I stepped inside and saw the particles of dried hemp dancing in the air. A gray string of slouching workers was slowly walking inside this translucent shroud, from one end of the barn to the other and back again. They held onto a faint rope along which they moved and looked like convicts on a chain gang. Soon the top of my throat began tickling, and my eyes started to get used to the countless particles wavering in the air that were produced when the workers curled together a new thread at the end of the barn.
I walked through the blurred veil to the end of the shed and saw the plant fiber passing through a primitive breaker resembling a wooden comb. This ancient device was removing dirt and making myriad particles fly. They were sticking out of nostrils, ears, sockets of blinking blind eyes, and from lips.
I was in the fifteenth century and so overwhelmed that I could not understand how these straight, long, loose strands were twisting and braiding together to form a rope. These gloomy workers had descended from the paintings of Brueghel the Elder right into socialist Russia. My eyes began hurting. Through the gleefully dancing dust, I looked at the reels placed on a rotating wooden disk twisting individual fiber strands. Yarns, spun from these strands, were twisting in directions opposite to each other. There was a blatant contradiction between the slow monotonous movement of the blind and the rapid irrepressible twitching of all that surrounded them—the twists of the yarns and the counter-twists of the strands and the twists of the ropes stretched along the length of the barn.
I panicked—what if the braided strands somehow got into someone’s hair or clothes? What questions could I ask them? I didn’t want to be there anymore and didn’t talk to anyone. Why should I remain in this hell if nobody allowed me to write about it?
“Well, did you like it?” asked my guide on the way back to the bus stop.
“It’s a health hazard.”
He stopped, “Do you realize that these people are happy that we have provided them with secure jobs?”
“I do,” I said. “I just don’t know what to write.”
He said, “I understand.”
In the evening I met with the hotel manager again. She had grown up near Moscow, and she missed cultured people. I impressed her with my manners. Maybe here, at the restaurant, she just wanted to talk about something intelligent and sublime, because her redneck husband did not understand this woman’s follies.
Soon I learned that he, a military man, told her to stay in Chelyabinsk while he would be involved in cleaning up large areas of nuclear contamination. Never before had I heard that the people of Chelyabinsk Region had suffered two nuclear disasters, the last one just two years before I was there. She was unable to grasp the reasons for allowing Nixon to visit the city when people were dying from nuclear radiation in its hospitals.
“We came here in 1951, after radioactive waste had been dumped for six years into the river, the only source of water for dozens of villages,” she explained. “He worked in a closed city called Beria ...”
I interrupted. “Beria? After the head of the secret police who was shot after Stalin’s death in 1953?”1
“Yes. He refused to say how far it was from here.”
“Do you understand the meaning of it?”
“Yes.”
“The entire military-nuclear industry here was built on the bones of prisoners,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What a perversion!” I burst out, “Stalin rewarded Beria with glory, even when the very existence of these cities was a top secret.”
“They began working there on the first Soviet plutonium production complex half a year after the war. Now this city is called Sorokovka.”
“Sorokovka?! The City of the Forties?”
“Yes.”
I exclaimed, “A veiled memorial to the dead!”
Who would have guessed that my journey from the fifteenth to the twentieth century could be so short!
“A couple of years ago a great misfortune happened again, elsewhere near Chelyabinsk, and,”—she squeezed my hand on the table—“my husband got nauseated and completely lost interest in me. Even before, he rarely smiled, and now he has stopped smiling. Completely.” She sighed. “They sent him to some military hospital for treatment, he said, and he wasn’t allowed to give me the address. Do you think he lied? During the last two months I haven’t heard from him.”
“If something really bad happened, you would be informed.”
She said, “We have no children.”
Only when the waiter brought our food did she remove her moist hand from mine.
I asked, “Who were all those criminals?”
She did not understand my question.
I explained, “Those who built all these nuclear sites.”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Criminals.”
The third nuclear disaster in the Chelyabinsk Region happened in 1967. Having been a center for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, the territory is now one of the most contaminated areas on the globe. The details became known only in post-Soviet times. The Russians had truly held a nuclear bomb suspended on a medieval rope.
After one year of work in The Life of the Blind, I was admitted to the Communist Party. My buddy Tom Kolesnichenko, the managing editor of the Asia and Africa Today, gleefully congratulated me. “Now, with this mighty red pass to the bright future in your pocket, we’ll try to move you, forgotten by your almighty enemies, from the blind to the blinded.”
1 Under Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953), the secret police agency was called NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which in 1943 was renamed MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs). In 1954 it became the KGB while Beria, as a powerful member of the Politburo, continued to lead the entire ramified punitive machine of the country. Beria was also in control of Soviet efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After Stalin’s death, Beria was accused by his colleagues in the Politburo of spying for numerous Western countries. Ten months later he was shot to death after a trial behind closed doors. The members of the Politburo were afraid that Beria would seize power in the country and kill his competitors. Of course, the name of the city Beria was changed, not to mention for the fact he was a known sexual predator, rapist, and murderer.
THREE
How to Become an Expert on Africa
MY WORK AT Asia and Africa Today started in 1960 under pitiful circumstances. A drunk Nikolai Nikolayevich Polyakov, its deputy editor-in-chief, pleaded to find a public restroom quickly. He begged us to stop the car and clutched at the steering wheel, but Tom tore his hand away, and we continued our perilous travel through the center of Moscow. Every two minutes, my friend kept solicitously asking the desperate man twice his age, “Have you not crapped yet, Nikolai Nikolayevich?”
It sounded like a cheerful refrain to a bawdy high school song.
Sitting in the back seat, I also begged Tom to let Polyakov out at any gateway.
Tom was adamant. “I just don’t want a former senior functionary of our great Party being arrested, drunk and shitted, violating the laws of our socialist society.”
Nikolai Nikolayevich Polyakov—behind his back everybody called him Nik-Nik—moaned like a haggard bull, “W-we s-a-a-id, we t-take him.”
This “him” was I, now drawn into this ridiculous scrape.
Earlier, in the morning, when I was editing a poem of a blind poet in the office of The Life of the Blind, Nik-Nik had doubted my suitability to work in his magazine. “Why do we need this reporter from some second-rate magazine for people with disabilities?” he persisted.
“Yesterday you praised his article in International Affairs,” responded Tom, who had actually written that boring piece about the struggle of the African peoples for a brighter future.
“Why didn’t he sign it with his own name?”
“Because he adores his wife Irina.”
My friend had kept in mind my recent troubles and had signed the article with the name A. Irinin. Nik-Nik, as Tom put it, still could
not forget the glorious days when he would decide whom to send to a concentration camp and whom to prison.
At noon Tom had placed a bottle of good Armenian brandy on Nik-Nik’s desk and half an hour later gently tried the door of his office—the deputy editor had locked it from the inside. He phoned me, “Nik-Nik should see you taking good care of him. Invent a reason to abandon the blind for a couple of hours, and we’ll take the old swine home.”
Polyakov lived at 26 Kutuzov Avenue, the address of the highest ranks of the Party. The police would not let me in, and Tom planned to drop me off at the entrance gate and pick me up on his way out of the heavily guarded compound. “We cannot repeat this grave political mistake,” he said.
“What mistake?”
“One time I let him out, and he went straight to the sacred entrance designed exclusively for Politburo members Brezhnev and Andropov. The guards luckily put him in the right elevator.”
“Lucky for him! So for two years you were the right hand of this boozer?”
“Yes—yes, to get this friend of mine Arkady Polishchuk out of shit, I’m trying to send Nik-Nik to hell ahead of time. High blood pressure.”
A portrait of Bobojon Ghafurov (1908–1977) and his book Tojikon (The History of Tajik People) on a fifty somoni bill issued in 1999 by the National Bank of Tajikistan in honor of the 90th anniversary of Ghafurov’s birth. (National Bank of Tajikistan)
In 1956 Khrushchev had arranged his modest purge of some of “Stalin’s falcons,” and both of my future bosses, Polyakov and Ghafurov, were sent to live out their days in honorable and well paid internal exile. Three years after Stalin’s death, shared fate brought them together. Bobojon Ghafurovich Ghafurov, former first secretary of Tajikistan’s Communist Party, became director of the Institute of Asia and Africa and editor-in-chief of its publication Asia and Africa Today. His once-a-month duty was to sign the next issue of the magazine that he had never read—“Bobo” was busy with more serious matters. (We called him Bobo, but only behind his back.)
For twenty years, the very name of this lame runt shook the mountains on the border between the Soviet Union, China and Afghanistan. Now it made tremble just the Institute, which had only six hundred Party members. The Party still needed Ghafurov’s ethnicity, instincts, and expertise for the implementation of the Russian policy in the East: born in a mountain Tajik village, an author of several books on the history of Tajikistan, and a full member of the Academy of Sciences—not every senior Party worker could boast of such a biography. Nevertheless, none of these achievements could’ve helped him to preserve his main instrument of power if he had not also been a protégée of the leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev. For this reason only, he remained a member of the Central Committee. This new position also made him the informal Moscow representative of the first secretaries of all the Central Asian republics.
When Tom brought me to his office lined with Persian rugs, Bobo said in his quiet manner that the magazine needed good journalists capable of editing clumsy scholarly writings. Then he apologized for being very busy and listlessly shook my hand goodbye. When we returned to the huge hall, Tom said, “Did you understand our Sultan? You were given a job that includes writing his books and articles.”
“He speaks in broken Russian.”
“All his books have been written in Russian and after that translated into Tajik. He’s a Tajik, not a Jew, and he doesn’t need to be able to speak, much less, to write in any language.”
“How did Ghafurov and Polyakov react to your upcoming move to Pravda?”
“Nik-Nik almost shed tears when he saw my first tiny piece in Pravda. As soon as you, Alik, begin writing for Pravda, for The Truth,” Tom solemnly raised his finger to the sky and then pointed it toward my chest, “you’ll begin receiving love letters from the Supreme Ruler who kicked you out of his Kostroma principality.”
“Fred Solyanov was right,” I said. “As a stagehand in his theater, I’d have greater self-respect.”
“Are you joking? You’re born a journalist and would’ve died of boredom and misery in that theater. Don’t you know—all of our theaters, inscriptions on the walls, songs and textbooks for first-graders—are part of the same propaganda machine? You better keep in mind, Nik-Nik will constantly check whether you’ve read the latest issue of Pravda. This is his favorite morning exercise. It gives him undeniable authority.”
By the time Pravda published my first freelance article not long after this conversation, Tom and Irina declared me a bummer and laughed it off when I named all the blacklisted writers who did not produce anything for years, or like our friend Gena Snegiryov, turned to writing for children. Talking with them about the regime was pointless. It was our world, our universe, beyond which was eternal emptiness.
A couple of years later, in 1962, I pulled a dirty trick. When Tom handed me an honorary certificate on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Pravda, I placed on his desk a satire about a celebration of this Soviet Press Day in a Congolese village. A made-up Pravda correspondent described the event in detail. Drunk out of his mind, the correspondent did not cut out of his report one sentence that revealed none of the villagers actually knew of the existence of the Soviet Union. The head of Pravda’s foreign department saw it as just a bug which, in order to avoid political disaster, needed to be fixed. He did, and the report was published.
Tom was resolutely tearing my gem into small pieces when Yevgeny Primakov, my new Pravda friend, entered the room, “My congratulations to our awardee!”
“Alik continues to misbehave,” said my buddy.
“Don’t be so cruel,” roared Primakov with a charming Georgian accent. “Let me read it.”
“No,” I said, “Tom is right. I behave like a schoolgirl in a brothel; she wants to make some money, but is determined to remain a virgin.”
DESPITE MY IMPROPER ATTITUDE, my career advancement continued. It was helped along in 1963 by the political error of our managing editor at Asia and Africa Today, Simon Verbitsky, who got the position after Tom had moved to Pravda. Simon had edited an article written by Professor Boris Sapozhnikov on an innocent subject about the tribes of the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan, which unfortunately had a common border with China. In our special repository for foreign publications and the TASS reports not intended for the general public, the professor found an appropriate sketch of Bhutan’s boundaries. The chart, copied with tracing paper, went to our censor and eventually was published with Sapozhnikov’s article. This is where a censor of higher rank initiated a huge scandal. He phoned Nik-Nik and ordered him to destroy all copies of this issue. The watchful censor was able to see on the faded image almost invisible dotted lines indicating China’s territorial claims to the Russian boundaries. Such was a brazen display of the new imperial attitude of Chairman Mao Zedong, whose timidity had disappeared after Stalin’s death.
Ghafurov immediately summoned all guilty parties. An hour later, Simon told me about the melodrama that had played out on the expensive Persian rug: “Congratulations! You and I are interchangeable,” he said to me. “Thou shalt become managing editor while I go back to supervise your information department.”
But I was expecting even worse for Simon, given what was happening on the border. It was the period of Beijing’s “cartographic aggression.” Chinese maps, atlases and textbooks kept including areas under the jurisdiction of the USSR as being part of China. The “aggression” began with an uninhabited area in the Pamir plateau and several small areas in the Far East, including two uninhabited river islands near Khabarovsk City. These borders had been drawn more than a hundred years ago by the expanding Russian Empire, and now Mao wanted to demonstrate his contempt for Khrushchev’s weakness and unscrupulousness toward the West. In the corridors of our Institute, normally reserved experts on China discussed which Russian territories Mao might tomorrow declare as his own. Universal opinion fully coincided with the opinion in the corridors of the Central Committee—we should dress them down harder.
Right at Ghafurov’s door, Polyakov had said that Simon should be fired and the question of his Party membership must be immediately addressed.
“No need to rush,” Bobo had retorted—Simon mimicked the favorite soothing gesture of Ghafurov when resolving difficult situations—“I’ll talk to the comrades in the Central Committee. Only a man with a magnifying glass in his hand could make out this map.”
Then Ghafurov had revealed what we did not know about the author of the article in question. “Tell me, Comrade Sapozhnikov, how could you, a former deputy head of the Special Propaganda Department of the Red Army, make this mistake?”
Sapozhnikov had stuttered that he knew that border inside out and had been crawling on those moors and hills on his belly long before the battle with the Japanese at Lake Khasan. Ghafurov returned a smile. “For that fighting in 1938 you got an order, and your chief Vasyli Blukher was shot several months later. I think the Institute’s Party Committee should discuss this map incident and take appropriate action.”
It meant that Sapozhnikov’s case had been soft-pedaled and most likely even closed. Fortunately for the participants of this melodrama, it was still a number of months before Mao’s inflammatory statement that Russia had stripped China of vast territories. Playful fate saved the professor and Simon from brutal punishment.
The following ten years, until my rebellion in 1973, I worked at Asia and Africa Today as the managing editor.
Soon I saw firsthand how important a place Ghafurov occupied in the impressionable hearts of the powerful first secretaries of the Asian republics, who were all members of the Central Committee. Our magazine was gaining strength and in addition to being an organ of the Academy of Sciences, became an organ of the Committee for Friendship with the Peoples of Asia and Africa. Thus, our editorial team found itself in the front ranks of fighters for world peace, but this political success had no effect on the circulation of the monthly, and Ghafurov decided to send me on a promotional mission to Dushanbe, the capital of his former fiefdom, Tajikistan. The importance of this visit to a small republic was not clear to me. However, Michael Kurgantsev, the head of the magazine’s culture department and Ghafurov’s leading ghostwriter, understood and instructed me: “Bobojon Ghafurovich asks you to stay away from local political games, even if your hosts try to draw you into them. Everyone will think that you’re his envoy, so you should strongly deny this.”
Dancing on Thin Ice Page 6