Of interest is the way in which Vlasov’s fate was decided. He had only recently demanded the expulsion from the Party of Romanov, now the new Chairman of the District Executive Committee. He had also fatally offended Rusov, the district prosecutor, as we have already reported in Chapter 4, above. He had offended N. I. Krylov, the Chairman of the District NKVD, by protecting two of his energetic and resourceful executives from being arrested for supposed wrecking—both of them had black marks on their records because of their social origins. (Vlasov always hired all kinds of “former” people for his work—because they mastered the business effectively and, in addition, tried hard; people promoted from the ranks of the proletariat knew nothing and, more importantly, didn’t want to know anything.) Nonetheless the NKVD was prepared to make its peace with the trade cooperative! Sorokin, the Deputy Chairman of the District NKVD, came in person to see Vlasov with a peace proposaclass="underline" to give the NKVD 700 rubles’ worth of materials without charging them for it (and later on we will somehow write it off). (The ragpickers! And that was two months’ wages for Vlasov, who had never taken anything illegally for himself.) “And if you don’t give it to us, you are going to regret it.” Vlasov kicked him out: “How do you dare offer me, a Communist, a deal like that?” The very next day Krylov paid a call on the District Consumer Cooperative, this time as the representative of the District Committee of the Party. (This masquerade, like all these tricks, was in the spirit of 1937.) And this time he ordered the convening of a Party meeting; the agenda: “On the wrecking activities of Smirnov and Univer in the Consumers’ Cooperatives,” the report to be delivered by Comrade Vlasov. Well, now, that’s a gem of a trick for you! No one at that point was making charges against Vlasov. But it would be quite enough for him to say two little words about the wrecking activities of the former secretary of the District Party Committee in his, Vlasov’s, field, and the NKVD would interrupt: “And where were you? Why didn’t you come to us in time?” In a situation of this sort many others would have lost their heads and allowed themselves to be trapped. But not Vlasov! He immediately replied: “I won’t make the report! Let Krylov make the report—after all, he arrested Smirnov and Univer and is handling their case.” Krylov refused: “I’m not familiar with the evidence.” Vlasov replied: “If even you aren’t familiar with the evidence, that means they were arrested without cause.” So the Party meeting simply didn’t take place. But how often did people dare to defend themselves? (We will not have a complete picture of the atmosphere of 1937 if we lose sight of the fact that there were still strong-willed people capable of difficult decisions, and if we fail to recall that late that night T., the senior bookkeeper of the District Consumer Cooperative, and his deputy N. came to Vlasov’s office with 10,000 rubles: “Vasily Grigoryevich! Get out of town tonight! Don’t wait for tomorrow. Otherwise you are finished!” But Vlasov thought it did not befit a Communist to run away.) The next morning there was a nasty article in the district paper on the work of the District Consumer Cooperative. (One has to point out that in 1937 the press always played hand in glove with the NKVD.) By evening Vlasov had been asked to give the District Party Committee an accounting of his own work. (Every step of the way, this was how things were in the entire Soviet Union.)
This was 1937, the second year of the so-called “Mikoyan prosperity” in Moscow and other big cities. And even today, in the reminiscences of journalists and writers, one gets the impression that at the time there was already plenty of everything. This concept seems to have gone down in history, and there is a danger of its staying there. And yet, in November, 1936, two years after the abolition of bread rationing, a secret directive was published in Ivanovo Province (and in other provinces) prohibiting the sale of flour. In those years many housewives in small towns, and particularly in villages, still used to bake their own bread. Prohibiting the sale of flour meant: Do not eat bread! In the district center of Kady, long bread lines formed such as had never before been seen. (However, they attacked that problem, too, by forbidding the baking of black bread in district centers, permitting only expensive white bread to be baked.) The only bakery in the whole Kady District was the one in the district center, and people began to pour into the center from the villages to get black bread. The warehouses of the District Consumer Cooperative had flour, but the two parallel prohibitions blocked off all avenues by which it could be made available to the public! Vlasov, however, managed to find a way out of the impasse, and despite the clever government rulings he kept the district fed for a whole year: he went out to the collective farms and got eight of them to agree to set up public bakeries in empty “kulak” huts (in other words, they would simply bring in firewood and set the women to baking in ordinary Russian peasant ovens, but, mind you, ovens which were now socialized, publicly not privately owned). The District Consumer Cooperative would undertake to supply them with flour. There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered! Without building any bakeries (for which he had no funds), Vlasov set them up in one day. Without carrying on a trade in flour, he released flour from the warehouse continuously and proceeded to order more from the provincial center. Without selling black bread in the district center, he gave the district black bread. Yes, he did not violate the letter of the instructions, but he violated their spirit—for their essence was to compel a reduction in flour consumption by starving the people. And so, of course, there were good grounds for criticizing him at the District Party Committee.
After that criticism he remained free overnight and was arrested the next morning. He was a tough little bantam rooster. He was short, and he always carried his head slightly thrown back, with a touch of aggressiveness. He tried to avoid surrendering his Party membership card, because no decision expelling him from the Party had been reached at the District Party Committee the night before. He also refused to give up his identification card as a deputy of the district soviet, since he had been elected by the people, and the District Executive Committee had not taken any decision depriving him of his deputy’s immunity. But the police did not appreciate such formalities and overpowered him, and took them away by main force. They took him from the District Consumer Cooperative down the main street of Kady in broad daylight, and his young merchandise manager, a Komsomol member, saw him from the window of the District Party Committee headquarters. At that time not everyone, especially in the villages, because of their naivete, had learned to keep quiet about what they thought. The merchandise manager shouted: “Look at those bastards! Now they’ve taken away my boss too!” Right then and there, without leaving the room, they expelled him from both the District Party Committee and from the Komsomol, and he slid down the well-known pathway into the bottomless pit.