We are so used to taking pride in our victory over Napoleon that we leave out of account the fact that because of it the emancipation of the serfs did not take place a half-century sooner. Because of it, the strengthened monarchy destroyed the Decembrists. (The French occupation was never a reality for Russia.) But the Crimean War, and the Japanese War, and our war with Germany in the First World War—all those defeats brought us freedom and revolution.
We believed in amnesty that spring, we weren’t being at all original in this. Talking with old prisoners, one gradually discovers that this thirst for mercy and this faith in mercy is never absent within gray prison walls. For decades and decades, wave after wave of prisoners has thirsted for and believed in either an amnesty, or a new Code, or a general review of cases. And the rumors about these things have always been supported by the Organs with skilled caution. The prisoner’s imagination sees the ardently awaited arrival of the angel of liberation in just about anything: the next anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin’s anniversaries, Victory Day, Red Army Day, Paris Commune Day, every new session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee—the VTsIK—the end of every Five-Year Plan, every Plenary Session of the Supreme Court! And the wilder the arrests, the more Homeric and mind-boggling the scale of the waves of prisoners, the more they inspired not sober-mindedness but faith in amnesty!
All sources of light can to some degree be compared with the Sun. And the Sun cannot be compared with anything. So it is that all the expectations in the world can be compared with the expectation of amnesty, but the expectation of amnesty cannot be compared with anything else.
In the spring of 1945, every newcomer to the cell was asked first of all what he had heard about an amnesty. And if two or three prisoners were taken from their cells with their things, the cell experts immediately compared cases and drew the conclusion that theirs were the least serious cases and they had clearly been taken out to be released. It had begun! In the toilet and in the baths—the prisoners’ post offices—our “activists” looked everywhere for signs and graffiti about the amnesty. And one day at the beginning of July, in the famous lavender vestibule of the Butyrki baths, we read the enormous prophecy written in soap on a glazed lavender slab far higher than a man’s head—which meant that one man had stood on another’s shoulders in order to write it in a place where it would take longer to erase:
“Hurrah!! Amnesty on July 17!”[143]
What a celebration went on! (“After all, if they hadn’t known for sure, they wouldn’t have written it!”) Everything that beat, pulsed, circulated in the body came to a stop beneath the wave of happiness, the expectation that the doors were about to swing open.
But… for mercy one must have wisdom.
In the middle of July, the corridor jailer sent one old man from our cell to wash down the toilet, and while they were there eye to eye—for he wouldn’t have dared in the presence of witnesses—he looked sympathetically at the prisoner’s gray head and asked: “What’s your article, father?” “Fifty-eight!” The old man lit up. At home three generations were mourning his arrest. “You’re not included,” sighed the jailer. Nonsense, we decided in the celclass="underline" just an illiterate jailer.
There was also a young man from Kiev in the cell, Valentin. I can’t remember his family name. He had big eyes that were beautiful in a feminine way, and he was terrified by the interrogation. There is no doubt that he had the gift of precognition—perhaps only in his then current state of excitement. More than once, he went around the cell in the morning and pointed: Today they are going to come for you and you. I saw it in my dream. And they came and got them… the very individuals he had pointed out. One might add that a prisoner’s heart is so inclined toward mysticism that he accepts precognition almost without surprise.
On July 27 Valentin came up to me: “Aleksandr! Today it is our turn.” And he told me a dream that had all the characteristics of prison dreams: a bridge across a muddy stream, a cross. I began to get my things together. And it was not for nothing either. He and I were summoned after morning tea. Our cellmates saw us off with noisy good wishes, and many of them assured us we were going off to freedom. They had figured it out by comparing our less serious cases.
Perhaps you honestly don’t believe it. Perhaps you won’t allow yourself to believe. You can try to brush it aside with jokes. But flaming pincers, hotter than anything else on earth, suddenly close around your heart. They just do. Suppose it’s true?
They assembled twenty of us from various cells and took us to the baths first. Before every big change in his life, the prisoner has first of all to take a bath. We had time enough there, an hour and a half, to exchange our hunches and ideas. At that point, all steamed up, our skins tender, we were taken through the little emerald park in the Butyrki’s interior courtyard, where the birds sang deafeningly, although they were probably only sparrows, and the green of the trees seemed unbearably bright to eyes no longer used to it. Never had my eyes seen the green of the leaves with such intensity as they did that spring! And never in my life had I seen anything closer to God’s paradise than that little Butyrki park, which never took more than thirty seconds to cross on the asphalt path.[144]
They took us to the Butyrki station—a very well-chosen nickname for that reception and dispatch point, especially because its main hall was really like a good railroad station. They pushed us into a large, spacious box. It was half-dark inside and the air was clean and fresh, since its one and only little window was very high up and had no “muzzle.” And it opened on that same sunny little park, and through the transom the birds’ twitter deafened us, and in the opening a little bright-green twig hung, promising us all freedom and home. (We had never been imprisoned in such a good box—and that couldn’t be a matter of chance!)
And we were all cases for the OSO’s—the Special Boards attached to the GPU-NKVD. And it turned out that each of us had been imprisoned for nothing much.
No one touched us for three hours. No one opened the doors. We paced up and down the box and, finally, tired out, we sat down on the slab benches. And the little twig kept bobbing and bobbing outside the opening, and the sparrows screamed as if they were possessed.
Suddenly the door crashed open, and one of us was summoned, a quiet bookkeeper, thirty-five years old. He went out. The door was locked. We started running about our box even more agitatedly than before. We were on hot coals.
Once more the crash of the door. They called another one out and readmitted the first. We rushed to him. But he was not the same man! The life had gone out of his face. His wide-open eyes were unseeing. His movements were uncertain as he stumbled across the smooth floor of the box. Was he in a state of shock? Had they swatted him with an ironing board?
“Well? Well?” we asked him, with sinking hearts. (If he had not in fact just gotten up from the electric chair, he must at the very least have been given a death sentence.) And in the voice of one reporting the end of the universe, the bookkeeper managed to blurt out:
“Five… years!”
And once more the door crashed. That was how quickly they returned, as if they were only being taken to the toilet to urinate. The second man returned, all aglow. Evidently he was being released.
“Well, well, come on?” We swarmed around him, our hopes rising again. He waved his hand, choking with laughter.
“Fifteen years!”
143
18. Indeed, the bastards were wrong by only one digit! For more details on the great Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945, see Part III, Chapter 6.
144
19. Many years later, this time as a tourist, I saw another, similar park, except that it was even smaller, in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad. The other tourists exclaimed over the darkness of the corridors and cells, but I kept thinking to myself that with such a park to walk in, the prisoners of the Trubetskoi bastion were not lost men. We were taken out to walk only in deathly cell-like stone enclosures.