Everything Flows (4 page)

Nikolay Andreyevich found this general atmosphere of suspicion unbearable. Anna Naumovna, the large-nosed laboratory technician, was coming into work every day looking pale, with mad, dilated eyes. One day she reported that a woman in her apartment, who worked in a pharmacy, had had a moment of forgetfulness and given a patient the wrong medicine. On receiving a summons to explain herself, she had felt so appalled that she had committed suicide; her two children—a girl studying at a music college and a boy who was still at school—were now orphans. Anna Naumovna had herself started coming to work on foot—because of the drunks in the trams who kept starting conversations with her about the Jewish doctors who had murdered Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.

Nikolay Andreyevich felt horrified and disgusted by the new Institute director, Ryskov. Ryskov kept saying that the time had come to purge Russian science of non-Russian names. On one occasion he declared, “Our science will no longer be a Yid synagogue. If only you knew how I hate them!”

Nevertheless, Nikolay Andreyevich was unable to suppress a sense of involuntary joy when Ryskov said to him, “The comrades in the Central Committee value your work, the work of a great Russian scientist.”

Mandelstam was no longer working at the Institute, but he had managed to find work as an adviser at a workplace training center. Now and again Nikolay Andreyevich would tell his wife to ring him up and invite him over. He was glad that Mandelstam, who had become nervous and suspicious, kept postponing their meetings—which he himself was now finding more and more painful. At times like this it was better to be among people who enjoyed life.

When Nikolay Andreyevich heard that Khavkin had been arrested, he glanced anxiously at the telephone and said to his wife in a whisper, “I’m certain that Isaac is innocent. I’ve known him for thirty years.”

Maria Pavlovna suddenly embraced him and stroked his head. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I know how much you put yourself out for Khavkin and Mandelstam—and only I know how much they’ve hurt you.”

But it was a difficult time. Nikolay Andreyevich had to speak at a public meeting; he had to say a few words about vigilance, and about the dangers of gullibility and complacency.

After the meeting Nikolay Andreyevich had a conversation with Professor Margolin who worked in the Physical Chemistry Department and who had also given an important speech. Margolin had demanded that the criminal doctors be sentenced to death, and he had read out the text of a congratulatory telegram to be sent to Lydia Timashuk, who had unmasked the Killer Doctors and who had just been awarded the Order of Lenin. This Margolin was an expert on Marxist philosophy; he was in charge of the lectures devoted to the study of the fourth chapter of
Stalin’s
Short Course
.

“Yes, Samson Abramovich,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “These are difficult times. I’m finding it hard enough myself, but you must be finding it still harder.”

Margolin raised his fine eyebrows. Pushing forward his thin, pale lower lip, he said, “Excuse me. I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Oh, I just, I just mean in a general sense,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “Vovsi, Etinger, Kogan—who could have imagined it? I was once an in-patient of Vovsi’s myself. The staff loved him, and the patients trusted him as if he were the Prophet himself.”

Margolin raised a thin shoulder, twitched a pale, bloodless nostril, and said, “Ah, I see. You think that it must be unpleasant for me, as a Jew, to say what I think of these monsters. On the contrary, I loathe Jewish nationalism more than anyone does. And if Jews with a leaning toward America become an obstacle on the road toward communism, then I shall be merciless—even toward myself, even toward my own daughter.”

Nikolay Andreyevich realized that he should not have talked about how much Vovsi was loved by his gullible patients. If a man could speak like this about his own daughter, then it was best to speak to him in the language of official formulas.

And Nikolay Andreyevich said, “Yes, of course. What ensures our enemy’s doom is our own moral and political unity.”

Yes, it was indeed a difficult time—and Nikolay Andreyevich’s only consolation was that his work was going well.

It was as if, for the first time, he had burst out of the narrow space of his guild and into domains of the real world where he had previously not been admitted. People were seeking him out, seeking his advice; they were grateful when he told them his views. Scientific journals that had usually ignored him began to take an interest in his articles. He even received a telephone call from the
All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries
, an institution that had never before contacted him. He was asked to send them the manuscript of a still-unfinished book so that they could look into the question of its publication in the People’s Democracies.

Nikolay Andreyevich was deeply moved by the advent of his success. Maria Pavlovna took it more calmly. What had happened was inevitable; it was, she thought, simply impossible for it not to have happened.

Meanwhile, the number of changes in his life only increased. He still did not like the new people at the head of the Institute. Even though they were promoting him and his work, he was repelled by their coarseness, by their extraordinary self-assurance, by their readiness to call their opponents toadies, cosmopolitans, capitalist agents, and hirelings of imperialism. Nevertheless, he was able to see in them what was most truly important: their boldness and strength.

And as for Mandelstam—Mandelstam was wrong to refer to these people as illiterate idiots, as “dogmatic young stallions.” What he himself saw in them was not narrowness but passion and purpose—a clarity of purpose that was born of life and oriented toward life. That was why they hated abstract theoreticians, hair-splitting
talmudists.

And although these new bosses sensed that Nikolay Andreyevich was not the same as them, that he was someone who thought and behaved very differently from them, they still thought well of him and had confidence in him: he was a Russian! He received a warm letter from Lysenko, who thought very highly of his manuscript and suggested that the two of them work together.

Nikolay Andreyevich had no time for the theories of the famous agronomist, but this letter still brought him great pleasure. And it was wrong to reject all of Lysenko’s work out of hand. And the rumors about his dangerous readiness to resort to “police methods,” to denounce any scientists who disagreed with him—these rumors were probably exaggerated.

Ryskov had invited Nikolay Andreyevich to give a paper debunking the scientific work of the cosmopolitans who had been driven out of the biological sciences. Nikolay Andreyevich kept refusing, although he was aware how much this annoyed Ryskov. The director wanted the public to hear the wrathful voice of a Russian scientist who was not a Party member.

It was around this time that rumors began to circulate about the construction in eastern Siberia of a vast city of camp barracks. These barracks, evidently, were for the Jews. They were to be deported—just as the Kalmyks, the Crimean Tatars, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Balkhars, the Chechens, and the Volga Germans had already been deported.

Nikolay Andreyevich understood that he had been wrong to promise Mandelstam bread and caviar.

He felt troubled and anxious. Every morning he looked through the papers to see if the trial of the Killer Doctors had begun yet. Like everyone else, he tried to guess whether or not it would be an open, public trial. He kept asking his wife, “What do you think? Will they publish day-by-day reports, with transcripts of the prosecutor’s speech and of cross-examinations, with final statements by the accused? Or will there just be a communiqué giving us the verdict of a military tribunal?”

On one occasion Nikolay Andreyevich was told, in the strictest confidence, that the doctors would be executed in public on Red Square. After this a wave of pogroms would sweep through the entire country and—to protect them from the just but merciless rage of the people—the Jews would all be deported to Siberia and to Turkmenistan, to work on the construction of the Turkmen canal through the Kara-Kum desert.

And this mass deportation would be an expression of the eternally vital spirit of internationalism which, while understanding the wrath of the people, could not tolerate lynchings and mob law.

Like everything else that took place in the Soviet Union, this upsurge of spontaneous fury had been conceived and planned well in advance.

Elections to the Supreme Soviet were planned by Stalin in exactly the same way; information was collected, deputies were chosen—and from then on the spontaneous nomination of these deputies went ahead as planned, as did their election campaigns and eventual victory in national elections. Stormy protest meetings were planned in exactly the same way—as were outbursts of popular fury and emotional expressions of brotherly friendship. And in the same way, several weeks before the May Day parades, officials gave their approval to the texts of journalists’ reports from Red Square: “At this moment I am watching the tanks race by...” It was in this way that the personal initiatives of Izotov, Stakhanov, and Dusya Vinogradova were planned; it was in this way that millions of peasants chose to join the collective farms; it was in this way that legendary heroes of the Civil War were brought into the limelight or faded into the background; it was in this way that workers came to demand the issue of State loans or the abolition of days off work; it was in this way that the entire nation’s love for its great Leader was organized; it was in this way that secret foreign agents, spies and saboteurs were chosen—and it was in this way, after long and complex interrogations, that accountants, engineers and lawyers who until recently had not for one moment suspected themselves of counterrevolutionary activity came to sign statements confessing to all kinds of acts of espionage and terrorism. This was how great writers beloved of the people were chosen; this was how editors chose the texts of moving appeals, addressed to young sons fighting on the front line, to be read into microphones by wooden-voiced mothers; this was how Ferapont Golovaty’s sudden patriotic initiative was planned; this was how Party officials chose people to participate in free and open discussions if, for some reason, free and open discussions were called for; this was how the texts of their speeches were carefully coordinated in advance.

And then, all of a sudden, on March 5, 1953, Stalin died. This death was like an invasion; it was a sudden irruption into this vast system of mechanized enthusiasm, of carefully planned popular wrath, of popular love that had been organized in advance by district Party committees.

Stalin’s death was not part of any plan; he died without instructions from any higher authority. Stalin died without receiving personal instructions from comrade Stalin himself. In the freedom and capriciousness of death lay something explosive, something hostile to the innermost essence of the Soviet State. Confusion seized minds and hearts.

Stalin had died! Some were overcome by grief. There were schools where teachers made their pupils kneel down; kneeling down themselves, and weeping uncontrollably, they then read aloud the government bulletin on the death of the Leader. Many people taking part in the official mourning assemblies in institutions and factories were overcome by hysteria; women cried and sobbed as if out of their minds; some people fainted. A great god, the idol of the twentieth century, had died, and women were weeping.

Others were overcome by joy. Villages that had been groaning beneath the iron weight of Stalin’s hand breathed a sigh of relief.

And the many millions confined in the camps rejoiced.

Columns of prisoners were marching to work in deep darkness. The barking of guard dogs drowned out their voices. And suddenly, as if the northern lights had flashed the words through their ranks: “Stalin has died.” As they marched on under guard, tens of thousands of prisoners passed the news on in a whisper: “He’s croaked...he’s croaked...” Repeated by thousand upon thousand of people, this whisper was like a wind. Over the polar lands it was still black night. But the ice in the Arctic Ocean had broken; you could now hear the roar of an ocean of voices.

Many working people, many scholars and scientists, felt both grief and the wish to dance with joy.

Their confusion had begun when they first heard on the radio the bulletin about Stalin’s health: “Cheyne-Stokes respiration...urine...pulse...blood pressure...” A godlike sovereign had suddenly turned out to possess weak and aging flesh.

Stalin Had Died! In this death lay an element of sudden and truly spontaneous freedom that was infinitely alien to the nature of the Stalinist State.

The State was shaken, just as it had been shaken by the shock of the German invasion of June 22, 1941.

Millions of people wanted to see the deceased. All of Moscow, all of the surrounding provinces, was flooding toward the House of Unions, toward the Hall of Columns. Outside the city, lines of trucks stretched for miles and miles.

The roads were jammed as far south as Serpukhov—and then as far as Tula, more than a hundred miles from Moscow.

Millions of people were going on foot, all heading for the city center. Streams of people, like black, brittle rivers, clashed against one another, were squashed and flattened against stone walls; they twisted and crushed cars; they tore iron gates off their hinges.

Thousands perished that day. The tragedy of
Khodynka
, on the day of the coronation of Nicholas II, paled into insignificance in comparison with the death day of the earthly Russian god, the pockmarked cobbler’s son from the town of Gori.