The only question is: Why did the Commandant remove his police spies instead of accusing M. of "slander" and issuing a warrant for his arrest? Is it possible that the original order to "isolate but preserve" M. was still in force? Or it may be that since M. was "in the charge of Moscow," the Voronezh branch of the secret police attached their agents to us simply out of excess of zeal—just to show their mettle. A third possibility is that the Commandant was actually displaying a certain liberalism. This did sometimes happen—even secret-police officials were human, and some of them were tired of killing. The only really strange thing is that all this was done by people, the most ordinary sort of people: "people like you and me, with eyes hollowed out in skulls,/ with as much right to judge as you." How can we understand or explain it? And what is the point of it all?
45 "Hope"
's three-year term of exile was supposed to end in the mid-
• die of May 1937, but we did not attach too much significance to this. We knew only too well that the length of your sentence was a matter of chance rather than of law—they could always add to it or shorten it, depending on how your luck ran. Experienced exiles, such as the ones we had met in Cherdyn, were always pleased if they were given a few more years without any formal proceedings. Otherwise it meant going through the ordeal of a new arrest and interrogation, after which you would be exiled to a new, unfamiliar place. Nobody knows better than an exile or a camp inmate how important it is to stay as long as possible in one place. This is the basic condition of survival, because it means you make friends with people who will help you to come through, and you acquire a few pitiful belongings—in other words, you strike some kind of roots and spend less of your strength on the struggle to stay alive. But this is true not only of exiles: moving to a new place is an intolerable ordeal for anybody in our conditions. No wonder people hang on so grimly to their "living-space." Only an incorrigible vagabond like M., who hated the very idea of being tied to one place, could dream of moving. A change could only bring trouble. But M. was tired of Voronezh.
In April I went to Moscow, but found myself confronted by a blank wall which it was quite impossible to breach. However, to keep M.'s spirits up I wrote to him in Voronezh to say that we should soon be moving, now that his sentence was almost over. M. did not react to my words of encouragement, but my mother took them seriously and went to look after M. in Voronezh for a while so that I could again visit Moscow in search of new hope.
Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda ["Hope"]? All I now heard from our friends and acquaintances was: "Not a hope!"—not a hope that anybody would help us, or give us work, or read letters from us, or shake us by the hand. By now everybody was too used to thinking of us as doomed. But one cannot live without hope and, however often our hopes were disappointed, we could only go on trying. The head of the local branch of the MGB had generously explained to us that we would not be able to stay in Voronezh unless we got some kind of private help. Since there was no hope of that, we had nothing to look forward to but the prospect of moving to some other place.
On May 16, 1937, we went up to the same window in the MGB office through which three years previously M. had handed over his travel warrant from Cherdyn and had ever since conducted all his business with the State. This was where all exiles had to come to "report"—some once a month, others every three days. There were so many of us, small fry caught in the toils of the State, that there had always been a long line at this window. We did not realize that these crowds of waiting people had been the outward sign that the good times described by Akhmatova as "vegetarian" were still with us. Everything is relative—we were soon to read in the newspapers that under Yagoda the forced-labor camps had been run like "health resorts." The press unleashed a flood of abuse against Yagoda, accusing him of being soft on all the scum in the camps and in exile. "Who would have thought that we have been in the hands of humanists! " we said to each other.
By the middle of May 1937 the line at the MGB window had dwindled to a dozen or so gloomy and shabbily dressed intellectuals. "Everybody's left Voronezh," M. whispered to me. Despite our isolation, we at once understood the reason: nearly all the old exiles had been re-arrested and no new ones were being sent. The "vegetarian" phase was over. People were no longer being banished, as we had been. From prison one now went either to a forced-labor camp or to the other world. A privileged few were kept in prison. The wives and children of prisoners were no longer sent into enforced residence away from the big cities, but were now also interned in special camps. There were even special institutions for small children, who were seen as potential avengers for their fathers. In 1956 Surkov said to me: "There must have been some case against Gumilev*—if you had a father like that and he was shot! He must have wanted to get revenge for him." It was curious that Surkov should have said this to me, of all people: he was so steeped in Stalin's Caucasian mentality that he thought only men might want to take vengeance.
Until 1937 all such potential avengers had merely been banished and one saw them standing in line in provincial MGB offices, waiting to "report." When we first arrived in Voronezh we saw there the son of Stoletov, who wandered the streets, alone and half but of his mind, complaining that his father had turned out to be a "wrecker." In 1937 the son of a man who had been shot would not have been sent to Voronezh, but would have been put straight behind barbed wire, and no complaints about his father would have been of any avail. Incidentally, neither M. nor I nor anybody else thought Stole- tov's son really meant it—but there were sons who sincerely cursed their executed fathers. After M.'s death, when I lived for a time on the outskirts of Kalinin, I met there a few wives who for some reason had been banished rather than sent to camps. They had also sent here a boy of fourteen who was distantly related to Stalin. He was being looked after by an aunt who lived nearby—also in exile—and his former governess. For days the boy went on raving against his father and mother as renegades, traitors to the working class and enemies of the people. He used a formula which had been instilled in him during his very careful upbringing: "Stalin is my father and I do
• Lev Gumilev, the son of Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev.
not need another one," and he kept referring to the hero of all the Soviet schoolbooks, Pavlik Morozov, who had managed to denounce his parents in time. He was tormented by the thought that he had lost the chance of becoming a second Pavlik by likewise exposing the criminal activity of his parents. His aunt and governess were forced to listen in silence—they knew what the boy would do if they dared breathe a word. The fact that he was allowed to live in Kalinin as an exile was only an exception that proved the rule. By 1937 no more exiles were being sent to Voronezh.
Without any hope or expectations, we stood for half an hour in the much diminished line. "What surprise will they have for us now?" M. whispered as we came up to the window. He gave his name and asked whether they had anything for him now that his term of exile had just come to an end. He was handed a piece of paper. For a moment he couldn't make out what was written on it, then he gasped and said to the clerk behind the window: "Does that mean I can go where I please?" The clerk snapped something back at him—they always snapped at us, they had no other way of talking— from which we gathered that M. was free again. A kind of electric shock went through the people glumly waiting behind us. They began to shuffle and whisper. They suddenly saw a faint gleam of hope: if one had been released, perhaps the same could happen to others as well?