Chapter Twenty-Nine
She placed the palms of her hands on my shoulders. Her hands smelled of old-fashioned elder blossom perfume, either hers or wafting from the lace sleeves become a bit yellow with time. We kissed primly and I saw close-up her lips pressed together and stretched into a cool smile with a tiny beauty mark and her eyes revealing absolutely nothing, not even self-consciousness.
It was then that I saw her father for the first time, although I had been a frequent visitor to their home. He was never there, having just left or not yet returned from the nobleman’s club.
He stepped forth in a new frock-coat and white vest, slipping starch-white cards into his billfold, ready for his upcoming round of visits. She presented myself to him saying my last name and the diminutive of my first. We kissed three times. He looked at me with too much attention and a strange curiosity, shook my icy hand, and poured two green cordial glasses of raspberry liqueur. We clinked glasses and drank. I, never before having had wine, sensed an immediate intoxication from the very aroma which filled my nostrils and throat with a wonderfully evanescent raspberry taste. Outside, beyond the windows with their dry, cracked putty, the air resounded with the constant Easter chiming of the bells of St. Michael’s Monastery above the sparrows in the lilac bushes ready to burst into flower. White clouds scudded across the watery azure sky and the sun glistened in the quicksilver bubble of the outdoor Reaumur thermometer. A resurrected fly crawled along the painted windowsill and I stared at her father with pickled eyes, at his stiff snow-white cuffs and golden cufflinks, his crewcut and powerful head well set on the compact, thickset torso of a retired cavalry officer who was squandering his wife’s Moldavian estate at the gaming tables of the Catherine Yacht Club.
“You remember my deceased father?” she asked, uncannily continuing to read my mind.
“I remember it all,” I responded wistfully.
“So do I,” she said and we both grew silent.
Chapter Thirty
Kirill Kostsinskii [K.V. Uspenskii], A Dissident’s Trial
Kiril V. Uspenskii (Kostsinskii is his pseudonym) was born in Petrograd in 1915. Both his parents were active Party members after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. The author was a military officer, though this did not forestall his first arrest in 1938. He was released and subsequently served in military intelligence. He was dropped behind German lines in the Ukraine to activate the local partisans. Captured by the German forces, he managed to escape, only to return and be excluded from the Communist Party. After World War II he devoted himself to literature. He was arrested again in 1960 and served a four-year sentence for “excessive fraternization” with foreigners. He became active in the human rights movement after his release from prison and was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1978. Taken from K.V. Uspenskii, “Iz vospominanii” [From my Memoirs] in Pamiat’, Paris, 1982.
In actuality, what was I accused of by the KGB? Why were they so angry with me? To answer this question I will have to digress somewhat.
I grew up in a family of intelligentsia Bolsheviks which was fully convinced that the concepts of humanism and communism were synonymous. During the days when Lenin and Zinoviev were hiding in the famous “lean-to,” N.I. Bukharin found refuge in my parents’ apartment. Naturally, I don’t remember this, but I do remember Bukharin’s rare visits in the 20’s and the beginning of the 30’s. They were always important to my parents. Humanism, elevated moral principles, and friendship with Bukharin—in that order but not without a shade of deference—did not later hinder my father along with everyone else, though not so forcefully, from being indignant at the vile crimes of Bukharin as well as other heroes (or victims) of “The Great Purges.” My mother, a sweet and selfless woman, admired Stalin’s courage
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and wisdom. She had forgotten how in 1928 or 1929, after a routine visit by Bukharin, she let fall a phrase in the presence of us boys: “If that is so, then Nikolai Ivanovich is undoubtedly right: he is a paranoiac.” It was completely clear from the context of whom she was speaking.
These contradictions were forming in the sub-conscious rather than in the conscious. “The Great Purges” elicited a morbid curiosity and a desire to understand what psychological motives induced Lenin’s comrades-in-arms to take up counterrevolution and betrayal. The study of party congresses, the works of Bukharin (miraculously preserved in our home, though later destroyed), and then, after the war, Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky and Bernstein, led to the formation of views which later, fully coincided with Dubcek’s program, encompassing the total spirit of the “Prague Spring.” I was not the only one to undergo a shift based on various phases of the party line. But we were living in an age of the Great Silence when open servility in science or art was labeled civic consciousness. Any pronouncement which required real civic courage and was supported by quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism in an adequate manner almost invariably ended with “serious unpleasantness.”
Realistically, nothing of essence changed later, other than that the “unpleasantness” became less catastrophic.
At about 8:00 AM on September 30, I was taken to a building in the political prison where I was “welcomed” by the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs]. As at my arrest, I was taken to a neighboring windowless room. One of the guards told me to undress, squat, bend over, spread, while another, meanwhile, carefully examined the contents of my pockets.
“And what is this?”
“The accusation and notes on my case.”
“That’s not allowed.”
“What do you mean, not allowed? You’re taking me to court.”
I declared that if my papers were taken away from me, I would not go to court.
“You’ll go,”—and the handcuffs clinked in his hands. Luckily, the officer on duty came around and explained to the sergeant that I was right.
A prison “black mariah” stood in the yard. I must say that the soldiers of my escort unit—even though they were rotated daily—radically changed their attitude toward me after the first day. They brought me parcels, notes, cigarettes, and expressed their sympathy in many ways. When alone, and without informers around, they asked me many questions. On the way to court and back, they left a door open in the vehicle and I hungrily peered at
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the life of the city. I reveled in the beauty of Leningrad with an unexpected painful acuity.
The trial went on for five days. My request to subpoena the experts who labeled my unfinished works as being anti-Soviet was summarily dismissed. I asked that three well-known writers, Iu. P. German, V. F. Panova, and A. I. Panteleev, who could provide an objective analysis of my literary work, be called. This solicitation was also refused. Subsequently, everything flowed within the predetermined channel. With minor exceptions, all witnesses repeated what they had said at the preliminary inquest.
I began my testimony poorly, declaring that I recognized the objective harm of many of my pronouncements. But I could not have or did not have any “desire” or “intent” to “weaken the Soviet State.” If I had been intent on an anti-Soviet line, I would have been secretive to the maximum. Furthermore, I assumed that the decrees of the Twentieth Party Congress signified a return to Leninist norms of democracy. That was why I had spoken openly regarding those deficiencies which impeded the normal development of our society, specifically in literature. I was trained as an intelligence officer and knew well the techniques of counter-espionage. I knew that my mail was being read, that the phone was tapped, and via an anonymous letter, that my apartment was bugged.