Monumental Propaganda (3 page)

5

An abundance of poets is a sign of a people's savagery.

At least that was the opinion of my oldest friend, Alexei Mikhailovich Makarov, nicknamed the Admiral, concerning whom we shall speak later. When he said it the first time, his assertion seemed ridiculous to me, but then he listed the countries and the regions of the world where people were wallowing in poverty and ignorance, some not even knowing what electricity or toilet paper were, and yet they had among them an immense number of bards, minstrels and other varieties of folk or court poets. The authorities there regard the state of the poetic word with anxious concern and good poets (who write good words about the authorities) are generously rewarded with all sorts of good things, whereas bad poets (who write bad words about the authorities) have their heads cut off. The risk of being left without a head can act as such a powerful stimulus to the mind that on occasion bad poets write much better poetry than good poets and people copy the poems of bad poets into notebooks, learn them by heart and transmit them from one generation to the next.

Although in Dolgov the education of poets was conducted in accordance with a less extreme system (their heads were not cut off, but their lives were made a misery), the number of versifiers per head of the local population was clearly in excess of essential requirements. In the late forties the most famous and prominent among them was, of course, our past master and local sage Serafim Butylko, but he was already growing old and antiquated in every sense. He had lost his six upper front teeth and turned gray, he dragged his feet and stooped, his control of metaphor was weak, he was unable to sustain a regular meter and he used weary, banal rhymes: “love—dove,” “folk—awoke,” “desire—perspire,” “hurry— flurry.” And this at a time when the young generation was boldly mastering word-root rhymes—assonant, dissonant, complex and God knows what other kinds of rhymes—such as “empower—yell louder,” “birch-tree—lurching free,” “attributes—hard rebukes,” “forest thickets—foreign critics,” as well as quite mind-boggling images and metaphors. Our most sophisticated and versatile writer was Vlad Raspadov—poet, art historian, essayist, journalist and generally multitalented artist of the word. In 1949, when he was still an eighth-grade schoolboy, he wrote a composition dedicated to the monument. The piece was written as a school essay, but it was so interesting that it was published in the
Dolgov Pravda.
This essay was called . . . Actually, I can't quite recall just at the moment . . . Either “A Melody Frozen in Metal,” or “Music Congealed in Cast Iron.” Something of that sort. It was a very vivid and graphic article, with a profound subtext. In speaking of the sculptor Ogorodov's creation, it said that it could not have been what it was were it not for the miraculous combination of the artist's talent and his genuine love for the prototype, which had fused into a single unity. “Gazing upon this marvel,” Raspadov wrote, “it is hard to imagine that it was molded or carved or manufactured in any physical fashion at all. No, this is simply a song that has broken free, that has been breathed out from the sculptor's soul and frozen in human form to our wonder and amazement.”

Raspadov's article, although it was not entirely correct from the viewpoint of socialist realism, impressed the readers and pleased the ideological authorities, and after reading it Pyotr Klimovich Porosyaninov said of Raspadov: “Yes, he's one of us!” Then he thought for a moment and repeated it: “One of us!”

As for Max Ogorodov, having created such an absolute masterpiece, he became extremely famous, won many state commissions and a Stalin Prize, Third Class, then Second Class, and then First Class, and soon changed his wife Zinaida, just as she had feared, for a new wife, First Class, who was eighteen years younger. And of course, he became very conceited. In his newfound conceit he claimed that he had surpassed all of his contemporaries in sculpture, even Tomsky and Konyonkov. And the only sculptors of the past he acknowledged as his equals were Myron, Praxiteles, Michelangelo and to some extent Rodin.

We will not attempt to deny that the miracle created by Ogorodov was a genuine miracle. It inspired awe and amazement in even the most worldly, distrustful and jealous connoisseurs of art. Scholars of art history made the journey to Dolgov especially, not only in eager anticipation of the twenty-six rubles a day travel allowance, but out of a genuine desire to be convinced by seeing it with their own eyes. One of them, having been convinced, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dabbed his eyes with it and said: “That's it! Now I can die.” And no one felt this response was oversentimental. Everyone could see that the monument really did radiate a mysterious power that distinguished it from other similar works. It stood in the middle of the square, on which streets large and small converged from every side. But previously they had simply met here as the accidental consequence of centuries of chaotic town planning. Whereas now every individual could sense physically that these streets and side streets were drawn here by the exceptionally powerful magnetism emanating from the monument, which was itself the natural focus of the town and, more than that, the center without which the town could not function, like a wheel without an axle. It was impossible for anyone who visited Dolgov in those days to imagine how the town could possibly have existed for all those hundreds of years without this statue.

Crowds of people, both locals and people passing through, came to look at the statue and noted the fact that, whichever side of the statue a person stood on—right or left—the cast-iron chief was looking at him, and even a person approaching the statue from behind had the feeling that it could actually see him with its back. Moreover, the iron man's direct gaze instilled in all comers an incomprehensible fear that expanded into icy terror. And this applied not only to humans but also to animals of a lower order. Even the pigeons did not sit on the iron peaked cap, although its upper surface was round and flat, most convenient for taking off, landing and performing other functions natural to birds. And in addition (though this is a mere detail) the statue was never attacked by rust.

The fame of the sculptor Ogorodov's exceptional creation spread far and wide, and one day an influential member of the Politburo came to Dolgov specially to see whether it would be worth transferring the monumental masterpiece to Moscow. Upon arriving in the square accompanied by Kuzhelnikov and looking at the statue, he also experienced quite evident agitation, and when he recovered, he said: “We don't want any of that!” And once again the matter went no further than a review of personnel: Kuzhelnikov was removed from his position and sent off as an ambassador to somewhere in Africa. But a short while later this Politburo member himself disappeared mysteriously, and precisely because of that phrase “We don't want any of that!” The phrase was reported to Stalin, and Stalin took the words “We don't want any of that!” as a reference to himself, not the sculpture, following which the Politburo member vanished and his name was dropped from various lists, textbooks, reference works and encyclopedias, so that now not even the historians are able to say for certain whether he ever really existed or not.

When the monument was erected, there were few people who had regarded as too bold Aglaya's assertion that it would stand for thousands of years. And it would have been quite impossible then to imagine that children born in that year would not even have entered first grade at school before the very ground would be shaken beneath the monument, and also beneath the great leader's entire cause.

6

When she got home from the Party activists' meeting, Aglaya didn't know what to do with herself. She drank some vodka, then some valerian drops, then more vodka. She lay down, jumped up, ran around the room thinking, but she couldn't understand how it could all have happened. After such words had been spoken, it was impossible to carry on living in the same old way—or perhaps at all. Khrushchev had said it; Mikoyan had supported him; Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich had kept silent. All of them had been faithful disciples and brothers-in-arms of Comrade Stalin. They had all sworn they were prepared to give their lives for him. What had happened to them? Had they gone insane? Had they turned out to be traitors? So wise and perspicacious, how could he have seen through everyone and failed to spot them?

Now she recalled that there had been certain hints at a change in the attitude to Stalin even earlier. At the end of the previous year Porosyaninov had come to the children's home and advised her, seemingly in passing and yet insistently, to take down the long banner hanging in the entrance hall with the words THANKS TO COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD! “The slogan's out of date,” he had commented, and gave Aglaya a meaningful look. But when she had asked what slogan to put up instead of the old one, Pyotr Klimovich had told her she could put up the same one, but with the words COMRADE STALIN replaced by THE COMMUNIST PARTY, so that the entire text read THANKS TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD!

“It'll be too long,” Aglaya said doubtfully.

“Never mind if it's long, so long as it's politically correct.” Then he had looked at her and added that you had to take life realistically—or, as he said, “reelsickly.”

Aglaya had done as she often did in such cases: she had promised to take the banner down, but in reality she had no intention of doing so. She had thought Porosyaninov would forget, but the next day he phoned and asked whether she had done as they agreed, and when he heard she hadn't got around to it yet, he insisted firmly: “Get around to it!”

And she had obeyed. For her Party instructions were law. Moreover, the situation had not been clarified yet, and two loves still dwelt in her heart in perfect harmony: love for Stalin and love for the Party. But now she was being urged to commit an act that she absolutely could not justify with any theories. Now everything had been said clearly and unambiguously and she faced a stark choice: to stick with the Party or stick with Stalin. An impossible, unnatural choice. For her, Stalin was the Party, and the Party was Stalin. For her, Stalin and the Party together were the people, the honor and the conscience of the entire country, and her own conscience as well. Harsh and uncompromising, a woman possessed, as—we repeat—she was called in those days, she was used to brushing all obstacles aside, but so far she had always forced her march in the direction indicated by Stalin, and that had been an easy and joyful thing to do. But now her guiding star had split into two halves, into two separate luminaries, and each was calling her to follow it.

That very night she fell ill, as she herself said afterward, with her nerves, although the doctor called in by her neighbor said it was simply flu. A rather nasty flu, certainly, brought to us either from Asiatic parts or—which was more likely—from America. Where, as everyone knew, they deliberately cultivated all sorts of viruses and microbes in scientific laboratories, as well as insects and rats, in order to infect the trusting and defenseless Soviet people and make them suffer.

By the evening of the following day her temperature had risen above forty degrees Celsius. Aglaya tossed and turned, burning up; she shuddered in her fever, sweated, lost consciousness, raved. But in her raving she experienced a joyful sense of anticipation, of something exceptional about to happen, and she was not deceived. During the first and second nights, Comrade Stalin came to see her alive and in person, dropped in just like a member of the family, genial and good-natured in his prewar-style field jacket and soft box calf boots. He opened the door silently, walked silently across to her bed, sat down at her feet, sucked on his smokeless pipe and looked at Aglaya affectionately. The first time, she failed to appreciate the situation and tried to talk to him, but scarcely had she parted her lips when he instantly disappeared, vanished into thin air. During his subsequent appearances she made no attempt to speak. She remained silent, and he remained silent, but she could feel that they were communicating with each other without words, and it was far better than with words.

Afterward, when she recovered, she retained in her memory the feeling that an extremely important conversation had taken place between them and although she could not recall its content, she realized that an absolute truth had been revealed to her, a truth beside which all words and all human knowledge paled into insignificance.

7

In itself Dolgov was just an average town. A bit too big for a district center, but not big enough for a regional center. It had a few factories, agroindustrial trusts and combines, shops, an oil tank farm, a service station, a poultry farm, a district Party committee, a district Soviet executive committee, a public prosecutor's office, a police station, a sobering-up station and a branch of the KGB. In the very center, on the opposite side of the square from the district committee of the CPSU, before you reached the collective farm market, there were even the remains of some structure that people referred to either as the kremlin or the arcade. At the time here described, it contained the district public utilities office, a dressmaking and tailoring establishment, an automobile repair shop and the “Hardware” shop. Standing nearby was the Church of SS. Kozma and Damian, which was repeatedly being closed as part of the campaign against religion and opened again out of economic considerations—while religion might have been regarded as opium for the people, it nonetheless contributed a lot of money to the budget. But then genuine opium generates a pretty decent income too.

The house in which Aglaya lived was built in 1946 on her instructions for the district Party's ruling class, or nomenklatura, as it was known. After the war they were more in need of housing than were simple Soviet people. Of course, they were always more in need. The further things went, the greater their need, and the less there was, the greater their need of it. However, after the war they were particularly needy, because the Germans had destroyed the nomenklatura apartment houses (since they were the best in the town) as they withdrew. Only the mansion in which the children's home was located had survived, thanks to an oversight on the part of the Germans.

There were no other decent houses in the town, and it would have been genuinely indecent for the Party's nomenklatura workers to live in poor-quality houses, but even more indecent for them to live in communal flats. And not just because the Party's nomenklatura workers did not know how to coexist in crowded conditions, but because then the details of their lives would have become known to simple Soviet people and that must never happen. Living apart from other citizens, the nomenklatura of those times (just like its counterpart in these times) had to appear and did appear to be a special breed of people, superior, mysterious and possessed of the entire body of human knowledge. Our fears and weaknesses were foreign to them. They understood the secrets of our being, what was and what would be, but they had no interests apart from constant concern for the good of the motherland and our well-being. And if they needed living conditions a little better than ours, then it was exclusively in order that they might think about us without being distracted by anything irrelevant. And we, who thought only of ourselves and our own petty affairs, could do that in any conditions.

The house where Aglaya lived had been intended to be a good one. It was quite unique in the town, with comforts hitherto unheard of in these parts, like gas, hot water and even a sewerage system, which in those days no one in Dolgov had ever even seen before.

On the outskirts of town people still simply relieved themselves in the open air, but nearer the center the public was a little more civilized and made use of communal facilities designed for this purpose—in the form of little planking sheds with two separate entrances and two doors that were often torn off their hinges, one of which bore the letter
M
and the other the letter W. Naturally, in these little sheds (the younger generations perhaps cannot even picture this) on both the M side and the W side the wooden floor was embellished with a dozen or so large holes in a long row and soft heaps deposited haphazardly around them, as though the bombardment had not been conducted point-blank, but from long-range guns, and shots had fallen short or overshot the target.

The author appreciates that the picture he paints of these facilities is none too appetizing, but we really should bear witness to such an essential aspect of our life. Otherwise the people of centuries to come will not even be able to imagine these holes and these heaps sluiced down with carbolic and sprinkled with lime, which in summer gave off such a strong smell that it made your nose smart and your eyes water as if somebody had tossed a handful of snuff into them. This smell could only be tolerated by Soviet people and large green flies about half the size of a sparrow. In hot weather it was too hot here, and in frosty weather it was too cold, and it was always slippery.

The visitors squatted in a row, like sheaves of wheat standing in the field, and I recall with particular sympathy the old men suffering from arthritic joints, constipation and hemorrhoids, who strained until they turned blue, wheezing and moaning and groaning as if they were in a nativity home.

Alexei Mikhailovich Makarov, also known as the Admiral, used to say that if it was up to him to decide what monument to erect to our Soviet era, he would not have commemorated Stalin or Lenin or anyone else, but the Unknown Soviet Man squatting like an eagle on the peak of a tall mountain (Mount Communism) deposited by himself.

However, let us return to Aglaya's apartment building. It was built in an unsuitable season—in autumn and winter—and in a rush. Using poor building technique. On a very weak foundation—that is, almost without any. In the semibasement they installed a gas collector consisting of twelve interconnected cylinders. The collector was constructed by local technology rationalizers, and it aroused serious doubts in the mind of the head of the fire safety office. But Aglaya had smacked him down and the fire safety chief had signed the certificate of approval, keeping his doubts to himself.

The building's walls were brick, but the internal cladding was wooden, and the wood (later it was suspected that this was sabotage) was of poor quality, infected by mold. Aglaya was asked at the time what to do about it, and she had encouraged them to continue: build, build; once we get on our feet and provide for the people, then we'll get around to thinking about ourselves last of all. In her modesty she had taken only a three-room apartment for herself and her son, although she was offered four rooms. But she only took three. With fifty-seven and a half square meters of useful floor space. She accepted it temporarily, until the end of the housing crisis. But the housing crisis proved to resemble the unattainable horizon that merely recedes as you advance toward it. The crisis had never come to an end, although in time some detached houses had been built. However, a place in one of them was not found for Aglaya—by that time she had been dropped from the nomenklatura. And in addition, after her son went away to study at college, she was effectively left alone. She had remained alone in her three rooms on the second floor. The first room was regarded as the sitting room; it had a big, round, extending table (no one ever extended it) and eight oak chairs around the table and a sofa bed for potential guests (she never had any). Lying in the middle of the room was a brown bearskin with glass eyes and bared fangs—a present from local huntsmen. Of the two other rooms one was the study to which she had been entitled by rank during her time as Party secretary and the other was her bedroom. These were fitted out with massive, cumbersome furniture: in the bedroom a large metal-frame bed with badly sagging spring mesh, in the study a heavy oak desk with two columns of drawers, its top covered in cloth that had originally been green and then turned gray with dust (no one ever worked at it), an oak armchair, a table lamp with a green shade made of glass, a heavy writing set with a bronze bird and two stone inkwells with desiccated entrails.

Aglaya's colleagues, who had not been dropped from the nomenklatura listings, gradually left this house, and their apartments, immediately transformed into communal facilities, began to be filled up with people from the lower orders, including two professors—one of agricultural science and one of Marxism-Leninism—who were biding their time here until they were rehabilitated. At one time there was even a certain Shakespeare scholar registered here, and a lady violinist with an international reputation, and the assassin-doctor Ivan Ivanovich Rabinovich. That was what they used to call him, although he had not killed anybody and he was not even a doctor, but a medical assistant, and not even in human medicine, but in veterinary practice. Nonetheless, he too had found himself in that category of people whom the Soviet authorities first wore down in the camps and then scattered into places of exile, not allowing them to settle in the big cities. They even picked smaller towns that were at least a hundred kilometers from the capital. Dolgov was just such a town. Which clearly worked to its advantage as far as its average intellectual and cultural level was concerned. That had risen here, while in the capital cities, by contrast, it had fallen. It would appear that the law of communicating vessels holds good not just for liquids.

In this same house there also lived the teacher of German Ida Samoilovna Bauman and her aged mother and Father Yegor, the priest of the Church of SS. Kozma and Damian, with his wife, Vasilisa, and his son, Deniska, the worst hooligan of all the courtyard kids. Also resident was the family of the public bath attendant Renat Tukhvatullin, all six of them—himself, his wife and four children aged from fourteen to four; the lame, deaf, one-eyed cat-lover Shurochka, nicknamed Shurochka the Idiot; and in the room next to Aglaya's bedroom there dwelt in solitude the quiet, smiling Savelii Artyomovich Telushkin, who had once served in the NKVD, the secret police, carrying out death sentences. He had served there for a long time and in the course of his service he had personally shot 249 people (he recalled the precise figure) on his own and many more in open battle, so to speak (for instance, he had taken part in the execution of the Polish officers), but he had not gone insane, had not suffered any pangs of conscience or been tormented by any doubts and his dreams were calm and idyllic: meadows, daisies, cows and May Day demonstrations.

Clearly, in the course of the house's existence there had always been movements taking place within it: people moved in and moved out, swapped one apartment for another, died, went away to the army or to jail, and it is impossible to mention everyone who ever lived at this address.

Among them, however, special mention should be made of the yard-keeper Valentina Zhukova and her son. Valentina was a large woman with a broad face and a broad, sloping back. She walked clumsily with her feet turned inward, holding her arms out slightly ahead of her, as though she were about to fight someone. Despite her apparently unalluring appearance, in her young days she had been very popular with the men, and from among them she had chosen as her husband, Seryoga Zhukov, an accordion player, joker and general troublemaker. At the very beginning of the war, without waiting to be called up, Seryoga had gone to the front as a volunteer. Valentina had spent part of the war as a member of Aglaya's partisan detachment, in which she had distinguished herself with her exceptional physical strength and bravery. One day in hand-to-hand combat she had first felled two Germans with a knockout blow from her fist and then tied them together and brought them back to the detachment as prisoners. After the war Valentina had worked for a while as district Party secretary Aglaya Revkina's driver. And after that, for the sake of a room in the semibasement, she had become a yard-keeper. She no longer had a husband. Seryoga had not come back from the war and he was listed as missing. Since there was no proof that he had not surrendered to the enemy alive, with his rifle in his hand, the missing man was regarded as a traitor, and Valentina as the wife of a traitor. Not only, therefore, did she not receive any pension for her husband; she was not even awarded any partisan medals for her own feats of courage.

She raised her son alone as well as she could. For old times' sake Aglaya sometimes hired Valentina to clean her apartment, do her washing or run errands to the shop, which the yard-keeper did for a small payment. Valentina's son, by the way, was called Georgii Zhukov, exactly like the famous general. This Georgii Zhukov (or simply Zhorka) also served in the army, but he didn't climb as high as the rank of marshal; in fact, he only reached junior sergeant. Despite his father's offense against the motherland, because of an oversight by his superiors he had served in a tank crew in Hungary, from where he brought home an accordion, and on Sundays he would perform the waltzes “The Blue Danube” and “On the Hills of Manchuria” and a tango about the exhausted sun. At first he would play his accordion in the yard, but later he was invited to weddings and birthday parties.

It goes without saying that sometimes furious rows would break out among the residents concerning a broken window, noise after eleven o'clock at night, the queue for the toilet, washing the floors and clearing out the garbage. But all that did not affect Aglaya; she lived separately, she had her own toilet and kitchen, and she didn't get into arguments with anyone. Her neighbors were afraid of her, with the possible exception of Shurochka the Idiot, who possessed (or so it was believed) the gift of foresight, and every time she met Aglaya, she would predict with a nasal twang that fire would flare up, iron birds would fly, iron horses would gallop, the earth would tremble and a dead person would fall on a living one.