Gulag

Even when the result was not insanity or suicide, the awkward encounters which plagued Moscow social life, post-1956, could be excruciating. “Two Russias are eyeball to eyeball,” wrote Anna Akhmatova, “those who were in prison, and those who put them there.”⁴⁴ Many of the country’s leaders, including Khrushchev, personally knew many returnees. According to Antonov-Ovseenko, one such “old friend” turned up on Khrushchev’s doorstep in 1956, and persuaded him to speed up the rehabilitation process.⁴⁵ Worse were the encounters between former prisoners and the men who had actually been their jailers or interrogators. A pseudonymous memoir published in Roy Medvedev’s underground political journal in 1964 described a man’s encounter with his former interrogator, who begged him for money for a drink: “I gave him everything I had left from my trip, and it was a lot. I gave it to him so that he would leave quickly. I was afraid I wouldn’t hold out. I felt an overpowering desire to let loose my hatred, pent up for so long, against him and his kind.”⁴⁶

It could also be extremely uncomfortable to meet one’s former friends, now thriving Soviet citizens. Lev Razgon encountered a close friend in 1968, more than a decade after his return: “He met me . . . as though we had only parted the evening before. He expressed his condolences, of course, about Oksana’s death, and asked after Yelena. But all of this was conveyed in a rapid, business-like way . . . and that was that.”⁴⁷ Yuri Dombrovsky put his feelings about a friend who offered his condolences too late into verse, in a poem entitled “To a Famous Poet”:

Even our children didn’t feel sorry for us Even our wives didn’t want us Only a sentry shot at us, skillfully Using our numbers as targets . . .

You were just drifting in restaurants And scattering jokes over glasses, You understood everything and welcomed everybody But didn’t notice that we had died.

So please explain to me now, why As they are reviewing the order of battle And I appear from a Northern grave You approach me as if I were a hero? Women were licking your hands— Was that for your courage? For the tortures you suffered?⁴⁸

Lev Kopelev has written that after returning, he could no longer bear to be in the company of successful people at all, preferring the company of failures.⁴⁹

How to talk about the camps—and how much to talk about the camps—with one’s friends and family was another source of torment for former prisoners. Many tried to protect their children from the truth. The daughter of the rocket designer Sergei Korolev was not told her father had been in prison until her late teens, when she had to fill out a form which asked whether any of her relatives had ever been arrested.⁵⁰ Many prisoners were asked, upon leaving their camps, to sign documents forbidding them to say anything about them. This frightened some into speechlessness, although others were not cowed. Susanna Pechora refused outright to sign these papers upon leaving her camp and has, in her own words, “been talking about it ever since.”⁵¹

Others found that their friends and family, if not exactly uninterested, did not want to know in any great detail where they had been or what had happened to them. They were too afraid—not just of the ever-present secret police, but of what they might learn about the people they loved. The novelist Vasily Aksyonov—Evgeniya Ginzburg’s son—penned a tragic but horribly plausible scene in his trilogy, The Generations of Winter, describing what happened when a man and his wife encounter one another after both have spent years in concentration camps. He immediately notices that she looks too healthy: “First tell me how you managed not to become ugly . . . you haven’t even lost weight!” he says, knowing too well all of the ways in which it was possible for women to survive in the Gulag. That night, they lie in bed far apart, unable to speak: “Melancholy and grief had burned them to the ground.”⁵²