Medicine, chemistry, pharmacology have long since been placed under military control. Throughout the world, institutes for the study of the brain have always accumulated the results of experiments, observations. Borgia’s poisons were always a weapon of Realpolitik. The twentieth century brought with it an extraordinary tide of pharmacological and chemical preparations for the control of the psyche.
But if it is possible to obliterate fear with medicine, the opposite is true a thousand times – it is possible to suppress the human will by injections, by pure pharmacology and chemistry without making use of any ‘physical’ methods such as breaking ribs and knocking out teeth, stubbing out cigarettes on the body of the person under investigation, or trampling him with the heels of boots.
These two schools of investigation were known as physics and chemistry. The physicists regarded purely physical persuasion as the cornerstone of their building and viewed beatings as a means of revealing the moral foundations of the world. Once revealed, how base and worthless were the depths of human essence! Beatings could achieve any testimony. Under the threat of a club, inventors made scientific discoveries, wrote verse and novels. The fear of beating and the stomach’s scale for measuring its ‘ration’ worked miracles.
Beating is a sufficiently weighty and effective psychological weapon.
Many useful results were produced by the famous and ubiquitous ‘conveyor’ in which the investigators alternated without giving the arrested person a chance to sleep. After seventeen days without sleep a man loses his sanity. Has this scientific observation been made in the offices of political investigators?
But neither did the chemical school retreat.
Physics could guarantee material for ‘Special Councils’ and all sorts of ‘troikas’ where a triumvirate of judges would make their decisions behind closed doors. The School of Physical Inducement, however, could not be applied in open trials. The School of Physical Inducement (I believe that’s the term used by Stanislavsky) could not publicly present its theater of blood, could not have prepared the ‘open trials’ that made all mankind tremble. The preparation of such spectacles was within the realm of competency of the chemists.
Twenty years after these conversations with Fleming I include in this story lines taken from a newspaper article:
Through the application of certain psychopharmacological agents it is possible, for example, to remove a human being’s sense of fear for a limited time. Of particular importance is the fact that the clarity of his consciousness is not in the least disturbed in the process.
Later even more unexpected facts come to light. Persons whose ‘B phases’ of dream were suppressed for a long period of time – in the given instance for seventeen nights in a row – began to experience various disturbances in their psychic condition and conduct.
What is this? Fragments of testimony of some former NKVD officer during the trial of the judges? A letter from Vyshinsky or Riumin before their deaths? No, these are paragraphs taken from a scientific article written by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But all this – and a hundred times more – was learned, tried, and applied in the thirties in the preparation of the ‘open trials’!
Pharmacology was not the only weapon in the investigator’s arsenal of those years. Fleming mentioned a name that I knew well.
Ornaldo!
Of course! Ornaldo was a famous hypnotist who appeared frequently in the twenties in Moscow circuses, and not only in Moscow.
Ornaldo’s speciality was mass hypnosis. Books on hypnosis are illustrated with photographs of his famous tours. ‘Ornaldo’, of course, was a pseudonym. His real name was M. A. Smirnov, and he was a Moscow doctor. There were posters pasted all the way around special drums used for theatrical advertisements. Paolo-Svishev had a photograph hanging in the window on Stoleshnikov Lane. It was an enormous photograph of human eyes with the inscription ‘The Eyes of Ornaldo’. Even now I remember those eyes and the emotional confusion that I experienced whenever I heard or saw Ornaldo’s circus act. There are photographs of Ornaldo’s performances taken in 1929 in Baku. Then he left the stage.
‘Beginning in the middle of the thirties Ornaldo was in the secret employment of the NKVD.’
The shiver of a revealed secret ran down my back.
Fleming would frequently, and for no special reason, praise Leningrad. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he admitted he wasn’t a native Leningrader. In fact, he had been recruited from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the twenties as their worthy replacement. They grafted on to him tastes much broader than those provided by an ordinary school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasev, but Bal-mont and Sologub, not just Pushkin, but Gumilyov as welclass="underline"
‘ “And you, watchdogs of the king, pirates guarding gold in the dark port…” I’m not quoting the line incorrectly, am I?’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘I can’t remember the rest. Am I a watchdog of the king? Of the state?’
And smiling – both to himself and his past – he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of lycée pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote Poltava. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.
‘When reading books I would first of all turn to the notes, the comments. Man is a creature of notes and comments.’
‘How about the text?’
‘Not always. There is always time for that.’
Obscene as this may sound, Fleming and his co-workers could partake of culture only in their work as investigators. Their familiarity with persons of literary and social circles was distorted but nevertheless real and genuine in a sense, not concealed behind a thousand masks.
The chief informer on the artistic intelligentsia of those years was Major General Ignatiev. To hear the name of this former czarist diplomat and well-known memoirist was surprising only at first. A steady, thoughtful, and qualified author of all sorts of ‘memoranda’ and surveys of writers’ lives, he had served fifty years in the ranks. Forty of those years were spent in the Soviet spy network.
‘I’d already read the book Fifty Years in the Ranks, and was familiar with his surveys when they introduced me to him. Or him to me,’ Fleming said thoughtfully. ‘Not a bad book, Fifty Years in the Ranks.’
Fleming didn’t care much for newspapers, news, or radio programs. International events scarcely interested him. His emotional life was dominated by a deep resentment for that dark power that had promised the high-school boy he would fathom boundless depths, that had carried him to such heights and that had now shamelessly cast him into the abyss.
Fleming’s introduction to culture was peculiar – some brief courses and some excursions to the Hermitage. The boy grew into an investigator-aesthete who was shocked by the crude force that was rushing into the ‘organs of justice’ in the thirties. His type was swept away and destroyed by the ‘new wave’ that placed its faith in crude force and despised not only psychological refinements, but even the ‘conveyor’ and the method of not allowing the prisoner to sit down until he confessed. The new wave simply had no patience for any scientific calculations or lofty psychology. It was easier to get results with simple beatings. The slow aesthetes ended up on the moon. It was sheer chance that Fleming remained alive. The new wave couldn’t wait.