The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

He stepped forth in a new frock-coat and white vest, slipping starch-white cards into his billfold, ready for his upcoming round of visits. She presented myself to him saying my last name and the diminutive of my first. We kissed three times. He looked at me with too much attention and a strange curiosity, shook my icy hand, and poured two green cordial glasses of raspberry liqueur. We clinked glasses and drank. I, never before having had wine, sensed an immediate intoxication from the very aroma which filled my nostrils and throat with a wonderfully evanescent raspberry taste. Outside, beyond the windows with their dry, cracked putty, the air resounded with the constant Easter chiming of the bells of St. Michael’s Monastery above the sparrows in the lilac bushes ready to burst into flower. White clouds scudded across the watery azure sky and the sun glistened in the quicksilver bubble of the outdoor Reaumur thermometer. A resurrected fly crawled along the painted windowsill and I stared at her father with pickled eyes, at his stiff snow-white cuffs and golden cufflinks, his crewcut and powerful head well set on the compact, thickset torso of a retired cavalry officer who was squandering his wife’s Moldavian estate at the gaming tables of the Catherine Yacht Club.

“You remember my deceased father?” she asked, uncannily continuing to read my mind.

“I remember it all,” I responded wistfully.

“So do I,” she said and we both grew silent.

Chapter Thirty

Kirill Kostsinskii [K.V. Uspenskii], A Dissident’s Trial

Kiril V. Uspenskii (Kostsinskii is his pseudonym) was born in Petrograd in 1915. Both his parents were active Party members after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. The author was a military officer, though this did not forestall his first arrest in 1938. He was released and subsequently served in military intelligence. He was dropped behind German lines in the Ukraine to activate the local partisans. Captured by the German forces, he managed to escape, only to return and be excluded from the Communist Party. After World War II he devoted himself to literature. He was arrested again in 1960 and served a four-year sentence for “excessive fraternization” with foreigners. He became active in the human rights movement after his release from prison and was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1978. Taken from K.V. Uspenskii, “Iz vospominanii” [From my Memoirs] in Pamiat’, Paris, 1982.

In actuality, what was I accused of by the KGB? Why were they so angry with me? To answer this question I will have to digress somewhat.

I grew up in a family of intelligentsia Bolsheviks which was fully convinced that the concepts of humanism and communism were synonymous. During the days when Lenin and Zinoviev were hiding in the famous “lean-to,” N.I. Bukharin found refuge in my parents’ apartment. Naturally, I don’t remember this, but I do remember Bukharin’s rare visits in the 20’s and the beginning of the 30’s. They were always important to my parents. Humanism, elevated moral principles, and friendship with Bukharin—in that order but not without a shade of deference—did not later hinder my father along with everyone else, though not so forcefully, from being indignant at the vile crimes of Bukharin as well as other heroes (or victims) of “The Great Purges.” My mother, a sweet and selfless woman, admired Stalin’s courage

285

286

Chapter Thirty

and wisdom. She had forgotten how in 1928 or 1929, after a routine visit by Bukharin, she let fall a phrase in the presence of us boys: “If that is so, then Nikolai Ivanovich is undoubtedly right: he is a paranoiac.” It was completely clear from the context of whom she was speaking.

These contradictions were forming in the sub-conscious rather than in the conscious. “The Great Purges” elicited a morbid curiosity and a desire to understand what psychological motives induced Lenin’s comrades-in-arms to take up counterrevolution and betrayal. The study of party congresses, the works of Bukharin (miraculously preserved in our home, though later destroyed), and then, after the war, Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky and Bernstein, led to the formation of views which later, fully coincided with Dubcek’s program, encompassing the total spirit of the “Prague Spring.” I was not the only one to undergo a shift based on various phases of the party line. But we were living in an age of the Great Silence when open servility in science or art was labeled civic consciousness. Any pronouncement which required real civic courage and was supported by quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism in an adequate manner almost invariably ended with “serious unpleasantness.”

Realistically, nothing of essence changed later, other than that the “unpleasantness” became less catastrophic.