The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

This is the sort of courtyard it was: all the older boys were thieves—some had been jailed for stealing once, some twice, some three times. Our courtyard’s past was shrouded in legends about certain big-time criminals, known throughout the Soviet Union, and about how it used to be that passers-by crossed the street to avoid our building. The courtyard resembled a well—a dark, narrow space surrounded by buildings. Not a single shrub or blade of grass, only asphalt. In the evening the older boys played cards for money and we, the younger ones, hung around, ran after cigarettes and vodka for them, listened, enraptured, to the stories of their criminal life and learned their underground songs. The air was thick with juicy profanity, and bloody fights often broke out between the card players. It’s no wonder that the seven and eight-year old boys cursed as not every adult could, and at eleven or twelve they could split a half-liter of vodka “three ways” and were somber realists. (At twelve I had a much more sober view of life than did my communist parents.)

At first I remained untainted and did not take part in any of this. After all, I had been told that none of this existed. I only looked on in horror. In the fall, I watched how boys my age stole watermelons from the produce shop, smashed them and swore. So, was it that my parents had deceived me? Or did I just have the misfortune of living in a bad courtyard full of degenerates? That was probably the case. Surely in all the other courtyards, all of them except our own, there lived good, conscientious children of good, conscientious parents. But the older I became, the more bad exceptions I encountered. As it was in our courtyard, so it was at school, the Pioneer camp and the village outside Moscow, where we rented a dacha in the summer. Nothing was as my parents or the books said it was.

And then I thought, it couldn’t be that I always encounter only exceptions to the rule. So they must not be exceptions, but the norm? And so it was. My parents and those books had been deceiving me. My parents’ faith showed fissures. But only so far as everyday matters were concerned. I simply convinced myself that the time when my ideals would be realized was still a long ways off. I remained an ardent communist and dreamed of universal brotherhood. I only lamented that I saw no principled people around me for whom an idea could take precedence over their own personal interests.

In 1954, when I turned fourteen, my mother and I visited the village of Inta in the Komi ASSR [Autonomous Republic]. We went there because in 1943 my older brother had been wrongfully convicted. My parents explained to me

276

Chapter Twenty-Eight

that there had been a mistake, and that justice would be restored. It was regrettable that comrade Stalin and his aides knew nothing about this, that it was kept from them; for if they had found out, my brother would be freed and those responsible for the mistake severely punished. Justice, however, was slow in coming. Comrade Stalin managed to die by the time my brother’s sentence was reduced from ten to six years (the time he had already served) and he remained exiled in Inta. (Later, after 1956, my brother was rehabilitated.)

And so, since Mohammed wasn’t coming to the mountain, that summer my mother and I went to see him in Inta. Revelations of things hidden from me began on our way there. From around Kotlas onwards there were endless guard towers with sentries. Those were the camps—and only the ones along the railroad. How many more were farther away, out of sight? It was as if the whole country north of Moscow was inhabited by criminals; that there were more criminals than non-criminals.

Inta consisted almost entirely of prisoners and former prisoners in permanent exile. The crowds of women in tattered gray clothes, surrounded by dogs and soldiers with automatic weapons, were a pitiful sight. But I still really considered them enemies. My visit to Inta enabled me to learn personally what most people found out only after 1956. Only I saw it all in a truer and more horrifying version.

I returned to Moscow a totally different person. I had lost all faith in the correctness of our ideas. In school I had been taught to believe that nothing in history happens by chance. From that time on I began to ponder many things. And my thoughts were one darker than the other. I no longer believed that man would ever learn to construct his life in accordance with the laws of goodness and justice.

“It’s not society that is bad, but man himself,” I decided. “No matter how you change social structure, man will always find an opportunity to be selfish and there will always be injustice.”