Fastenko told us that even in the Soviet period a Political Red Cross had existed. We found this difficult to imagine. It wasn’t that we thought he was telling us an untruth. Somehow we just couldn’t picture such a thing. He told us that Y. P. Peshkova, taking advantage of her personal immunity, had traveled abroad, collected money there (you’d not collect much here), and then seen to it that foodstuffs were bought in Russia for political prisoners who had no relatives. For all political prisoners? And he explained at this point that the KR’s—the so-called “Counter-Revolutionaries”—engineers and priests, for example, weren’t included, but only members of former political parties. Well, why didn’t you say so right away? Yes, and then for the most part the Political Red Cross, except Peshkova, was itself liquidated and its staff imprisoned.
It was also very pleasant, on those evenings when one wasn’t expecting interrogation, to talk about getting out of prison. Yes, they said there had been astonishing instances when they did release someone. One day they took Z-v from our cell, “with his things”—perhaps to free him? But his interrogation could not have been completed so swiftly. Ten days later he returned. They had dragged him off to Lefortovo. When he got there, he had evidently begun to sign things very quickly. So they brought him back to us. “Now if they should just release you,” we would say to a fellow prisoner, “since your case, after all, isn’t very serious, as you yourself say, then you must promise to go see my wife and, to show you’ve done it, tell her, let’s say, to put two apples in my next parcel…. But there aren’t any apples anywhere right now, so tell her to put in three bagels. But then there mightn’t be any bagels in Moscow either. So all right, it will just have to be four potatoes!” (That’s how the discussion went, and then they actually did take N. off, “with his things,” and M. got four potatoes in his next parcel. Truly astonishing! It was more than a coincidence! So they had really let him go! And his case was much more serious than mine. So maybe soon… However, what really happened was that M.’s wife brought five potatoes, but one of them got crushed in her bag, and N. was in the hold of a ship en route to the Kolyma.)
And so it went. We talked about all kinds of things and recalled something amusing, and it was all very jolly and delightful to be among interesting people who were so different from those you used to spend your life with, and who came from outside your own circle of experience. Meanwhile the silent evening check-up had come and gone, and they had taken eyeglasses away and the light bulb had blinked three times. That meant that bedtime would be in five minutes.
Quick! Quick! Grab a blanket! Just as you never knew at the front when a hail of shells would begin to fall all around you, here you didn’t know which would be your fateful interrogation night. And we would lie down with one arm on top of the blanket and try to expel the whirlwind of thought from our heads. Go to sleep!
And at a certain moment on an April evening, soon after we had seen Yuri off, the lock rattled. Hearts tightened. For whom had they come? Now the jailer would whisper: “Name with ‘S’? Name with ‘Z’?” But the guard did not whisper anything. The door closed. We raised our heads. There was a newcomer at the door: on the thin side, young, in a cheap blue suit and a dark-blue cap. He had nothing with him. He looked around in a state of confusion.
“What’s the cell number?” he asked in alarm.
“Fifty-three.”
He shuddered a bit.
“Are you from freedom?” we asked.
“No!” He shook his head in a painful sort of way.
“When were you arrested?”
“Yesterday morning.”
We roared. He had a very gentle, innocent sort of face, and his eyebrows were nearly white.
“What for?”
(It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an answer.)
“Oh, I don’t know…. Nothing much.”
That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his own case always seemed especially nothing much.
“But anyway, what was it?”
“Well, you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian people.”
“Whaaat?”
(None of us had ever run into that sort of “nothing much.”)
“Are they going to shoot me?” His face grew longer. He kept pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off.
“Well, no, probably not,” we reassured him. “They don’t shoot anyone nowadays. They give out tenners—every time the clock strikes.”
“Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?” asked the Social Democrat, true to his class principles.
“A worker.”
Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly proclaimed to me: “You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that’s the mood of the working class!”
He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was nowhere else to go from there and nothing else to listen to.
But he was wrong.
“What do you mean, a proclamation? Just like that? Without any reason? In whose name was it issued?”
“In my own.”
“And who are you?”
The newcomer smiled with embarrassment: “The Emperor, Mikhail.”
An electric shock ran through us all. Once again we raised ourselves on our cots and looked at him. No, his shy, thin face was not in the least like the face of Mikhail Romanov. And then his age too…
“Tomorrow, tomorrow. Time to sleep now,” said Susi sternly.
We went to sleep, confident that the two hours before the morning bread ration were not going to be boring.
They brought in a cot and bedding for the Emperor, and he lay down quietly next to the latrine bucket.
In 1916 a portly stranger, an elderly man with a light-brown beard, entered the home of the Moscow locomotive engineer Belov and said to the engineer’s pious wife: “Pelageya! You have a year-old son. Take good care of him for the Lord. The hour will come—and I will come to you again.” Then he left.
Pelageya did not have the faintest idea who this man was. But he had spoken so clearly and authoritatively that her mother’s heart accepted his word as law. And she cared for her child like the apple of her eye. Viktor grew up to be quiet, obedient, and pious; and he often saw visions of the angels and the Holy Virgin. But, as he grew up, these visions became less frequent. The elderly man did not come again. Viktor learned to be a chauffeur, and in 1936 he was taken into the army and sent off to Birobidzhan, where he was stationed in an auto transport company. He was not at all overly familiar or cheeky, and perhaps it was his quiet demeanor and modesty, so untypical of a chauffeur, which attracted a civilian girl employee. But the commander of his platoon was after the same girl and found himself out in the cold because of Viktor. At this time, Marshal Bliicher came to their area for maneuvers and his personal chauffeur fell seriously ill. Bliicher ordered the commander of the motor company to send him the best driver in the company; the company commander summoned the platoon commander, who immediately latched onto the idea of dumping his rival, Belov. (That’s the way it often is in the army. The person who deserves promotion doesn’t get it, and the person they want to get rid of does.) In addition, Belov was sober, a hard worker, and reliable—he wouldn’t let them down.
Bliicher liked Belov. So Belov stayed with him. Soon Bliicher was summoned to Moscow on a plausible pretext. This was how they separated the marshal from his power base in the Far East before arresting him. He had brought his own chauffeur, Belov, to Moscow with him. Having lost his boss, Belov then landed in the Kremlin garage and began chauffeuring, sometimes for Mi-khailov (of the Komsomol), sometimes for Lozovsky or somebody else in the leadership, and, finally, for Khrushchev. He had a close view of things—and he told us a lot, too, about the feasts, the morals, the security precautions. As a representative of the rank-and-file Moscow proletariat, he was also present at the trial of Bukharin in the House of the Unions. Of all those for whom he worked, he spoke well only of Khrushchev. Only in Khrushchev’s home was the chauffeur seated at the family table instead of being put in the kitchen. Only there, in those years, did he find the simplicity of the workingman’s life preserved. Khrushchev, who enjoyed life hugely, also became attached to Viktor Alekseyevich, and in 1938, when he left for the Ukraine, he tried to get him to go along. “I would have stayed with Khrushchev forever,” said Viktor Alekseyevich. But for some reason he felt he should remain in Moscow.