At that time the police stopped many Jews in the streets, but they never stopped me. If Stalin had not died on March 5, 1953, in Davidkovo, I would have definitely been a good deal better informed of my fate.
SIX
The Struggle for Purity in the Party Ranks
TOM WAS STAYING overnight at my place when the phone woke us up. My wife had recently left me for another man, but occasionally she still called me. Our conversation was short, and I did not mention her name but Tom immediately said, “That was her.”
“Yes,” I said. “Good night.”
“What did she want?”
“Nothing. Just asked if I had matches.”
“In the middle of the night? From the other end of Moscow?”
I said, “Good night!”
“Was she drunk?”
“Good night. It sounded like it.”
“Did she want to come here?”
“How would I know? I wouldn’t allow it anyway. I think.”
After a few minutes of silence, he said, “I know how to get back at her.”
“Go to hell!” I said.
“It’s good that I helped you obtain the rare privilege of traveling to West Africa. Your return home serves as direct proof of your loyalty to your Motherland.”
“Stepmother-land.”
“We’ll make you deputy managing editor of Pravda. You’ll have money, status, and an editorial dacha in Silver Wood.”
“She doesn’t need your shitty cottage. Her father already has his own.”
But it was impossible to stop him, “It’s a damn hard and thankless position. No good reporter of our paper would want it, but I’ll try to convince the top brass that we need one exemplary Jew. In the West they call us an anti-Semitic paper.”
“I agree with the West,” I said. “I don’t want this job and don’t want to go abroad with a KGB escort anymore.”
“You idiot, the Fatherland needs you! I always hoped that such a trip could make you a chosen Jew. You’ll be plowing for three or four years like a mule, night and day, and in return you’ll be sent as a correspondent to a vacation in Africa for the rest of your life. Then you could write your children’s books about Tuaregs and their camels.”
“What if I escape to the West?”
“You wouldn’t do that to your parents and me.”
“Don’t criticize Irina,” I said. “I divide people into two categories—those that I understand and women. About them I know only one thing for sure—they pee sitting down.”
I had long forgotten about that conversation when Tom called me. “Vadim is interested,” he said. “You should come over here. Otherwise, not only I, but also Primakov and your boyhood chum Zhukov, will look like a bunch of fools.”
Herculean efforts to rescue me from myself were continuing.
Vadim Nekrasov was Pravda’s deputy editor-in-chief for international affairs. He asked if I had ever worked on a newspaper and why I had stopped writing for Pravda; he did not say a word about my marital status, which could only mean that Tom had already briefed him in detail and that Nekrasov was a tactful man. At the end he asked, “How did you get that footage for your TV-presentation on Angola?”
Front pages of Pravda from the 1960s. (Russian International News Agency).
The film had been shot by Americans, and we cut twenty minutes of tape out of it so that no one looking to interrupt our aims would be able to try us for a copyright violation in a foreign court.
“I was surprised to see you,” said Nekrasov, “not him, with these unique shots.”
“Tom recommended me for this job.”
I promised Nekrasov to show to my next TV audience a photo of Tom with some cool Angolan rebel, both with Soviet sub-machine guns and in Soviet military uniforms. He knew the picture and laughed. “It should be shown all over the world,” he said. “I’ll recommend you, but be patient. It’s a long process.”
OUR MEETING TOOK PLACE in mid-May, 1967. On May 27, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser declared, “Our objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”
On June 5, Israel pre-empted her three Arab neighbors and attacked their armies concentrated on her borders. Thus Israeli aggressors insidiously destroyed the strategic plan of Tom Kolesnichenko for my intrusion into the ranks of the ruling nomenclature with its variety of benefits. He called me from his office, “Are you rejoicing, scoundrel?”
“I’m delighted,” I said. The Soviet leadership felt humiliated. Moscow was intensely preparing its friends for this war and hoped that it would put an end to the very existence of the Jewish state. Within six days, Israelis took control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
“Your new friend,” Tom said, “has informed me that our drinking party has been postponed indefinitely. His royal family sobered up, and you won’t be allowed to their feast within firing range.”
“During the wake?” I said. “Give them my condolences.”
A year later, the defense of the joint postdoctoral thesis about the Six-Day War by two Pravda correspondents, Yevgeny Primakov and Igor Belyaev, was held behind closed doors. By declining to attend this defense, I deprived myself of a unique opportunity to learn at least some truth about the events that had been the subject of misinformation unprecedented even for the Russians.
I was examining a cover of a Syrian magazine with a depiction of a hook-nosed Jew writhing on the bayonet of a swell Syrian soldier, when a surprised Polyakov poked his head into the room, “Why didn’t you go listen to your buddies?”
The old man was not stiff-faced anymore; he was pathetic. I took pity on him and lied. “Somebody forgot to include you and me on the list of invitees.”
He approached my desk and looked at the soldier dumping the last Jew into the sea.
“From the special repository?” he asked.
I nodded.
He put down his heavy hand. “Don’t leave it on the desk.”
I ALREADY WAS very selective in my writing, but still tried not to disappear from the public eye. The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 delivered the final blow to my fading desire to write. Many ordinary citizens were disappointed. Some of them wrote carefully worded letters to the Central Committee with a polite request to withdraw from the fraternal country. In response, the Party took a step which had successfully worked throughout all years of its rule. Mighty waves of meetings swept Russia. All who had hands raised them in a unanimous vote on the resolutions in defense of the brotherly country from American imperialism and its Czech accomplices.
My university friend Fred Solyanov did not raise his hand. Recently he had found a new job at the Theater Museum and abandoned his old one as a stagehand. He hoped that no political shocks could threaten the world of great actors’ worn costumes, dusty great masters’ set designs, tattered playbills, and theater programs yellowed with age. But the day came when, at a general meeting, all the staff of the museum approved a resolution in support of the action in Czechoslovakia. Everybody raised their hands. Except for Fred Solyanov. Colleagues tried to convince him, “What are you? Crazy? Just raise it! You can’t fight a cannon with a peashooter!”
But he did not raise his hand. And was promptly fired.
In my magazine, instead of voting, Simon and I pretended to be very busy preparing the latest issue.
“We can’t pull this off—such a cheap trick,” said Tom.
Politburo ordered many correspondents to be sent to Czechoslovakia on short assignments, one after another. Tom and my classmate Vladimir Zhukov, now an expert on the USA, were also sent to Prague.
Vladimir lived in a heavy building near Mayakovski Square with his parents. After Stalin’s demise, his father, a KGB lieutenant general, was expelled from the Party, kicked out of the KGB, and stripped of his rank, but the huge apartment was not taken from him. Then he, the former ruler of Dalstroy, a conglome
rate of hard labor camps at the farthest northeastern part of Russia, was generously given the job of director of a large hotel on the edge of Moscow.
I had a rare opportunity of observing him only when his icy eyes showed interest in the young women in our company. Georgy S. Zhukov would tap with his foot on Vladimir’s door and, without waiting for an answer, with the words “Gifts from Georgia!” bring inside a basket with bottles of rare Georgian wine, strong homemade grape vodka called chacha, young cheese, and fruit one couldn’t buy in Moscow.
The former two-star-general embarrassed our ladies with his French. Once I brazenly asked him, “Where did you learn your French?”
He beamed. “In Paris! I had an unforgettable teacher. Oh yes, it certainly was a she.”
When it was time for me to go home, Vladimir whispered at the door, “My father and his Georgian friends remember their adventures as you and I remember our school antics.”
“When we were kicked out of the classroom by our teachers into the empty hallway?”
“Is that a hint?” Vladimir said.
I whispered, “He’s a mystery to me.”
“To me, too,” said Vladimir.
I was always sure that all forced labor camps were parts of the Gulag system. Only years later, when I was living in Washington DC and attempting to find some information on Vladimir’s father, did I discover that Dalstroy (an abbreviation for Remote Construction Sites) with its more than five hundred camps, divisions, and subdivisions, was not connected to the Gulag at all. It was spread over the entire uninhabited Kolyma Territory rich in gold, tin, cobalt, uranium, and other strategic minerals. This area, about the size of France, was reachable only by sea from the inhospitable northern Pacific shores.
Now I questioned the tale of the white thoroughbred that the general rode at the camps. An enormous part of Kolyma lies within the Arctic Circle with its permafrost and tundra. On the permafrost even rats die.
Our paths had diverged long ago, so I was surprised when a drunk Vladimir suddenly called me. He was supposed to start working as the Pravda correspondent in New York, but all of a sudden had an unpleasant assignment and needed an advice from his old buddy. From his unintelligible mutter I understood that some twenty-year-old idiot named Natasha wanted to go blind after reading his article about a blind Chairman of the USA Communist Party. With the blessings of romantically inclined local Party officials, she proclaimed to all mankind, including Leonid Brezhnev and Pravda, that she was offering her eyes to Comrade Henry Winston. She was convinced that the Soviet medicine could work miracles. The Central Committee of the Party supported this ambitious local initiative. To interview her, Vladimir had to fly to Novosibirsk where he had lived with his parents years ago.
Vladimir’s father said to his son, “If you want to dance, you have to pay the piper.”
The white prancing thoroughbred immediately came back into existence.
Now it was my turn to give Vladimir some qualified advice. I said, “Make your father convince his former buddy in Novosibirsk to cancel the entire affair for the sake of common sense.”
“They drank a lot of Georgian chacha with the former first secretary. Now the man lives at some Black Sea resort.”
Vladimir suddenly hung up. In the end, I thought, transplanting eyes is a simple procedure in comparison with the construction of a paradise on this planet.
A week later, Tom told me that Zhukov and the paper’s photographer continued drinking during the flight and were not sober when Natasha got their call from a Novosibirsk hotel. They invited the girl to the hotel, expressed their admiration, interviewed her, drank more, now with her, took pictures of her and with her in various positions, winking to each other, hugged her, drank again, laughed for no reason, kissed and caressed her again until she broke free from their hugs and, frustrated, ran away, perhaps in tears.
The next day the indignant first secretary of the Novosibirsk Region rang Moscow. The two culprits were expelled from the newspaper. But not from the Party. Both received reprimands with a serious warning of expulsion from it. After that, someone’s mighty hand arranged for them to work at the Novosti Press Agency (APN) and they had a serious conversation with its head of personnel—the KGB general Karpovich, who happened to be the father of our man of principle in Nigeria, Cyril Karpovich.
Before long I found out which crimes the Party could not forgive.
Usually it took only a couple of days for our Party secretary to collect the monthly dues of our editorial Party cell. Once an enraged member of the Institute’s Party Committee entered our editorial room and yelled at Vlad, “How many times we must ask you to bring the dues immediately, just a hundred yards down the corridor?!”
Our colleague blushed and muttered that he had again forgotten at home the key to the safe where the money was kept.
“We’re going to refer this matter to the District Party Committee!” barked the activist as he slammed the door behind himself.
Fortunately, in the room were only Simon Verbitsky and I.
“Speak!” I said.
Vlad muttered, “You know.”
“Drank away the money?”
He nodded. The blush never left his face.
“Better if you killed someone,” I said dejectedly.
“I know,” he said.
Simon threw up his hands, “Why didn’t you tell us before, damn you?”
“We would’ve collected this shitty money,” I said, staring out the window.
Five minutes later Simon and I stood before that very Committee member with a promise to put our colleague at once into a clinic for alcoholics.
“It’s too late,” he pronounced. “You chose an irresponsible drunk as your Secretary.”
Vlad already owed three months’ money, and the District Committee had been informed.
“You’re right,” I said. “We are all responsible for this.”
“The Party Charter doesn’t provide for collective responsibility for failure to pay dues,” said the jerk.
When we came back, Polyakov had been already in the room and was chastising Vlad, “You encroached on the sacred by stealing the Party’s money!”
I said, “We should warn him about being expelled from the Party like they did recently to Vladimir Zhukov in Pravda.”
“It won’t work,” said the experienced Polyakov and turned to Vlad, “You’re fired.”
“Nikolai Nikolayevich,” I begged, “he has three children to support. Maybe in order not to wash our soiled linen in public, it could be written in his work report that he left of his own will?”
“No. The expulsion from the Party is a dangerous thing to hide,” Polyakov said.
SEVEN
On the Horns of a Dilemma
WITH EVERY PASSING DAY, I was increasingly moving away from the magazine’s affairs. Nobody complained—the editorial machine worked almost without my participation. Only our pedantic office manager and both literary editors had long been unhappy with me. The ladies kept asking, “What happened? You’ve changed beyond recognition.”
What could I say to them? That I despised our constant lies? They knew it, but pretended that they did not. Did I need to remind them about that desperate Crimean Tatar who entered this editorial room and put on the desk closest to the door a battered school notebook? It happened three years ago, but I still remembered the scrawled handwriting on its cover and his husky voice, “Please publish this protest against the persecution of my people.” He quickly left our room. We knew that Tatars were expelled from Crimea by Stalin when we were little kids. Fifteen years after Stalin’s death, we did not open that notebook. We were still afraid. Our office manager, a mild-mannered widow, passed this bomb to the Institute’s Party Committee. We all felt relieved and never talked about the man dressed like a beggar and probably out of his mind.
If I spoke about him out loud, my colleagues would start to fear each other. They would think who among them could report our conversation to the KGB. Stalin i
nstilled fear in our genes, a mighty, conquering fear. Victorious socialism defeated us all.
It took years for me to turn into a true escapist. I stopped reading our materials and was just putting my initials in the corner. To my surprise, Tom treated this revelation calmly. “For years I haven’t read the pages of Pravda devoted to the achievements of this great country,” he told me. “I’m only interested in what goes on outside our borders.”
“Do you want to be duped just on foreign policy issues?” I said. “Don’t be choosy. Sorry, Tom, but I don’t even read your articles anymore.”
Tom snorted.
BY CHANCE, I found a graceful way to confront my frustration. Freezing October rain was falling from the sky, when I saw two cheerful high school girls with figure skates proudly sticking out of their bags.
“Getting ready for winter?” I joked and told them that before they were born, I played hockey for the Moscow University. They invited me to come to their ice skating rink. Long before the winter? In the open air? I was impressed.
The next day I went to the Sokolniki Park’s artificial rink and watched the amateur dancers from the stands. Soon I bought figure skates and joined the group. Several months later, in early springtime, when we sunbathed while training, a skillful twenty-year-old girl said, “Arkady, you keep a nice edge and have a stronger push and a longer step than some young boys. I will teach you sequences and patterns, and you’ll make a good partner.”
I was happy.
In three weeks the ice began melting. We had a long summer break, and my cheerfulness disappeared. In the fall, we were back, and again I danced away my worries, sometimes even in the light drizzle while ignoring the dangers of shallow puddles. But my dark mood returned during our fifteen-minute walks to the subway and, unable to hide my bitterness, I subjected to my anti-Soviet tirades a married couple I had met on the ice.
The young husband said once, “Arkady, you don’t know us.”
“I trust you, Alexei,” I said.
Dancing on Thin Ice Page 9