“The problem, of course, was that when Lenin died, Stalin took over, and Stalin was interested only in people who were loyal to him. He got rid of everyone who had come into positions of power under Lenin. Stalin was very shrewd. Instead of having them shot, which might have made martyrs of them, he accused them of crimes against the Soviet Union; he said they had spied for the capitalist powers that had sent troops to defeat the Red Army after the October Revolution. The charges were false, but most of the people accused, confessed, including Bukharin, the most famous of those put on trial. In open court Bukharin confessed to things he had never done.”
Bending forward, Chicherin looked at me intently and struck the table three times with his knuckles. “He didn’t confess to avoid his own death. He knew that once he made that confession, the only thing left was his execution. His confession was suicide. He didn’t do it to save his life. He did it because he believed that without that confession his life would have no meaning.
“Bukharin believed-they all believed-in the infallibility of the Communist Party. The party was in the service of history, and history,” Chicherin said with a rueful look, “was the one true God. If they denied the party, they would be denying the only God they had. Bukharin was put in the following position: He believed in the party, but the party insisted on his guilt. The only way he could deny his guilt was to deny that the party was right.
But how could the party-how could God-be wrong? Bukharin chose to remain a believer. He confessed and he was sentenced to death.”
Chicherin leaned against the back of the armless chair and folded his arms across his chest. He lowered his eyes, and placed one hand on the back of his neck. For a long time he stared down at the floor, a brooding look on his mouth. Finally, he tilted his head to the side far enough to cast a sideways glance at me.
“Have you never represented someone who confessed to something he did not do because of something he believed in?” he asked.
“I’ve had a few cases where someone made a false confession, but it was always to protect someone else. I’ve never had one where someone did it because of something they believed in.”
Removing his glasses, Chicherin closed his eyes and grasped the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said when he opened his eyes. There was a trace of weariness in his voice. “What you said made me think of how the world has changed. You find it perfectly reasonable that someone would be willing to take the blame for something they didn’t do to protect someone they loved. I remember the time when millions of people were in love with an idea, a cause, and were willing to die for it, Communism, democ-racy, Fascism, whatever it was, that was larger than themselves.
First God died, then Fascism, then Communism, and now what is there left to die for? Has the world become less insane, or perhaps more so?”
He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. Then he sat straight up and put on his glasses.
“The people who prosecuted my father were able to use both of these things, the cause he believed in and the people he loved.”
“What happened to him?” I asked after Chicherin fell into another long silence.
He turned up the palms of his hands. “He confessed to everything; he would have confessed to anything. He had a wife and a child. It was the only way to protect my mother and me from Siberia or worse.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically.
Chicherin smiled. “It was a long time ago. I was a small boy.
I didn’t know what happened until years later. My mother never told me. She said he had been killed in an accident.”
Finishing his tea, Chicherin sprang to his feet. “There’s something I should give you, something I think you should read.”
When he opened the door, the dim light from the shop dissolved the shadows that had draped the walls. I followed him as he moved briskly through the stacks. He lifted the shade on the front door and turned the sign around to announce that he was once again open for business.
With his back to me, he searched the shelves of a bookcase behind the counter. Most of the books had slips of paper sticking out the top, the name of the buyers who had ordered them or, sometimes, the address where they were to be sent. On more than one occasion he had explained to me that most of the money he made came from the rare or out-of-print books for which col-lectors were willing to pay substantial amounts. His own specialty was Russian-language first editions.
“Here it is,” he announced, tapping with his outstretched finger the spine of a small volume on the shelf second from the top.
He moved the stepladder into position and pulled it out. “The Possessed, by Dostoyevsky. Have you read it?” he asked as he handed it to me across the counter.
“I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, but no, I haven’t read this. I may have started it once.”
As if seized by a sudden impulse, his head gave a slight jerk.
A moment later, a thin smile dashed across his mouth.
“In a certain way,” he said, “this is a companion to Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov kills the old woman with an axe because he wants her money and because he believes in nothing that would stop him. He has rejected all morality, all religion; he is a nihilist, someone for whom nothing can be more important than himself. The Possessed, on the other hand, is an account of what can happen when people like this band together, and decide to destroy not just one human being, but everything, because they believe in nothing except the supreme importance of replacing everything with something of their own creation. They believe they can create a better world, because they don’t believe in the one that exists.”
I was still thinking of the confessed killer of Calvin Jeffries, trying to make it fit into what Chicherin was telling me. “How does that explain someone who confesses to a crime he did not do and then commits suicide?”
“It’s what Bukharin did; it’s what my father did,” he reminded me. “This book,” he went on, nodding toward the volume in my hand, “has some extraordinary things about the way in which people who no longer believe in religion or morality, who feel betrayed by those beliefs, have nothing left but the desire to destroy everything connected with them. Dostoyevsky understands the emptiness of the soul; but he thinks it can only be filled again by a belief in a Christian God. Anything else is nihilism. And, who knows, perhaps it is, but the same thing that leads some people to Dostoyevsky’s God leads others to believe in other things, things for which they are sometimes willing to die.”
Chicherin sat down on the chair behind the counter and sighed.
Removing his glasses, he blew his breath on them until they clouded over and then wiped them clean on the arm of his gray long-sleeve shirt.
“Consider Dostoyevsky himself. He had the unique experience of being a witness to his own execution. Arrested in his youth for radical activity with organizations advocating a socialist society, he was sentenced to death. He was lined up against a wall and blindfolded. He could hear the order being given to the execution squad to raise their rifles, then the order to take aim. In the stillness of that early morning he could hear the sound of the rifles being cocked.”
Chicherin looked at me. “What do you think must have passed through his mind? Do you think it was what people so often say about the last few seconds before you’re about to die: that his whole life passed in front of his eyes?” He folded his arms and crossed his legs and began to rock back and forth. “There was a time in my life when I used to think about that: what it would be like, waiting for your own execution.” He gave me a reassuring glance. “I was in Russia then, and it was never anything imminent, just an occasional possibility. But when I did think about it, and when I’ve thought about what Dostoyevsky went through and some of the things he later wrote, I think it’s more likely that it would seem as if your whole life had been nothing-had no meaning at all-except as the prelude to this one moment, this last moment you’ll ever know.”