The waves were generated by the Organs’ hidden law of self-renewal—a small periodic ritual sacrifice so that the rest could take on the appearance of being purified. The Organs had to change personnel faster than the normal rate of human growth and aging would ensure. Driven by that same implacable urgency that forces the sturgeon to swim upriver and perish in the shallows, to be replaced by schools of small fry, a certain number of “schools” of gaybisty had to sacrifice themselves. This law was easily apparent to a higher intelligence, but the bluecaps themselves did not want to accept the fact of its existence and make provision for it. Yet, at the hour appointed in their stars, the kings of the Organs, the aces of the Organs, and even the ministers themselves laid their heads down beneath their own guillotine.
Yagoda took one such school of fish along with him. No doubt many of those “whose glorious names we shall come to admire when we come to the White Sea Canal were taken in this school and their names thenceforward expunged from the poetic eulogies.
Very shortly, a second school accompanied the short-lived Yezhov. Some of the finest cavaliers of 1937 vanished in this one. (Yet one ought not to exaggerate their number. It did not by any means include all the best.) Yezhov himself was beaten during his interrogation. He was pitiful. And Gulag was orphaned during this wave of arrests. For example, arrested with Yezhov were the Chief of the Financial Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Medical Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Guard Service of Gulag (VOKhR),[95] and even the Chief of the Security Operations Department of Gulag, who oversaw the work of the camp “godfathers.”
And later there was the school of Beria.
The corpulent, conceited Abakumov had fallen earlier, separately.
Someday—if the archives are not destroyed—the historians of the Organs will recount all this step by step, with all the figures and all the glittering names.
Therefore, I am going to write only briefly about Ryumin and Abakumov, a story I learned only by chance. I will not repeat what I have already written about them in The First Circle.
Ryumin had been raised to the heights by Abakumov and was very close to him. At the end of 1952, he came to Abakumov with the sensational report that Professor Etinger, a physician, had confessed to intentional malpractice when treating Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, with the purpose of killing them. Abakumov refused to believe him. He knew the whole cookery and decided Ryumin was getting too big for his britches. (But Ryumin had a better idea of what Stalin wanted!) To verify the story, they arranged to cross-question Etinger that very evening. But each of them drew different conclusions from his testimony. Abakumov concluded that there was no such thing as a “doctors’ case.” And Ryumin concluded that there was. A second attempt at verification was to take place the following morning, but, thanks to the miraculous attributes of the Nighttime Institution, Etinger died that very night! In the morning, Ryumin, bypassing Abakumov and without his knowledge, telephoned the Central Committee and asked for an appointment with Stalin! (My own opinion, however, is that this was not his most decisive step. Ryumin’s decisive action, following which his life hung in the balance, was in not going along with Abakumov earlier. And perhaps in having Etinger killed that same night. Who knows the secrets of those courtyards! Had Ryumin’s contact with Stalin begun earlier perhaps?) Stalin received Ryumin, set in motion the “doctors’ case” and arrested Abakumov. From that point on it would seem that Ryumin conducted the “doctors’ case” independently of and even despite Beria! There were signs before Stalin’s death that Beria was in danger—and perhaps it was he who arranged to have Stalin done away with. One of the first acts of the new government was to dismiss the “doctors’ case.” At that time Ryumin was arrested (while Beria was still in power), but Abakumov was not released! At the Lubyanka a new order of things was introduced. And for the first time in its entire existence a prosecutor crossed its threshold—D. Terekhov. Imprisoned, Ryumin was fidgety and subservient: “I am not guilty. I am here for no reason.” He asked to be interrogated. As was his custom, he was sucking a hard candy at the time, and when Terekhov rebuked him for it, he spat it out on the palm of his hand. “Pardon me.” As we have already reported, Abakumov roared with laughter: “Hocus-pocus!” Terekhov showed him the document authorizing him to inspect the Internal Prison of the Ministry of State Security. Abakumov brushed it away: “You can forge five hundred of those!” As an organizational “patriot,” he was principally offended not by being in prison but by this encroachment on the power of the Organs, which could not be subordinate to anything in the world! In July, 1953, Ryumin was tried in Moscow and shot. And Abakumov remained in prison! During one interrogation he said to Terekhov: “Your eyes are too beautiful. / am going to be sorry to have to shoot you![96] Leave my case alone. Leave it while you still have time.” On another occasion Terekhov called him in and handed him the newspaper which carried the announcement of Beria’s exposure. At the time this was virtually a cosmic upheaval. Abakumov read it and, with not so much as the twitch of an eyebrow, he turned the page and started to read the sports news! On another occasion, during an interrogation in the presence of a high-ranking gaybist who had, in the recent past, been his subordinate, Abakumov asked him: “How could you have permitted the investigation of the Beria case to be conducted by the prosecutor’s office instead of by the MGB?” (Everything in his own domain kept nagging him.) He went on: “Do you really believe they are going to put me, the Minister of State Security, on trial?” The answer was “Yes.” And he replied: “Then put on your top hat! The Organs are finished!” (He was, of course, too pessimistic, uneducated courier that he was.) But when he was in the Lubyanka, Abakumov was not afraid of being tried; he was afraid of being poisoned. (This, too, showed what a worthy son of the Organs he was!) He started to reject the prison food altogether and would eat only eggs that he bought from the prison store. (In this case, he simply lacked technical imagination. He thought one couldn’t poison eggs.) The only books he borrowed from the well-stocked Lubyanka library were the works of, believe it or not, Stalin! (Who had imprisoned him.) But in all likelihood this was for show rather than the result of any calculation that Stalin’s adherents would gain power. He spent two years in prison. Why didn’t they release him? The question is not a naive one. In terms of his crimes against humanity, he was over his head in blood. But he was not the only one! And all the others came out of it safe and sound. There is some hidden secret here too: there is a vague rumor that in his time he had personally beaten Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law Lyuba Sedykh, the wife of Khrushchev’s older son, who had been condemned to a punishment battalion in Stalin’s time and who died as a result. And, so goes the rumor, this was why, having been imprisoned by Stalin, he was tried—in Leningrad—under Khrushchev and shot on December 18, 1954.[97] But Abakumov had no real reason to be depressed: the Organs still didn’t perish because of that.
As the folk saying goes: If you speak for the wolf, speak against him as well.
Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood?
It is our own.
And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
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16. VOKhR: Militarized Guard Service, formerly the Internal Guard Service of the Republic.
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17. This is true. On the whole, D. Terekhov is a man of uncommon strength of will and courage (which were what was required in bringing the big Stalinists to justice in an uneasy situation). And he evidently has a lively mind as well. If Khrushchev’s reforms had been more thoroughgoing and consistent, Terekhov might have excelled in carrying them out. That is how historic leaders fail to materialize in our country.
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18. Here is one more of his eccentricities as a VIP: he used to change into civilian clothes and walk around Moscow with Kuznetsov, the head of his bodyguard, and whenever he felt like it, he would hand out money from the Cheka operations funds. Does not this smell of Old Russia—charity for the sake of one’s soul?