Try living in Russia. Саша Кругосветов
would tell each other, «Borka didn't cry when they announced Stalin's death.» Everybody cried, but he didn't. We need to beat him up. Thank God this disgraceful, unmotivated punishment didn't happen. I don't know why, but it didn't. Praise to our father in heaven that the turned the foolish children away from sin. The most repulsive trait of the marginal person is their urge to leave their social group behind. The urge to hide and dissolve in the crowd. To get close to the dominant group. How many people like that I happened to meet. I myself did not try to disguise my Jewish origins, at least I think I didn't. Almost never. But then, with Borka, I probably disguised them. Perhaps unconsciously. Did I discuss with the others that Borja didn't cry for Stalin? Yes I did. Being a little wimp, I reasoned just like the others. And that although I didn't cry either. But I judged Borka. Borya, if you are still alive, if you happen to read this, I implore you to forgive me for I have sinned. Forgive me that I was with the crowd then and not with you. I ask your forgiveness not because you are Jewish. But also because a decent person, and that includes a boy, a child, must not side with the crowd, but with the weak person who is being insulted through no fault of his own.
The Leningrad Affair was closed. The Doctors' Plot, too. «The inspection has shown that the doctors were arrested without good reason and illegally», and the doctors' testimonies were extracted with the help of «inadmissible methods of investigation». The question of resettling the cosmopolitans became redundant. There were prisoners' riots in Vorkuta, Norilsk and Kengir. There was a commission to inspect cases and rehabilitate individuals. An amnesty was held. «I walk towards freedom. Towards the gunshot. Towards everything that dares to interfere», Korzhavin wrote after the amnesty. The deported peoples returned home. The German and Japanese POWs were returned. Austria left the military blocks and declared itself neutral.
A new turn began in the straggle for power in the Kremlin. Who had time for cosmopolitans? My father came home. Re-joined the party. Found a job. Not the one he'd had before. The position was lower and so was the salary. That was understandable. My father was elderly already and had no specialist education. The family was reunited. Life went on. Another three years passed. The Twentieth Party Congress took place. Stalin's monument was thrown off its pedestal. Life in the country was changing. There would be no more excesses. My father was completely rehabilitated. He wanted to rehabilitate himself at work. They talked differently to him now. Politely and respectfully. So many years have passed, dear comrade. Let's not return to the past. We can't change the past. After all many people lost their lives, too. My father once again worked in the same system as before. He built bridges. Once he met his previous boss, the one who had pushed him to the brink of the abyss. He threw himself at my father and hugged him. «Yakov, I'm so glad to see you alive and unharmed. You haven't changed at all. How are you, where are you? Come on, stop turning your nose up. Let's forget the past. You have caused us a lot of trouble, too. So many commissions turned up because of your complaints. Why are you not saying anything? Really, you haven't changed at all. Just as spiteful and stubborn as before. You're breaking the principle.» I can imagine what my father must have felt during this meeting.
Nobody talked about cosmopolitism any more. They didn't pin yellow stars to our clothes. Thank you very much. But the shadow of being second-class people kept hovering above our family for a long time. «Where can I find a photograph, for myself as well as for the public, so that nobody can guess that according to my passport I'm a…» It hovered above all the other families. Those who had previously been called cosmopolitans. Above my parents – for their entire life, until their last day. Above me – until the collapse of the communist empire in the 1990s. Until the one-party monopoly collapsed.
Alas, neither the country nor the people have cleansed themselves through repentance for these and the other crimes of the communist regime. For the genocide of one's own people. For the annihilation of millions of the most honest and capable people who rotted in the torture chambers of the revolution's guards and at the timber felling sites of the GULAG. We can't begin a new life and become a free people if we don't cleanse ourselves through repentance. And thus we continue to carry to this day the ancestral stigma of a people living in slavery. Under the heel of the carefree children and grandchildren of the screws and other heirs to the screws. But we'll talk about that a bit later.
My universities
For Gorky it was the Volga and the strap of the barge hauler. I have no experience to match that, of course. I've never had to do hard, back-breaking labour. But I wasn't afraid of physical labour and didn't avoid it. When I was still a boy I learned to do everything with my own hands – I could work with wood and metal; I could solder and build electromechanical models. Our room on Liteiny Prospekt was heated by a stove in winter. Our firewood was kept in the second backyard, in a low basement. Right next to the neighbours' firewood. Nobody fenced in or guarded their firewood. Nobody ever stole another's firewood. Since I was ten years old it was my responsibility to fire up the stove after school. I would go down into the basement, chop wood, put it into a sack and carry it home, up the steep high staircase. There was no lift in our house. Once I had entered college there was the kolkhoz. We were sent to a village with the expressive name «Gnilki» – «Rotten». The kolkhoz allocated a hut to us students. We knocked together wooden bunks. And then we lived there. We cooked our food in huge pots over the fire. Some of the food we'd brought ourselves. Tinned stewed meat and cereals. The kolkhoz gave us potatoes, vegetables, milk and bread. We worked in the fields, weeding. Everyone tried to stand out and get a larger amount of work done. That's how it was. That's what young people were like. I also made an effort. And although I was constantly exhausted, I was Leningrad rowing champion by then already, well, I couldn't for the life of mine break out and become an exemplary worker. I didn't have the knack. Our exemplary workers were guys and gals who'd come from the provinces, most of them from Belarus. We went to work in the kolkhoz every year. On the first of September we'd show up at college. An assembly would be held during which it was announced who would go where with whom and when, which food items to buy, what things to take. And we'd be off for a month to help the country with the harvest. It was possible to avoid this labour in autumn by working on a building site during summer. In one such summer I was sent to dig pits for the foundations of future houses. The Malaya Okhta district was erected from scratch. Who could have known that a few years down the line, my parents and I would receive a flat there and would go on to live in precisely that district? I finished college. I was given an assignment and went to work straight to the kolkhoz. Those working there mostly worked to tick off a box, to have fun. Later it became customary to send employees to vegetable storehouses to pick through the vegetables. Not for long, just for one or two days. That went on until the year 1990. It even continued while I was working at the Academy of Sciences. Just to show off. Research associates, graduate students, doctors of science and professors with decent salary pretended to be doing something. They'd arrive at the vegetable storehouse at around 9am. At 10am the representative would appear and allocate the groups to different storage facilities. Around 10.30 they'd reach their workplace. Another person would come, give a briefing and distribute packing materials. At 11 they'd start work. At lpm they'd break for lunch. At 2 they'd gradually get down to work. At 3, well, perhaps it was time to stop? They would call the representative. Well, did you get at least something done – thank goodness. Can we take some vegetables, carrots, cabbages? Take a little, that is permitted. For some reason the plan was always fulfilled. The party coordinator in person watched over the plan fulfilment; he was a doctor of science, by the way. A self-evident mockery of common sense. Oh well. Not at all like the universities of Aleksei Maksimovich. Nothing would have happened had I been spared this stupid experience. But what has been has been. I won't renounce a single thing in my life. Everyone has his own universities, his own school of life. I had mine. Let me tell you of the real universities.
My first university was the communal flat. Our neighbours there were uncle Petya, his wife, aunt Zhenya, and their adult son, Tolya. They were good people. Of course they weren't my real aunt and uncle, but that's how you addressed adults back then. In everyday life you didn't call people by name and patronymic, it wasn't proletarian to play those tricks. The first to come into the kitchen would be uncle Petya, fat and good-hearted as he was. There was a wood-burning cooker in the kitchen and a separate gas cooker. Uncle Petya would be wearing his poison-green underwear, regardless of whether anyone else was in the kitchen. He'd light the gas cooker and stand close to it, warming his bottom. That was his obligatory ritual before