MEYERHOLD’S LETTER
Between 1933 and 1939 hundreds of thousands of citizens suspected of terrorist activities were arrested throughout the Soviet Union as enemies of the people: some were Trotskyists, others agents of intelligence services in Europe and Japan. Among them, in the early morning of May 16, two intellectuals of great importance were arrested: the writer Isaac Babel, whom we all know, and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Russian theater’s greatest innovator. Meyerhold was to the theater what Eisenstein was to film.
During the final phase of perestroika, a committee of writers led by Vitaly Shentalinsky began, after a tireless and arduous struggle with police agencies and their defenders, the inspection of the literary archives of the KGB. These documents are horrendous and shocking; the whole of the terror of the Great Purge is encapsulated there.
Those arrested, in general, were convinced that top state officials did not know what was happening in the country, that their imprisonment was the result of a provocation organized by perverted minds to discredit the Communist system, and carried out by murderers of the worst sort.
The far-reaching purges began in December of 1934, after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose popularity obscured the figure of Stalin. During the Gorbachev period, people began to speak openly about the possibility that the murder was arranged by the NKVD and ordered by Stalin himself. The persecution of the enemies of Kirov brought an end to all of his opponents. “We must extinguish the enemy without quarter or pity, without paying the slightest attention to the moans and sighs of professional humanists,” a senile and troubled Gorky demands in Pravda on January 2, 1935. The systematic work of extermination, the so-called “purges,” decreased in late 1939. One of Gorbachev’s great virtues has been his attempt to clean up the past. Communism would be devoid of any moral grounds if it did not vigorously reject the crimes committed. Khrushchev was heroic in denouncing Stalin’s crimes, releasing political prisoners falsely accused and restoring their reputation when the whole of the mechanism of terror was in motion, when the criminals were still alive. The apparatus took a few years but eventually halted it. Gorbachev is attempting to take the next step. The old guard has placed in his way the same obstacles — adding even more — with which they defeated Khrushchev. They made the task impossible for him; they caused him to fail. And what they achieved was a suicide. Times were different and they, oblivious to reality for a very long time, succumbed and destroyed what was left of the socialist system.
In Vsevolod Meyerhold’s file, Shentalinsky found a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, president of the Council of the People’s Commissars, with the assurance that if it arrived in his hands he would be released and, also, the criminal proceedings being employed in the Lubyanka would end.
The investigators began to use physical methods on me, a sick, 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down on the floor and then beaten on my feet and spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force…For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height.
When they added the “psychological attack,” as it’s called, the physical and mental pain aroused such an appalling terror in me that I was quite naked and defenseless. My nerve endings, it turned out, were very close to the surface on my body and the skin proved as sensitive and soft as a child’s. The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when his master whips it. One time my body was shaking so uncontrollably that the guard escorting me back from such an interrogation asked: “Have you got malaria?” When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.
Fright arouses terror, and terror forces us to find some means of self-defense.
“Death, oh, most certainly, death is easier than this!” the interrogated person says to himself. I began to incriminate myself in the hope that his, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold…4
VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD
4 Translated by John Crowfoot.
22 MAY
Morning at the Pushkin Museum. I lingered in the hall where the Matisses are, both upon entering and on my way out. To see them again is like winning a prize. I wanted to go later to the little Gogol Museum. It was in that apartment where he spent his last crises, it was there that he burned the notebooks written over the years, including the second part of Dead Souls, where he spent his long death throes and lived his last scene, pathetic and grotesque like everything having to do with him. The priest who tortured him for months, Father Matvey, a cruel and demented mind, had attached a cluster of leeches around his nostrils (to extract the bad blood and the fetid mucus he was emitting); as he lay dying, he regained consciousness from time to time, during one of which, quite disturbed, he tried to wrest the disgusting animals from his face, horrified because he believed that the fingers of the devil were seizing his soul. He died with that conviction, and he was right, except the devil’s name was Matvey, but he did not know it. The place is small, I seem to remember it having sparse, rundown furniture, all of it from the period of Gogol, which may have even been his. I couldn’t go in because it was under renovation. I only went there once, when I worked at the embassy, accompanied by Kyrim. There were about seven or eight of us at the time plus the old woman in charge of explaining the author’s life, his work, and his belongings; we all began to act like characters from Gogol, as if someone had hypnotized us or wound us up. It was not an intellectual or student audience. They were people of modest means; one would think they only came to a museum because they were one step from the door and a terrible storm suddenly struck. But that was not the case. I spent about half an hour there, maybe more, fascinated by the nonsensical conversation that arose among the small group of spectators and the director, from all appearances the only employee, with that look only old maids possess: fragile, trembling, sophisticated, and modest, a caricature of expressions and gestures of Marlene Dietrich and Kay Francis, a voice that whistled trying to hide the absence of an upper front tooth; the others, as far as I remember, were a hearty and cranky old man, another man of the same age, timid and skittish, and a young deaf-mute, a girl his age, perhaps his girlfriend, who translated the director’s explanation into sign language, and two older women who moved like wind-up dolls, without blinking or breathing, but alive, that was immediately obvious. I think that was all of us. The little old maid recounted inconsequential episodes from the life of Gogol, coloring them with a moralistic and didactic tone; she transformed him into a “positive” writer, “realist in form and national in content,” “as progressive as they come.” The timid old man dared, in a terrified voice, to ask if his influence had reached the October Revolution, and the other old man, the sour-faced man, who from the outset had assumed command, roared: “