by Victor Serge
“I am writing for the future. One day the archives will open. Perhaps my memorial will be found in them. The work of the historians who are studying our period will thereby be lightened. I regard that as much more important than what you are probably commissioned to ask me … Now, citizen, permit me to ask a question in turn: Of what, precisely, am I accused?”
“You will learn that before long. Are you satisfied with your living conditions? The food?”
“Passable. Sometimes not enough sugar in the preserves. But many Soviet proletarians, who are accused of nothing, are less well fed than you and I are, citizen.”
Zvyeryeva said dryly:
“The session is over.”
Rublev returned to his cell in excellent humor. “I sent that hideous cat running, Dora. If one had to explain oneself to such creatures … Let them send me someone better, or let them shoot me without any explanations …” The field of poppies appeared on a distant slope, through a veil of rain. “My poor Dora … Am I not even now tearing their entire scaffolding down?” Dora would be glad. She would say: “I am certain that I shall not survive you long, Kiril. Show me the way.”
Rublev did not always turn around when the door opened. This time, after he had distinctly heard the door close, he had the feeling of a presence behind him. He went on writing — he did not intend to let his nerves get the better of him.
“Good day, Rublev,” said a drawling voice.
It was Popov. Gray cap, old overcoat, bulging brief bag under his arm, just the same as ever. (They had not seen each other for years.)
“Good day, Popov, sit down.”
Rublev gave him the chair, closed his notebook, which lay open on the table, and stretched out on the bed. Popov examined the cell — bare, yellow, stifling, surrounded by silence. He obviously found it unpleasant.
“Well, well,” said Rublev, “so they’ve locked you up too! Welcome, brother, you have more than deserved it.”
He laughed to himself, heartily. Popov threw his cap on the table, dropped his overcoat, spat several times into a gray handkerchief. “Toothache. The devil take … But you are mistaken, Rublev, I have not been arrested yet …”
Rublev flung his two long legs into the air in a jubilant caper. And, talking to himself and laughing uncontrollably: “Old Popov said not yet. Not yet! Freud would give three rubles spot cash for that lapsus linguae.… Seriously, Popov, did you hear yourself say not yet? Not yet!”
“I said not yet?” Popov stammered. “Not yet what? What can it matter? What do you mean by … by picking on words like that? What is that I am not yet?”
“… arrested, arrested, arrested, not yet arrested!” Rublev cried, with wild mockery in his eyes, in the reddish tangle of his eyebrows, in his bristling beard.
Wall, window with dirty panes, iron grating … Popov stared at them stupidly. This insane reception staggered him. He let silence grow between them until it became almost uncomfortable. Rublev crossed his arms under his neck.
“Rublev, I have come to decide your fate with you. We expect much of you … We know what an intensely critical mind you have … but we know too that you are loyal to the Party … The men of the older generation, like myself, know you … I have brought you some documents … Read them … We have confidence in you … Only, if you don’t mind, let’s change places — I’d rather lie down … My health, you know — rheumatism, myocarditis, polyneuritis, et cetera … You’re lucky to be healthy, Rublev …”
Spilled water spreads, but the very obstacles it encounters give it a definite outline. So Popov regained the advantage. They changed places, Popov lay down on the cot, and he really looked like a sick old man — his teeth gray, his skin muddy, his few strands of hair a sorry white and absurdly ruffled. “Will you hand me my brief bag, please, Rublev? You don’t mind if I smoke?” He extracted a sheaf of papers from his bag. “There, read those … Don’t hurry … We have plenty of time … It is serious, everything is extremely serious.” His short sentences ended in little coughs. Rublev settled down to read. Résumé of the reports of the military attachés at … Report on the construction of strategic roads in Poland … Fuel Reserves … The London Conversations … Long minutes passed.
“War?” said Rublev at last, wholly serious.
“Very probably war, next year … mmmm … Did you see the figures on transport?”
“Yes.”
“We still have a slight chance of shifting the war toward the West …”
“Not for long.”
“Not for long …”
They discussed the danger as if one of them were calling on the other at his house. How long would it take to mobilize? Cover troops? There would have to be a second oil refinery, in the Far East, and the Komsomolsk road system would have to be developed at top speed. Was the new railroad in Yakutia really finished? How did it stand up under winter conditions?
“We count on the probability of extremely high troop losses …” said Popov in a clear voice. “All those young fellows …” thought Rublev. He had always enjoyed watching parades of athletes; his eyes, as he walked through the streets, would follow the strapping young men from different parts of Russia: Siberians with broad noses and horizontal eyes set deep under stern foreheads, Asiatics with broad, flat faces, and certain Mongols with delicate features, products of fine races civilized long before white civilization. Their young women went through life with them, shoulder to shoulder (he was perhaps visualizing these images from recollections of moving pictures), and all together they moved through crumbling cities, under the bombers; and our new square reinforced-concrete buildings, the work of so many famished proletarians, became burning skeletons, and all those young men, all those young women, millions of them, splattered with blood, filled hideous pits, hospital trains, ambulances stinking of gangrene and chloroform — we shall certainly have a shortage of anesthetics … Slowly, there in the hospitals, they continued their transformation into corpses … “I must stop thinking in images,” he said, “it becomes unbearable.”
“Unbearable indeed,” Popov answered.
Rublev nearly cried out: “You still here! What are you doing here?”
But Popov attacked first:
“We count on losses which may reach several millions of men during the first year … That is why … mmmm … the Political Bureau has adopted the … mmm … unpopular measure … forbidding abortion.… Millions of women are suffering under it … We no longer count in anything less than millions … We must have millions of children, and have them now, to replace the millions of young men who will perish … mmmm … and you, meanwhile, sit here writing … may the devil take … take what you are writing, Rublev … mmmm … and all this paltry business of your resisting the Party … Knee and jaw at once …”
“What jaw?”
“The upper … Pain here, pain there … Rublev, the Party asks you, the Party orders you … I am not the Party.”
“Asks what? Orders what?”
“You know as well as I do … It is not for me to go into details … You can arrange things with the examining judges … they know the scenario … that’s what they’re paid for … mmm … some of them even believe it, the young ones, the stupid ones … mmm … they’re the most useful … I pity the suspects who fall into their clutches … mmm … You still resist? … You’ll be made to stand up in front of a roomful of people — all the diplomats, the official spies, the foreign correspondents, the ones we pay, the ones who are on more than one payroll, the scum of the earth, all hungry for just that, you will be put in front of the microphone, and you’ll say, for example, that you are morally responsible for the assassination of Comrade Tulayev … That, or something else … mmm … how should I know what? You will say it because the Prosecutor, Rachevsky, will make you say it, word by word and not once but ten times over … mmm … he’s patient, Rachevsky, like a mule … a filthy mule … You will say whatever they want you to say, because you know the situation … because you have no choi
ce: obey or betray … Or we will call upon you to stand in front of the same microphone and dishonor the Supreme Tribunal, the Party, the Chief, the U.S.S.R. — everything at once, to proclaim … the devil take me … my knee … to proclaim what you call your innocence … and what a pretty spectacle your innocence will make at that moment! …”
It had grown dark. Rublev walked up and down his cell in silence. The voice that sometimes rose out of Popov’s mutterings, sometimes was lost in them, showered him with little muddy words; he did not hear them all, but he had the feeling that he was walking on spit, and little gray splatterings of spit kept raining around him, and there was nothing to say in answer, or what he could say in answer was of no use … “And it is on the eve of war, in this hour of danger, that you have destroyed the cadres of the country, decapitated the army, the Party, industry — you immitigable idiots and criminals …” If he cried that, Popov would answer: “My knee … mmm … perhaps you are right, but what good does it do you to be right? It is we who are the power, and even we can do nothing about it. You are being asked for your own head now; and you aren’t going to announce the fact before the international bourgeoisie, are you? Even to avenge your precious little head, which will soon be cracked open like a nut … mmmm …” A despicable person — but what way was there out of this infernal circle, what way?
Dressed in an old tunic and shapeless trousers, his hands crossed on his chest, Popov continued his monologue, with short pauses. Rublev stopped beside him as if he were seeing him for the first time. And now he addressed him in the familiar form — sadly at first:
“Popov, old man, you look like Lenin … It is striking … Don’t move, let your hands stay just as they are … Not like Ilich alive, not a bit … You look like his embalmed body … The way a rag doll looks like a living being …” He studied him with an attention that was at once dreamy and intense. “You look like him in gray crumbling stone, or after the fashion of a sow bug … the bumps on your forehead, your miserable little beard, poor, poor old man …”
There was sincere pity in his voice. On his side, Popov was watching him with the most intense attention. Rublev read something in his eyes which was at once veiled and unmistakable: danger.
“… poor bastard that you are, poor old wreck … Cynical and foul-smelling … Ah!”
With a look of despairing disgust, Rublev turned away and went to the door. The cell seemed too small for him. He thought aloud:
“And this graveyard maggot has brought me word of the war …”
Popov’s muttering and spluttering began behind him again — spitefully perhaps?
“Ilich said that there’s always some use around a house for a cleaning rag … mmmm … a slightly dirty rag, naturally, since it is in the nature of cleaning rags to be slightly dirty … I am willing … I am no individualist … mmmm … It is written in the Bible that a living dog is better than a dead lion …”
Popov rose, put away the papers he had brought, and laboriously got into his overcoat. Rublev stood with his hands in his pockets, not offering to help him. He murmured, for himself:
“Living dog, or plague-bearing, half-dead rat?”
Popov had to pass in front of him to get the guard to open the door. They did not take leave of each other. Before he crossed the threshold, Popov shoved his cap on his head with a quick gesture, visor tilted up and at a slight angle. At seventeen, just before his first taste of prison, in the days of the first revolutionary enthusiasm, he had enjoyed giving himself the same sort of underworld air. Framed in the metal doorway, he turned, his chest brushing against the square double tooth of the lock, and looked straight at Rublev with eyes that were clear and still vigorous.
“Good-by, Rublev. I don’t need your answer … I know what I needed to know … mmmm … Basically, we understand each other perfectly …” He lowered his voice because of the uniforms outside the door. “It is hard, certainly … mmmm … for me too … But … mmm … the Party has confidence in you …”
“Go to hell!”
Popov took two strides back into the cell and, without any stammering, as if the hideous fog of his life had cleared around him, asked:
“What answer shall I take from you to the Central Committee?”
And Rublev, erect too, said firmly:
“That I have lived my whole life only for the Party. Sick and degraded though it may be, our Party. That I have neither thought nor conscience outside of the Party. That I am loyal to the Party, whatever it may be, whatever it may do. That if I must perish, crushed by my Party, I consent … But that I warn the villains who are killing us that they are killing the Party …”
“Good-by, Comrade Rublev.”
The door closed, the well-oiled bolt slipped gently into the socket. The darkness was almost complete. Rublev rained smashing blows on the sepulchral door. Muffled steps hurried along the corridor, the wicket opened.
“What is it, citizen?”
Rublev thought that he roared, but actually his voice was only an angry breath:
“Turn on the light!”
“Sh … sh … There you are, citizen.” The electric bulb went on.
Rublev shook the pillow on which his visitor’s head had left a hollow. “He is unspeakable, Dora, he is filthy. It would be a pleasure to drop him over a cliff, into a well, into a black abyss, provided that he would stay under forever and neither his cap nor his brief bag would float to the surface of any water ever again … One would go away afterward with a feeling of relief, the night air would seem purer … Dora, Dora …” But — as Rublev very well knew — it was Popov’s flabby hands which were pushing him insidiously toward the black abyss.… “Dialectics of the relation between social forces in periods of reaction …”
7. The Brink of Nothing
Deportee Ryzhik presented insoluble problems to numerous offices. What could one think of an engine driver who had escaped unscathed from thirty telescoped locomotives? Of his fellow combatants, not one had survived. Prison had providentially protected him for over ten years, from 1928 on. A series of pure chances, such as save a single soldier out of a destroyed battalion, kept him out of the way of the great trials, of the secret investigations, and even of the “prison conspiracy”! At time of the latter, Ryzhik was living absolutely alone, under surveillance from the highest quarters, on a kolkhoze in the middle Yenisei; during the progress of the investigation, which should have disclosed him to be a political witness of the most dangerous sort, one of those who are instantly inculpated because of their moral solidarity with the guilty, he was in solitary confinement near the Black Sea, under absolutely secret orders! Yet his dossier left the directors of purges with no excuse. But the very outrageousness of his situation saved him, from the moment when prudence advised not paying too much attention to him for fear of involving too many people in responsibility. The offices finally became accustomed to this strange case; certain heads of bureaus began obscurely to feel that the old Trotskyist was under some high and secret protection. They had vaguely heard of similar cases, precedents.
Through Prosecutor Rachevsky, the Acting High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev, and Popov (delegated by the Central Committee to supervise “judicial inquiries into the most serious cases”), the Bureaus received an order to add to the dossier of the Erchov-Makeyev-Rublev case (assassination of Comrade Tulayev) that of an influential Trotskyist (which meant a genuine Trotskyist), whatever his attitude might be. Rachevsky, contrary to Fleischman’s opinion, held that to make the case more convincing to foreigners, one of the accused might this time be allowed to deny all guilt. The Prosecutor undertook to confound him by testimony which could easily be worked up. Popov casually added that the verdict might take into consideration the doubt raised by his denials, it would produce a good effect, if the Political Bureau considered it worth while. Zvyeryeva volunteered to bring together the secondary testimony which would overwhelm the denials of the as yet unknown defendant. “We have such a mass of material,” she said, “a
nd the conspiracy had so many ramifications, that no resistance is possible. The guilt of these counterrevolutionary vermin is collective …” A search of the files brought to light a number of dossiers, only one of which perfectly suited the end in view: Ryzhik’s. Popov studied it with the caution of an expert faced with an infernal machine of unknown construction. The successive accidents which explained the survival of the old Oppositionist were revealed to him in their strict concatenation. Ryzhik: erstwhile worker in the Hendrikson Pipe and Tube Works, St. Petersburg, member of the Party since 1906, deported to the Lena in 1914, returned from Siberia in April 1917; had several conversations with Lenin immediately after the conference of April ’17; member of the Petrograd Committee during the Civil War; defended the Workers’ Opposition before the Petrograd Committee in ’20, but did not vote for it. Commissar of a division during the march on Warsaw, worked at that time with Smilga, of the C.C., Rakovsky, head of the government of Ukrainia, Tukhachevsky, commandant of the army, three enemies of the people too tardily punished in 1937 … expelled from the Party in ’27, arrested in ’28, deported to Minusinsk, Siberia, in July ’29, condemned by the secret collegium of Security to three years of penal internment, sent to the isolator of Tobolsk, there became the leader of the so-called “Intransigents” tendency, which published a manuscript magazine entitled The Leninist (four issues attached). In 1932, the secret collegium gave him an additional sentence of two years (upon decision of the Political Bureau), to which he answered: “Ten years if it amuses you, for I very much doubt if you will remain in power more than six months with your blind starvation policy.” Author, during this same period, of an “Open Letter on the Famine and the Terror,” addressed to the C.C. Refuted the theory of state capitalism and maintained that of Soviet bonapartism. Liberated in ’34 after an eighteen-day hunger strike. Deported to Chernoe, arrested at Chernoe with Elkin, Kostrov, and others (the “deportees’ Trotskyist center” cases). Transferred to Butirky prison, Moscow, refused to answer questions, went on two hunger strikes, transferred to the special infirmary (cardiac deficiency) … “To be deported to the most distant regions … No letters …” More than a hundred names appeared in the 244 pages of the dossier and they were the terrifying names of men cut down by the sword of the Party. Sixty-six — a bad age, either the will stiffens for the last time or it suddenly collapses. Popov decided: “Have him transferred to Moscow … See that he travels under good conditions …” Rachevsky and Gordeyev answered: