And so the waves rolled on—for “concealment of social origin” and for “former social origin.” This received the widest interpretation. They arrested members of the nobility for their social origin. They arrested members of their families. Finally, unable to draw even simple distinctions, they arrested members of the “individual nobility”—i.e., anybody who had simply graduated from a university. And once they had been arrested, there was no way back. You can’t undo what has been done! The Sentinel of the Revolution never makes a mistake!
(No. There were a few ways back! The counterwaves were thin, sparse, but they did sometimes break through. The first is worthy of mention right here. Among the wives and daughters of the nobility and the officers there were quite often women of outstanding personal qualities and attractive appearance. Some succeeded in breaking through in a small reverse wave! They were the ones who remembered that life is given to us only once and that nothing is more precious to us than our own life. They offered their services to the Cheka-GPU as informers, as colleagues, in any capacity whatsoever—and those who were liked were accepted. These were the most fertile of all informers! They helped the GPU a great deal, because “former” people trusted them. Here one can name the last Princess Vyazemskaya, a most prominent postrevolutionary informer [as was her son on the Solovetsky Islands]. And Konkordiya Nikolayevna Iosse was evidently a woman of brilliant qualities: her husband was an officer who had been shot in her presence, and she herself was exiled to the Solovetsky Islands. But she managed to beg her way out and to set up a salon near the Big Lubyanka which the important figures of that establishment loved to frequent. She was not arrested again until 1937, along with her Yagoda customers.)
It is strange to recount, but as a result of an absurd tradition the Political Red Cross had been preserved from Old Russia.
There were three branches: the Moscow branch (Y. Peshkova-Vinaver); the Kharkov (Sandormirskaya); and the Petrograd. The one in Moscow behaved itself and was not dissolved until 1937. The one in Petrograd (the old Narodnik Sheytsov, the cripple Gartman, and Kocherovsky) adopted an intolerably impudent stance, mixed into political cases, tried to get support from such former inmates of the Schliisselburg Prison as Novorus-sky, who had been convicted in the same case as Lenin’s brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, and helped not only socialists but also KR’s—Counter-Revolutionaries. In 1926 it was shut down and its leaders were sent into exile.
The years go by, and everything that has not been freshly recalled to us is wiped from our memory. In the dim distance, we see the year 1927 as a careless, well-fed year of the still untruncated NEP. But in fact it was tense; it shuddered as newspaper headlines exploded; and it was considered at the time, and portrayed to us then, as the threshold of a war for world revolution. The assassination of the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, which filled whole columns of the papers that June, aroused Mayakovsky to dedicate four thunderous verses to the subject.
But here’s bad luck for you: Poland offered an apology; Voikov’s lone assassin was arrested there—and so how and against whom was the poet’s appeal to be directed?[21]
Who was to be repressed? Whose neck should be wrung? It was then that the so-called Voikov draft began. As always happened when there were incidents of disturbance or tension, they arrested former people: Anarchists, SR’s, Mensheviks, and also the intelligentsia as such. Indeed, who else was there to arrest in the cities? Not the working class!
But the old “close-to-the-Cadets” intelligentsia had already been thoroughly shaken up, starting in 1919. Had the time not come to shake up that part of the intelligentsia which imagined itself to be progressive? To give the stucfents a once-over? Once again Mayakovsky came to the rescue:
A convenient world outlook gives rise to a convenient juridical term: social prophylaxis. It was introduced and accepted, and it was immediately understood by all. (Lazar Kogan, one of the bosses of the White Sea Canal construction, would, in fact, soon say: “I believe that you personally were not guilty of anything. But, as an educated person, you have to understand that social prophylaxis was being widely applied!”) And when else, in fact, should unreliable fellow travelers, all that shaky intellectual rot, be arrested, if not on the eve of the war for world revolution? When the big war actually began, it would be too late.
And so in Moscow they began a systematic search, block by block. Someone had to be arrested everywhere. The slogan was: “We are going to bang our fist on the table so hard that the world will shake with terror!” It was to the Lubyanka, to the Butyrki, that the Black Marias, the passenger cars, the enclosed trucks, the open hansom cabs kept moving, even by day. There was a jam at the gates, a jam in the courtyard. They didn’t have time to unload and register those they’d arrested. (And the same situation existed in other cities. In Rostov-on-the-Don during those days the floor was so crowded in the cellar of House 33 that the newly arrived Boiko could hardly find a place to sit down.)
A typical example from this wave: Several dozen young people got together for some kind of musical evening which had not been authorized ahead of time by the GPU. They listened to music and then drank tea. They got the money for the tea by voluntarily contributing their own kopecks. It was quite clear, of course, that this music was a cover for counterrevolutionary sentiments, and that the money was being collected not for tea but to assist the dying world bourgeoisie. And they were all arrested and given from three to ten years—Anna Skripnikova getting five, while Ivan Nikolayevich Varentsov and the other organizers of the affair who refused to confess were shot!
And in that same year, somewhere in Paris, a group of Russian émigré Lycee graduates gathered to celebrate the traditional Pushkin holiday. A report of this was published in the papers. It was clearly an intrigue on the part of mortally wounded imperialism, and as a result all Lycee graduates still left in the U.S.S.R. were arrested, as were the so-called “law students” (graduates of another such privileged special school of prerevolutionary Russia).
Only the size of SLON—the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp—limited for the time being the scale of the Voikov draft. But the Gulag Archipelago had already begun its malignant life and would shortly metastasize throughout the whole body of the nation.
A new taste had been acquired and a new appetite began to grow. The time had long since arrived to crush the technical intelligentsia, which had come to regard itself as too irreplaceable and had not gotten used to catching instructions on the wing.
In other words, we never did trust the engineers—and from the very first years of the Revolution we saw to it that those lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses were kept in line by healthy suspicion and surveillance by the workers. However, during the reconstruction period, we did permit them to work in our industries, while the whole force of the class assault was directed against the rest of the intelligentsia. But the more our own economic leadership matured—in VSNKh (the Supreme Council of the Economy) and Gosplan (the State Planning Commission)—the more the number of plans increased, and the more those plans overlapped and conflicted with one another, the clearer became the old engineers’ basic commitment to wrecking, their insincerity, slyness, venality. The Sentinel of the Revolution narrowed its eyes with even greater vigilance—and wherever it directed its narrowed gaze it immediately discovered a nest of wreckers.
21
19. Evidently, the monarchist in question assassinated Voikov as an act of private vengeance: it is said that as Urals Provincial Commissar of Foodstuffs, in July, 1918, P. L. Voikov had directed the destruction of all traces of the shooting of the Tsar’s family (the dissection and dismemberment of the corpses, the cremation of the remains, and the dispersal of the ashes).