“Here. Look at them. Our stones have come back to us; now it’s our turn to go back to our stones.”
Henceforth, young Tatars would frequent Mikha’s home. They came with petitions, with letters of protest, with requests and demands. They stayed overnight, sleeping on air mattresses on the floor. The cause of these Tatar strangers was closer to Mikha’s heart than the efforts of Jews to return to Israel. After all, the Jewish exile had lasted for two thousand years already; it was ancient history, while the Tatars’ was still fresh. Their homes and wells in Crimea had not all been destroyed. The Tatars still remembered the Soviet soldiers who had evicted them and then deported them, and neighbors who had occupied their homes.
Mikha got caught up in this cause which was not directly his own, drawn in by his characteristic unflagging sympathy and warmth. He helped them write letters, distribute them, and establish contacts. Several times at the behest of his Tatar friends he traveled to Crimea, and he and his friend Ravil collected memoirs about the deportations of 1944.
He and Edik published their magazine, but, quite predictably, the literary section shrank and the political section grew. They also added a new section called “The Periphery,” in which they discussed the plight of various ethnic minorities and nationalities, the extinction of the smaller peoples, their forced assimilation. Edik, with his characteristic academicism, wished to stay within the framework of anthropology and demographics, which lent the magazine an aura of scholarship. This did not diminish its anti-imperialist bent, however.
* * *
Ilya made photocopies of all eight issues. The editions usually numbered about forty copies. A full collection of all the different issues has not been preserved, but individual issues may still be found in various archives, both Western and KGB.
* * *
Mikha hadn’t seen Sanya in nearly a year, and met with Ilya only on matters of business.
* * *
On the night of August 21, 1968, an event took place that would change everything: Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia. Actually, this was a coalition of troops from five countries, but the initiative was indubitably a Soviet one. They called it “Operation Danube.” Russian tanks rolled into Prague, dealing the strongest possible blow to the global Communist movement.
The whole night through Mikha fiddled with the corrugated knobs on the old Telefunken, his only legacy from Aunt Genya, listening to the Western news reports. Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” lay in pieces, and the last illusions were shattered.
For so many years Mikha had studied Marxism, trying to work out how such wonderful ideas about justice could become so misshapen, so distorted, in their implementation; but now the truth was laid bare—it was a grandiose lie, cynicism, inconceivable cruelty, shameless manipulations of people who had lost their humanity, their human dignity and self-worth, out of fear. This fear enveloped the whole country like a dark cloud. One could call this cloud Stalinism; but Mikha had already understood that Stalinism was only a singular instance of the evil of this enormous, universal, timeless political despotism.
Mikha was prepared to rush out onto the square to share his anguish and horror. But first he went to grab a pencil. He wanted to write a poem; but what came out instead was a vehement tract. For three days Mikha wrestled with the words, but they never seemed as elegant and convincing on paper as they were when they originated in his heart. What he was feeling was a desire to find the right words, and to express them, so that everyone would read them and understand, and everyone would agree …
* * *
On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Sergei Borisovich called and asked the young people to come by immediately. From him, they learned the latest news: that on Red Square, next to Lobnoe Mesto, also known as the Place of Skulls, there had been a demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The names of seven people who went out onto the square were already known. All the demonstrators but one had been arrested. Next to the former site of public executions, she had sat down with a three-month-old baby in her arms, holding a Czech flag.
“Gorbanevskaya!” Mikha said.
Chernopyatov confirmed it. His house was full of people. They were already discussing who would write a letter of protest, and to whom it would be addressed. Mikha shut himself up in Alyona’s room and finished the piece that he had been working on all those days, without being able to finish it. Now, after the demonstration, he reworked it, shifted the accent of the argument, and titled it: “The Five-Minute Demonstration of the Magnificent Seven on Lobnoe Mesto.” He handed it to Chernopyatov, who frowned.
“As usual, too much pathos, Mikha!”
In the evening he showed the piece to two more people: Edik and Ilya.
Edik considered it to be too wordy and vague. Ilya took the piece of paper without saying a thing.
Twenty-four hours later, the Voice of America was reporting what had happened on Red Square—about the five-minute demonstration and about the magnificent seven. The text had been edited and shortened. Still, there could be no doubt, it was Mikha’s piece!
So someone must have passed it to them! One of two people: Ilya or Edik. Unbelievable!
Everyone was nervous, and tried to keep a low profile. Searches and arrests were taking place throughout the city. In contrast to what the century had seen prior to these events, the numbers of human casualties were smalclass="underline" around a hundred civilians killed on the Czech side, and nineteen Soviet troops. After the successful completion of the operation, about two thousand people were arrested in Czechoslovakia. In Russia, the numbers were negligible: the seven demonstrators on Red Square and ten more demonstrators, unknown and unsung, in the provinces.
A major trial was being planned for the protesters. Chernopyatov knew them all, and all the information about the trial filtered down to him.
Mikha and Edik were planning to publish a new issue of Gamayun devoted entirely to the Crimean Tatar movement before the New Year holidays. Putting together a literary section was proving to be the most difficult part, but with the help of his Tatar friends, Mikha was able to find a Crimean Tatar poet living in Uzbekistan. His name was Eshref Shemi-zade. The Tatars did a word-for-word translation, and Mikha translated excerpts from the semidestroyed poem. The excerpts were written with the poet’s lifeblood, and Mikha, in anguish himself, somehow managed to make a rendering:
It’s not a dog that sets up a terrible howl
In the icy Moscow night.
It’s the Kremlin leader, craving blood,
Insatiable. He howls and snarls …
Just before the New Year, Mikha had his baptism by fire. His house was searched. Four men scoured the empty room, taking a long time, then, bewildered by its unyielding transparency, they began to knock on the walls to see if they could discover something that way. On a bookshelf, among the books, they found a packet of letters that had belonged to his late aunt Genya. The letters were wrapped in gray paper and bound with coarse string into smaller bundles, according to year. On every bundle there was a date: one bundle per year, dating from 1915 to 1955. There were forty in all. It was family correspondence with relatives from Arkhangelsk, Karaganda, and the Urals. Mikha had found the letters not long before, when they were discarding the wardrobe. He had kept them at the request of Marlen, but he hadn’t even thought to read them, out of a sense of delicacy and tact. Now the police were hastily untying the string; but when they saw the dates, they lost interest. That was unfortunate: among the letters was, among other things, correspondence between the legendary Samuil and Lenin, as well as between Samuil and Trotsky. There was also an extremely interesting letter in which Lenin tried to persuade Samuil to find a secret source of financing, independent of government, to develop the world Communist movement …