“Trifles,” laughed both Zoia and Ekaterina Stepanovna, saying, “Money will come with time! Money is a thing that is acquired. It was, and will be, and still be even more.”
I was delighted. Not every capitalist would be so cheerful about the loss of 600 thousand rubles!
For Zoia it was most important to have the investigation and trial proceed not in Novosibirsk but in Iakutsk. In Iakutsk she had a sister who was married to a public prosecutor, another prosecutor was her cousin, and a third was some sort of relative. With such a situation and the fact that the lost 600 thousand in gold did not make up all of their liquid capital, Zoia had good reason to think that if they succeeded in having the trial in Iakutsk they would manage to smother the case and obtain freedom.
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And they succeeded. They were being sent to Iakutsk for trial. It was in the process of being moved to Iakutsk that they were quartered at the Irkutsk prison. Here they waited for the Iakutsk convoy, which was supposed to arrive specially for them, since there was no regular transfer of convicts to Iakutsk.
Among the female criminals Zoia was just like a tamer in a tiger’s cage. For them, I think, her calm and disdainful confidence had a most powerful effect, so that they did not dare touch her. In her, they also saw a procurer of material goods such as themselves, but on an immeasurably greater scale. Sometimes she liked to tease the “tigers,” when they were already gnashing their teeth, but she was far above their criminal ways.
At that time the cell captains were appointed rather than elected by the inmates as before, and one fine day Zoia was appointed captain. How quickly did order enthrone itself in our chaotic cell! There was no extortion, no getting rations out of turn, no special privileges, no fights. Even cursing occurred less frequently.
How did Zoia achieve this? She didn’t scream, as some captains did. She didn’t threaten to complain to the administration. This relative order seemed to come on its own.
I would end almost every one of my sketches about the Russian women whom I met in prisons and transfer points with a question of their destiny. I wanted to know whether they managed to mend the broken threads of their lives. And I would especially have liked to know about the future of Zoia Zhigaleva.
She undoubtedly was an extraordinary person. How often in the ensuing years in the camps would I remember seeing the helplessness of captains and sometimes even the brigadiers before the anarchic criminal convicts, plain hooligans and even those women who were convicted on article 58 [political prisoners]—not criminals, but more vile than the criminals. How often in the Akmolinsk camp during the wild screaming of obscenities and utter lawlessness frequently ending in injury and even murder did I think to myself: “If only Zoia were here!” With her mere presence, with her calm and derisive response to hooligan behavior, she brought order and organization where there had been rampage.
I would say to her: “Zoia, in an earlier time in Russia or in the West, you would have become one of the great agents in the nation’s industry or commerce. But here they consider you a transgressor of the law, a speculator, that is, an enemy of the people.” I didn’t notice that Zoia had any repentance or wish to stop her interrupted activity. On the contrary, temporary failure and a clash with the Soviet laws strengthened her daring and desire for success despite all obstacles.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God
The first paragraph of this selection sets the theme. How does a child of committed communists, who feels an intense hatred for religion and believes in its eradication by force, turn to God while a teenager? Cases of this type lead to broader questions peculiar to the twentieth century—what are the psychological factors which make an individual a dissident in a dictatorial state? Originally published as “Kak ia prishel k Bogu” [How I Came to God] in Grani, Nos. 111–112, 1979.
The saying “He was Saul and became Paul” applies to me. Raised by parents who were devoted communists, I was not, like most children my age, simply indifferent to religion—I hated it. I dreamed of the time when the last devout old woman would die and the last church would be closed. I was perturbed with the government for mollycoddling believers. Why wait for the last old woman believer to die? Just close the churches and be done with it. There certainly would be no believers from my generation, that’s for sure. How could an educated person believe in the flood and in a God with a beard? And if you had told me, a ten-year old boy, that in seven years time I would be baptized of my own accord, I would have laughed out loud. But that’s what happened.
With the best of intentions, my parents played a dirty trick on me, but it worked out for the best because I was led to God. With the best of intentions my parents, as did our literature, served up fantasy for reality. They believed that the truth could be harmful to a child’s developing worldview. And so they taught me that the goal they worked for, “man is a friend, comrade and brother to man,” was already achieved or almost achieved; that with rare exceptions, all of our people were good, conscientious, and placed the interests
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of society ahead of their own. But when I encountered life, I found nothing of the kind.
In my children’s books I read about child volunteers who helped the sick and elderly and about teachers who devoted their lives to children, but in life I found none of this, either.
My parents and our writers had obscured my vision with rose-colored glasses and when I removed them, my eyes hurt.
Evtushenko [Evgenii Evtushenko, the poet] wrote that a “chain of inconsistencies could lead to loss of faith.” But he put it very mildly. In fact, inconsistencies did make many lose faith. It’s no accident that among my generation, those who were sixteen or seventeen in 1956, there are so many “superfluous” people. Fortunately, my disillusionment in one faith led me to another. But that all came later. For the time being, at nine and ten years old, I only bumped into sharp corners and sustained bruises.
It began with my ethnicity. My father is Jewish and my mother is Russian. If I don’t look Jewish, than I look even less like a Russian. The first blow was when the kids in the courtyard that we moved to when I was six years old called me a short, small, three-letter word: Yid. The concept of different nationalities was a very vague one for me. Thanks to my parents, I figured approximately thus: there is the Soviet Union and then there are other countries. And those who live in the Soviet Union are all Russians, all Soviets.
When I came home and told my parents that the other children had called me some strange word and refused to play with me, my parents explained that in the dark past Jews were called that word, that my father was indeed a Jew, but now that no longer meant anything. The parents of the children who called me this name were probably just very backward. This consoled me, but then in the courtyard, at school, and the young Pioneer camp, I continued to hear that word.
For a long time I could not understand and tried to explain: “What do you mean, guys? I was born in Moscow, after all. My homeland is Russia, I don’t even know the Jewish language.”