We have become so used to the piling up of injustices during interrogation and trial that we have ceased drawing any distinctions of degree between them. This captain and this colonel were veteran officers of the Tsar’s Russian Army. They had both been over forty, and they had both served in the army for twenty years, when the telegraph brought them news that the Tsar had been overthrown in Petrograd. For twenty years they had served the Tsar according to their oath. And now, against their wills—for all we know, possibly muttering “Beat it! Scram!” to themselves—they swore loyalty to the Provisional Government. After that, no one asked them to swear any more oaths because the whole army fell apart. They didn’t like the new scheme of things, wherein soldiers tore shoulder boards off officers and killed them, and it was natural for them to join other officers to fight against it. And it was natural for the Red Army to fight against them and push them into the sea. But in a country in which at least the rudiments of jurisprudence exist, what basis was there for putting them on trial, and a quarter of a century later at that? (They had lived as private persons all that time… Mariyushkin up to the very moment of his arrest. Borshch, to be sure, had turned up in a Cossack wagon train in Austria, but in a transport, with the old men and women, not in an armed unit.)
However, in 1945, in the very center of Soviet jurisdiction, they were charged with: actions directed toward the overthrow of the government of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets; armed incursion into Soviet territory, in other words, not having immediately left Russia when Petrograd was declared Soviet; aiding the international bourgeoisie (which they had never seen even in their dreams); serving counterrevolutionary governments (i.e., their own generals, to whom they had been subordinate all their lives). And all these sections—Nos. 1, 2, 4, 13—of Article 58 were included in a Criminal Code adopted in 1926, that is, six to seven years after the end of the Civil War. This was a classic and unconscionable example of the ex post facto application of a law! In addition, Article 2 of the Code specified that it applied only to citizens taken into custody on the territory of the Russian Republic. But State Security’s strong right arm had grabbed people who were in no wise Soviet citizens from all the countries of Europe and Asia.[139] And we won’t even bring up the question of statutes of limitations. This question was provided for very flexibly—no statutes of limitations applied to Article 58. (“Why stir up the past indeed?”) Such statutes are invoked only in the case of our home-grown executioners, who have destroyed many, many more of their compatriots than did the whole Civil War.
Mariyushkin, at least, remembered everything clearly. He told us the details of being evacuated from Novorossisk. But Borshch had already descended into second childhood and prattled on and on about celebrating Easter in the Lubyanka: he had eaten only half his bread ration during Palm Sunday week and Holy Week and had set the rest of it aside, gradually replacing the stale pieces with fresh ones. Thus he had accumulated seven full rations when it came time to break the Lenten fast—and he had “feasted” for the three days of Easter.
I do not know what kind of White Guards they were in the Civil War, either of them, whether they were among the exceptional few who hung every tenth worker without trial and whipped the peasants, or whether they were the other kind, the soldierly majority. The fact that they were being interrogated and sentenced in Moscow was no proof of anything nor a matter of any consequence. But if, from that time on, they had lived for a quarter of a century, not as retired officers, on pensions and with honor, but as homeless exiles, then how could anyone point to any moral basis for trying them? That is the kind of dialectic Anatole France mastered, but which we cannot seem to grasp. According to Anatole France, by the time it’s today, yesterday’s martyr is already in the wrong—in fact, from the first minute the red shirt covered his body. And vice versa. But our version is: If they rode me for one short year, when I had just outgrown being a foal, then I am called a riding horse all my life, even though I have long since been used only as a cab horse.
Colonel Konstantin Konstantinovich Yasevich was very different from these helpless émigré mummies. For him, clearly, the end of the Civil War had not ended the struggle against Bolshevism. As to how he continued to struggle—where and with what—he did not enlighten me. But the sense that he was still in the service remained with him in the cell itself. In the midst of all the chaotic concepts, the blurred and broken lines of vision, in most of our heads, he had, evidently, a clear and exact view of everything around him; as a result of this reasoned point of view on life, his body, too, exhibited a steady strength, resiliency, and activity. He was certainly not less than sixty. His head was totally bald, without a single hair. He had already survived his interrogation and was awaiting his sentence, like the rest of us. He could expect no help from anywhere, of course. But he kept his young, even rosy skin. Among all of us in the cell, he alone did exercises every morning and washed himself at the faucet. The rest of us were trying not to squander the calories in our prison ration. He put his time to use, and whenever an aisle opened up between the rows of board bunks, he paced those fifteen to twenty feet with a precise stride and a precise profile, crossing his arms over his chest and staring through the walls with clear young eyes.
And the difference between us and him was that we were all astonished at what was happening to us, while nothing around him contradicted his expectations, and precisely for that reason he was absolutely alone in the cell.
A year later, I was able to appraise his conduct in prison. Once again I was in the Butyrki, and in one of those seventy cells I met some young codefendants of Yasevich who had already been sentenced to ten and fifteen years. The sentences given everyone in their group were typed out on cigarette paper, and for some reason they had it in their possession. Yasevich was first on the list, and his sentence was: to be shot. So that was what he saw—what he foresaw—through the wall with his still-young eyes as he paced back and forth from the table to the door! But his unimpaired consciousness of the correctness of his path in life lent him extraordinary strength.
Among the émigrés was one my own age, Igor Tronko. We became friends. Both of us were weak, dried out; our skin was grayish-yellow on our bones. (Why had we collapsed to such an extent? I think the main cause was spiritual confusion.) Both of us were thin and on the tall side, and we were shaken by the gusts of summer wind in the Butyrki courtyards. We always walked side by side, with the careful steps of old men, and discussed the parallels in our lives. He had been born in South Russia the same year as I. We were still nursing babes when fate stuck her hand into her well-worn purse and drew out a short straw for me and a long one for him. So it was that he rolled off across the sea, even though his White Guard,father was just a rank-and-file, unpropertied telegrapher.
I found it interesting in the extreme to picture through his life all those compatriots of my generation who had landed outside Russia. They had grown up under good family supervision and in very modest, even meager, circumstances. They were all very well brought up and, within the range of existing possibilities, well educated. They grew up without knowing fear or repression, though the White organizations maintained a certain yoke of authority over them until they themselves grew strong. They grew up in such a way that the sins to which all European youth was subject in that period—a high crime rate, a frivolous attitude toward life, thoughtlessness, dissipation—did not touch them. That was because they grew up, so to speak, in the shadow of the indelible misfortune which had befallen their families. Whatever country they grew up in, they looked on Russia alone as their Motherland. Their spiritual upbringing was based on Russian literature, all the more beloved because to them it was the beginning and end of their Motherland, because for them their Motherland did not exist as a primary geographical and physical fact. The contemporary printed word was much more generally accessible to them than to us, but they received Soviet books in conspicuously small quantities. And they felt this lack all the more keenly; it seemed to them chiefly responsible for their inability to understand what was most important, highest, and most beautiful in Soviet Russia; and that the books they did receive presented a distortion, a lie; were incomplete. The picture they had of our real life was very, very faint, but their longing for their Motherland was such that if we had called on them in 1941 they would all have joined the Red Army, and it would have been even sweeter for them to die than to survive. These young people from twenty-five to twenty-seven already represented and firmly defended several points of view, in definite conflict with the opinions of the old generals and political leaders. Thus Igor’s group was called the “nepredreshentsy”—the “non-prejudgers”: they declared that anyone who had not shared with the Motherland the whole, complex burden of the past decades had no right to decide anything about the future of Russia, nor even to presuppose anything, but should simply go and lend his strength to whatever the people might decide.
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14. On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws—just give them the chance to reach out that far.