all the protective layers that hypocritical society has devised to hide the essence beneath. But the distinctive thing about us was that we never removed the smiling masks with which we confronted the world. I have often known people to make a good career because of their urbane intellectual appearance and suave speech. I remember, for instance, the director of the Ulianovsk Teachers' Training College, who in 1953 gleefully conducted the purge of Jewish members of the staff.* During a special faculty meeting under his chairmanship which had been called to expel me, I could not take my eyes off his face. He looked extraordinarily like Chekhov, and, as if to heighten the resemblance, he wore not the usual kind of glasses, but a pince- nez in a thin gold frame. The play of his features and the soft modulations of his voice were unforgettable—there's no point in trying to describe them, as people would think me guilty of overstatement.
I was the first of a series of people who were going to be expelled. The instructions to start this purge had taken some time to filter down to the provinces, and by the time they reached Ulianovsk it was too late: a few days after the meeting in the college we heard the news of the Leader's death. I went to memorial meetings at which people actually sobbed. As a woman messenger employed by the College said to me, "We managed all right, nobody ever touched us . . . but what's going to happen now?" The director carried on with the purge interrupted by Stalin's death—he hadn't managed to finish it off in good time because each case had to be considered separately. He expelled twenty-six people—not only Jews, but some suspiciously intellectual staff members from other ethnic groups as well—before he was himself dismissed while hounding Professor Lubishchev, a biologist who had once spoken up against Lysenko. He was transferred to another college, where he is highly regarded because of his bland manner and Chekhovian appearance. This man is a real lover of pogroms, and with his deceptive appearance he was made for the times in which we live. Such skill at mimicry was much prized, and no end of gullible people were taken in by sophisticated mannerisms and smooth talk.
* The "exposure" of the "Doctors' Plot" led to a widespread purge of Jews in the last months before Stalin's death. (See note on page 115.)
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