Monumental Propaganda (12 page)

“That's all right then. But the Brest fortress was a defensive action, and we're going to take the Reichstag. Tomorrow. Meanwhile, you go to your room and forget about milk with honey and cupping glasses—have a glass of vodka with pepper and you'll be right as rain.”

28

That summer was an uncomfortable one in Dolgov. Thanks to high pressure that remained stuck over the region for a long period, the heat was extreme and interminable. During the afternoon the temperature in the shade reached thirty-four degrees, and at night it never sank below twentyfive. The heat withered cereal crops in the field, the local streams ran shallow, the peat bogs ignited spontaneously and in town a constant smoky haze became an unvarying feature of the weather, even rating a mention in the meteorological reports. This kind of weather was hard for people with cardiovascular problems to tolerate; several of them actually found it intolerable and died. And soon after that the toll of cattle and people was sharply increased by the appearance in the diminished local waters of the bacilli of either plague or cholera—the bacteriologists failed to identify which.

But Stepan Kharitonovich was as strong as a horse—no cholera ever got a hold on him, his circulatory system was sound, his heart functioned rhythmically and that tickle in the throat was, as we recall, something he had simply invented. Realizing there was no way he could wriggle out of speaking at the bureau meeting, he drank until three in the morning, then slept, and though no one thing on its own could have overpowered him—neither the vodka, nor the heat, nor the bedbugs—all of them together took their toll even on him, and he turned up at the bureau session wretched, pale and crumpled. He turned up after everyone else in the hope of somehow concealing himself behind their backs, but Porosyaninov, his elbows already propped on the presidium table, directed him with his eyes to a seat in the second row behind the public prosecutor, Strogii, a man of limited size in all three dimensions, behind whom there was no way you could hide.

As he squeezed his way between the chairs and the knees to reach this place, Shaleiko noticed that Aglaya Revkina was sitting directly behind him, dressed for the front line in boots, a dark woolen skirt and military tunic caught in with a commander's belt, wearing two orders, four medals and some other badges. Not knowing how to reply to her unspoken question, he nodded to her almost imperceptibly, with nothing but his chin, and sat down, his shoulder blades squirming under her physically palpable gaze.

They started the session without any procrastination. The case was presented by Porosyaninov. Even reading from a sheet of paper, he confused his noun cases and prepositions, like a foreigner who had begun studying Russian at an advanced age. Shaleiko listened without hearing him. He only took in fragments of individual phrases. Comrade Revkina, a communist of long standing with great services to her credit, had recently been showing signs of failing to understand certain things. She had demonstrated a tendency toward conceit and arrogance. At a time when the Party, together with the entire Soviet people, had set itself new goals, Comrade Revkina was clinging to the old. Bearing in mind her former services, they had taken a humane line with Comrade Revkina, they had conversed patiently with Comrade Revkina on numerous occasions, they had explained to Comrade Revkina the essential significance of the policy of the Party and the government at the present stage, but comrade Revkina had failed to heed the opinion of her Comrades and had become obstinate in her errors. She had supported the anti-Party group and thereby set herself outside the ranks of the Party.

This time Aglaya had prepared herself for the occasion.

She walked out with her thumbs thrust into her belt, straightened her tunic and shook herself so that the medals on her chest jangled.

“Have you,” she began, addressing the auditorium, “thought about what you are doing? If you don't like Comrade Stalin, then why didn't you say so while he was alive? You should have told him back then: ‘We're sorry, Comrade Stalin, but we don't like you. And we don't like Molotov, or Kaganovich.' If you'd said that back then, then I'd respect your position now. But back then you said that you loved Comrade Stalin very much and you were prepared to go through hell and high water for his sake . . .”

The hall was filled with a timid silence. Sensing that she had the audience in her grasp, Aglaya raised her voice: “Stalin and his comrades-in-arms made the revolution. And without the revolution, who would you be? You'd be nobody. Stalin raised every one of you from beggars to kings . . .”

The first to come to his senses was Nechaev, who banged on a carafe with its stopper. Porosyaninov also shook himself awake: “Comrade Revkina, we don't need an elementary course in politics. Speak about yourself.”

“I am speaking about myself,” Aglaya countered. “Like all of you, I grew up with the name of Stalin. Under his leadership we carried through collectivization, industrialization . . .”

Nechaev tapped on his carafe again and Porosyaninov began lisping again: “Comrade Revkina, there's no need to tell us the history of the Party—we already know it.”

“If you already know it, then I'd advise you to recall how Stalin fought against opposition and opportunists. Essentially, against the likes of you . . .”

“Comrade Revkina!” said Nechaev, raising his voice.

“You don't like that?” said Aglaya, turning toward him with a smirk. “Well, I think Comrade Stalin wouldn't have liked you either. He wasn't fond of people like you. Comrade Stalin loved honest, principled communists. But when it came to traitors—”

“No more! No more!” Nechaev shouted. “You no longer have the floor. Leave the podium! Leave the podium immediately!”

“No,” she resisted. “I haven't finished speaking. I'm sure all of you sitting here agree with what I'm saying. You have your convictions too.”

She was half-right. These people did have convictions, but all they amounted to was that you should never, under any circumstances, go against the bosses. And they didn't like Aglaya's speech because they could sense opposition and reproach in it: I'm good, principled and brave, but you are cowards, toadies and puppets.

Refusing to accept that they were pitiful nonentities, the delegates were indignant; they stamped their feet and yelled out single words, such as “Shame!”; “Out!”; “Enough!”; “Cheek!”

“Recant!” Muravyova called from her seat.

The boss of the meat-processing combine, Botviniev leapt to the front once again, yelling: “Rip the bad grass out of the field!” And he began jerking his arms, as though he was pulling up weeds.

The author of these lines once had occasion to observe a dramatic incident from the life of chickens. One unfortunate crested hen happened to fall into water. Strangely enough, she didn't drown, but she was so thoroughly soaked that every last feather on her body fell out. Encountering her in such a miserable condition, the other chickens threw themselves on the unfortunate fowl like natural-born predators. It turned out that great passions rage even in the breasts of these insignificant creatures and they harbor the urge to hound and henpeck anyone weaker than they are no less than we do ourselves. They flung themselves on their denuded sister with the screams of an eagle, and they really would have pecked her to death if not for the intervention of their owner. The chicken was separated from the others, and after a while, having grown new feathers, she was once again accepted as a full-fledged member of the family of chickens.

For a long time the members of the bureau shouted, shrieked, whistled, foamed at the mouth and suffered collective convulsions, like members at a meeting of the Russian Holy Rollers sect. In vain, Secretary Nechaev leapt up and down, banged on the carafe and shouted, “Comrades! Comrades!” The comrades did not hear him, and they did not listen to him, realizing perfectly well that this insubordination would be recorded as a point in their favor. In a certain place it would be noted as an ideologically justified psychopathic response.

When they finally did settle down, individual orators began to take the floor: the head livestock specialist, Obertochkin; the director of the reinforced concrete combine, Syrtsov; the head of bathhouses, Kolganov, and yet again, Muravyova. They all condemned Revkina, saying that she had lost her way, had become obstinate in her errors, demonstrated signs of complacency, conceit and arrogance, that she was providing grist to the mill of the enemies and was perhaps herself an enemy. A schism in Soviet society was the very thing on which our enemies had always counted. At this moment Revkina was being applauded, at least mentally, by the international imperialists; the Pentagon had its eye on her as it finalized its plans of aggression, and the CIA had added her to the rolls of its voluntary agents and paid thirty pieces of silver into her account.

I do feel a certain apprehension that the modern-day reader might regard this description as an ill-judged grotesque and, reasoning logically, think: dozens of people gathered together couldn't possibly say things like that! You can think what you like, but in those days that is exactly what people did when they gathered together in dozens and hundreds in enclosed premises and in thousands upon thousands on squares under the open sky. And was there really not a single normal person among them who would have said: Fellow citizens, what kind of gibberish is this? You should all be consigned to the madhouse immediately? People like that did turn up sometimes. But they were the really mad ones. Because a normal person understands that it's dangerous and pointless to oppose universal insanity, and rational to participate in it. It should also be noted that people are all actors, and many of them easily adapt to the role written for them out of fear or in hopes of a worthwhile reward. The enlightened modern-day reader thinks that half-wits such as those we have described no longer exist. The author is unfortunately unable to agree. The sum total of viciousness and stupidity in humanity neither increases nor decreases, but fortunately the times do not always deploy it in full.

29

The session of the bureau of the district committee of the CPSU was drawing to a close. Everyone, naturally, was agreed that Revkina had to be excluded from the Party and isolated from society, and someone even had the idea of suggesting (and this at the local level and long before the case of Boris Pasternak) that if Revkina didn't like our Soviet society in its renovated form, she could run off to her transoceanic masters. An essentially absurd proposal, because Revkina's ideas would scarcely have been to the liking of the transoceanic masters either.

Shaleiko sat there listening to the speakers and hoping that the words spoken by others would be enough and he would be left in the position of the local Pilate, able to wash his hands of the business and then wash them really clean when he got back to the hotel. But just when he was sure that the danger had passed, Porosyaninov fixed him with a keen stare and asked with undisguised malice: “And why does our communist Shaleiko have nothing to say?”

Shaleiko leapt to his feet as though he had been scalded. As he made his way out of the row, stepping on someone's feet, Aglaya watched him, assuming that he would make some kind of attempt to defend her. What could have given rise to such an impossible hope in her mind? Why did she hope to discover in someone else a virtue that she herself did not possess? In the past, when taking part in dozens of similar tribunals, had she ever defended anyone? Even though she was a brave woman, a partisan. Capable, in an attempt to save a comrade, of hurling herself into a raging torrent, an inferno or a hail of machine-gun bullets, of risking her life anywhere at all, except in a closed Party meeting.

Shaleiko walked slowly toward the podium. Perhaps hoping there would be an earthquake or that the Americans would drop a hydrogen bomb on Dolgov and the need to speak would be averted. But neither one thing nor the other happened. He arrived at the podium without mishap, loitered while he gathered himself and said: “Right then, I won't wander on overmuch, I'll just say that our Party, led by the faithful Leninist Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, is waging—now what's the simplest way of putting it?—a gigantic, a titanic, struggle for the affirmation, strictly speaking, of Leninist norms, and we won't allow anybody to crap in our kitchen garden.”

Having expressed this opinion, he left the stage and, instead of going back to his place, set off toward the exit, but he was stopped.

“Comrade Shaleiko,” Nechaev called to him.

“What?” Shaleiko stopped and looked at Nechaev in bewilderment. He'd said the most important thing, hadn't he, so now what?

“You spoke somehow too briefly and reluctantly,” said Nechaev.

“I spoke reluctantly?” Shaleiko asked dejectedly.

“Yes indeed. Reluctantly and briefly, as though you were simply taking the easy way out. Perhaps you might offer some arguments in support of your idea?”

“All right then.” Shaleiko went back to the podium. “If you want arguments,” he said, putting the emphasis on the
u,
“I personally don't have any and I don't need any. The arguments are given to us by Aglaya Stepanovna herself, who has moved on way ahead of us and informs us by her own behavior that she's a great swell and we're collective farm yokels and don't understand a thing. And at a time when our Party is steering a grandiose and universally historical course to overcoming. Which provokes a natural rumpus and dismay in the camp of our enemies. Aglaya Stepanovna has . . . no of course, I won't say that . . . in the past she had definite, so to speak . . . But that's no justification, and that's not what . . .” He thought for a moment and turned to face Aglaya, realizing he had nothing more to lose: “I stand here looking at you, Aglaya Stepanovna, and wonder why you sit there so proud and stubborn, like you were some kind of queen or something? What happened to you? Maybe you've fallen under someone's influence? I know there's some people who might listen to some—pardon the expression—BBC, flap their ears and start—well, you know what. But don't you go listening to those there voices, look here with your own eyes. Come to our collective farm at least and I'll show you personally how our rank-and-file, so to speak, farmers, live. Every one, literally every one of them, has a cow in the barn, a calf, and some even have a heifer. Our collective farm workers have four motorcycles and one Moskvich automobile. They've bought a new Radiola for the club. And we have a dream for the future—well, maybe not for us, but for our grandchildren—of putting in water pipes and one of those toilets so when you pull on a chain the water runs down. That's where our dreams are leading us, but you, Aglaya Stepanovna, are an old woman. Take a look at yourself, come to your senses and stop. If you don't stop, you know, then we'll trample you underfoot, sweep you aside and that . . .”

Shaleiko left the podium to applause, which was later described in the newspaper as “tumultuous.” Whether it was really tumultuous or not is not so very important; what is important is that the resolution to exclude Com. Revkina from the ranks of the CPSU was approved unanimously. As was only to be expected.

Aglaya sat upright without her face showing the slightest sign of any feeling whatsoever. But her thoughts were somewhere else completely, and she didn't immediately understand the question that she was asked.

“What?” she queried.

“I asked you,” said Nechaev, “if you have your Party card with you.”

“I always carry my Party card and my Party conscience with me,” Aglaya said distinctly.

“As for your conscience,” said Nechaev, “you can take that to church, but I must ask you to hand your card in here.”

“Well, there's your answer!” said Aglaya, giving him the finger, which the members of the Party bureau did not like at all. As they went their separate ways afterward, they were still discussing what an outrageous gesture it was. Pah! How crude!

“Revkina!” Porosyaninov growled menacingly. “Remember where you are!”

“Comrade Revkina,” Nechaev said politely, “you must surrender your Party card.”

“I didn't get it from you.”

“Hand it in quietly,” said Porosyaninov, “or else we'll take it by force.”

“Take it then,” Aglaya suggested, shifting the card from her pocket to her bosom.

The members of the presidium exchanged glances, and Nechaev settled on a compromise.

“All right,” he said, “everyone's tired and we'll postpone the handing in of the card for the time being. But you, Aglaya Stepanovna, will not be needing it anytime in the near future. Not until you reflect on your behavior and draw the appropriate conclusions. And if you do and you come to us and recant, then perhaps we'll give you a chance to rejoin the Party, with a severe reprimand.”

Aglaya did not accept her exclusion, but she did not bother to appeal. She decided that now she was her own communist, and her own Party too. The day after her exclusion she opened a special account in the savings bank and began paying her Party membership dues into it every month. She herself deposited the money, and she herself noted in her Party card that the dues for such and such a month had been paid.