His initial approach to writing his memoirs, which he had started in the camps, was as a loyal Soviet citizen. Although he had witnessed many crimes against humanity committed under Stalin, he was still devoted to the Communist cause and praised the Soviet people for their heroism. He saw his memoirs as a record of “cruel, difficult, but splendid times.” The main hero of his books would not be him personally, but Soviet man as a collective hero. The title he came up with for his work—“Pir bessmertnykh” (The Feast of Immortals)—was supposed to convey his stand, as he states in his epigraph:
All things living on the earth are afraid of death; only a human being is capable of consciously conquering his fear. By overstepping the fear of death, an ideological man becomes immortal, and in this is his highest and eternal reward! There are millions of mortals on the earth, and they disappear without a trace; for them, the dangers and rigors of life are their damnation, but, for us [Soviet people], they are joy, pride, and triumph. Struggle is the feast of immortals.
In the course of the next four years, overcoming his infirmities and using whatever time was left after working at his main job as a translator and consultant at the All-Union Research Institute of Medical Information, he did it.
Having gone through all nine circles of Stalin’s man-made hell, he couldn’t help but gradually revise his world outlook. His memoirs somberly record his transformation from an idealistic youth caught in the cross fire between two opposing ideologies to a selfless fighter for his country’s proclaimed ideals, to a deeply disillusioned man, whose main preoccupation in the waning years of his life was to leave at least some trace of it for future generations. During his first years in the camps he had thought that “the root of the evil [was] not in people but in the two-faced [Soviet] system—a contradictory mixture of Lenin’s sensible humanity with Stalin’s beastly inhumanity.” But, after years of tormenting ruminations, he changed his mind. He was no longer inclined to exonerate either Lenin or the Soviet people. In his concluding volume, “Trudnyi put’ v bessmertie” (“The Hard Road to Immortality”), he made clear his view that Lenin was the cause of the country’s troubles. After all, through the principle of Party “democratic centralism,” none other than Lenin had implemented the personal power of a dictator, thus making the fate of the state dependent upon the personality of the ruler. As Dmitri logically concluded, “Stalin didn’t fall from the skies and capture the position of secretary general by force; he was the logical heir of Lenin.”2
Dmitri realized that Lenin’s fatal “mistake” was the result of the country’s much deeper historical and cultural problems. Russia was “accustomed to centralism,” which was predicated, among other reasons, on the sheer vastness of her territory and the multitude of ethnicities living on it. And Russia was a country of “unbelievable cultural backwardness.” Before his arrest Dmitri had lived only a short time in the Soviet Union as an adult. It was thus during his camp years, and, to an even greater degree, going though the turmoil of his first years in freedom, that he arrived at a much deeper understanding of his country. When he started his memoirs, he wanted to write “from civic, Soviet, Party, and patriotic perspectives,” but his conclusions, full of pain and shame for his country, were eventually hardly pleasing either to Soviet power or the Communist Party. Now, no longer a blind believer in the viability of the Communist idea, he concluded that the camp was “a little world that, on a smaller scale, reflects life outside of it . . . like a little drop of water reflects the huge sun”; that is, the camp was the whole Soviet Union in miniature.3
As he saw it, the main problem of the Soviet system was, first and foremost, its lawlessness, the fact that the country’s judicial system had long ago been replaced by Party decisions. He also acknowledged to himself what he had refused to see before—that democracy Soviet-style had always been nothing but a sham: neither Stalin, nor Khru shchev, nor any other Soviet leader had come to power as a result of free elections. And despite its claim to be a society of equals, Soviet society was stratified into classes the same way as in capitalist countries, only adjusted by the poverty of the vast majority of people and a lack of culture. He found the two causes interrelated. Living in the showcase of the Socialist capital, the southwestern sector of Moscow, he observed that the people around him, who “presumably [would] step into the Kingdom of Heaven during their lifetime,” lived in “hopeless and deadening boredom, dragging themselves to Communism with vodka and foul language.” Thus, poverty wasn’t the only reason for their miserable existence but also the low cultural habits of the nation in general: “In Germany, such poverty would look different; it would be better and cleaner . . . The tattered and bogged-down Soviet man grows spiritually only on the pages of Soviet newspapers.”4
Dmitri was also appalled by the thinning moral fabric of the Soviet people. After he returned from the camps, he was shaken by the realization that no one expressed any sense of moral responsibility for the national tragedy of persecution of innocent people that had occurred, as if millions of human lives were meaningless. Life went on as if nothing had happened, as if no one was guilty of bloodshed on such a grand scale.5
Now Dmitri totally dismissed the very idea of Communism, which he called “a great mirage” that was “no better or worse than any other religion . . . But we work honestly only for the joy of labor, not for the sake of believing in the possibility of such nonsense as the future satisfaction of all human needs.” And he predicted the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall, because it lacked a mechanism for economic development due to the system’s rigidity, the lack of competition, and absence of personal interest. He was also sure that the Soviet Union would collapse for another reason: the unresolved issue of relationships between the nationalities. (As we know now, all of Dmitri’s pre -dictions came true a quarter of a century later.)6
During the years of writing his memoirs, Dmitri’s hopes of seeing his work in print went up and down. In November 1962, a literary sensation took place in the Soviet Union. Written by a former Gulag prisoner and a non-Party member like Dmitri himself, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel devoted to life in Stalin’s camps, was published with the explicit approval of Khrushchev. It was the first major work of Soviet literature since the 1920s that had a politically controversial theme.
As could be expected, Dmitri took Solzhenitsyn’s writing to heart. In his “Zapiski iz zhivogo doma” (“Notes from the House of the Living”), one of the camp memoirs he was working on at the time, he disputed Solzhenitsyn’s approach to the description of camp life. He found the novel a “boring tale by a boring author about boring aspects of bright life, which he overlooked.” He attributed the novel’s success only to the fact that it had broken political taboos.7
Dmitri also tried to publish at least part of his memoirs, but he didn’t succeed. When he gave his manuscripts to the Union of Soviet Writers for review, his work received a strong and unequivocal rejection. Arguably, there were objective shortcomings that Dmitri could easily eliminate with careful and judicious reworking. One of these concerned the genre problem. Although his introduction qualified his writing as pure memoir and “raw material for future historians’ analysis,” here and there he slipped into the genre of an autobiographical novel, taking poetic license, mostly in rendering the life stories of other prisoners. There were some stylistic glitches for sure. A talented painter, he possessed extraordinary descriptive power when depicting landscapes, such as early morning in the African desert or a spring day in the Far North, but his attempts to render the speech mannerisms of prisoners of lower strata of society were less successful.8
But style was not the main reason for the sharp and unequivocal rejection of his work—it was his political stance. Although unable to refute any of Dmitri’s observations and conclusions about his camp experience or about the country, using a typical Soviet strategy for dismissing any criticism, the reviewer accused him of ignoring the bigger picture, of “wearing not only blinkers
but also special glasses for local vision.”
The rejection bruised Dmitri’s ego. But the pain was of his own making: he had naively taken the official claims of de-Stalinization of the country at face value. The thaw in Soviet cultural policy, started under Khrushchev, was a cautious and carefully controlled process. Camp memoirs denouncing Stalin’s excesses were balanced by ones reaffirming a core belief in the Communist ideology. Dmitri was outraged by the publication of another work on the same topic, Boris Diakov’s Povest’ o perezhitom (A Tale of Survival), justly seeing in it the Party’s attempt to set an example of how one should write about the controversial topic. In this work, the author chose as the main hero a four-star general and focused his vision on the lives of imprisoned Communists, complete with a Socialist competition for the most productive work efforts and, as Dmitri caustically puts it, “enthusiastic signing up for state bonds, quotations from Lenin’s work that produce abundant tears [of admiration] rolling down the cheeks.”9
As much as Dmitri mocked such writing and felt outrage toward it, his own work reveals an inner struggle. His criticism of the Soviet system and the Communist Party for abuse of power, lawlessness, and crimes against humanity is devastating. To that end, he also takes to task another book on camp life, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. Indeed, its author’s plight was much easier than his. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor for taking part in an antigovernment circle. Symbolically addressing his famous compatriot, Dmitri writes:
A hundred times I put my head into a noose for my government and received twenty years of imprisonment and five years of “a muzzle” [“exile,” in camp slang], not counting the destruction of my family, my broken ribs, my damaged head, and my battered abdomen. Socialism isn’t tsarism, and the secretary general of the Communist Party isn’t the tsar, the little father. And you didn’t see the true horrors of life, Fyodor Mikhailovich. I was taken from the camps as an invalid, and now they refuse to publish [my camp memoirs] “Notes from the House of the Living,” for the invisible camp fence still stands in my way.10
Among many examples of the heartless treatment of prisoners in Soviet camps that Dostoevsky couldn’t possibly even imagine, Dmitri records one episode that he was unable to forget for the rest of his days. In Norilsk, late in the evening, walking through a blizzard to his cabin, he stumbled upon a naked boy about twelve years old, covered from head to toe with snow. The boy wasn’t shivering from the cold: his freezing body had already passed this phase. Dmitri thought the boy had gotten lost and couldn’t find his barrack. When he attempted to take him indoors, with whatever life remained in him, the boy uttered his request that he be left alone—he wanted to freeze himself to death. Dmitri picked him up and took him into one of the barracks. He later learned that the boy’s father, a prominent Party official in Kiev, had been arrested together with his wife. The father was shot, and the mother got lost somewhere in the camps. Without bothering to conduct at least some semblance of investigation and trial, they sent the teenager to the camps. Totally neglected by the whole world, he lost his will to live.11
Meanwhile, times changed for the worse. In October 1964, Khrushchev was ousted from power. The opportunities for any work of literature with anti-Stalinist themes to appear in print were slowly but surely curtailed. The time of Brezhnev began, and with it came the reversal of the thaw. Soviet cultural policy became increasingly conservative and repressive. In his May 1965 speech commemorating the twentieth anniversary of victory over Germany, Brezhnev used Stalin’s name positively for the first time. Other alarming signs of freeze came along. In February 1966, the infamous trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the first such trial since Stalin’s days, took place. Although there was no return to the purges of the 1930s and 1940s, under Yuri Andropov, who became head of the KGB in 1967, the notorious agency regained much of the power it had enjoyed under Stalin.
Yet, all these developments didn’t stop Dmitri. On the contrary, now he felt that writing about the camps was an even more urgent matter as the political climate of the country chilled. He believed that eyewitnesses like him could undermine Party efforts to falsify history. “I must become worthy of my fate,” he kept telling himself.
He knew quite well that the omnipresent KGB had informers in all layers of the population, and he worried that his memoirs could be confiscated and destroyed. First, he attempted to deposit at least part of his work for safekeeping in the Lenin Library in Moscow, the largest and most prestigious library in the country. When they didn’t accept his manuscripts, he took them to Leningrad and deposited them in the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library. First, they put them in a general manuscript vault, but after examination by the KGB censor, they were transferred to a “special” vault, which meant that only those with special clearance would be allowed to read them. Dmitri hoped that his work would survive until better times in that “special” vault. In fact, in the foreword to his manuscripts, he wrote, “Without any hope of being heard in my lifetime, I firmly believe in our future and work for its sake . . . [Meanwhile] I’m writing for my own drawer, but in the deep belief that someday these pages will come into the hands of someone who will use them for their intended purpose—for the common good, for restoration of the truth.”12
Since his Gulag memoirs had no prospects of finding their way to the press, and knowing that now as an old and sick man, he might not live very long and any trace of his life would vanish along with his body, he felt that at the very least he should somehow make known his service to the country as an intelligence officer. With ingenuity that harked back to his best days of spying in the West, he designed a scheme aimed at attracting the attention of the KGB brass. Using a new format popular in Soviet journals of the time, interviews with celebrities under the heading, “A Conversation with Interesting People,” he composed a self-interview, complete with the “journalist’s” questions and his own detailed responses. Of course, without giving the actual names of the nations upon whom he had spied in the past, in a very succinct form, Dmitri described his most important operations. To make the interview sound real, he interjected details about his present self, such as “The aged man smiles; his face gets younger” or “Dmitri Aleksandrovich strokes his white beard.” Certainly, he omitted from his text any mention of his arrest, torture, and the many years spent behind barbed wire. He sent his self-interview to the popular journal Ogonyok (Little Light), which had a circulation of several million copies.
Of course, by now he knew quite well that in the Soviet press, tightly controlled by the Party and KGB censors, his text didn’t stand a chance of being published. But he was counting on the domino effect, on what would happen after his submission landed on the editor’s desk. While all KGB activities constituted state secrets, information about the agency’s operations in the West were guarded even more tightly. Duly alerted, the editor rushed the material to the attention of the KGB. As expected, Dmitri’s self-interview was banned from publication, but it produced the desired effect. First, the KGB censor, G. A. Sokolov, invited Dmitri for a talk to make sure that the author was a real person and that he hadn’t invented all the mind-boggling adventures described in his self-interview. Then, after the censor’s report, the KGB bosses examined the agency’s archives and found that most of the material about Dmitri’s work in the West hadn’t survived the thirty-year span. They invited the old-timer over to headquarters and asked him to write everything he remembered about his operations in minute detail. This was how Dmitri’s memo, titled “Rukopis’ Gansa” (“Hans’s Manuscript”), written in one of the KGB offices, came about. (Several decades later, this memo became the main source of writing on Bystrolyotov for KGB officers-cumwriters, such as Oleg Tsarev, Evgeni Primakov, and others.)
Writing the memo produced some good results for Dmitri. Soon, the omnipotent organization made sure that he was given a two-room apartment on Vernadsky Prospect (the same place where I had visited him in September 1973) an
d money for furniture. The unusual generosity and change of heart on the part of the agency, not known for its good-heartedness, can be explained by the effect of one paragraph that Dmitri added as a postscript to his memo: “The best years of my life were connected with my work in [our] intelligence. I’m proud of them. I’m glad that I returned to the USSR; granted, I did it to my ruin, but I returned consciously, drawn by a patriot’s duty. I believe that I’ve lived a good life and am ready to live it the same way again.”13
Today’s KGB successors widely publicize these lines of Bystrolyotov, now reclaiming him as their hero. In so doing, they suppress from the public the fact that by the time these words were written, the KGB had completely forgotten about him and his selfless service to the country. From what is known today about his real life, it is hard to accept the words of his postscript at face value. As was any Soviet citizen, Dmitri (to even a greater degree) was well familiar with the unlimited power of the KGB over the life and death of any person in the country. He was only too aware that any expression of bitterness about his ruined life would mean falling out of grace with the almighty organization.
It may also be that the last phrase of his postscript (“I believe that I’ve lived a good life and am ready to live it the same way again”) had another, hidden meaning that anyone who knew Dmitri would find quite in line with his defiant nature. The phrase could mean “Up yours! Despite your efforts to destroy me, you didn’t succeed. I’m alive and kicking.”
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