'The kid’s been taken to Petrovka.’
Before we could uncover more, the article appeared which made Oktyabrina a celebrity at last. It occupied six full columns in Komsomolskaya Pravda. But her name leapt from the sea of compacted print.
RIFF-RAFF - A Feuilleton -
The conversation was prolonged, painful and futile.
I went to the window. The street sparkled with festive lights, and happy smiles adorned the faces of thousands of strolling Muscovites. But I felt as if Vd swallowed a glass of castor oil.
Then she was led away hy the warders. We all fervently hope that this will be the last time she is under guard. But she gives us no encouragement.
Even now she is smugly unrepentant. Despite all she’s done and everything that awaits her, Oktyabrina Matveyeva clings to the intolerable squalor of her way of life. As our conversation ended, she told a last, pathetic story about her marvelous lovers’ who would ‘rescue her magnificently, like a tragic damsel in distress’.
Under the circumstances, after all that had happened, this fatuity was not affecting, but vulgar. Vulgar and gangrenous, Like everything she stands for. Like the condition of her soul. ...
But not like the first impression she makes. 1 met her accidentally ; as I was leaving Petrovka 38 a slight commotion at the entrance interrupted the buildings quietly disciplined, hard-working life. Eighteen-year-old Oktyabrina Matveyeva was being led in under guard.
My first thought was involuntary: had there been a mistake in the arrest of this sapling of a girl? A girl who, by the wide-eyed ‘innocent’ look of her, belonged almost anywhere else? Everything 1 knew about the work of the People’s police made this improbable. But in the end, I concluded that they had indeed erred - in not having arrested her much sooner.
She had been living in Moscow over a year. During this time, she was involved with nothing that was not illegal, immoral, degenerate or offensive to the Soviet way of life.
The contrast between her appearance and reputation intrigued me. I decided to follow the case - from Petrovka 38 to the place of detention to which she was subsequently delivered. It is a hard duty to report the filth I uncovered.
Oktyabrina Matveyeva was arrested in a hospital ward, where she had caused chaos and suffering to gravely ill patients - while remaining callously indifferent. This was entirely characteristic: screaming at doctors in a hospital ward - where she had no business whatsoever - was but the latest of a string of ‘exploits’.
Nine months ago, she deliberately tried to help a known speculator escape arrest in a major railroad station. A month earlier, she created a disturbance in our capitals beloved Lenin Museum - an uproar which the words ‘outrageous’,
‘scandalous’ and ‘revolting’ cannot encompass. In short, she spat on everything most cherished by the Soviet people. "
No one will be surprised that a person who endangers 226
hospital patients and gleefully blasphemes our Leader does not value honest labor. By her own admission, Matveyeva has not worked a single day during her ‘sojourn in Moscow.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat. But how does a non-worker exist? By being a parasite - a sucker of society's blood.
Each parasite steals in its own way. Matveyevas was to leech on spineless men. Her list was long - and did not fail to include members of the so-called foreign press corps: mole-like creatures who rummage through our society's garbage, from which they concoct their ‘reportage'. Matveyeva was not too fastidious to accept hand-outs from these pitiable outcasts. In other words, she was a prostitute.
And a speculator. For she also busied herself buying and selling rags. She never wasted an opportunity to turn a kopek in some back alley. Her compulsion to sell junk was as strong as to sell her body....
One more ‘detail': Oktyabrina Matveyeva had no business in Moscow in the first place. She came not to study or work, but specifically to live her putrid way of life - without a propiska, of course. She was a depraved individualist who not merely disregarded society, but sneered at it.
But more than this provoked my nausea on that brilliant February evening. I was alone with Matveyeva. The warden hoped that I might unravel what still puzzled everyone.
‘What made you insult society at every opportunity, Oktyabrina? Was something troubling you?'
‘Do let's discuss something more interesting. Who sold you that tie you're wearing? It's a fascinating piece - for a museum, I mean?
‘Look through the window, Oktyabrina. All those people - they're happy because they've found their place in life. They work. Raise children. Contribute to the society that nurtures them. Does that mean nothing to you?'
‘Who wants to have babies? Just to spend their lives at some desk hearing about obligations. ... I might tell you what one of my most marvelous lovers said about that. He
was also a journalist, from Rome.
To many of my questions, Matveyeva produced an inane smirk and corresponding gobbledygook, insulting even the Russian language. But a fool is happy only in fairy-tales, as they say.
How is it possible that such a girl can ‘flourish* in our socialist society? We once believed that the elimination of capitalism ivould insure the disappearance of her kind of decadence. But facts must be faced: 50 years have passed since the Great October Socialist Revolution - for which, with a final stinging irony, Oktyabrina Matveyeva was named. And although our achievements in those five decades have thrilled the world, we cannot be content while scum like she still poison our society.
Thus the answer is not in slogans but lies in a full and objective examination of the facts: what turned Oktyabrina Matveyeva rotten. We asked a reporter in Omsk to investigate her background. He visited her parents. They live in the quiet village of Nikolaiyevka, Omsk Province; and are long-standing members of the thriving ‘Our Leninist Path* state farm. Vladimir Pavlovich, the father, operates a combine. Svetlana Petrovna, Oktyabrina’s mother, works in a new brick dairy barn.
Oktyabrina herself was trained as a milkmaid. Her younger sister was a gold medalist in the local school. The family seemed to lack nothing.
But those who said this cared too little about Soviet responsibility for ones neighbors to look beneath the surface, where grave trouble lurked. Oktyabrina had hardly cut her pigtails when her ‘career as a parasite and cheat was launched.
She had left school. She treated her work with unconcealed contempt. She was often missing from the morning milking, her most crucial duty. A search would find her hidden with a fashion magazine, or trying to distract a young tractor driver. Her cows suffered visibly from her wilful 228
neglect.
She was as cruel to her parents. Beneath the surface of innocent curiosity, a wholly selfish ego was running wild, like malignant cancer.
‘Finally we had to send her to a colony,’ said Svetlana Petrovna, wiping away tears. ‘We were all so ashamed. But she was wild; we couldn’t cope with her ’
Yet the family history is more complex. Sympathy for her parents cannot absolve them of their blame for Oktyabrina’s deep moral flaws.
That they took no part in community life - avoiding meetings, even films, in the Palace of Culture - was in itself an ominous warning. The Matveyevs isolated themselves from the socialist collective - in order to booze. They were known on the farm as ‘the moonshine pair’.
And when they drank, vodka’s fever possessed them. Neighbors described repulsive, shrieking battles. Moreover, vodka alone held them together. They were never heard to exchange an affectionate word. They never strolled together through the neat little village, went to the well together, or watched the sunset, hand in hand....
But these details are not our concern here. Our concern is why intolerable cynicism and anti-social attitudes were permitted to fester. After six months in a juvenile colony, Oktyabrina blithely resumed her anti-social ways. Unobserved and unhindered. No one bothered with the festering sore. Because no one saw any immediate advantage in intervening. No one cared.