Malva Landa, Moscow, spring of 1977. The oldest Russian human rights activist, one of the first members of the Moscow Group to promote the implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR (1976). In May 1977, during her trial, I introduced a group of Pentecostal leaders to A.D. Sakharov. Photographer unknown. (Sakharov Archive)
“For being unable to re-educate my mother.”
“Sorry for the foolish question.”
“We always knew where your bitterness would lead you,” Alexei said.
In the courtroom, soon after I pointed out Sakharov to my companions, the court clerk gabled that for technical reasons the court was again postponed. Alexei darted out of the room. Sakharov, the Pentecostals, and I went for a short walk through a spring grove nearby. He asked them to tell him about themselves, and they did at length. When Goretoi asked him about his attitude toward religion, Sakharov replied, “Positively viewed, and with respect.”
After that he hurried to the city. We feared for Sakharov and wanted to accompany him at least to the train, but he resolutely refused, saying that he could perfectly get home on his own.
SIXTEEN
In the Cultist’s Lair
I WAS READYING to travel to underground churches, when my old pal the police major delivered a summons from the Visa Office. He said in a congratulatory tone, “They’re going to give you a visa.”
I looked at the little rectangle. It was hard to believe. I had done nothing to deserve such a gift. Questions churned in my head. Why are they suddenly releasing me from their fishbowl? The fake foreign correspondents, without fail, were still continuing their faithful KGB service. Did they happen to find that crumpled piece of paper sealed under the insole of my ice-dancing boot, now regrettably fallen into disuse, with addresses of Evangelicals to whom I planned to travel? Could it be some trap? What should I do?
All I knew was that I had to rush.
As soon as the policeman left, I started packing my suitcase, then caught myself and tried to fill my briefcase instead, without making it suspiciously fat. Before leaving the apartment, I turned on the light in the kitchen in the faint hope that this hackneyed trick might make the KGB have to spend a couple of nights before figuring out that I was wasting electricity.
This morning nobody was there on duty at the entrance, but I did not want to tempt fate, and on the way to the railway station, skipped buying food for the trip. So far everything had been fine, except for the fact that no one in the church of Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi was waiting for me.
On the train, I climbed up on the top bunk, turned my back to my fellow travelers, pretended to be asleep, and focused on what was happening. My first thought was ridiculous: they had decided that locking me up could make me a celebrity and could be more damaging for their enterprise than kicking me out of the country. If nobody stopped me on the platform of Temryuk, one and a half thousand kilometers away from Moscow, then indeed they were choosing to let me out of their cage.
No one knew about my sudden departure. Three members of the now nearly moribund Moscow Helsinki Human Rights Group knew of my plans to travel to Pentecostal and Baptist churches, but two of them, Alexander Ginsburg and Natan Sharansky, had already been in prison for several months, the general was ill, and his wife was busy taking care of him and their fifty-year-old helpless son with Down syndrome. If the KGB found out that I went on a trip without notifying anyone, they might be tempted to settle scores with impunity, maybe by “finding” me dead on the tracks. I hoped that my thoughts were not clouded with delusions of persecution. I decided that I should just go on behaving insolently and shamelessly, since only my dear friend Tom Kolesnichenko could imagine that I would be such a reckless fool.
This was June 2, 1977. We had planned that we would meet in Starotitarovskaya only in the middle of June. Our list of Christians asking for exit visas had already started to snowball, and I would be with believers not only from neighboring towns and villages but even with some from Ukraine and the Caucasus.
Clearly my arrival in Starotitarovskaya, at the southwesterly edge of Russia, would not be a cause for celebration among the local population still overheated after a recent public trial of the Pentecostal “fanatics.” The police visited all of them and demanded that they attend a political lynching at the District House of Culture. There, signatures on notices were obtained from all members of the church, including the old and the sick.
The next day I left my top bunk only by early afternoon, when the train was approaching Temryuk. A lively old woman said, “Here we were arguing about you, son. Tell us, who’s right? Were you drunk and forgot your suitcase at the railway station in Moscow or somebody stole it there?”
I explained that my wife had already taken all our suitcases with food to Temryuk. The experienced old lady shook her head, “Yeah, you men cannot be trusted even with empty bags; you’ll sell your last pants to get a drink.”
In Temryuk, there wasn’t anyone in mufti rushing toward me with an arrest warrant, and I began thinking about the thirty-five kilometers that lay between this district center and the Starotitarovskaya Cossack village. The southern air was filled with the aroma of sprouting greens. I had not eaten since the morning before and bent my steps toward a café called Red Poppy next to the station. Several men and a barmaid—an artificial blond with lush hair—looked at me with displeasure, hostility and suspicion. Behind the barmaid hung a handwritten sign, “We do not sell alcoholic beverages. Only champagne.” The bar customers stood at the ready with empty glasses, which she filled below the counter with a yellowish drink from a hidden flagon. Judging by the grimace on her face, it was heavy.
While walking back to the barmaid, a curly-haired mustachioed man passed by me and asked hospitably, “A visit to Cossacks?”
I nodded. “Yes, Starotitarovskaya.”
“I’ll take you there.”
“Thank you.” I pointed at his blue pants with red stripes. “There are still some fearless Cossacks over there.”
“You can read about us only in textbooks now. There is little left of us, hereditary Cossacks, but now many out-of-towners—Armenians and even Baptists—live there.”
“Where did the Cossacks go?”
“Scattered haphazardly or laid low, became Party workers and accountants, no longer warriors.”
Pride was evident in his words, and to please him, I said, “You probably have a sheepskin hat and a sharp saber at home.”
The Cossack smiled. “My grandfather surrendered the saber. If he had tried to hide it, he’d have ended up in some godforsaken place.”
When a girl brought me a goulash and two glasses of tea, he twirled his drooping mustache and nodded at her. “A good-looking Cossack, too.”
She blushed.
“What’s a Cossack without a horse?” I said, and she chuckled appreciatively.
“We came here two hundred years ago,” he said, “to defend Russia against the Caucasus highlanders and the Turks. Hence—close to the Black and Azov Seas and a short hop away from Crimea—just to live and be happy with life.”
After I finished eating, he said, “Okay, time to go. You should’ve tried this grape wine, almost as strong as vodka.”
“I’m afraid to go with you,” I said, clicking on his empty glass and grinning crookedly.
“Don’t worry, Cossacks are good drivers. I won’t charge you for the ride.”
When our risky travel began, I asked—avoiding the word “Pentecostals,” unfamiliar to locals—if he knew those “Baptists.”
“Dangerous nuts,” he said. “A prison is the place for them, and an orphanage for their children.”
“What would you do if police took your child from you because you wanted to keep your horse and sabre?”
He looked at me with surprise. “The Baptists are cunning. They don’t behave like Russians, don’t drink, and want to move to Israel. No wonder they are suspected of spying.”
“And what would one spy on in your village? Homemade wine? Moonshine?”
> “They meet with foreigners in Moscow.”
“KGB agents walk behind every foreigner over there. Well done, Baptists! Learned foreign languages in a Cossack village!”
He guffawed.
I explained that one million spies come to the capital every day from every corner of the country to spy on sausage and clothes.
He tittered.
To learn the state of our prosperity, I continued, it’s enough to see our queues for oranges; the queues to Lenin’s Mausoleum reflect our state of mind.
Along the straight-as-an-arrow, partially paved road, now and then stood fruit trees and red poppy flowers, bright in the sun, on tall upright stems.
“Beautiful land,” I said, “and spacious. There is enough space here for everybody, even for believers in God.”
“Recently we gave them hell,” my driver said. “People wanted to beat them. They prayed for three hours. We laughed, didn’t allow them to leave. Many demanded that the cultists be evicted out of Krasnodarsky Territory. One of them, probably their priest, wanted to say something, but we didn’t give him a chance.”
“Weren’t you interested in what he could say?”
“No. I don’t want my children to listen to these illiterate savages. There were a lot of our children there—just give them a pretext to skip school…. All the district bosses were there, too.”
If this dashing Cossack only knew that he was taking me right into the hornet’s nest. When we were halfway, he did ask, “What’s the name of your friend? Maybe I know him.”
“Goretoi …” my voice cracked. “Here—ah he … probably goes by … like a Cossack, Mykola …
“His surname is naturally Cossack,” said my driver approvingly. “But Mykola is Ukrainian. We would call him Nikolai. No, not familiar.”
But misfortune happened anyway. I asked him discreetly to stop at the beginning of the street, but he said, “No—no” and took me straight to Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi’s house. And, of course, the Lord had arranged for the good Nikolai Petrovich to be standing right at the wooden gate of his mud-brick hut.
“Wait!” my Cossack said, “That’s him! That priest with thick glasses!”
“He’s a pastor, a bishop,” I said.
“You lied to me!” he yelled.
“No, I didn’t. He isn’t a Baptist. He’s a Pentecostal.”
“Who cares? A sectarian is a sectarian!”
“Does one need to be a Baptist—to reject this fairy tale of building a paradise on earth? This is their crime, nothing else.”
Goretoi was talking to someone inside the house, but the shortsighted pastor could hardly see me in the truck, though he could hear our argument.
“And who are you?” persisted the angry Cossack. “Why did you come here? To stir up trouble?”
“You go down to the KGB!” I said. “Right from here! Say that a suspicious Muscovite went over to the enemies of the people and brought a briefcase full of Bibles.”
“Is it true?”
“No, you can’t buy a Bible in this country. It’s more dangerous than your grandfather’s sword. See in what a beggarly house this spy and his bunch of underage spies live? Wouldn’t you want to leave the country if your children were thrashed almost daily in school?”
“What do you need them for? You don’t look like a believer.”
“I like them. They lie less than you and I do, they work hard and don’t steal, they are less afraid of the authorities than we are, and they teach us not to fear death.”
“And you’re no longer afraid of death?” His bright eyes were full of scorn.
“Of course, I’m afraid. But they prefer it to spiritual death.”
“And what is spiritual death?” the Cossack snickered.
“You’d better ask them. Nikolai Petrovich would be happy to explain it to you. Let’s go over to him; he’ll be glad to talk with you.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m serious.”
He shook his head.
“Recently,” I said, “these ‘fanatics’ brought me a newspaper from the Far East. A seventh-grader named Love is reported to have begged the authorities to take her away from her parents, and to put her into an orphanage. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Okay, you better go,” he said, clearing his throat. “The neighbors might become interested in what I’m doing here for so long.”
“Thanks for bringing me here,” I said, extending my hand. “What’s your name? I’ll ask them to pray for you and for those you love.”
His mouth twisted. He shook my hand without saying a word.
In the rays of the unobtrusive sun, we were having dinner in a courtyard, at a homemade table of long narrow boards. I peered at the children, made faces at them, and then tried to look perfectly innocent; they stared at me and smiled at each other—we had fun. Their mother, Varvara Nikolaevna, busy at the stove, said through the open window, “Arkady Abramovich, you would make a good father.”
The children told me how they stopped going to school a month ago after the principal trumpeted at an assembly that if he were given an AK assault rifle, he would have shot all of the sectarians.
“What a gifted educator of the young generation of builders of communism!” I loudly proclaimed.
The kids thought it was very funny, and when they finally calmed down, Goretoi said that the inspectors from the Board of Education visited families of Pentecostals on three consecutive days to persuade the children to return to school.
“See how humane they are?” I said. “And you keep complaining.”
The children continued giggling.
“I have long noticed,” I said, “that my inappropriate jokes are enjoyed only by unreasonable children.”
Varvara Nikolaevna apologized for serving meatless potato soup and bland kasha. I asked the master of the house to bring his wife to Moscow during his next trip, so she could cook me such a delicious meal.
“Maybe one day,” he said, “she’ll cook for you in America. If the KGB is serious about your visa.”
This cheerful mood at the table looked unreal to me. I already knew that back in Nakhodka their little children as well as those of his deacon Nikolai Bobarykin were forced to go on stage and give evidence in court. They were questioned to establish the “facts”—the creation of a prohibited fanatical sect.
“There were enough crying children in the courtroom to form a kindergarten,” joked Goretoi.
“Or an orphanage,” corrected Nikolai Bobarykin, approaching me from the gate with Feodor Sidenko. Both kissed me on the lips.
“We knew,” seventeen-year-old Ilia said, “they wanted to take away our dad.”
“This five-year-old,” his father said, “yelled louder than the judge when the witness Sidenko told him …”
Nikolai P. Goretoi and me in his vegetable garden. June, 1977.
And here Feodor almost gleefully repeated his offence in his hoarse voice, “All of this is gross bullshit!” Children roared with laughter again as he continued, “For contempt of court the judge sent me to a forced labor camp for six months.”
I knew this judge had violated the law and sentenced Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi to five years of camp and five years of exile when the law provided only for one or the other.
“Especially after that trial,” Ilia said, “other children threw stones at us. This school is better than in Nakhodka.”
His father turned to him. “Show Arkady Abramovich your head.”
Ilia got up from the long bench, walked over to me, and bent his head. Parting his thick black hair, I counted nine whitish scars. “Twelve years ago?” I asked.
Goretoi, his wife, their son Ilia, and me with those who just joined the “hit list” by putting their names on a list of those desiring to emigrate. Ilia is on the far right; I counted scars on his head.
“They caught us outside our house,” he explained. “The older children were beaten at school. We were building a cute little house of stones.”
“Does your head still hurt?”
“Now—no.”
I knew that Pentecostals were stoned in other cities, but for the first time I heard it from the children themselves.
“That’s why,” Goretoi said, “most of them don’t have a chance to finish high school.” He passed to the sharp-eyed Valery a buttered enameled bowl. Valery deftly climbed the cherry tree by which we were sitting. Soon the bowl stood in front of me, full of cherries. I said, “No way!” and pushed it toward the children.
“What’s the matter with you, Arkady Abramovich?” their mother exclaimed. “Really! You’re our dear guest!”
“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t have enough fruit here for this underage legion.”
“Don’t you see our plum tree and two apple trees?” she said.
“They won’t begin to bear fruit for two months,” I said, sounding ridiculous.
“Sooner,” said Goretoi.
Looking at the curly potato field, I began to devour cherries. Soon some legionnaires joined me. I thought, just talking with these children around this table gives you a picture of the life of Evangelicals in the Soviet Union. The sixteen-year-old Klava Pishchenko tried to comfort this depressed Muscovite. “Here we’re treated better,” she stressed.
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“All ten of us were beaten up in Nakhodka. After such a beating I was sick for six years.”
“You look healthy now.”
“I’m fine now, only sometimes have headaches.”
The children calmly continued to eat cherries. The adults, too, showed no particular feelings. It was their life.
Then we heard another voice from the gate: “Welcome to our church, Arkady Abramovich!” It was Enoch, the oldest son of the Goretois. “My barefooted scouts have told me of your arrival, but I was standing in the clay and couldn’t tear myself away from the work. We’re building a house for a brother from our church.”
“Enoch,” said Nikolai Petrovich, “in a couple of hours send the children to every family; as it gets dark, we’ll gather at the home of Vera Shchukin.”
Dancing on Thin Ice Page 21