After that, Brezhnev himself approved the book.
In December again, though in Zhukov’s seventy-second year, the proofs were sent to the publisher.
Should he rejoice or not?
Sunk in his deep armchair, overcome by weakness, he sat. And he remembered—he remembered the furious applause in the Writers’ Club (was that three years ago?). He remembered how everyone in the hall had gotten to their feet again and again as if they were using the palms of their hands to make an imprint of his immortal glory.
Their applause was like a stubborn repetition of the disappointments and hopes he had heard from the generals right after the Twentieth Congress.
There was pain in his heart. Perhaps it was then that he should have done something. Then, perhaps, then was the time he should have acted.
Can it be that I was really such a fool . . . ?
1994–1995
FRACTURE POINTS
1
WHO DIDN’T GO hungry that year? Though his father was a shop foreman, he never “picked up” anything extra and never allowed anyone else to do so. In the family were his mother, grandmother, sister, and Mitya, almost seventeen, and all of them so hungry! He would stand by his lathe all day and then at night it was off in a boat with a friend to catch some fish.
His father’s shop produced shell casings for the Katyushas. The people in the Kharkov Hammer and Sickle Factory kept working—they weren’t allowed to stop—right until the city itself was in flames. They almost were caught by the Germans and left the city while bombs were dropping around them, going all the way back to the Volga.
The war? Well, by now it seemed to be coming to an end. The front lines had all moved westward, but then what would happen? Mitya was only a whisker away from his call-up. But he already knew what he could achieve, given his character and his brain, and in that spring of 1944 he passed not only his ninth but also his tenth grade as an external student, and passed with honors. In September he could make a run for some college or institute. But which one? He and his friend got their hands on a booklet, The Colleges and Universities of Moscow. Wow, what a lot of names, and then there were all the faculties, departments, and specialties. What did they all mean? Who could make sense of it? How to decide? They had almost made up their minds, but then they read that the Energy Institute on Enthusiasts’ Highway provided three meals a day! And that outweighed everything else. (Though he kept it to himself, he had been thinking about law or history.) Still, with the breeziness of youth, he applied there.
He was accepted. The student residence was in Lefortovo. The trouble was the way they calculated the three meals. Cabbage soup was one meal, a scoop of rotten mashed potatoes another. Then 550 grams of poor-quality bread. That meant they would spend the day studying and the night unloading trucks. They were paid in cigarettes. Then it was off to the market to trade a pack of “Ducats” for some potatoes. (His father helped him out as well.)
Those born in ’26 were now all being grabbed for the army. Those born in ’27 were ducking here and there. He managed to keep out of the way. And then the war was over.
The war was over, and yet it wasn’t over. Comrade Stalin declared that now we have to rebuild! Life went on in the same rigid military fashion as before, though without the military funerals. Rebuild! A year, two years, a third year of rebuilding meant that you had to go on working, living, and feeding yourself as if there were still a war on. He was already in his fourth year and had saved 400 rubles for a new pair of pants, but then the rumor went round of the currency reform. People rushed off to the savings banks, and immediately two lines would form, one to deposit money, another to take it out; but there was no telling which was the best. Mitya Yemtsov guessed wrong, and his pants vanished into thin air. There were some immediate gains: student grants and salaries weren’t divided by ten, and there was no more rationing. With his January grant money he bought up enough rye bread to stuff himself, and some tea and sugar as well. The head of their institute was a woman with reputation and influence—Malenkov’s wife, in fact—and she was able to get some supplemented grants. Yemtsov’s grant increased as well. He was thriving.
He was thriving not only because of the food and not only because he was doing well in his studies. (They were selecting students to specialize in atomic energy and automated aircraft guidance systems. He chose the latter, without giving it a great deal of thought. Had he taken the nuclear option, he would have been locked away in secret laboratories for years on end, as if he’d gone to prison.) He was also thriving in his community service, in the Komsomol.
It happens imperceptibly and not by any intention: we learn our own worth only with the passing of years and by the way that others regard us (“he’s exceptional”). Everyone notices that you’re energetic by nature, that you’re the first to make proposals on how the collective should handle a certain issue, that your opinions prevail over others’. So, why don’t you preside over the meeting? Will you make the report? Well, why not? And your words come together easily when you make a speech—these people must be supported, those must be denounced. Everyone applauds. And they vote for you. It all proceeded so smoothly, as if it had happened of its own accord: Komsomol leader, faculty secretary in your third year, deputy secretary of the whole institute in your fifth. (For this post, you had to be a candidate for the party. But an instruction had come from the Central Committee: Party intake is to be suspended effective 1948 [during the war they had taken in too many people]. And so the proposal was “that Comrade Yemtsov be accepted, as an exception.” There were now some war veterans at the party meeting, and they began to murmur: Why him? Why the exception, and for a young puppy like that? The meeting was against the proposal. But the head of the institute, this imposing and confident woman, rose to her feet—and remember who her husband was. Was anyone unaware of that? Her words fell weightily on the auditorium : “There are some special considerations in this case.” And that was enough. Even the veterans voted in favor.)
Very soon—you still hadn’t graduated and hadn’t yet been given your job assignment—they took you into the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol as deputy director of student youth. (You still had to travel to the institute, but why take the streetcar? Call the city committee and you can ride in a Pobeda; call again and the Pobeda will bring you back, but not to the student residence: now you have an apartment.)
Yes, you had favorable winds behind you, to be sure. But you weren’t the least bit embarrassed in front of your classmates because there was nothing dishonest in any of this: you never pushed for it yourself, you never plotted and schemed, it just happened all by itself. And even more: the work of the Komsomol was honest, true, even sacred! (The first time you came into the Komsomol City Committee’s offices, it was like a religious person entering a church—with reverence and awe.) This was the living, throbbing center of a resplendent life for all our people: after the world-renowned victory we had won, the streams of energy directed to reconstruction simply poured through the whole country! And the news of our grandiose construction projects resounded through the land. And you are a part of this, and you are helping guide your generation of students toward those projects and those achievements.
He wrote proudly to his father (who had remained in his factory shop, now on the Volga—they were never sent back to Kharkov). His father could appreciate what it meant to succeed through your own talents. He was the son of a blacksmith who had risen to become an engineer. He had married a girl from a Poltava landowning family who in the early 1920s was looking to shelter herself under someone’s wing. (Later, his father would get very angry when his wife spoke to her mother in French.) In 1935 he suffered the misfortune of being arrested when someone spread slander about him. (Their family immediately had to begin living in straitened circumstances, and their Schroeder grand piano was put into a cellar on its side.) Six months later, however, his father was acquitted. Being freed in such a wondrous fashion only strengthened his proletarian faith in t
he soundness of our system and reinforced his lifelong dedication to the path of Lenin.
But wasn’t it true that something had changed in the Komsomol City Committee? Not everyone entered there with reverence. And some were clearly deficient in ideological enthusiasm; their affectation was obvious and could not be hidden. It was true, to be sure, that once a person yields even a little to his personal interests, it’s very difficult to put him back on the right path. One person is scheming against another to get a better job. Suddenly, the second secretary of the City Committee gets caught on his office sofa with a secretary. Well, measures were taken . . .
Like it or not, there are also certain facts that slip into each of our lives. Here was a fact: Beginning with his promotion to deputy director of the section and continuing with each promotion, a long envelope, always of the same greenish brown color, would slip into his hands each month. It was called a “package.” Inside was the equivalent of a month’s wages, the full amount, without any deductions, taxes, or payments for state loans. And you’d be lying if you said that you found this awkward, unnecessary, or unacceptable. In fact it was very acceptable: there’s always a use for a bit of extra cash.
He married one of his classmates, but they had no honeymoon: like all party and government officials in Moscow, he had to be on duty in the City Committee until two or three in the morning, wide awake because of the will and the habit of Stalin. He would come home in his Pobeda sometime before four a.m., and why should he wake his wife? She had to get up at six to catch the suburban train for work.
His work and his responsibilities expanded in a big way. They set up the International Union of Students (he worked in it with Shelepin himself) and made it a part of the international struggle for peace. Here he also had a support job, writing speeches for the big bosses: “We will not allow the clear sky of our homeland to be darkened once more by the clouds of war! ”—that sort of thing. Some tasks were secret, some quite open, but he was in the public eye and he held his head high.
Then his father came to visit him while on holiday. He stayed for a week. He listened to what his son had to say and took a close look at everything. But he expressed none of that fatherly pride that Dmitry had expected. Even worse: he sighed and said, “So, now you’re one of the straw bosses. You’d be better off back on the shop floor. Production—that’s the only real job.”
Dmitry was wounded and offended. He felt that he had always been flying high, and if he did touch the earth he walked about it like a bigwig. Then suddenly to hear that he was a straw boss?
His father read only the newspaper For Industrialization. And he lived “for the good of the people,” as he was fond of saying.
The son rejected what he had heard as merely a father’s grouchiness. But as the weeks passed, something began to gnaw at him inside and to weigh heavily on him. His father’s censure lay on his heart like a stone. It would have been easy to brush it aside had it come from anyone else. But from his father . . . ?
Perhaps his father was right: What sort of “job” did he have? He could see it himself: talk and more talk, sitting through meetings, plotting and scheming, too much drunkenness. When he looked at his colleagues, he could see they were all blockheads and bureaucrats. And if you yourself had such abilities, why not find a place where they could be better used? (But where should he go? That he didn’t yet know.)
Still, parting with his “packages” and his Pobeda wouldn’t be easy.
Something kept gnawing away at him. And it wasn’t easy to decide what to do about it.
Suddenly, just like that and with no real consideration, he put together a letter of resignation and sent it in.
Then he learned what such a letter meant. How could a member of the party send in his resignation? Against the will of the party? He’s an unreliable element in our midst! And they made him out to be such a troublemaker, and they gave him such a going over and chewed him out at the party meeting so that he could only sit there like a boiled crayfish and go on apologizing for his error.
Perhaps it was for the best. His career took a positive turn again. (He was given some very odd assignments: the students at one institute had established, supposedly in jest, the Society for the Protection of Bastards and Bootlickers. When you looked into it closely, though, was it not a case of political subversion?)
Then there was a major shake-up in the party in Moscow. At a plenum of the Moscow City and Oblast Committees, the longtime first secretary, Popov, who was so solidly entrenched, so imposing and so unshakeable, was suddenly ousted. (His enemy, Mekhlis, had been plotting against him, and Stalin had decided to purge those who had done well by the war. There was no shortage of accusations against Popov, either: How was it that a paved road outside the city reached just as far as the home of Popov’s mistress and no farther?) Khrushchev was designated to take his place.
Then came Komsomol Day. A group of Komsomol activists were invited to a reception and a banquet in the St. George Hall in the Kremlin. The lively and generous Khrushchev, whose round head looked as though it had been shaven, made a promise to them: “Keep working! Keep working, and you all can be secretaries of the Central Committee!”
Suddenly—and what in blazes ever made him do it?—Yemtsov spoke up. Recklessly he jumped to his feet: “Nikita Sergeych! May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“It’s been two years now since I graduated, and my diploma is still lying idle in my desk. Don’t we need people to work in manufacturing? I’m prepared to go anywhere the party wants to send me.”
(Now how did that sound! Right in the St. George Hall. He had to admire his own courage.)
Khrushchev barely paused before he nodded his bald head: “Comrade Sizov, I believe that you can look into this request?”
“Look into it!” Why that’s as good as an order when it comes from the mouth of one of the country’s leaders! (Mitya never expected such a sudden and irreversible turn of events. Had he been too hasty in jumping up like that?)
Sizov called him in to discuss the matter. He said expansively: “Why did you take that approach? You should have said something to us earlier. We could even have moved you up to the Central Committee.” Well, I’ve lost that chance. “So where do you want to go?” “Somewhere in the aviation industry.” “The Aviation Materials Research Institute? Or the Central Aerodynamics Institute?” “No, I want to go directly to the manufacturing sector.”
The request went through the ministry’s personnel section, and he was assigned a place in the provinces. True, he was able to choose the city he had come from and where his parents were living. The names of such factories are made deliberately obscure to conceal their purpose. This one was called the “Modular Assembly Plant”—try and figure out what’s going on in there. What was going on was the manufacture of aviation electronic equipment, autopilots, and fuel metering devices, but the plant was also supposed to produce consumer goods. They were to get busy producing household refrigerators, for example: We should be ashamed to be lagging so far behind Europe!
People there knew that “Khrushchev himself had sent him,” and this helped him become head of a factory department rather quickly. (But now he had only a fifth of the salary and the “package” he had earned in the Moscow City Committee, and that really pinched; he even felt the loss of his thirty-ruble “bread increment.”) His department, though, had been assigned the task of producing refrigerators! They had a refrigerator from England right there, and their only job was to make a copy of it. Lord knows, they made an exact replica, but there must have been some secrets that they still hadn’t grasped: a tube in the condenser coil would clog, or it would produce so much cold that everything would freeze. Buyers would return the refrigerators with complaints and curses: “The damned thing won’t stay cold!” The stores would submit claims for replacement.
What made his job easier, though, was that in those years—the early 1950s—the factory still maintained the unquestioned discipline of
wartime—this despite the fact that the townspeople called it the “booze factory” (they were allotted a good deal of alcohol, intended for cleaning their equipment).
Stalin’s death was shattering! It wasn’t that they considered him immortal, but he had seemed some eternal Phenomenon that could not simply cease to exist. People sobbed. His old father wept. (His mother did not.) Dmitry and his wife wept.
Everyone realized that they had lost the Greatest of Men. But at the time, Dmitry still did not fully realize how great he had been. It would take many more years to grasp fully the Impetus that Stalin had given to move the whole country into the future. The sense of a war still being fought would pass, but the Impetus would remain, and only through it would we achieve the impossible.
Yemtsov, of course, was much more than a common man. He had an uncommon mind and uncommon energy. His work at the factory demanded not so much the knowledge he had acquired in his institute as the knack of handling equipment and people skillfully. Once again, he was spending very little time at home. Now, though, he had a new son, and when could he find time to help bring him up? He didn’t have a moment to spare. His greatest life lesson, however, he learned from the factory manager, Borunov.
Managers came and went, staying for a year or eighteen months at best. The latest manager, along with the chief engineer, had been replaced “for producing poor-quality goods”: review commissions from the merciless Office of State Inspection showed up unexpectedly, as did commissions from the Office of the Prosecutor; the factory’s work was halted; one office after another was interrogated; everyone lived in terror. And so Borunov came in as the new manager. He was a strapping, handsome man of about forty, a Russian original. His face seldom wore a smile, but it radiated an assured superiority that said that he could remedy any problem.
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