by Victor Serge
III. MESSAGES
Every time Engineer Botkin had a questionnaire to fill out (. . . 15. What are your social origins? 16. What did you do before the Revolution? . . . 21. Have you belonged to any political parties? . . . 25. Have you been imprisoned under the Soviet regime?), he declared himself “Unaffiliated, sympathizing with the C.P.” In private, he was more precise: “strict-ly unaffil-i-ated”. His knowledge of foreign languages, his love of mathematics, a penchant for mechanical drawing which went back to his early childhood, the dreary pleasure he took in boring work, even at home, at night, when he forced himself to read the most insipid official speeches without skipping a line—made of him a valued specialist, confident of earning his thousand roubles a month without having to join the party of his sympathies. “And what else does homo sovieticus need beyond a thousand roubles a month?” Botkin would settle the question, after a short pause supplied for your meditation: “A subscription to the Technische Rundschau.” He slept, stretched straight out, next to Lina, love being a precondition for the proper equilibrium of the faculties and Lina being a nice warm girl—almost pretty and agreeably unintelligent—whose presence blended in with the subdued lighting filtering through a lampshade of tender-blue silk. But if he had to choose between the Technische Rundschau and Lina, Lina’s tepid warmth, Botkin would not have hesitated. He believed in physiology, not in sentiment, and held technology to be “the lever of civilization”.
The shock brigades of construction workers at the site of the Stalin Tractor Works in Stalingrad were returning from work, singing in the smoke-clouded dusk, when the Director informed Botkin of an unhoped-for piece of news: a three-month official mission to London, Paris and Berlin by order of the Central Administration for the Construction of Agricultural Machinery, to gather information on new models under construction. “You will receive secret instructions, Vitalii Vitalievich. I congratulate you.” Botkin kept all his cool at the price of a suffocating effort. As soon as he got home, he stretched out on the sofa, unhooked his collar and let his right hand fall to the carpet, totally limp.
“You don’t want dinner?”
“No.”
Lina turned pale, naturally imagining some kind of sabotage trial. What would become of her if they arrested Vitalii? “Just so long as they arrest Ivan Petrovich too, or I’ll die of spite in front of his Nina, that blonde bitch.” Vitalii Vitalievich Botkin smiled up at the ceiling.
“What is it?”
“A mission abroad . . .”
Lina glowed all over. “My darling.” A sudden tenderness threw her into his arms. “The factory is sending just you? Ivan Petrovich?”
“Ivan Petrovich is staying home.”
“Oh! I’m so glad. Nina Valentinovna will die of envy!” Lina was overcome with happiness. “You’ll bring me back something, won’t you darling?”
They did not know it, but their joy bordered on a vast, unexplored domain, beginning at the outer limit of physiology: a domain they would never enter.
Botkin visited factories in London suburbs where poverty is a wasting disease, on the islands of the Seine under a sad smiling sky, on the outskirts of Berlin, clean, grey and bare. On the Thames, on the Seine, on the Spree, little black tugboats belched soot: mostly old tubs—clear evidence of capitalism’s decrepitude. The London buses were comfortable, the Paris ones smelly and bumpy; similarly the Metro had no elevators, but the London Underground . . . From these signs, as well as from the dirt on the streets and the old facades of Paris, Botkin recognized that a profound disease was eating away at the French bourgeoisie. Because of the upholstered seats of the London buses, the British Empire seemed more solid to him than people said. All his misfortunes—if indeed they were misfortunes—came from these incidental reflections, for he concluded: “Trotsky is wrong again in announcing the decline of the British Empire . . .” Now, as he was glancing through the titles of Russian publications displayed on a news-stand on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Botkin noticed the Bulletin of the Opposition, printed on thin paper in pocket-size format. He opened the pages with the edge of his nail: “During the first three quarters of the year the locomotive works have delivered to the country 250 fewer machines than had been forecast. An extremely serious lack of skilled labour has been observed. In the course of the summer 2000 workers left the Kolomenskoe factory alone . . .”
“Naturally,” thought Botkin. “The instability of personnel today is one of the most troublesome obstacles to industrialization.” Botkin bought the Bulletin. That subversive paper made his fingertips burn and he quickly picked up the first large-size magazine that came to hand in order to conceal it. This turned out to be full of women in pink negligées. Botkin walked down the boulevard and then walked back up it again to make sure he wasn’t being followed, that he hadn’t been noticed, that nothing had happened, that nothing would happen. When he reached the Pont Saint-Michel he was seized by the temptation to throw both publications into the Seine—racy drawings and Marxism, classified ads from procuresses and forbidden statistics of the first Five Year Plan. He should have. Caution kept him locked in his hotel room that evening pouring over texts datelined Prinkipo, October 22, 1932: The Soviet Economy in Danger. He covered a scratch-pad with writing, staying awake until three o’clock in the morning, for he was taking the express to Berlin that day. “Now, in Berlin, Vitalii Vitalievich, it would be better if you didn’t stay in a hotel—that would look suspicious—but at the residence for officials of the Trade Delegation on Lutzowplatz.”
“. . . Noted: The Decree of September 11, 1932 signed Molatov-Kalinin requires individual farmers to lease their horses to the Kolkhozes. The Kolkhozes, working 80% to 90% of the land, are that short of horses. The Kolkhozes recently received 100,000 tractors. Poltava: 19 out of 27 tractors out of commission in a few weeks. Privolzniansk Station, Ukraine: 52 tractors of which two have been out of commission since the spring, 14 undergoing major repairs; of the remaining 36, fewer than half in use during sowing time and even those unusable half the time (probably for lack of fuel). Calculate the efficiency co-efficient of tractors?”
“Consider: disappearance of horses. Horses find their fodder locally; useful for light transport. Tractors unusable for light transport. Problems of fuel supply. Tractorism demands a network of roads, road-tanker service, the construction of railway tank-cars. Billions.”
“Increase in mechanized traction: from 306,500 hp in 1928 to 2,066,000 hp in 1932—totally insufficient to compensate for the loss in animal traction.”
“Number of households having left the Kolkhozes in six months: 502,000.”
“Imbalance between the needs of the Plan and raw material resources (metal shortage, factory slowdowns). Stoppage of new construction due to lack of raw materials and funds. Blocked capital.”
There was a bit of everything, pell-mell in these notes. On the quality of production contrasted with the quantitative rate of growth. On wages: “The successes of socialism are defined by the condition of the workers and their role in the State.” On the expulsion of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Uglanov, Riutin, Slepkov, Maretski: “Playing hide-and-seek with the Revolution, double-dealing with social classes, playing at diplomacy with history is absurd and criminal. Zinoviev and Kamenev fell for having failed to follow the only valid rule: ‘Do what you should, whatever the outcome.’ (L.T., October 1932).” On the productivity of labour and the cost of production which, instead of declining by 5% as forecast, has increased by 2.5%. On the Plenum of the Communist International (September 1932—“Recommended: preparing the dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain under Soviet form.” Think about: “The Stalinist bureaucracy had become the most formidable internal obstacle to the victory of the proletarian revolution (in Spain). L.T.”
“Stop the expropriation of peasants designated as rich (Kulaks), the cause of the disorganization of agriculture. Revise the plans: enough gigantomania. Moderate effort, adjust construction to needs.”
Comment: Very reasonable. I thought so from
the beginning.
Marginal Note: Assuming an average of approximately 5% well-off peasants based on statistics for 1926 (it’s true that the Central Bureau of Statistics was a mess) out of a rural population of more than 120 million inhabitants (not ‘souls!’) liquidation of Kulaks signifies expropriation and deportation of 5 to 6 million persons. Repercussions on agriculture?
Botkin underlined his own observations with lines so straight you would have thought they were drawn with a ruler.
Impossible to adopt a humanitarian viewpoint.
Man’s insignificance in relation to production. Production becomes conscious of itself through the Plan.
Look into: proper maintenance of the labour force (skilled, the only important element) as indispensable as proper maintenance of tools and equipment. The labour force as one element of tools and equipment. Hence: deterioration through undernourishment, overwork, stress. Shock brigades, socialist emulation? Efficiency. Overhead expenses?
Botkin’s handwriting was tiny, precise, and polished. He regarded the facts, with which he filled up thirty pages, with a cold eye, with total impartiality, so that no feelings interfered with his judgement. Know, understand, react. Technology needs only lucidity based on exact documentation. Having thought it over, he crossed out the note on the men expelled from the Party—Zinoviev and the others—with a double line in blue pencil: political information of secondary importance. Ultimate insignificance of politics from the point of view of technology. Then he went back and tore it up into little pieces which he burned in the ash-tray. The Bulletin, also torn into little squares with meticulous care, he drowned in the toilet of the sleeping-car between Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne. The scratch-pad, read over and pondered, had a similar fate, between Warsaw and Niegoreloe on the border of the land of The Great Plan, where soldiers in long, grey overcoats with green cloth triangles on their collars, attentively searched the luggage of V.&npsp;V. Botkin, Chief Technician of the Stal-sel-mach-stroy, travelling on an official mission.
How could he have suspected that in Berlin, while he was strolling in pleasant company on the Tauenzienstrasse, where the trams run over lawns, someone had got into his room, instantly selected among two hundred little keys the one which opened his suitcase, and removed the articles in it one by one with a hand so expert it didn’t crumple any of them. Expert eyes, even more skillful, remembering the correct position in which to replace each article, deliberately overlooked the big sealed envelopes with the address of the Central Administration for the Construction of Agricultural Machinery. The eyes easily discovered the scratch-pad concealed near the bottom, under some underwear next to the bottle of Houbigant for Lina, opened that notebook, instantly recognized its spirit, the quotations . . . The professional face, a featureless face forever anonymous, brightened into a cunning smile. The hands focussed the stubby housing of a Zeiss lens over the pages of the notebook. Five exposures. It’s done. Every object back in place. The suitcase closed. That very evening a confidential packet is sent addressed to the GPU Special Service, Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow. There typists will make several copies: 1st for the central file, 2nd for the political section (suspected Trotskyists), 3rd for the economic section (suspected saboteurs), 4th for the foreign section (suspected spies). From the old, gabled, red-brick building facing the walls of Kitai-Gorod to the white, square, fifteen-storey tower at the top of Kuznietski-Most telephones communicate a new name among that day’s harvest of names. A name to be filed among the millions of names already registered, known, studied, worked over, liquidated, emptied by administrative death of everything human they contained: Botkin, V. V.
From his first contacts with the Central Administration in Moscow, where he presented his reports, the strange expressions on people’s faces informed him of the events that had taken place in Stalingrad. A colleague told him about them, confidentially, when they were alone in the cafeteria among the cold reflections of frosted glass walls, stiff potted palms, white oil cloths, portraits frozen in the torpor of a hospital or an empty steamship. The waitress, leaning on her elbows with her hands over her ears, was turning the yellowed pages of a pre-war novel. The colleague was sipping his curds by little spoonfuls. A congealed silence fell from the too-high ceiling.
“Locked up, all of them, Vitalii Vitalievich. You understand: the year’s funds all spent and only 60% of the construction plan for the first seven months of the current fiscal year completed. A disaster, what? At that rate, the factory would have cost twice the projected figures and wouldn’t have been completed until three years after the target date.”
“By God,” exclaimed Botkin, delighted to have been absent for three months, “I told them so! They should have foreseen the lack of materials, the fluctuations in prices, the shortage of transport, the decline in the purchasing power of the rouble, the labour shortage, the famine.” He would have foreseen everything.
“In any case,” replied the colleague, dropping his head, “if they had foreseen it, they would have been locked up even sooner, blamed for exaggerating their estimates, not believing in the stability of the rouble, banking on the disorganization of transport, underestimating the economic possibilities. Gerasimich more or less said all that to the Planning Sub-Commission. He got five years.”
Botkin made an evasive gesture. A worrier, this colleague, and a little bit anti-Soviet. How right they are not to entrust official missions to these fellows! After all, wasn’t Gerasimich an old social-democrat, pessimistic on principle? Pessimism, in our age of disciplined energy, is perhaps an involuntary form of sabotage. Botkin, quite at ease in a London-tailored suit, satisfied with himself, with his luck and with a world in which some people’s blunders automatically facilitate others’ advancement, concluded: “It’ll all work itself out. As for myself, I feel that miscalculations harmful to the State must be paid for. You have to have a sense of responsibility. Man doesn’t count compared to production.”
“I agree entirely,” mumbled the colleague, terrified, with suddenly distant politeness. His hand was holding his empty glass of curds, a large, dreary, faceted glass, all milky. It was all there was between them at the moment.
Botkin was arrested the next day as he was leaving an Administration meeting. They didn’t interrogate him until two months later, towards midnight. The suit of fine English wool retained its impeccable appearance, throughout tribulations. But the man—thinner, without underwear, his face drowning in stubble, his shoes unlaced—looked in it like a bogus wild man from a circus act, a ruined gambler picked up by the Bobbies around the London docks, a dirty, counter-revolutionary saboteur caught red-handed. He learned that five charges were hanging over him: smuggling (on account of the two flasks of Houbigant brought home for Lina); sabotage; counter-revolutionary activities; and espionage (economic and political). Various paragraphs of Article 58 of the Penal Code threatened him with several death penalties. Two attentive officers observed him from an angle, while a third exhorted him at length to confess. Botkin did not feel any excessive astonishment during this mysterious game. On the contrary, he felt a certain impersonal satisfaction at finally understanding the way these shady, commonplace things are done. But fear wore him down in the stifling murmur of the cells; fear, foul air, the pittances devoid of calories, a sexual half-frenzy which revived every few days at regular intervals. His cell-mates, five technicians, seemed more anxious than he did. “Out of five, they’ll certainly shoot one. The rest, gentlemen, is no more than a matter of probabilities.”
Confess to smuggling, to sabotage, to Trotskyism, to counter-revolution, to espionage, confess, confess, confess, confess, confess. Botkin dropped his head, indignant, resigned, sorry not to be able to discover in himself any sins to acknowledge, except for the two vials of perfume for Lina. That, yes, I confess, I brought them in illegally.
“Obviously. We have the material evidence. With all due respect, citizen Botkin, we also have other material evidence. But when I produce it, understand that it will already be to
o late for your salvation.” With these words (this was in the sixth month of wearing down his nerves), the investigating judge opened his drawer, took out an envelope, removed a photographic print which he sternly handed to the accused. Botkin took a moment to recognize his handwriting. It looked strange to him on that grey, glossy paper, for he had all but forgotten his notebook, covered with writing one night in Paris, reread on the train between Berlin and Warsaw, destroyed in the toilet of the sleeping-car an hour from the Soviet border, Niegoreloe. It was all so improbable, unfair, mad, crushing, improbable.
“Confess, confess, confess, confess. Ah! You understand?” He understood all right and blanched to the point of fainting under his blond stubble. Then—all at once—he began to talk volubly. He confessed, denied, demonstrated, explained, pleaded. Two uniformed men drank in his words. A stenographer recorded them without his knowledge behind the drapes. “But after all, Botkin, now that nothing but repentance can save you, you’d do better also to confess that on April 30th last, when you abstained from taking the floor at your company Technicians’ Conference, you did so deliberately in order to allow construction costs to be inflated by 8%, as one of your accomplices had proposed.”
“If you wish,” said Botkin, undone, no longer believing in reality, the truth, himself. Believing only in death, which surprises you from behind in the depths of a cellar and smashes your skull, probably without pain. Everything around him was heaving, floating, changing its shape, slipping away. His head was itching, his back aching. He had a great yearning for sleep. To sleep peacefully for one night before being shot. What more to desire.
He was spared the cellar of ultimate anguish. It even worked out rather well in the end, for when Botkin reached Projects Office No. 4 of the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp, Kola Peninsula (latitude 68° 8', longitude 37° 2'), he found a dozen colleagues, slide-rules, a draftboard, excellent technical dictionaries in German, and a quiet corner. Through a skylight he could see a stony heath overhung with clouds which the north winds sometimes moulded into prodigious aerial battles. From the office to the dormitory-barracks it was a good hour’s walk through the empty spaces under the clouds. And for Botkin that hour became an hour of unexpected joy: he spent it with a travelling companion of dull appearance whose name was just as dull—Ivanov or Petrov or Pavlov. He was an economist by profession, an old Party member although young in years, a Trotskyist, accustomed for the past six years to deportations, imprisonment, concentration camps, transfers; a lad of methodical and ironic disposition. With him Botkin felt for the first time in his life that he could talk as if he were thinking aloud, without fear, doubt, or reservation. The other man responded in kind, simply. The things they said to each other on that deserted heath, and in safety, would have been enough anywhere else to destroy them forever. Here, this brought them closer together in an absolute disinterestedness.