It is true that the refusal to comply was made to sound like a favor ("We don't want to arrest you, too"), but the general tone, the armed guards, the air of mystery and hint of intimidation ("He'll commit a new crime") all struck a new note. The forces conjured up by the older generation were getting out of hand, and a future was brewing that had little resemblance to the terror of the early revolutionary days. There was even a new language coming into being—a language of state. Fearful as it was, the terror of the early days could not be compared with the systematic mass extermination which the all-powerful "state of a new type" practiced on its subjects in accordance with laws, instructions, orders and directives issued by all kinds of committees, secretariats, special tribunals—if they were not simply handed down "from above."
When M. told him how he had been received by the interrogator, Bukharin flew into a rage. We were quite taken aback by the violence of his reaction. A few days later he came to tell us that no crime had been committed—either an old or a new one—by M.'s brother, and that he would be released in two days' time. These two days were needed for the formal winding up of a case involving an uncommitted crime.
Why did Bukharin react like this? He was, after all, a proponent of terror, so why should he have got so worked up? A youth had been picked up as a warning to his fellow students, and he wasn't even in danger of being shot—a very ordinary case. So why was Bukharin so upset? Did he too have a foreboding of the "new" spirit that was beginning to threaten us all? Did he remember the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem? Did it occur to him that neither he nor his colleagues would now be able to contain the forces awakened by them, any more than the poor apprentice could halt the magic broom? No, the most likely thing is that Bukharin was indignant because a wretched interrogator had got out of line and failed to obey an order passed down by his seniors in the hierarchy. The machine, he must have thought, was not yet properly tuned, and did not always work as it should.
He had always been a man of passionate temperament, quick to anger, but his way of venting his indignation changed with the times. Until 1928 he would shout "Idiots!" and pick up the phone, but after 1930 he just frowned and said: "We must think whom to approach." He arranged our trip to Armenia through Molotov, and also our pension. The pension was given "for services to Russian literature and in view of the impossibility of finding employment for the writer in Soviet literature." This formula was close to the realities of the situation, and we suspected that Bukharin was responsible for it. In the case of Akhmatova they could think of nothing better than to give her a pension on the grounds of old age, though she was only thirty-five. As an "old-age pensioner" she received seventy roubles a month—enough to keep her in cigarettes and matches.
At the beginning of the thirties Bukharin, in his search for "transmission belts," was always talking of going to see Gorki to tell him about M.'s plight—the way nobody would publish him or give him work. M. vainly argued with Bukharin that no good would come of such an approach to Gorki. We even told him the old story about the trousers. When M. returned to Petrograd from Wrangel's Crimea by way of Georgia, he was half dead and had no warm clothing by the time he arrived in the city. In those days clothing could not be bought, but was supplied only against vouchers. The issue of such vouchers for writers had to be authorized by Gorki. When he was asked to let M. have a pair of trousers and a sweater, he crossed out the word "trousers" on the voucher and said, "He'll manage without." The many writers who later became "Fellow Travelers" still recall Gorki's fatherly concern for them, but this was the only time he ever denied someone a pair of trousers. The trousers were a small matter in themselves, but they spoke eloquently of Gorki's hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him: here too it was a question of "spineless intellectuals" who were worth preserving only if they were well equipped with solid learning. Like many people of similar background, Gorki prized learning but had a quantitative view of it: the more, the better. Bukharin did not believe M., and decided to take soundings. Soon, however, he was telling us: "There's no point in going to Gorki." However much I pestered him, he wouldn't tell me why.
When our apartment was searched in 1934, they took away all Bukharin's notes to us. They were a little flowery, with a sprinkling of Latin tags. He begged our pardon for not being able to see us at once, but nolens volens he could only see us at the times arranged by his secretary: "Please don't think me bureaucratic, but otherwise I could never get anything done. Would tomorrow at nine be convenient? The pass will be ready. If it's inconvenient, perhaps you can suggest another time."
I would give a great deal to be able once more to ask Korotkova, the squirrel-like secretary mentioned in "Fourth Prose," for an interview, and then to come and talk with Nikolai Ivanovich about all the things we didn't manage to say at the time. Perhaps he would again ring up Kirov and ask him what was going on in Leningrad and why they were not publishing Mandelstam there—"the book has been scheduled ages ago, but you keep putting it off year after year." And now it's twenty-five years since M. died. . . .
Fate is not a mysterious external force, but the sum of a man's natural make-up and the basic trend of the times he lives in—though in our age a great many tortured lives have been cut to the same hideously standard patterns. But these two men, with their particular endowments, themselves defined their relations with their times.
2 8 Voronezh
's identity papers were taken from him at the time of his
• arrest. When we arrived in Voronezh, his only document was the travel warrant issued to him by the Cherdyn GPU Commandant which enabled him to buy tickets in the military booking offices. M. now handed it over at a special window in the shabby premises of the Voronezh GPU and was given a new document which only entitled him to a temporary residence permit. He had to make do with this while it was being established whether he would be kept in Voronezh itself or sent off into the countryside somewhere. Moreover, our new overlords had not decided which category of exile we belonged to. There are several types, of which the two main ones known to me are "with reporting" and "without reporting." In the first case, one had to make regular visits to the GPU offices. In Cherdyn M. had to go and report every three days. If one does not have to report, one may be either permitted or forbidden to travel in the region to which one has been exiled. In the autumn M. was called to the police and given identity papers with a permit to reside in Voronezh. The type of exile was thus the easiest—with identity papers! It was now that we learned what a privilege it is to have identity papers, a privilege not granted to everybody.
The granting of identity papers is an enormous event in the life of an exile, since it gives the illusion of having some rights as a citizen. The first few months of our life in Voronezh were marked by constant visits to the police to get a piece of paper known as a "temporary permit." Seven or eight months running we had to renew this permit, which was valid for only one month at a time. A week before it expired, M. had to begin collecting the necessary documents needed for its renewaclass="underline" a note from the local housing department to certify that he had been properly registered to live in such-and-such a house, references from the GPU and his place of work. There was no problem about the note from the GPU, since his standing with them was clear enough, but what was he to do about the second reference? At first he had to ask the local branch of the Union of Soviet Writers. This was never a straightforward procedure. The officials of the Union would gladly have made out any kind of certificate, but they were frightened, and some of them trembled at the thought of exercising their right to put the Union's stamp on a scrap of paper, in case they found themselves issuing a certificate to a bad writer. Every time the heads of the local branch applied to some higher authority for permission to issue a paper stating that M. really was engaged in literary work. At first there was whispering, dark looks and much scurrying about, but once they received clearance from higher up, the Voronezh writers were all smiles: they, too, were glad when all ended well. Those were still comparatively innocent days.