Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [308]
A weakness gripped his whole body—his hips, his shoulders; his arms had grown weak too, and the tumor seemed to wrench his head sideways. “Why did you tell me that?” he moaned in a miserable, feeble voice. “Haven’t I had enough misfortune?” And twice his head and chest shuddered with tearless sobs . . .
“What right have they to let these people out now? Have they no pity? How dare they cause such traumas!”41
Feelings of guilt could be unbearable. After Khrushchev’s secret speech, Aleksandr Fadeev, a committed Stalinist and much-feared literary bureaucrat, went on an alcoholic binge. While drunk, he confessed to a friend that as head of the Writers’ Union, he had sanctioned the arrests of many writers he knew to be innocent. Fadeev killed himself the following day. He allegedly left a one-sentence suicide letter, addressed to the Central Committee: “The bullet fired was meant for Stalin’s policies, for Zhdanov’s aesthetics, for Lysenko’s genetics.”42
Others went mad. Olga Mishakova, an employee of the Komsomol, had denounced the youth organization’s leader, Kosarev. After 1956, Kosarev was rehabilitated, and the Komsomol Central Committee expelled Mishakova. Nevertheless, for a year afterward, she continued to come to the Komsomol building, to sit all day in her empty office, even to take a break for lunch. After the Komsomol confiscated her pass, she kept coming, standing by the entrance during her old office hours. When her husband was transferred to a job in Ryazan, she still got on the Moscow train every morning at four o’clock, and spent the day in front of her former office, returning in the evening. She was eventually placed in a mental institution.43
Even when the result was not insanity or suicide, the awkward encounters which plagued Moscow social life, post-1956, could be excruciating. “Two Russias are eyeball to eyeball,” wrote Anna Akhmatova, “those who were in prison, and those who put them there.”44 Many of the country’s leaders, including Khrushchev, personally knew many returnees. According to Antonov-Ovseenko, one such “old friend” turned up on Khrushchev’s doorstep in 1956, and persuaded him to speed up the rehabilitation process.45 Worse were the encounters between former prisoners and the men who had actually been their jailers or interrogators. A pseudonymous memoir published in Roy Medvedev’s underground political journal in 1964 described a man’s encounter with his former interrogator, who begged him for money for a drink: “I gave him everything I had left from my trip, and it was a lot. I gave it to him so that he would leave quickly. I was afraid I wouldn’t hold out. I felt an overpowering desire to let loose my hatred, pent up for so long, against him and his kind.”46
It could also be extremely uncomfortable to meet one’s former friends, now thriving Soviet citizens. Lev Razgon encountered a close friend in 1968, more than a decade after his return: “He met me . . . as though we had only parted the evening before. He expressed his condolences, of course, about Oksana’s death, and asked after Yelena. But all of this was conveyed in a rapid, business-like way . . . and that was that.”47 Yuri Dombrovsky put his feelings about a friend who offered his condolences too late into verse, in a poem entitled “To a Famous Poet”:
Even our children didn’t feel sorry for us Even our wives didn’t want us Only a sentry shot at us, skillfully Using our numbers as targets . . .
You were just drifting in restaurants And scattering jokes over glasses, You understood everything and welcomed