Everything Flows (24 page)

In the summer
Ivan Grigoryevich traveled to the seaside town where, beneath a green hill, his father’s house had stood.

The train went right along the shore. During a short stop, Ivan Grigoryevich got out and looked at the green-and-black water. It was always moving, and it smelled cool and salty.

The wind and the sea had been there when the investigator summoned him for interrogations during the night. They had been there while a grave was being dug for a prisoner who had died in transit. They had been there while guard dogs barked beneath the barrack windows and the snow creaked beneath the boots of the guards.

The sea was eternal, and the eternity of its freedom seemed to Ivan Grigoryevich to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigoryevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle, nor would its thundering, splashing freedom care about him when he ceased to live. No, he thought, this is not freedom. This is astronomical space come down to earth, a splinter of eternity, indifferent, always in motion.

The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

After passing the night in the station, he set off early in the morning toward the house. An autumn sun was rising in a cloudless sky, and it was impossible to distinguish it from a spring sun.

The silence around him was deserted and sleepy. He felt such an intensity of emotion that it seemed as if his heart, which had endured everything, would be unable to endure it. The world became divinely still; the dear sanctuary of his childhood was eternal and immutable. His feet had long ago trodden these cool cobbles; his child’s eyes had gazed at these rounded hills now touched by the red rust of autumn. He listened to the noise of the stream, on its way to the sea amid watermelon rinds, gnawed corncobs, and other town detritus.

An old Abkhazian man, wearing a black sateen shirt girded by a thin leather belt, was carrying a basket of chestnuts toward the bazaar.

Ivan Grigoryevich might perhaps, in his childhood, have bought figs and chestnuts from this same unchanging old graybeard. And it was the same southern morning air—both cool and warm, smelling of the sea and of the mountain sky, of roses and of garlic from the kitchens. And the same little houses with closed shutters and drawn curtains. And behind these shutters were sleeping the same children—children who had never grown up—and the same old men as forty years ago, still not gone to their graves.

He came out onto the main road and began to climb the hill. There was the sound of the stream again. Ivan Grigoryevich could remember its voice.

Never before had he seen his life as a whole—but now here it was, lying there before him.

And, seeing his life, he felt no resentment toward anyone.

All of them—those who had prodded him with their rifle butts as they escorted him toward the investigator’s office, those who had subjected him to long interrogations without letting him sleep, those who had said vile things about him at public meetings, those who had officially renounced him, those who had stolen his camp ration of bread, those who had beaten him—all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to. They had not wanted to do evil to him.

They had betrayed, slandered, and renounced because there had been no other way for them to survive. And yet they were people; they were human beings. Had these people wanted him to be making his way like this to his abandoned home—old, alone, and without love?

People did not want to do evil to anyone, but they did evil all through their lives.

All the same, people were people, they were human beings. And the wonderful, marvelous thing is that, willingly or unwillingly, they did not allow freedom to die. In their terrible, distorted, yet still-human souls, even the most terrible of them looked after freedom and kept it alive.

He himself had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, no political party, and he had no disciples.

Why had his life been so hard? He had not preached; he had not taught; he had simply remained what he had been since birth—a human being.

The mountainside opened out before him. From the other side of the pass appeared the tops of oak trees. He had walked there as a child, searching in the half dark of the forest for traces of the Circassians and their vanished life: fruit trees gone wild, remnants of what had once been a fence around a house.

Perhaps his own home would still be as unchanged as the town streets and the stream?

It would be at the next turn of the road. For a moment it seemed to him as if an improbably bright light, brighter than any light he had ever seen, had flooded the whole earth. A few more steps—and in this light he would see his home, and his mother would come out toward him, toward her prodigal son, and he would kneel down before her, and her young and beautiful hands would rest on his gray, balding head.

He saw thickets of thorns and hops. There was no house and no well—only a few stones shining white amid dusty grass that had been burned by the sun.

Here he stood—gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, yet still the same as ever, unchanged
.

1955–6
3

All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions
By far the largest public organization in the Soviet Union, it served as an umbrella organization for the various individual trade unions.

did all the plowing
An allusion to a proverbial fly who has been sitting for some time on the horn of an ox. When another fly asks him where he has been, he replies, “We’ve been plowing!”

makhorka
The very coarsest, strongest tobacco.

first among equals
During the nineteenth century these words were used with regard to the relationship between Russians and other Slav nationalities, especially Serbs. During and after the 1930s they were applied, semi-officially, to the relationship between Russians and other Soviet nationalities.

Vanya
The most common affectionate form of Ivan.

candidate’s dissertation
A
kandidatskaya dissertatsiya
is the equivalent of a PhD. A
doktorskaya dissertatsiya
, here translated as “doctorate,” is an even higher degree.

vitalism
This is the doctrine that the functioning of a living organism is determined by a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces. Such a way of thinking was, of course, unacceptable to the guardians of the “scientific materialism” that was the Soviet orthodoxy.

Killer Doctors
On January 13, 1953, some of the most prominent doctors in the USSR were accused of taking part in a vast plot to poison members of the political and military leadership.
Pravda
reported the accusations under the headline VICIOUS SPIES AND KILLERS PASSING THEMSELVES OFF AS DOCTORS AND PROFESSORS . Stalin evidently intended these accusations to serve as a prelude to a vast purge of Jews. Only Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1953, prevented this purge from being carried out. The preparations for the affair of the Killer Doctors began at least a year in advance. Early in 1952, after the death in Moscow of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsan, Stalin said, “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, Choibalsan...die so quickly! We must change the old doctors for new ones.” Later that year, perhaps in response to this remark, Mikhail Ryumin, deputy minister for state security, alleged that the Jewish professor Yakov Etinger had, under the pretense of treating Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, set out to kill them. When his superior refused to believe the story, Ryumin went over his head directly to Stalin, who immediately suspected a wider conspiracy to kill off the Soviet leadership.

Short Course
The Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)
was published in 1938. Between then and 1953, more than forty-two million copies of the book were issued in sixty-seven languages. Most often referred to simply as
The Short Course
, it was seen as the encyclopedia of Marxism; it is notable for the frequency with which Lenin and Stalin are repeatedly mentioned in the same phrase, as if the two names were inseparable. Stalin supervised and heavily edited the work but himself contributed only one section of chapter 4, about dialectical and historical materialism. After the Second World War, however, he claimed sole authorship of the work.

All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries
The organization, founded in 1925, that was responsible for all cultural and scientific exchanges and contacts with other countries.

Khodynka
A mass panic occurred on Khodynka Field in northwest Moscow during festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar. This resulted, according to official sources, in the death of 1,389 people.

the scroll of his life
Grossman is alluding to a line from a short poem by Pushkin, “Memory” (1828): “Memory silently unrolls before me its long scroll.”

Lubyanka
A large square in central Moscow where the headquarters of Soviet state security (regardless of its many changes of name) has been located since 1920. Like all headquarters buildings of the Soviet state security organizations, it contained an internal pre-trial prison, invisible from outside.

Moscow Trials
A series of show trials of real and imagined political opponents of Stalin. The first trial, of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and fourteen other Left Deviationists, was held in August 1936; all the defendants were sentenced to death. The second trial, in January 1937, was of seventeen lesser figures; thirteen were shot and the remaining four sent to labor camps. The third trial, in March 1938, was of Nikolay Bukharin, former head of the Communist International; Aleksey Rykov, a former prime minister; and nineteen other Right Deviationists. All the leading defendants were executed. Andrey Vyshinsky was the chief prosecutor at all three trials. The most terrible year of Stalin’s purges has always been seen as 1937, and this may have led Grossman to forget that the trial of Bukharin and Rykov was in fact held in early 1938.

weekly parcel of food
The pay differential between members of the Soviet elite and ordinary workers was less than in most societies. For the main part, the elite received their payments in kind. One of their many privileges was to be provided regularly with food that it was impossible to obtain in ordinary shops.

War Communism
The economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1921. All industry was nationalized; all private enterprise was illegal; workers were shot for going on strike; grain and other products were requisitioned from the peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population. The requisitioning of grain led to what was, in effect, a second civil war: the peasants grew less and less grain, and the Bolsheviks resorted to ever increasing violence in order to extort from the peasants what little grain they had grown. Together with the severe drought of 1921, this war between city and country resulted in a serious famine and the death of three to ten million peasants. After an uprising in March 1921 by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the relatively liberal New Economic Policy, which lasted until 1928.

Higher Academic Council
The panel of scientists then responsible, on behalf of the Academy of Sciences, for making decisions on appointments and higher degrees.

“Indians”
Jacques Rossi, who spent time in the Gulag, writes: “A crowded barracks is hot, like in India, even during winter, and virtually everyone is half naked. Some are hot and others have lost all their clothes in card games.” (
The Gulag Handbook
[New York: Paragon House, 1989], 141.)

the “thieves” and the “bitches.”
Russian criminals were in a position of considerable power in the camps, and they lorded it over the political prisoners. They referred to themselves as “thieves” and strictly observed a so-called thieves’ code (
vorovskoy zakon
) that, among other things, strictly forbade any collaboration with the authorities. Thieves who violated this code and collaborated with the authorities were known as “bitches.”

“engineer saboteurs”
The first important show trial in Stalin’s Soviet Union was the Shakhty Trial in 1928. A group of engineers in the north Caucasus town of Shakhty was accused of conspiring, with foreign support, to sabotage the Soviet economy. This marked the beginning of the use of accusations of sabotage—an accusation made only too often during the purges of the 1930s.

six-month city passport
From late 1932 until the 1960s, collective-farm workers did not have the right to an internal passport. This meant that they had little more freedom of movement than they had had as serfs.

He washed the old man’s feet
From “The Grandfather” (1870) by Nikolay Nekrasov. The grandfather is one of the Decembrist rebels who, hoping to install a constitutional monarchy, took part in a failed coup against Nicholas I in December 1825. Like Ivan Grigoryevich, the grandfather has just returned from years of exile and forced labor in Siberia.

“without right of correspondence”
During the purges, when a prisoner was executed, his relatives were usually told that he was being sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence.”

realm of form—during these last decades it has taken over the realm of content
A key Stalinist axiom was that culture should be “national in form and Socialist in content.” Nikolay Andreyevich is—very perceptively—pointing out that this principle has now been superseded.

Black Hundreds
A reactionary, militantly antisemitic movement in Russia in the early twentieth century.

the Siege
The Siege of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to January 1943, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established. The siege, however, was not totally lifted until January 1944; it was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history.

shared with two chance companions
It was customary for drunks to gather in threesomes in alcohol shops, pay for a bottle of vodka together, and then share it on a park bench or in the main entrance of some nearby building.

laurel-crowned horseman
The Bronze Horseman
is the usual name for a famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great, unveiled in 1782. Peter the Great sits heroically on horseback, his arm pointing toward the River Neva; his horse, rearing at the edge of a cliff, is trampling a serpent under its back hooves.
The Bronze Horseman
is also the title of one of Aleksandr Pushkin’s masterpieces, a narrative poem written fifty years later, in 1833. The hero of this poem is Yevgeny, a young clerk whose sweetheart is drowned when the Neva overflows its banks. Yevgeny shakes his fist at
The Bronze Horseman
and curses Peter the Great for founding the city somewhere so vulnerable to flooding. The statue comes alive and chases Yevgeny through the city. The poem’s central theme is the conflict between the needs of the State and the needs of ordinary citizens.

I have a passport
That is, an “internal passport,” which Ivan Grigoryevich would have received on his release.

classified as a kulak
Peasants were classified as poor peasants (
bednyaki
), who had no property of their own; middle peasants (
serednyaki
), who owned property but did not employ hired labor; and rich peasants, or kulaks, who both owned property and employed hired labor. During collectivization, the kulaks were deported en masse. According to data from Soviet archives, more than 1.8 million kulaks and family members were deported in 1930 and 1931; nearly 500,000 of these appear to have died or escaped before reaching the camps or labor colonies that were their destination. Nearly 400,000 kulaks and family members are said to have died between 1932 and 1940.

“Push that which is falling!”
A sarcastic allusion to Nietzsche: “But I say: what is falling, we should still push! Everything today—it is falling, it is falling apart: who would hold it up? but I—I would still push it...” (
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, translated by Thomas Wayne [New York: Algora Publishing, 2003], 161.)

stand “almost side by side”
The learned informer is quoting a famous line of the Futurist poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930). In his “Jubilee Poem” written for the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, Mayakovsky declares that, since his own name begins with
M
and Pushkin’s with
P
, he and Pushkin will, in the eyes of posterity, be standing “almost side by side.”

the word “Man”
In the last act of Maksim Gorky’s play
The Lower Depths
, Satin says: “M-A-N! That is magnificent! That has a...proud sound! We must respect man! Not pity him...not humilate him with pity. We must respect him!”

Intourist
Throughout the Soviet Union all hotels, restaurants, and other facilities for tourists were managed by Intourist. Intourist restaurants were, on the whole, superior to other restaurants, and they were open only to foreigners and to members of the Soviet elite.

Tsarskoye Selo
The small town outside Petersburg that, from the late eighteenth century, was the main summer residence of the Russian tsars.

application for a pension
Soviet soldiers or officers taken prisoner by the Germans were considered suspect. Most of them were sent to the camps on their return to the Soviet Union. Widows only received pensions if there was documented evidence that their husbands had died on the battlefield. The Soviet defeats of the first months of the war were so swift, and so catastrophic, that such evidence was seldom recorded.

footcloths
These were lengths of cloth wound around the foot and ankle. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century these were far more common in Russia than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they were less common, worn mainly in the army and in the camps.

Putilov Factory
By 1917, this factory, which produced both artillery and rolling stock for the railways, was the largest in Petrograd. It had strong revolutionary traditions; a strike there in February 1917 was part of the chain of events that led to the February Revolution and the Tsar’s abdication. After the October Revolution it produced the first Soviet tractors; after the assassination of Kirov in 1934, it was renamed the Kirov Factory.

sentenced under Article 58
That is, as a counterrevolutionary.

labor day
A labor day is the equivalent of the average amount of work that—supposedly—could be performed by one person in the course of a working day. This amount of work—for example, plowing a hectare of land or threshing a ton of grain—would often, in fact, take several days to carry out. At the end of the season the income of the collective farm in money and kind was shared according to the number of labor days each member had to his credit. (Robert Conquest,
The Harvest of Sorrow
[New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 176–77.)