As far as we know, he held his last position in Kazakhstan, in the Central Office for Communications and liaisons. He was bored; and in his office he again began to draw plans and make calculations: a bomb the size of a walnut, with tremendous destructive power, obsessed him until the end of his life.
B. D. Novsky, the representative of the People’s Commissariat for Communications and Liaisons, was arrested in Kazakhstan on December 23, 1930, at two o’clock in the morning. His arrest was much less dramatic than reported in the West. According to the reliable testimony of his sister. there was no armed resistance and fighting on the stairs, Novsky was asked urgently over the telephone to come to the Central Office, The voice was probably that of the engineer on duty: Butenko. During the search, which lasted until eight o'clock in the morning, all his documents, photographs, manuscripts, sketches, and plans, as well as his books, were taken. This was the first step toward the liquidation of Novsky. On the basis of very recent information, given by A. L. Rubina, Novsky's sister, this is what happened later:
Novsky was confronted with a certain Reinhold, T. S. Reinhold, who confessed that he was a British spy, and that by order he had been sabotaging the economy. Novsky maintained that he had never before seen this unfortunate man with a cracked voice and a dull gaze. After fifteen days, which were granted to Novsky to think things over, he was again brought before the interrogator, and offered sandwiches and a cigarette. Novsky refused the offer and asked for a pencil and paper, to get in touch with some people in high places. At dawn the next day he was taken out of his cell and sent to Suzdal. When the car arrived at the railroad station on that icy morning, the platform was deserted- A single cattle car stood on a siding, and it was to this car that they took Novsky. Fedukin, the tall, pock-marked, and unbending interrogator, spent some five hours alone with Novsky in this cattle car (the doors were locked from the outside), trying to persuade him of the moral obligation of making a false confession. These negotiations failed entirely. Then followed long nights without days spent in solitary confinement in Suzdal Prison, in a damp scone-walled cell known as the "doghouse,” which had the major architectural advantage of making a man feel as if he were buried alive, so that he experienced his mortal being, in comparison with the eternity of stone and time, as a speck of dust in the ocean of timelessness, Novsky was already a man of failing health; the long years of hard labor and revolutionary zeal, which feeds on blood and glands, had weakened his lungs, kidneys, and joints. His body was now covered with boils, which would burst under the blows of rubber truncheons, oozing out his precious blood along with useless pus. Nevertheless, it seems that in contact with the stone of his living tomb, Novsky drew some metaphysical conclusions undoubtedly not much different from those suggesting the thought that man is only a speck of dust in the ocean of timelessness; but this also revealed to him another conclusion, which the architects of the "doghouse" could not have foreseen: nothing for nothing. The man who found in his heart this heretical and dangerous thought, which speaks of the futility of one's own being-in-time, Ends himself, however, faced with another (final) dilemma: whether to accept the transitoriness of this being-in-time for the sake of that precious and expensively acquired knowledge (which excludes any morality and therefore is made in absolute freedom), or, for the sake of that same knowledge, to yield oneself to the embrace of nothingness.
For Fedukin it was a question of honor, the greatest challenge: to break down Novsky. In his long career as an interrogator, he had always succeeded: in breaking their backs, he had also broken the wills of even the most tenacious prisoners (which was why they always gave him the toughest material). Novsky, however, stood before him like a scientific puzzle, an unknown organism that behaved quite unpredictably and atypically in relation to Fedukin's entire experience. (There is no doubt that in Fedukin’s laudable theorizing there was no bookishness, given his less than modest education, so that any connection with teleological reasoning would have escaped him. He must have felt like the originator of a doctrine, which he formulated very simply, to make it comprehensible to any man: “Even a stone would talk if you broke its teeth").[8]
On the night of January 28–29, they led from his cell a man who still bore the name Novsky, though he was now only the empty shell of a being, a heap of decayed and ever- tortured flesh. In Novsky’s dull gaze one could read, as the only sign of soul and life, the decision to endure, to write the last page of his biography according to his own will and fully conscious, as one writes a last testament. He formulated his thought like this: '"I've reached my mature years-why spoil my biography?" He therefore seemed to have realized that even this last trial was not only the final page of the autobiography which he had been consciously writing with his blood and brain for some forty years, but also that this was indeed the sum of his living, the conclusion on which everything hinged, and all the rest was (and had been) only a minor treatise, the arithmetical calculation whose value was insignificant in relation to the final formula that gave meaning to these subordinate operations.
Novsky was led out of the cell by two guards, who supported him on each side, down some half-dark stairs that wound vertiginously into the depths of the triple cellar of the prison. They brought him to a room illuminated by a bare light bulb that hung from the ceiling. The guards released him, and Novsky staggered. He heard the iron door close behind him, but at first he noticed only the light, which cut painfully into his consciousness. The door opened again, and the same two guards, preceded by Fedukin, brought in a young man and left him about one meter from Novsky. It flashed through Novsky's mind that this was probably another false confrontation, one of many, so he stubbornly clenched his toothless jaws and with a painful effort opened his swollen eyelids to get a look at the young man. He expected to see again a corpse with dull eyes (like Reinhold), but with a shiver very much like foreboding he saw before him young, living eyes full of fear that was human, altogether human. The young man was naked to the waist; with astonishment and the dread of the unknown, Novsky realized that his muscular body was entirely devoid of blue marks, without a single bruise, with healthy dark skin untouched yet by putrefaction. But what astonished and frightened him the most was that gaze, whose meaning he could not penetrate, that unknown game into which he was being drawn, at the point when he thought that everything was already over in the best possible sense. Could he have fathomed what the ingenious and infernal intuition of Fedukin was preparing for him? Fedukin was standing behind him, invisible yet present, holding his breath, letting Novsky discover it for himself and be horrified by it and then, when the denial born of terror whispered to him that that was impossible, ready to hit him suddenly with the truth, the truth more awful than the merciful bullet he could use to blow his brains out.
8
The journal Worker published several fragments from Fedukin's memoirs, called The Second Front (August and November 1964). Thus for, this autobiographical "piece" covers only the earliest period of Fedukin's “background activity,'' but judging by this material, in which the vividness of his actual practice is replaced by overly schematic reflections, I am afraid that even the complete edition of his memoirs would not reveal the secret of his genius: it seems to me that, except in actual practice, Fedukin was a theoretical zero. He extracted confessions according to the most profound principles of inner psychology without even being aware that psychology existed; he dealt with human souls and their secrets without knowing that he did. But even now, what really attracts us in Fedukin's remembrances are his descriptions of nature; the austere beauty of the Siberian landscape, the sunrise over the frozen tundra, diluvial rains and treacherous waters cutting through the taiga, the silence of distant lakes, their steel color-ail of which testifies to his undeniable literary talent.