Monumental Propaganda (16 page)

38

Aglaya had once altered her documents, adding seven years to her age so that she could join the struggle for the establishment of Soviet power sooner. In 1962, even according to her documents, she still hadn't reached retirement age, but she was put out on a pension on account of the time she had served at the front during the war. The pension she was given, however, was not the personal merit pension to which she was entitled by her entire life of devotion to the Party and the government, but an ordinary pension that amounted, with a supplementary service bonus, to eighty-two rubles and sixty kopecks. On an income like that, you'd think twice before buying a bar of soap. Especially since it wasn't the ordinary kind she bought, but perfumed toilet soap at thirty kopecks a bar. Her expenditure on inspectors had finally come to an end though. Stalin hadn't fallen through the floor, the other residents had got used to him and stopped complaining, and no one bothered Aglaya anymore.

Freed from the responsibilities of a daily job, she had absolutely no idea what to do with herself or how to occupy her time. She wasn't going to sit out on the bench with the old grannies and listen to their complaints about rheumatism and indigestion. Or their dream-readings, stories about grandchildren's pranks and recipes for pickling cucumbers. She made up her mind to try to learn English and even picked up a self-instruction manual for beginners from somewhere, but after a week of self-torment she gave up. What good was English to her anyway, even if she did manage to learn it?

But one day she glanced at her bookshelves, where the works of Stalin occupied the place of honor, took down Volume 6, chosen at random, opened it at the work
On the Foundations of Leninism
and realized what her goal was for the immediate future. She would learn this work by heart. Day by day. One page at a time. A hundred and twenty pages—that was only four months of work.

Late that afternoon she organized the spot for her daily study session. She dragged the bearskin over to the statue (what an incredible amount of dust there was!), then dropped two cushions, a copybook and a fountain pen from the Union factory onto it. She brought the table lamp from her study and stood it beside her, drank a shot of vodka, took a sip of tea from a mug and set to work, beginning with the foreword.

“The foundations of Leninism,” she read aloud to herself, “are a big subject.” And she thought to herself: I should say so! Very big. “To exhaust this subject,” the text continued, “would require an entire book.” One book wouldn't be enough, thought Aglaya, and found to her delight that her thought coincided perfectly with the author's. “More than that, it would require an entire series of books,” was what he said. Encouraged, she began reading loudly, with expression, taking pleasure in her own hoarse, smoke-roughened voice: “To expound the foundations of Leninism does not mean to expound the foundations of Lenin's world outlook . . .”

She imagined Stalin, not the statue, but the living man she had seen that time in the Hall of Columns. She imagined him walking slowly from corner to corner of the room smoking his pipe as he dictated pensively in a mild Georgian accent: “Lenin's world outlook and the foundations of Leninism are not identical in volume. Lenin is a Marxist and the basis of his world outlook is, of course, Marxism. But from that it does not at all follow that an exposition of Leninism must be begun with an exposition of the foundations of Marxism . . .”

“It doesn't follow,” Aglaya agreed, and, closing her eyes, she decided to repeat the entire paragraph. “To expound the foundations of a world outlook means . . .” She stumbled to a halt. “It means . . .” What did it mean? She couldn't remember, she glanced at the book . . . Does not mean . . . Ah, it does not mean! “To expound the foundations of Leninism does not mean to expound the foundations of Lenin's world outlook . . .”

Eventually, she memorized this sentence, but when she reached the end of the paragraph, she had retained the final words in her memory but forgotten the first ones. She decided not to give in, and each evening, arranging herself at the foot of the monument, she read, repeated, wrote notes and repeated again. Her head, unused to such intense exertion, felt as if it were splitting open, but positive progress was achieved. It was slow though. It took her two weeks to reach the question: “And so, what is Leninism?” She struggled to master this page for three weeks, but still didn't understand what Leninism was, and the author himself didn't seem to have understood, because he concluded his lengthy critique of Lenin's ideas with the same question: “What then, after all, is Leninism?”

39

Meanwhile, in Aglaya's opinion the events that were taking place in the country were simply disgraceful. Baldie took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn't grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn't grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils—NECs— and the maize still didn't grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “her” and instead of “cucumber” people would have written “queucamber.”

In '62 the Caribbean crisis erupted. Baldie sent ships to Cuba with rockets so they could be installed and pointed at America. The Americans said they would never allow it. They dispatched their aircraft carriers and submarines to Cuba. Baldie wouldn't withdraw, the American president Kennedy wouldn't give way. The war of nerves lasted two days, with the gap between the fleets of the two superpowers narrowing all the time. The most sensitive Americans gulped down nitroglycerine and jumped out of windows on top stories. Soviet people, not being sufficiently well informed, were not alarmed and remained inside their windows. But some more knowledgeable individuals were concerned.

During those days Marat wrote to Aglaya that the clouds were gathering over the island and the weather forecasters were predicting a typhoon, so he had sent his wife and child home to Russia. But since the typhoon might possibly even reach Moscow, wouldn't it be better for Zoya and little Andrei Maratovich to pay a visit to his granny? Granny replied that in her view society was degenerating still further. The central press was publishing more and more pseudohistorical material about Stalin and his comrades-in-arms. Abominable jokes were circulating among the people; some people openly listened to foreign radio stations, wrote anti-Soviet works and circulated them. And as time went on, the Party was becoming more and more polluted by an alien element, by people who only joined it for the sake of their careers, in order to exploit their position for their own grubby purposes. While her letter was on its way from Dolgov to Havana, the crisis was successfully resolved, and the need for the grandson to visit his granny was averted.

In that same year of '62, rumors spread of an uprising in Novocherkassk having been ruthlessly suppressed by the armed forces with the use of tanks. Aglaya's reaction to this event was ambivalent. She sympathized with the workers who had risen in opposition to the antipopular regime and Baldie, but at the same time she was in no doubt that such uprisings had to be suppressed as antipopular themselves, and in the harshest manner possible. On learning that the instigators of the uprising had been shot, she was incensed both by the fact that they had been shot at all and the fact that not enough of them had been shot.

The echoes of this event had still not died away when something else happened that was really obnoxious, something that she took to heart far more than the Caribbean crisis. The literary journal
New World,
long famous for its critical stance, published a novella by a totally unknown political prisoner, who was immediately declared a great writer. And the characters in this novella were unlike any that there had ever been in Soviet literature. Not collective-farm workers, not factory workers and not the labor intelligentsia, but convicts. And not convicts who had gone astray by chance and were now on the road to correction, but politicals. Enemies of the people. And they were depicted as good people who had suffered for nothing. And the author described the soldiers of the interior forces in the blackest possible light and called them mindless parrots. And the worst thing of all was that the readers turned out to be so politically immature that they flung themselves on this work, passed it from hand to hand and when they met each other they glanced around over their shoulders and asked in low voices: “Have you read it?”

Aglaya read the beginning. Six or seven pages. And promised herself she would never touch that journal again. But unfortunately this novella proved not to be the only one of its kind. First one journal then another, thick ones and thin ones, and then the newspapers published novellas, stories, poems, articles and exposés in which the authors besmirched Soviet history, and what they wrote about Stalin was simply too disgusting to repeat. He deceived Lenin and wiped out the Leninist old guard, he murdered Kirov, annihilated the intelligentsia, ruined the peasantry, decapitated the army, failed to prepare for the war, hid in a bunker, and he couldn't tolerate criticism.

40

After its initial publication by
New World,
the work that had shaken Aglaya so badly by the unknown political prisoner (who immediately became very well known) was published in a popular mass edition by the periodical
Novel Newspaper,
in a separate hardback edition and another edition in paperback, immediately achieving total coverage of the entire country, like the Hong Kong flu. In Dolgov, too, people forgot about absolutely everything else and talked of nothing but this book, read it as soon as they could and, after they'd read it, expressed their enthusiasm in the loftiest possible terms. And the general opinion was that anyone who wasn't absolutely ecstatic was either stupid or—even worse—acting on instructions from “the organs.”

Of course, the first person to own the novella was Mark Semyonovich. He brought the journal from Moscow, where he had received it from the author himself, with whom he had been personally acquainted in the Khanty-Mansiisk taiga. Having brought the journal back to Dolgov, Mark Semyonovich gave it to various people to read, of whom I was one. Which was a status I achieved only with great difficulty. Shubkin said there was a queue for the journal, so he would only give it to me for two hours.

“Are you being funny?” I said. “How can anyone read an entire novella in such a short time?”

“What's the problem?” Mark Semyonovich asked in surprise. “It's only a hundred and twenty pages long. Can't you read at a speed of a page a minute?” And then he remembered: “Ah yes, my dear fellow, I forgot. You haven't even mastered speed reading.”

Eventually, I managed to borrow the journal from him until the following morning, and I kept it until lunchtime, because I felt I had to share the joy of my discovery with the Admiral, who had mastered speed reading. The Admiral asked me to go for a walk, and while I went to the shop, the post office and the house manager's office, he read the whole thing. He liked the novella. “Not too bad,” he said, and that was high praise coming from him. For him Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina,
Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons,
Dostoevsky's
Brothers Karamazov
and the stories of the Serapion Brothers were all “not too bad.” True, there was an even higher category—“not at all bad”—but that applied to Tolstoy's
War and Peace,
Gogol's
Dead Souls,
Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin,
Homer's
Iliad,
Dante's
Divine Comedy,
and I think that was all. As a matter of fact, he had only four categories for things that could be read: “not at all bad,” “not too bad,” “all right” and “tolerable”—and a fifth for things that weren't worth reading in any weather—“rock bottom.” The fifth category included the whole of Soviet literature except Sholokhov's
And Quiet Flows the Don,
a large part of modern Western literature and Gabriel García Márquez. I usually took an ironical view of the Admiral's assessments, but this time I was in no mood for joking. I didn't regard him as stupid, and I didn't want to suspect him of being connected with “the organs.” I started to argue with him, claiming the novella was “not at all bad.” He said it was “not too bad.” I said “not at all bad.” He said “not too bad.” I said: “I don't agree with your opinion.” And he said: “You can't agree or disagree with my opinion because you haven't got any opinion of your own.” “What have I got then?” “You have the idea that in keeping with the moods of a certain circle of people at a certain time you ought to have opinion such-and-such about item such-and-such. And in your circle, having generated an idea, which you believe to be your opinion, you wage a campaign of terror against those who disagree. And if I tell you that I think so-and-so or so-and-so about a certain item, but not what I ought to think about it in your opinion and the opinion of your circle, you cannot even imagine that it is my own honest opinion, you find it easier to imagine that I'm saying it because I have some complexes or other, or even worse, at someone else's prompting, in order to please someone, or”—he gave me a piercing look—“even on someone's instructions. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?”

Of course, I didn't dare to suspect the Admiral of such things, and I listened patiently as he told me that I and others like me had renounced the primary SCOSWO, but in our heart of hearts we were still SCOSWOITES. And we attempted to find a uniquely correct and scientific explanation for each individual case, allowing for no other interpretations.

I don't think I had ever seen the Admiral so worked up.

“Well then,” I said to him, “I see that for you no authorities exist.”

“Absolutely right, for me no authorities exist.”

“But come on,” I said, confused. “I don't understand. There has to be someone whose opinion you can trust.”

“I don't see why I should trust anyone more than myself. And as for your idol, I assure you, a little time will pass and you'll lose interest in him and find yourself another.”

“Never as long as I live,” I said.

The Admiral proposed a wager and I accepted.

“We'll write down the terms on paper,” said the Admiral, “or you'll only renege later.”

I agreed, and I composed something like a promissory note to the effect that I, so-and-so, affirm that the writer so-and-so is one of the greatest writers of all times and all peoples and I doubt whether this firm opinion of mine will ever change.

I hate having to admit this, but after maybe fifteen or twenty years had gone by, I happened to call in to visit the Admiral, already an old man by that time, and found him reading a book. I asked him, “What's that you're reading?” “I'm not reading it, I'm rereading it,” he said, and showed me the cover. I said, “Why would you want to waste your time on that kind of nonsense?” He shot me a glance laden with irony: “You don't think much of the author, then?” “I don't think anything at all about him,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders. And then the Admiral—what a rancorous man he was!—asked me to push an old cracked trunk across to him, opened it with a gloating smile, took out a piece of paper, held it out to me and asked, “Do you know that handwriting?”

The blood, as they say, rushed to my face. I couldn't believe my memory had played me such a vicious trick. I'd completely forgotten that I once sincerely worshiped that writer and had classed him in the top flight of world literary classics.

For me this is probably one of the most unpalatable confessions possible, but as an absolutely honest man, I cannot refuse to make it. Especially since I deduced a certain principle from it. When we promote a living person to the rank of idol, we only recognize him in that capacity. The moment we begin to doubt his divine qualities, we immediately cast him down into the abyss, no longer noticing even his genuine virtues.

As I took my leave of the Admiral in great embarrassment, I said to him: “Well, yes, of course back then, in specific circumstances, perhaps I exaggerated a bit. I'm ashamed, but what are you reading it for now?”

“Well now,” said the Admiral with a gentle smile, “I'm reading it because in places the writing's really not too bad.”