Notes from My Window^57
purges which so fascinate Soviet speciaHsts—and talks about it spellbindingly for hours, commenting on Marxist, non-Marxist, and anti-Marxist theories, and drawing Russian geography, cHmate, history, psychology, national character, culture—the whole of Russian civilization, with special emphasis on the shaping-cM^rz-reflecting role of the Orthodox church—into his extemporaneous discourse.
Semyon is especially scornful of Western social scientists who predict an early liberalization (normalization!) of Soviet rule—in stupendous ignorance, he says, of the central shaping forces of the Russian mentality and way of life. But he is hardly less contemptuous of foreign writers who treat the widely heterogenous members of the underground "democratic movement" as selfless heroes one and all, carrying the banners of Virtue, Good and Russia's Hope. Some dissenters glorified in the Western press are vainglorious and intolerant as well as courageous, he says; and only the superficiality of Western analysts—who portray in a single dimension, omitting everything but the dissent itself—fails to recognize the tyrannical potential of those fighting the present tyranny. "Lenin t-too was a dissenter in his d-day, you know. How m-many times have Western analysts got things wrong? Swallowed n-novelistic nonsense about Russia's new saviors? Sacrificed their intelligence because they needed p-political heroes?"
That Russia's present martyrs are brutally repressed, he says, does not in itself make them virtuous, any more than the long oppression of American blacks has made them the country's natural leaders. The contribution of Soviet dissenters and protestors is their recognition of the society's grave illnesses— from which they themselves are not immune. The unqualified adulation of Solzhenitsyn, for example, is based on a publicity trick: a "pre-packaged 'solution' for m-minds that, to recognize b-black, must have an opposing white." The first thing Western students are taught about Leninism, he continues, is that its narrowness developed in reaction to the autocracy it opposed. "Yet Western teachers s-somehow can't apply the same analytic concept to Solzhenitsyn's n-nature, shaped by the society he opposes. He is in the Russian tradition: religious, mystic, p-potentially dictatorial. P-plus qa change. But for all their
58^MOSCOW FAREWELL
1-luxurious libraries to draw on, not one p-pampered Princeton 'scholar' writes a word of this.
"And by the way, if it's democracy they really w-want for Russia, as they claim, the Communist Party happens to serve quite well. In the t-true sense of the word, it's relatively quite d-democratic: consisting, and r-reflecting the views of, society's lower elements. The scholars haven't even got their t-terms straight, meaning their ideas. And here, the p-problems are far deeper than scholarly."
In short, Semyon's prognosis is profoundly pessimistic and, as with much debunking, has a realistic ring. But sneer as he will at Western naivete, he can't keep himself from his addiction to forbidden books. He knows they will land him in trouble again; it's said that one of the KGB informers on our floor (a misery of dourness, while the other is a handsome ladies' man) was assigned to watch Semyon more closely even than the Western students. "Sooner or later, they'll have to p-put me in a 1-labor camp. It's convenient, you know, to have a State t-that lays down hard laws about sin. That caters to one's own shilly-shallying death wish."
In all, Semyon has vouchsafed a dozen sentences about himself Discussion of personal affairs is frivolous; it is the affairs of state that merit attention—above all, the philosophy of state power. By what means do some men dominate others? Hypotheses, abstractions and analytical formulas are his companions; personality—of the Lenins, Stalins, Nassers and Joe McCarthys —enters only as a factor in these equations. His is the ultimate of that well-known phenomenon, the human condition studied by someone isolated from ordinary human contact. Surely his insatiable passion for everything historical, anthropological and sociological is a partial substitute for the personal exchange from which he feels his ugliness excludes him.
What I've learned about him seems all political, too. Born in Rostov-on-Don, he moved to Leningrad with his mother while his Cheka father, whom he rarely saw, roamed the country on extremely secret—presumably murderous—assignments. In Leningrad he read, kept to himself, and entered the University, from which he was expelled seven years ago for participation in an "anti-Soviet" political cell. The "cell" was in fact a half-dozen
Notes from My Window X 59
Students who met to discuss the Russian past and future in terms of heretical concepts such as humanism, agrarian sociaHsm, and "genuine" Marxism (as opposed to Marxism-Leninism, the illegitimate and corrupt distortion of Marx's theories and ideals). The group was heavily influenced by Nikolai Berdyayev, the early twentieth-century philosopher who wrote of creativity and the free human personality as the central meaning of Christianity and the hope for Russia's salvation.
After months of discussion and extremely difficult preparation, the group "published" a "journal," using—at great risk—a mimeograph machine in a government office to which a member had access. It was a collection of essays about the drift of Russian history interrupted by Bolshevism, and was designated "Volume I, Number I." There was no second number. The KGB unearthed the authors within days, and they were imprisoned for ten months while the case was investigated. Tried in secret, the moving spirits were sentenced to five years of labor camps and exile.
Semyon spent some months in prison, too, but his monkish personality apparently saved him from serious punishment: although a charter member of the "cell," he had attended only two meetings and could not face the personal involvement of long "underground" editorial conferences and secret working shifts with the mimeograph machine necessary to produce the journal. Or did his father's influence save him? In any case, his present enrollment in Moscow University—rather than chopping logs in exile—is puzzling.
"How did it come about?" I asked him when he confirmed the Leningrad episode. "Surely you can't be expelled from one university, have that on your record, and go to another?"
"These things happen. N-not everything in this country is as eflficiently t-totalitarian as your p-political scientists imagine. . . . Don't worry," he added, implying that I might suspect a quid pro quo had been demanded for allowing him to continue his education. "I'm hardly the informer t-type."
On his next visit, more of his background emerged. I had asked something about Leningrad and he was lecturing me, in his contemptuous yet brilliant style, about the city's Party organization as a traditional power base in Politburo intrigues.
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Having tossed off plot-and-counterplot biographies of Zinoviev, Kirov and Zhdanov as examples, he suddenly froze, staring at the window's blackness. When he snapped back, it was to say something wholly extraneous to his previous associations.
"More Leningraders expired d-during the Nine Hundred Days" (the Wehrmacht seige of 1941-43) "than Americans in their w-wars combined. I m-mean all the wars in the history of your country, including the Civil W-war."
He stated this as dry fact, perhaps implying that Leningrad's tortured political history—the purges and bloody retributions, execution and exile of hundreds of thousands of her best people, including the best Communists—cannot be understood without a grasp of the tragedies that were not self-imposed. This is an underlying theme of much he says about Soviet—and tsarist— rule: cruel acts of nature visited upon Russia sustain an atmosphere and mentality that encourage the politics of masochism. But surely the statement about the Nine Hundred Days was also a hint about his personal history? For until the children could be evacuated, he himself endured the seige.
Semyon once described the experience to Chingiz. His family —grandmother, mother and an aunt; his father was still away on special duty—lived in a largish room of a relatively comfortable downtown apartment. A month after the German invasion, little remained of recognizable life; the blockade's sealing in September introduced them to hell. Semyon's grandmother died first: too old to work, she was not allotted bread enough to live, even lying all day in bed. Semyon hid when her corpse was carried out. His aunt was then killed in a cellar hit by a shell.