Vainly trying to maintain some balance between Kuba and Natalya Roginova, the frail President Romanovsky decided sometimes in favor of Kuba’s recommendations, sometimes for Roginova. While he lived, the other members of the Politburo were absolved from the responsibility of choosing between the two. But nobody attending the meeting in the smoke-filled room at Romanovsky’s dacha had any doubt that the choice loomed closer with every passing week.
Chapter Six
In the spring and summer months of that year the policy of the Leningrad authorities became clear. The vegetable supply improved dramatically in the stores. At the Finland Station a new meat market was opened, supplied by Finnish farmers who were encouraged to cross the border for the weekend. Their compensation for the low ruble exchange was rumored to be nights of girls and vodka in the special hotels reserved for them.
But there was another side to the coin. No child of any of the identified demonstrators at the Blue Bridge was accepted as a Komsomol candidate, a candidate for the youth wing of the Party. In terms of jobs and preferments it could be a serious blow. Zoya Densky was one of many who was dismissed from the University at the end of the semester, “for inadequate achievement.” She was unable to find employment except as a road sweeper.
I think my father suffered more than I did. I didn’t object so much to the work because I was young and I got on well with those elderly women who were now my colleagues. I learned a few things about life, too, from them. They had the most cheerfully dirty minds I ever came across, before or since. But they really had hard lives. War widows most of them, from all over Russia, with tales to tell about what it had been like in the countryside under the glorious Stalin that made your stomach turn.
I saw Anton Ovsenko only once that summer. It had been a bitter, if fairly temporary, blow, to my seventeen-year-old ego to discover that he was already engaged to be married. Of course I dreamed of him leaving his fiancée and suddenly appearing at our apartment asking for me. I would be wearing my best dress and German shoes or sometimes even a wedding dress, about to leave that very moment for the wedding office to be married to a fat bureaucrat only to be saved by Anton. But life isn’t like that. In fact, when I did see him next, I was in heavy overalls and work gloves, shoveling a pile of rubbish into the back of a truck as he approached along the embankment. It was a hot summer day and my hair was thick with dust and sweat. And instead of that romantic meeting on the doorstep of our apartment, I dodged round the back of the truck and let him pass without seeing me.
I stuck to the street work because I had to. But I kept my contacts with the University because a lot of the students there were beginning to think differently about things. That summer a number of us started an underground magazine. Cat and Mouse we called it for obvious reasons. The idea was to print anything that Leningrad Pravda (“Truth” it means in Russian!) wouldn’t print. And in that summer, that was plenty.
I can’t really explain to you how in those days we all seemed to be waiting for something. Certainly we waited for winter, because we knew food would become short again and the power cuts would begin to have an effect. But also we knew the authorities were waiting — or if we didn’t know we certainly felt it. In our bones somehow we felt that they weren’t satisfied with the outcome of the spring’s Blue Bridge affair. It wasn’t their way, unless they’d changed a lot, to be content with banning a few students when people like my father were still free.
So we waited and worked at spreading the truth about the way the Party sucked the country dry. In the meantime people like my father were making plans, but by some sort of agreement we never told each other exactly what we were up to.
As I say, throughout that short Leningrad summer, we waited.
For the authorities, the Leningrad summer was passing quietly. Natalya Roginova, of course, claimed it was the result of the Blue Bridge concessions. But for Semyon Kuba the task ahead was to restore the respect for authority which had been dangerously diminished there in the spring.
By early September he had reinforced Lieutenant General Dora’s combined militia and KGB command with five thousand border guards now barracked at key points in the city. Lists were drawn up and the leading man on each list was followed for a period of two weeks to establish his likely whereabouts on a particular night in late September. It had been agreed by the KGB planning staff that all principals must be arrested on the same night, even if mopping-up operations continued with less important figures during the next day.
Early in September Joseph Densky became aware that he was being followed. Two days later Anton Ovsenko reported that he, too, was being watched and within the week a dozen or more other demonstrators believed that they had identified a permanent KGB tail.
On September 15 all were arrested.
But Joseph Densky had already made his preparations. Two days later the first of a series of statements signed by him began to circulate in illegal typescript, samizdat, throughout Leningrad. Within a week of his arrest it was published in the Western press and broadcast into the Soviet Union by the BBC Overseas Service:
We are Soviet citizens from various towns of the Soviet Union — united in bitterness.
Our comrade workers, who bear surnames, forenames and have children who bear their patronyms — they are suffering. They are undeservedly insulted, beaten, thrown into prison and psychiatric hospitals.
A dog would not bear the kind of humiliation and derision we have suffered.
It has been claimed that we are represented by Trade Unions of workers. Would we be in prison today if that were true?
At home we have been denied justice by the very State organ which is charged under the Soviet Constitution to see that justice is done, the Procurator’s Office of the U.S.S.R. For all these reasons we have been forced to proclaim the existence of, and our membership in, a Free Trade Union Movement of the U.S.S.R. A fish, the peasants say, rots from the head.
Fellow workers, we ask your support.
Consciousness for Joseph Densky was the sensation of the cold concrete floor against his cheek. His body, hunched somewhere behind him, seemed to be enveloped in a numbed sleep. But the rasp of the concrete was real. He opened his eyes. One seemed to be full, sticky, the eyelid hardly moving. The other, closer to the floor, focused on a concrete gully an inch or two away. Blood from his hand or arm dripped into the white disinfectant fluid that swirled along the gully. He could smell the disinfectant now, sharp in his nostrils. The dripping blood creamed into milky whiteness.
His body was returning from the depths. He was crouched, like a wounded animal, head down. He rolled over, his hip thumping hard against the concrete.
He sat up slowly easing himself back to rest against the wall. His arms moved where he directed them. There were no sharp pains. He turned and with his thumbnail scratched a mark in the slime below the leaking windows. He had just survived his fifteenth night of interrogation.