And here around me, at the airport in Yakutsk? Is it not the same? A crowd of people sitting wordless, motionless, an inert crowd which will not so much as twitch, which, it seems to me, isn’t even breathing. So let us stop getting excited and thrashing about, let us stop tormenting the stewardesses with questions for which they have no answers, and, following the example of our brothers and sisters from the sleepy village of San Juan near Valdivia, from the settlements on the Gobi desert crushed by the heat, and from the littered outskirts of Shiraz, let us sit motionless, staring off into space, and every hour sinking deeper and deeper into a state of mental numbness.
AFTER FOUR DAYS the storm in Kolyma passes, the buxom stewardess runs around the terminal, wakes the sleeping as she calls out loudly: “Magadan! Who for Magadan?” Hurriedly, nervously, we collect our bags, sacks, packages, suitcases. Wrapping ourselves in scarves, buttoning sheepskins, and pulling big hats with earmuffs down on our heads, we dash chaotically to the airplane, which immediately wheels toward the runway. We’re flying. A woman is sitting beside me — she is going to visit her son, who is serving in the army in Kolyma. She is worried by his letters; it is clear from them that he is not tolerating diedovshchyna very well.
Have I heard about diedovshchyna? Yes, I have. It is a system of sadistic treatment of recruits by NCOs and older soldiers. One of the malignant tumors eating away at the Red Army. Soviet society scaled down to the size of a platoon or company and dressed up in uniform. The essence of this society: the cruelty of the strong toward the weak. The recruit is weak, so those above him by virtue of rank or length of army service make him their slave, pariah, shoeblack, spittoon. The recruit must buy his way into this brutal community, must lose his personality and dignity. Toward this end they mistreat the recruit, harass him, break him, destroy him. They beat and torture him. Sometimes he cannot stand the baiting, the cruelty and the terror; he tries to escape or commits suicide. The recruit who endures the hardships and the ruthless prison house of the diedovshchyna will live with only one thought in mind — to recoup, to get revenge, to retaliate for his humiliation, for the fact that they dragged him through the mud and the filth, that he had to smell the foot rags of the corporals, that they kicked him in the face with their boots. But who can yesterday’s recruit retaliate upon? Whose packages from home can he steal, whose kidneys can he injure? Naturally, only someone weaker than he, and, therefore, the new recruit.
Adding fresh fodder to this traditional, ordinary sadism, ethnic and religious conflicts have flared in today’s army: the Uzbek is killing the Tajik, a platoon of the Orthodox (Russians) clashes with a platoon of Muslims (Tatars), the shamanist (Mordovian) sticks a knife into the back of the atheist (German).
Alarmed and appalled mothers have started organizing into various unions and associations to force the authorities to combat diedovshchyna. One can meet them at various demonstrations and marches as they walk holding two photographs before them: in one, a young boy, a picture given to his mother as a keepsake when he was leaving for the army; in the other, the same face, the same head — already in a coffin. If the mother is relatively wealthy, these photographs are framed, behind glass. But one can also see poor women, who carry shabby, frayed photographs. The rain and snow wash away and smudge the features of the young face. If you stop for a moment as you are walking past, the woman will thank you for the gesture.
My neighbor on the plane tells me about the torments of her son, the recruit. She whispers, into my ear, for she is after all betraying the secrets of the great army. I do not know if she has read Mikhaylovsky’s study of Dostoyevsky. An old, large text written in 1882. Mikhaylovsky was a Russian essayist, thinker. He rejected Dostoyevsky, called him a “cruel talent,” but at the same time marveled at his perspicacity, his genius. Mikhaylovsky writes that Dostoyevsky discovered a horrifying attribute in man — unnecessary cruelty. A tendency in man to inflict suffering on others — without cause and without purpose. One man tortures another for no reason, except that torturing gives him a pleasure to which he will never admit out loud. This trait (unnecessary cruelty), combined with power and pride, gave rise to the world’s most ruthless tyrannies. It was Dostoyevsky who made this discovery, Mikhaylovsky emphasizes; in the story “The Village of Stiepanchykovo and Her Inhabitants” he describes a small, provincial creature named Foma Opiskin — tormentor, monster, tyrant. “Give Foma Opiskin the power of Ivan the Terrible or Nero,” writes Mikhaylovsky, “and he will not be outdone by them in anything and will astound the world with his crimes.” More than half a century before Stalin solidified his position in the Kremlin and before Hitler came to power, Dostoyevsky conceived in the figure of Foma Opiskin the progenitor of both these tyrants.
Preying upon his victims, Foma is satisfying the need to act sadistically, to torment, to cause pain. Foma is not a practical man (“he needs that which is unnecessary”); by inflicting suffering on others he does not achieve anything — therefore one cannot understand him in terms of any rational, pragmatic categories. He does not think about the fact that behaving sadistically toward others has no purpose and does not lead to anything — what is important to him is the process of sadistic activity itself, the tyrannizing itself, the cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Foma “beats a completely innocent man without reason.” This gives him pleasure and a feeling of absolute power. This pure, immaculate disinterestedness in the act of inflicting suffering, defined as “unnecessary cruelty,” is what Mikhaylovsky sees as Dostoyevsky’s great psychological discovery.
But why, Mikhaylovsky wonders, did people of Foma Opiskin’s type find such fertile ground in Russia? Because, he answers, “the main characteristic of the Russian, encoded in the Russian nation — is the incessant pursuit of suffering.” Yes, it had to be a Russian who described the personage of Foma, who discovered his dark soul, filled with “indomitable, self-generated anger,” who showed us his ghastly, inconceivable Underground.
BENEATH THE WINGS of the aircraft, a white, still plain unrolls, here and there darkly stained by forests, a monotonous and empty space, gentle hills in the shape of flat, squat mounds — nothing that would catch the eye, nothing that would hold the attention. That is Kolyma.
In Magadan it is more than fifty kilometers from the airport to town, but luckily I found a taxi, a dented, rusty Volga. I was riding with my heart in my mouth, for I didn’t have a pass to enter the city. I was afraid of being turned back, after having thought for so long about coming here, to see this most terrible — next to Auschwitz — place on earth. We were driving along a snow-covered highway, between hills, occasionally passing thin young pine forests. From one of these young woods two young men suddenly emerged, in dark glasses and in elegant Western coats with raised collars. Like characters from a crime film. They stopped us and wanted to know if we would give them a ride to town. The driver looked at me, but I was of the opinion that there was no question that we should take them. It turned out that a good angel had sent them, for ten kilometers farther on there was a checkpoint and we had to stop. Seeing the militiamen from a distance, I removed and hid my glasses. Here people wear spectacles with yellow or brown plastic frames, and my frames are metal, light, they immediately attract attention for being different, not from here; and whenever I wish to disappear, I hide the glasses. In my cheap wool quilted jacket and reindeer-skin hat I looked like someone from Omsk or Tomsk. The militiamen at once became interested in our young men’s dark glasses, a quarrel started, a row, a struggle, and they were dragged out of the car. In short, the militiamen stopped the young men and ordered us to keep going.