Everything Flows (19 page)

Some believed that there had been a coup d’état, that their enemies had seized power—and that these enemies, while continuing to use Soviet language and Soviet concepts, were now settling accounts with those who had conceived and created the Soviet State.

Sometimes a former district Party committee secretary would end up in the same cell as the district Party committee secretary before him, whom he had himself unmasked as an enemy of the people; and then, a month later, yet another Party committee secretary from the same district would join them on the bedboards. He too, the unmasker of the previous secretary, had now been unmasked. Everything had become one: the clatter and clanking of the trains heading north; the barking of guard dogs; the squeaking of boots and ladies’ summer shoes on the crunchy
taiga
snow; the scratching of investigators’ pens; spades grating against frozen earth as
zeks
dug graves for other
zeks
who had died from scurvy, from the cold, from heart attacks; people’s repentant appeals, at Party meetings, to be treated with clemency; people with white, dead lips, repeating after the investigator the words, “I confess that, having become a paid agent of foreign intelligence, inspired by a ferocious hatred of everything Soviet, I was preparing to commit acts of terrorism against Soviet statesmen and at the same time supplying secret information...”

Muffled by the thick stone of the Lefortovo or the Butyrka—the constant crackle of rifle and pistol shots: nine grams of lead in the chest or the back of the head for the thousands, for the tens of thousands of innocents discovered to have committed “especially vicious acts of espionage or terrorism.”

And those builders of the new world who were still free kept on trying to divine: “Will they, won’t they?” Everyone was waiting for a knock on the door in the night, the whisper of car tires outside the building, and then a sudden silence.

And so, in chaos and absurdity, in the madness of false accusations, the generation of the Civil War disappeared. New days began, and new actors appeared on the stage...

Mekler
, Lev Naumovich...He had used to wear size forty-five shoes and a size fifty-eight suit from the
Moscow Tailoring Combine
. And now he had been sentenced under Article 58: betrayal of the Motherland, terrorism, sabotage, never mind a few other things.

He had not been shot, probably because he was one of the first to be arrested. At that time death sentences had not been handed out with such freedom.

Stumbling, squinting shortsightedly and distractedly, he had gone through all the circles of the prison and camp hell. He had not perished because an inner fire—the faith that had consumed him since adolescence—had protected him from scurvy and from malnutrition, from bitter winds and from nights when the temperature fell to forty degrees below zero. Nor had he died of dysentery; nor had he perished when a barge packed with prisoners sank in the Yenisey.

He had not had his throat cut by the common criminals. He had not been tortured to death in a punishment cell or beaten to death during interrogation. He had not been shot during a mass purge, at a time when every tenth prisoner was being shot.

Where had this powerful flame of fanaticism come from? How had it appeared in this son of a sad, sly shopkeeper from the shtetl of Fastov? How had it sprung up in a young man who had studied in a commercial school and who had been brought up on the
Golden Library and on the adventure stories of Louis Boussenard
? What had instilled him with this hatred of capitalism? Neither he nor his father, after all, had spent years down mines or in factories filled with smoke and dust.

Who or what had given him the soul of a fighter? The example of Zhelyabov and Kalyaev? The wisdom of
The Communist Manifesto
? The sufferings of the poor next door?

Or had these coals been smoldering deep in the millennial abyss of heredity, ready to burst into flame in the struggle against Caesar’s soldiers or against the Spanish Inquisition, in the hunger and intellectual frenzy of
Talmud Torah schools
, in a shtetl’s attempt to defend itself during a pogrom?

Maybe it was indeed these thousands of years of humiliation, the anguish of exile in Babylon, the humiliations of the shtetl, the poverty of the Pale of Settlement, that had engendered the frenzy for justice that had forged the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler?

His inability to adapt to everyday life evoked both mockery and admiration. To some there had seemed something saintly about this Komsomol leader in torn sandals, in a calico shirt with an open collar, with nothing on his head but his curly hair—and he had seemed no less saintly as a regimental commissar wearing a torn leather jacket and a peaked Budyonny helmet with a red star that had faded as if from loss of blood. And he had been no less unshaven and ragged when, as commissar of justice for the entire Ukraine, he had gotten out of his car in a tattered raincoat with missing buttons and walked, in winter, to his office.

He had seemed helpless, as if not of this world, but there were some who remembered listening reverently to him during stormy meetings at the front and then following him into the fire of Wrangel’s machine guns.

He was a preacher, an apostle, a soldier of the world socialist revolution. For the sake of the Revolution he was ready, without a second thought, to give up everything—his life, the love of a woman, all those nearest and dearest to him. The only thing it was impossible for him to give up was happiness—since nothing could have brought him more happiness than to go to the stake for the Revolution, to sacrifice for her everything on earth that a human being holds dear.

The future world order seemed to him infinitely splendid, and for its sake Mekler was ready to employ the most pitiless violence.

He was, essentially, someone kindhearted. If a mosquito was sucking his blood, rather than crushing it with a slap of the hand, he would send it on its way with a delicate flick of his fingers. If he caught a bedbug on the scene of the crime, he would wrap it in a piece of paper and carry it outside.

What distinguished his service to the Revolution and the good of humanity was his lack of pity for suffering and his readiness to shed blood.

In his revolutionary purity he imprisoned his father and testified against him before the Cheka. And when his sister begged him to defend her husband, who had been arrested as a saboteur, he turned his back on her cruelly and sullenly.

In his meekness he was pitiless toward those who held the wrong views. To him the Revolution seemed helpless and childishly trustful—surrounded as she was by treachery, the cruelty of the wicked and villainous, the filth of those who wished to corrupt her.

And so he was pitiless toward the enemies of the Revolution.

On his revolutionary conscience there was only one stain. Without telling the Party, he had given help to his old mother, the widow of a man who had been shot by the organs of justice. And, after her death, he had paid for her to be given a religious funeral; that had been her last, pathetic wish.

His vocabulary, his way of thinking, his actions all sprang from one and the same source: the books written in the name of the Revolution, the justice and morality of the Revolution, the poetry of the Revolution, and the strategy of the Revolution—her marching soldiers, her visions, her songs.

It was through the eyes of the Revolution that he looked at the stars in the sky and at birch leaves in April; it was from her most sweet cup that he drank the charm, the potion of first love; it was in the light of her wisdom that he understood the battle in ancient Rome between patricians and slaves, the struggle between landowners and serfs, the class warfare between factory owners and the proletariat. The Revolution was his mother, his tender beloved, his sun, his destiny.

And now the Revolution had put him in a cell in the Lubyanka and knocked out eight of his teeth. Swearing obscenely and calling him a mangy Yid, stamping on him with officer’s boots, she had demanded that he, her son, her beloved apostle, should confess himself to be her secret and mortal enemy, her would-be poisoner.

He did not, of course, renounce the Revolution. During conveyor-belt interrogations that went on for a hundred hours his faith did not waver for even a moment; his faith did not waver when he lay on the floor and saw the polished toe of a box-calf boot beside his blood-filled mouth. The Revolution was coarse, obtuse, and cruel as she interrogated him under torture; she was enraged by the loyalty, by the meek patience of the Old Bolshevik, Lev Mekler.

This rage was the rage of a man trying to drive away a mongrel who won’t stop following at his heels. First he quickens his steps; then he shouts at the dog and stamps his feet; then he shakes his fist at the dog and throws stones at it. The dog runs away, but when, a hundred yards farther on, the man looks around, he sees the now crippled dog hurriedly limping after him—as determinedly faithful as ever.

And what the man finds most abhorrent of all is the look in those doggy eyes—so meek, so sad and loving, so fanatical in their devotion.

The dog’s love enrages its master. The dog sees this rage and cannot understand it. The dog cannot understand that, while committing an unprecedented injustice, the master wants, at least a little, to appease his conscience. The dog’s meekness and devotion have been driving him insane. He hates the dog for this love more than he ever hated the wolves against which the dog once defended the house of his youth. He is hoping, through his coarse brutality, to put an end to this love.

Shocked by this sudden, inexplicable cruelty, the dog keeps on following the master.

Why? Why?

And the dog cannot understand that there is nothing absurd or senseless about this sudden hatred; the dog cannot understand that
everything is real and rational
.

This hatred is normal and predictable; it is an expression of a clear, mathematical logic. To the dog, however, it seems like a spell of madness. It all seems wild and senseless, and the dog even feels anxious on the master’s behalf. The dog wants to rescue the master from his blindness—for the master’s sake, not for its own. And the dog loves the master and therefore cannot leave him.

And the master understands now that the dog is not going to leave him. The master knows now that the only thing he can do is to strangle the dog or shoot it.

And in order that this execution—this execution of a dog that adores and idolizes him—should not weigh on his conscience or evoke the disapproval of his neighbors, the master decides that this dog must be turned into an enemy, into an artificial enemy. Let the dog confess, before dying, that it wished to tear its master to pieces.

It is easier to kill an enemy than to kill a friend.

In that first house, after all—in the house he built in his youth in the midst of gloomy and deserted ruins, in the house where he once prayed with a pure heart—the dog was his friend and guard, his inseparable companion.

So let the dog confess that it was in cahoots with the wolves.

And in its death agony, as it is being choked with a rope, the dog looks at its master with meek love, with a faith equal to that which led the first Christian martyrs to their deaths.

And the dog never understood one very simple thing: its master had left that house of prayer and youthful intoxication and moved into a building of granite and glass, and his village mongrel had begun to seem an absurdity, a burden. More than a burden—a danger. Which was why he killed it.

T
he years
passed, the dust and the fog cleared, and it became possible to make out what had happened. What had once seemed like chaos or insanity, like self-destruction, like a chain of absurd coincidences, what had once driven people out of their minds because it seemed so mysteriously and tragically senseless—all this gradually became recognizable as the clear, distinct attributes of the new reality.

The fate of the generation of the Revolution now ceased to seem mystical and extraordinary and began to seem entirely logical. And Ivan Grigoryevich felt able, at last, to understand his country’s new fate—the fate that had been built on the bones of that generation.

The Bolshevik generation had been formed in the days of the Revolution, in the days when the ideal of a World Commune held sway, when people took part in inspired, hungry,
voluntary working Saturdays
. That generation took on its shoulders the legacy of the World War and the Civil War—chaos, famine, typhus, anarchy, crime, and banditry. Through Lenin’s lips it proclaimed that there was a party that could
set Russia on a new path
. Without hesitation, it accepted the legacy of hundreds of years of Russian despotism, during which dozens of generations had come and gone, knowing no rights except that of a master to do as he pleased with his serfs.

Under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik generation dissolved the Constituent Assembly and destroyed the democratic revolutionary parties that had struggled against Russian absolutism.

The Bolshevik generation did not—in the context of bourgeois Russia—believe in the value of individual freedom; it did not believe in the value of freedom of speech or of freedom of the press.

Like Lenin, it saw as irrelevant nonsense the freedoms of which the intelligentsia and many revolutionary workers had long dreamed.

The young State destroyed the democratic parties, clearing the way for Soviet construction. By the end of the 1920s, these parties had been liquidated. Men who had been imprisoned under the Tsar were either back in prison or carrying out forced labor.

The year 1930 saw the total collectivization of agriculture.

Not long after this the ax was raised yet again. This time, however, it was on the generation of the Civil War that the ax fell. A small part of this generation survived, but its soul, its faith in a World Commune, its romantic and revolutionary strength disappeared with those who were destroyed in 1937. Those who were left, those who went on living and working, managed to adapt to the new time and its new people.

The new people did not believe in the Revolution. They were the children not of the Revolution but of the new State that the Revolution had created.

The new State had no need of holy apostles, of frenzied, possessed builders, of faithful disciples. The new State no longer even needed servants; it needed employees. And the State’s only misgiving with regard to these employees was that they did, on occasion, turn out to be very petty-minded indeed—and thieving rascals into the bargain.

Terror and dictatorship swallowed up their creators. The State, which had seemed to be a means, had now proved to be an end in itself. The people who had created this State had seen it as a means of realizing their ideals. It turned out, however, that their dreams and ideals had been a means employed by a great and terrible State. The State was no longer a servant but a grim autocrat. It was not the people who needed the Red Terror of 1919. It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants—most of the people, after all,
were
peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks. Nor was it the people who destroyed the workers’ right to strike or the peasants’ right to sow what they chose. It was not the people who added huge taxes to the price of consumer goods.

The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content
; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.