V. N. Khomenko, a sixty-year-old Cossack captain from the Kuban, was also imprisoned in their cell. He was the “soul of the cell,” if a death cell can be said to have a souclass="underline" he cracked jokes; he smiled to himself; he didn’t act as if things were bad. He had become unfit for military service way back after the Japanese War, had studied horse breeding, and then served in the provincial local self-government council; by the thirties he was attached to the Ivanovo Provincial Agricultural Department as “inspector of the horse herd of the Red Army.” In other words, he was supposed to see to it that the best horses went to the army. He was arrested and sentenced to be shot for wrecking—for recommending that stallions be gelded before the age of three, by which means he allegedly “subverted the fighting capacity of the Red Army.” Khomenko appealed the verdict. Fifty-five days later the block supervisor came around and pointed out to him that he had addressed his appeal to the wrong appeals jurisdiction. Right then and there, propping the paper against the wall and using the block supervisor’s pencil, Khomenko crossed out one jurisdiction and substituted another, as if it were a request for a pack of cigarettes. Thus clumsily corrected, the appeal made the rounds for another sixty days, so Khomenko had been awaiting death for four months. (As for waiting a year or two, after all, we spend year after year waiting for the angel of death! Isn’t our whole world just a death cell?) And one day complete rehabilitation for Khomenko arrived. (In the interval since his sentence, Voroshilov had given orders that gelding should be done before age three.) Die one minute and dance the next!
Many sentences were commuted, and many prisoners had high hopes. But Vlasov, comparing his case with those of the others, and keeping in mind his conduct at the trial as the principal factor, felt that things were likely to go badly for him. They had to shoot someone. They probably had to shoot at least half of those condemned to death. So he came to believe they would shoot him. And he wanted just one thing—not to bow his head when it happened. That recklessness which was one of his characteristics returned to him and increased within him, and he was all set to be bold and brazen to the very end.
And an opportunity came his way. Making the rounds of the prison for some reason—most likely just to give himself a thrill—the Chief of the Investigation Department of Ivanovo State Security, Chinguli, ordered the door of their cell opened and stood on the threshold. He spoke to someone and asked: “Who is here from the Kady case?”
He was dressed in a short-sleeved silk shirt, which had just begun to appear in Russia and therefore still seemed effeminate.
And either he or his shirt was doused in a sweetish perfume that drifted into the cell.
Vlasov swiftly jumped up on the cot and shouted shrilly: “What kind of colonial officer is this? Get out of here, you murderer!” And from that height he spat juicily full into Chinguli’s face.
And he hit his mark.
Chinguli wiped his face and retreated. Because he had no right to enter the cell without six guards, and maybe not even with six guards either.
A reasonable rabbit ought not to behave in that fashion. What if Chinguli had been dealing with your case at that moment and was the one to decide whether to commute or not? After all, he must have had a reason for asking: “Who is here from the Kady case?” That was probably why he came.
But there is a limit, and beyond it one is no longer willing, one finds it too repulsive, to be a reasonable little rabbit. And that is the limit beyond which rabbits are enlightened by the common understanding that all rabbits are foredoomed to become only meat and pelts, and that at best, therefore, one can gain only a postponement of death and not life in any case. That is when one wants to shout: “Curse you, hurry up and shoot!”
It was this particular feeling of rage which took hold of Vlasov even more intensely during his forty-one days of waiting for execution. In the Ivanovo Prison they had twice suggested that he write a petition for pardon, but he had refused.
But on the forty-second day they summoned him to a box where they informed him that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had commuted the supreme measure of punishment to twenty years of imprisonment in corrective-labor camps with dis-enfranchisement for five additional years.
The pale Vlasov smiled wryly, and even at that point words did not fail him:
“It is strange. I was condemned for lack of faith in the victory of socialism in our country. But can even Kalinin himself believe in it if he thinks camps will still be needed in our country twenty years from now?”
At the time it seemed quite inconceivable: after twenty years. Strangely, they were still needed even after thirty.
Chapter 12
Tyurzak
Oh, that good Russian word “ostrog”—meaning “jail.” What a powerful word it is and how well put together. One senses in it the strength of those thick, impenetrable walls from which one cannot escape. And it is all expressed in just six letters. And it has so many interesting connotations deriving from words that are close to it in sound: as, for instance, strogost—meaning “severity”; and ostroga—meaning “harpoon”; and ostrota—meaning “sharpness” (the sharpness of the porcupine’s quills when they land in your snout, the sharpness of the blizzard lashing your frozen face, the sharpness of the pointed stakes of the camp perimeter, and the sharpness of the barbed wire too); and the word “ostorozhnost”—meaning “caution” (a convict’s caution)—is somewhere close too; and then the word “rog”—meaning “horn.” Yes, indeed, the horn juts out boldly and is pointed forward! It is aimed straight at us.
And if one glances over all Russia’s jail customs and conduct, at the entire institution during, say, the last ninety years, then you’ll see not just one horn really, but two horns. The Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) revolutionaries began at the tip of one horn, right where it gores, right where it’s too excruciatingly painful to take even on the breastbone. They kept wearing it down gradually until it got rounded off, shrank to a stump, and was hardly a horn any longer, and finally became just a woolly open spot (this was the beginning of the twentieth century). But then, after 1917, the first swelling of a new knob could be felt, and there, there, splaying out and with the slogan “You don’t have the right!”—it began to thrust upward again, and to narrow to a point and harden, to acquire a horny surface—until by 1938 it was pinning the human being right in that gap between the collarbone and the neck: tyurzak.[267] And once a year, the single stroke of a watchman’s bell could be heard in the night in the distance: “TONnnnnn!”[268]
If we pursue this parabola with the help of one of the prisoners in the Schliisselburg Fortress near St. Petersburg, we find that initially things were pretty bad.[269] The prisoner had a number, and no one called him by his family name; the gendarmes acted as if they had been trained in the Lubyanka. They didn’t speak a word on their own. If you stammered out: “We…,” the reply came: “Speak only for yourself!” The silence of the grave. The cell was in eternal shadows, the windows were frosted glass, the floor asphalt. The hinged ventilation pane in the window was open for forty minutes a day. The food consisted of grits and cabbage soup without meat. They would not allow you any scholarly books from the library. You wouldn’t see another human being for two years at a stretch. Only after three years would they let you have sheets of paper—numbered.[270] And then, little by little, things got to be more lenient as the point of the horn got rounded off; there was white bread; and then the prisoners were allowed tea and sugar; one could have money and could buy things in addition to the rations; smoking was permitted; they put transparent glass in the windows; and the transom could be kept open all the time; they painted the walls a light color; in no time at all you could get books by subscribing to the St. Petersburg library; there were gratings between the garden plots; one could converse through them, and prisoners even delivered lectures to other prisoners. By then the prisoners were urging the prison administration: “Give us more land to work on, more!” So they planted two large prison courtyards in flowers and vegetables—no fewer than 450 varieties! And then there were scientific collections, a carpentry shop, a smithy, and they could earn money and buy books, even Russian political books,[271] and also magazines from abroad. And they wrote their families and got letters from them. And they could go out to walk the whole day long if they liked.
268
2. TON=Tyurma Osobogo Naznacheniya=Special Purpose Prison. TON is likewise an official abbreviation.
269
3. Vera Figner,
270
4. According to the account of M. Novorussky, from 1884 to 1906 three prisoners in Schliisselburg committed suicide and five others went insane.
271
5. P. A. Krasikov, who, as we have seen, later condemned the Metropolitan Veniamin to death, read Marx’s Capital in the Peter and Paul Fortress. (But he was there only a year, and then they let him out.)