Sergei Ivanov
Long ago, in Krushchev's time, there was a joke. A drunk gets hauled in by the cops. He doesn't have any documents on him.
"Who are you?"
The drunk answers:
"I am the husband of Yekaterina Furtseva, member of the Politburo of the Communist Party Central Committee."
"Very good. And what's your name?"
"I'm Furtseva's husband!"
"Where do you work?"
"I'm Furtseva's husband!"
"Your address?"
"I'm Furtseva's husband!"
Finally, driven to desperation, the policeman shouts:
"Fine! But now, tell me, what do you do during the day?"
This story has a particular poignancy for me. Since until recently I was the husband of a member of staff of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (RCP).
But first, you have to understand, I love my wife and I respect her. Or at least her soul has several qualities which are very dear to me. For example, she genuinely suffers on seeing homeless animals. And these poor things, embittered and battered, so cruelly treated by people, sense this in her and come up to her fearing nothing. A stray cat, in miserable circumstances, once leapt straight up into her arms. And that was that. She now lives happily, together with her two sons, at home with us. The cat's name is Katya.
And my wife's name is Irina.
She is a talented television journalist. Talented in the real, not the Soviet sense of the word. But enough of this lavish praise. She is not perfect. And one particular deficiency, particularly in this country, is her penchant for arguing. Moreover, more than anything, she loves to argue with her bosses. And bosses here don't like that sort of thing. As a result, in 1989 my wife was 'promoted' out of her office at Central Television into what was called the 'Higher Party School', one suspects to be taught some manners. Once upon a time those who entered the 'Higher Party School' graduated exclusively into the ranks of leading administrators or Party apparatchiks. But by 1989 the throne under the CPSU was definitely wobbling, and being sent to the HPS was nothing short of exile.
However, one has to say that Irina looked forward almost with pleasure to going back to school. Ten years at Central Television with its ideological purity and cruelty had tired her. And after ten years she was also finally tired of endlessly quarrelling with her bosses. Moreover, as it quickly became clear, one could get away with going to classes at the Higher Party School once, at most twice a week (while she retained her full television pay). The exams were a joke and more importantly, given the almost complete absence of any kind of food in the shops, the canteen was pretty well stocked and she could buy stuff to take home. In other words, things were looking good.
So, our relatively ideologically conformist family lived in relative peace for the next two years, up until the spring of 1991, when Irina sat her final exams and graduated as a political scientist.
They weren't anxious to see her back at Central Television. Nor was I for that matter. I said to her: "Stay home. We'll just sit around and eat and drink." At the time I was making a packet out of writing, so to say "sit around and eat and drink" was meant literally, not as some kind of cruel Soviet joke.
Then suddenly she received an unexpected invitation to go and work for the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. Naturally people don't just get invited out of the blue to places like this. The truth of it was that several of Irina's friends who had ridden the wave of Gorbachev's rise to the heights of the government and Party were in a position to intercede for a decent person and a capable journalist. Irina was asked to organise and then sit on the board of what was to be Russian Communist Party Television (RCP TV). For a person as honest and sincere as my wife, to refuse an offer of this order would have been difficult.
But for the same reason, neither was it easy to accept! Right from the outset Ivan Polozkov's party, which had only been organised as some sort of ideological rearguard action by the conservatives in the wake of Yeltsin's relentless drive for power, had compromised itself. Firstly with ill conceived and then with simply stupid declarations and actions. General Secretary Polozkov himself seemed to have his foot permanently in his mouth. But in private Irina was assured that Polozkov was not the whole party, and that his 'leadership' could not last for ever. As a result, Irina started work as a consultant in the RCP apparatus.
Incidentally, what does it mean to be a 'consultant' to the Central Committee? The hierarchy of power looks more or less like this: General Secretary, member of the Politburo, secretaries of the Central Committee, heads of administration, deputy heads, consultants, researchers. After this one moves into the technical sector, the people that keep the apparatus greased, oiled and running smoothly. On this grandiose and sweeping staircase, Irina stood more or less as the senior assistant to the junior janitor, in the slang which was de rigeur amongst her fellow workers. (One has to remember here that only a few years ago a single word from the junior janitor's senior assistant was enough to bring beads of sweat to the foreheads of all the editors of the countries main newspapers and heads of television.)
Nevertheless, things do change, or at least appear to. And nowhere have these appearances been more evident in our country than in the roller coaster years of Gorbachev's leadership. Characteristic in this respect was Irina's conversation with Ivan Polozkov the day she became a senior party apparatchik. Polozkov asked:
"But aren't you afraid of working for us?"
To which Irina replied:
"I'm only afraid of mice."
I have to admit, the directness yet diplomacy of her answer warmed my heart. But what is more interesting here is the question itself of the party's number one honcho: "Aren't you afraid of working for us?" Again, only a few years ago, to work in the Central Committee apparatus, well, it meant to have God by the balls! But Irina had no god, and these days the party had no balls. By now, even an idiot could see this.
Only a few days went by with her at her new job before I began to notice that my wife's mood was turning sour. It turned out that there was nothing for her to do! The whole thing about RCP TV was a joke. Irina didn't have even the most basic equipment to work with, nor the means of acquiring it. To add insult to injury, there wasn't even a television set in her office. A couple of times she set her jaw, marched into her new bosses and explained, demanded, begged... They looked on her intrusion as some sort of plot, as though she had gone mad.
"Wait!" they told her. "The Party doesn't have the means yet."
***
"What did you do today?" I would ask her in the evening.
"Read the papers!"
Sometimes she snapped: "I read a novel!"
On the one hand it had the quality of a bad dream, that my wife was wasting her talents for some Polozkov. On the other hand it was offensive that a talented person was sitting there twiddling her thumbs.
"Well, what do your bosses and the other workers do?"
"The same thing."
"Which is?"
"That's right, nothing!"
At first it didn't sink in, then when it did, the thought wouldn't leave me alone. One day I made a detour on my way home and walked past the enormous Central Committee building just to soak it all in, and I was suddenly struck with horror by the thought that hundreds, if not thousands of intelligent, specially trained people were sitting in there with nothing to do for days on end!
Then the sense of all this senselessness finally dawned on me. The seventy-three years of the existence of the Party apparatus had a single purpose. To make sure that nobody, for whatever reason, ever encroached on, criticised or besmirched Marxist ideology. They vigilantly x-rayed the people, dissected them, labelled them and categorised them. Their single task was to prepare to repulse even the slightest attack with a battery of ideological articles, books, translations and Party, Komsomol and Pioneer meetings. Their tentacles spread to every nook and cranny of our public lives and with their steely fingered grip on the education system, they cultivated nature and tended the growth of an ideological changing of the guard. That is they bashed in the heads of our children with an ideological sledge-hammer. For them nothing could exist outside of ideology. Not physics, not music, not even bee-keeping. I suppose you think I am exaggerating? On the contrary, I am understating the case. I simply don't have the time, or the space, or the desire, or, most importantly, I don't wish to bore you by recounting the whole of this strictly and logically organised nightmare.
But somewhere about the middle of winter 1990/91, the Party apparatus simply ceased being the 'leading and guiding force of Soviet society'. The people simply got sick of it and stopped listening, reading and watching. Suddenly the Party was no longer there. Even the people who had kept one ear cocked for any new development in Gorbachev's games also turned their heads away. In effect it meant that nobody paid the Party apparatus any more attention whatsoever, if for no other reason than the simple fact that the Party had lost the will to punish the people, while the people had lost their fear of the whip.
As I understand it now, the whole idea of RCP TV had been no more than the result of inertia. The machine had had to grind it out as an idea, elaborate it as a concept, fix it on paper for discussion, etc., simply because the machine exists, no more no less than that. But in this tale the role of chief engineer of this new component of the machine - a component which had to exist, even if it didn't exist, and therefore required all the care and attention that any new component of a machine needs while it is being run in - had fallen to my poor Irina. It fell to her to somehow deal with her spanking new part of the machine while everyone else around ignored her, since in one way or another the machine was consuming all of their time too, even if it only meant that they sat twiddling their thumbs and reading the newspaper, occasionally checking an imaginary dial here, adjusting a presumed lever there, while it went about its work.
It was then that she first decided to quit. She marched into her bosses.
They blinked, then said: "One does not resign from the Central Committee! Remember that!" And they doubled her pay.
One day Irina invited me out to dinner.
"Where?" This was new to me.
"Our canteen."
This invitation was curious enough. I agreed.
Irina ordered a single entry pass, a simple card the size of a business card, bordered in red and embroidered with the single word 'visitor'. And there we were, standing before a solid, even grand looking building, with a stone staircase which wasn't crumbling while the brass hand-rail was even polished. Anyone who has spent any time in Moscow knows what a rarity a building of this quality and character is these days. Once inside, I almost felt hemmed in by the cleanliness, the sensitivity to space, the luxurious comfort of it all. We were given enormous menus. And being a pleb, I of course chose the most expensive things I could find, again simply out of curiosity. I have no idea how much this might have cost in, say, New York, but in the Central Committee canteen it came to the princely sum of four roubles twenty-two kopecks. Given that on the day of the dinner, one US dollar was worth a little over thirty roubles, it meant I paid about thirteen cents for my dinner. And this was already after Finance Minister (nowadays ex-Prime Minister) Pavlov had almost doubled the prices on state goods and services such as these. As we used to joke, why should the apparatchiks bother finish building communism when they already had it so good while they were building it.
***
In the end Irina resolved to resign from the Party after the upcoming elections for the Russian Presidency which were to be held in June. But not before. Because of the election campaign, she had finally been given some work commensurate with her abilities and talents and she was excited by the prospects of it. She had been entrusted with creating and maintaining Nikolai Ryzhkov's television image for the duration of the campaign - a difficult and challenging task given that Ryzhkov's popularity rating had been zilch ever since his announcement of price rises the previous August. This had set off a wave of panic buying that in the end completely destroyed the already tottering distribution mechanism which meant that whereas nothing had been available in the shops before, since then people had had to make do with less than nothing.
Moreover, it was common knowledge that the Russian Communist Party was bankrolling all of the candidates, except of course Yeltsin. It was obviously an immoral position the RCP had taken. Though Irina and I did argue about this, in principle she agreed with me. After all they were wittingly supporting candidates who were avowed fascists, as the case was with Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, or the laughing stock of the country as the case was with her own dear Nikolai Ryzhkov.
My wife is a single-minded person. And her mind is her own. She doesn't easily don the role of somebody's servant (she was born a Leo), but when she does, she fights tooth and nail for her lord and liege. Irina went about her near impossible task with the determination of the damned, organising suitably flattering photo opportunities, arranging for fawning articles to appear in selected journals and producing a video dedicated to his caring presence and gentle smile, a true man of the people.
The RCP meanwhile, which was still less than a year old, was coming apart at the seams. Naturally Irina could not but be aware of this. The senior apparatchiks were making emotionally charged and morally invigorating speeches left, right and centre. At the same time they were buying up Party dachas and cars, etc., all on the cheap and all with tax-payers' money. It was this doubling, tripling, even quadrupling of standards which finally allowed Irina to consider breaking with the Party with a clean conscience and without feeling that she too had failed by not following through on her job. However, she was proud. And she didn't want to be seen as a rat abandoning a sinking ship. Trying to explain to her that the RCP was more like a rotting hulk full of convicts than a sinking ship had no effect.
In the end, though, she stopped vacillating and made up her mind to quit. To protect herself from any possible recriminations, the strategy she decided on was the following: Irina would take her holidays which were due. While on holiday she would tender her resignation. This is the standard method of disappearing from work in the Soviet Union without drawing attention to oneself: "Oh, Irina? I think she's on holidays, I'm not sure when she'll be back." Or simply: "Irina? She's on holidays." After a while they forget. Only then would Irina venture in to work and formalise what was already a fait accompli.
***
August the 16th was her last day at work. We spent the 17th and 18th grinding ourselves into nervous exhaustion rushing about the shops as the 19th was her birthday. We had to buy food and drink for the party. And if as a family of three, not counting Katya the cat and her two sons, we were managing on Irina's and my incomes, buying enough food and drink for fifteen people was quite another matter. We haggled and shouted and stood in queues and lost our tempers, first with shop assistants and then with each other, then made up. (If you think getting divorced over not being able to buy sausage and cheese is a joke, try living in the Soviet Union for a while!). Then Irina finally broke down and began sobbing and we stood there in the dust on the sidewalk with empty shopping bags and realised that there was going to be no birthday party and made our way home. We rang our friends and apologised and on the evening of August the 18th set off for our dacha. It was bequeathed to us by my dead parents. And though it is not far from Moscow, it is far enough out for one to forget the burdens of life in the city. Our dacha is in an out of the way village with the sort of name one would expect, 'Ilyich's Testament', as in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
***
Nevertheless we did have a birthday after all. Only it wasn't the one we had expected. It was the birthday of the Junta!
Irina and our daughter stayed at the dacha. I dashed to Moscow. I'm not going to write here about tanks or APCs or barricades or demonstrations. As a pacifist, all I experienced was a deep sense of dread when I realised what was going on in the streets of my beloved city.
The only opposition I would allow myself to contemplate was forbidding Irina to ever go to work at the Central Committee again, holidays or no holidays, resignation or not.
But on the other hand I found it absolutely beyond myself to force her to go to Moscow and brave the tanks, to actually tender her resignation and thus end the whole filthy affair. We were in a catch-22. She could not go to work to resign. She could not stop going to work without resigning. Moreover, alongside my dread was an equally deep conviction that the Junta held power in a vice-like grip.
Then events shifted so swiftly and so decisively in the other direction that all of a sudden it was no longer necessary for Irina to either hand in her resignation, or even turn up at work at all. The RCP had simply ceased to exist. As a result my wife never lost her cherished name as an orthodox and true Communist. In the sense that her comrades had long ago when they compromised themselves with their dirty deals but nevertheless clung like leeches to the carcass they had already long ago sucked dry of any blood and life.
As soon as the coup collapsed, the doors of the Central Committee building were sealed shut. The entrance was roped off while two six-foot policemen with expressions the likes of which I had never seen before, took up positions on either side of the broken name plaque to the right of the door. I wanted to cross this new and somehow exciting barrier:
"I just want a couple of pieces of the sign."
This new type of policeman cocked his head: "Why?"
"Souvenir."
The policeman shrugged and kicked in my direction a couple of pieces of dark red glass with scratched gold lettering. That evening I took them home to Irina. She burst out crying.
During the coup, had my wife, married to the Party in a sense, supported Kryuchkov and his cronies? In one sense, no. But she did say: "Nothing could be worse than Yeltsin, so this must be better." Which was the line the whole of the RCP had taken since its formation. Thus Irina was not on the side of the democrats. She remained loyal to her own dear Russian Communist Party, despite the fact that she never stopped, and never thought to stop arguing with her bosses and criticising the party. The logic of a lowly servant; no responsibilities and hence no fears.
The only real crisis we had because of our different positions was on August the 20th when Kalinin, appointed military commander of Moscow by the State Emergency Committee, ordered that a curfew be introduced. I was plunged into a reverie of dread, thinking that this was the end. Next there would be shooting and the streets would be running with blood.
"And a good thing too!" snapped Irina, jerking me out of my reverie. I had been thinking out loud. "They'll sort things out!"
"Shut up!" I shouted at her, losing my temper. "Just shut up!"
We stood in stunned silence. Seven year old Tanya was watching me in horror from the embrace of her mother. In the background the announcer on the TV droned on about the program being laid out by the Emergency Committee for the revival of the country.
Irina and I were clearly on very different sides of the barricades at the White House. But as best we could we sought to dismantle the barricades being erected in our family.
With the collapse of the coup, the end of August saw our Soviet 'thermidor', the settling of accounts. Wicked days! Though one could console oneself that at least now the activists of this debauchery of 'progressive forces' were getting their just desserts.
Nevertheless, I was afraid for my wife, who in essence was guilty of nothing. You could not turn the TV or radio on without hearing some call for the death penalty: "Shoot them!". "Hang them from the lamp-posts!" I don't know whether Irina was afraid for herself. But it was obvious that she was suffering. She remained closed in on herself, smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. She kept the television on in the kitchen, all day long watching the proceedings of the public trial of the Communist Party going on at the Congress of Deputies. And all the time she was cooking the most extravagant and time consuming meals imaginable, which given the near absence of food in Moscow to begin with, meant she was dooming herself to the labours of Sisyphus. Her determination had taken another turn, I could see that no matter what evils it was convicted of, she would continue to believe in her damn party!
And perhaps you will think I am weak at the knees. But while she was suffering, the only salve I could offer was to suffer along with her and I started to believe in her damn party too. Perhaps it would have been better to smash the thing to bits, burn it and scatter its ashes to the four winds. But I didn't have the stomach for the fight, nor was I interested in seeing more blood spilt than already had been. And I was convinced then, and remain convinced now, that the vast majority of my fellow citizens think exactly the same way.
The Central Committee building was sealed on August the 24th. On the 29th, Irina received a telephone call and was told that she could remove her personal belongings from her office. Her boots, an umbrella and some other odds and ends were there. I begged her not to go. But of course she went.
She had been ordered to be there at half past three. Tanya and I sat at home waiting. Irina wasn't home at five, nor had she appeared by six. It wasn't more than twenty minutes from our flat to Old Square where the building is, even on the slowest tram. It was already six thirty. By now both Tanya and I had fallen silent and were simply watching the door and clock fearfully. The clock hands dragged themselves around the face going slower and slower. Then finally the door creaked open. It was half past seven!
She flounced in savage, energetic, revived by her Pyrrhic victory. As it turned out, the staff who had been ordered in on that day, about two hundred in all, gathered in front of the sealed doors at the appointed time. Secretaries, bosses, legal experts - the whole hierarchy of command collapsed into one sweating and milling herd, fretting and pawing at the pavement in their collective anxiety. They waited more than an hour before finally being allowed to enter the building, but even then only in small groups. The rest waited outside in the drizzle. At the rate things were going the last would not be allowed in before the following morning. The sullen mumbling and grumbling of the former leading cadres of the land abruptly turned into a general cry that this was a democratic country. Standing around and getting soaked had not cowed them. Quite the opposite. The chill had snapped them out of their melancholy, cleared their minds, and reminded them of who they were. The old rhetoric came flooding back: "You have no right under the law to be doing this! Where are your documents?"
Meanwhile access to and from the building was not being controlled by the police skulking to one side. Rather, it was a group of rag-tag volunteers, newly empowered by their victory over the Emergency Committee, but not exactly sure of how to behave themselves in front of their former lords and masters. Finally they caved in. Someone was delegated to make a phone call to some anonymous entity in the White House. The caller came back crestfallen, announcing: "Ok, you can all go in, but make sure you only go to your own room!"
"How long were you in your office?" I asked Irina.
"About an hour."
"It took you an hour to get your boots and umbrella?"
"I was destroying documents!"
"Jesus! What documents? The newspapers you were reading? The novels?"
"Everything that was on my desk!"
"What did you do?"
"Ripped everything up and flushed it down the toilet."
I was given to understand that it wasn't only Irina who had done this. Why did they, and by 'they' I mean our leaders in the White House, not the pathetic mob policing access to the building that day, allow them to do it? I don't really want to know, but I suspect that our democrats, most of whom were apparatchiks yesterday anyway, weren't averse to turning a blind eye to what was going on. After all, they had undoubtedly done a fair bit of destruction of their own papers when they shed their former skins. Perhaps there is an empathy here. Something ordinary people still haven't sensed.
Irina did actually have one rather incriminating piece of evidence on her desk. It was that video she had been commissioned to make extolling the ethical and practical qualities of Nikolai Ryzhkov. Forgetting about its theme for a moment, it was actually a very nice piece of work. My wife had brought the damn thing home with her.
"Why, for heavens sake, didn't you just chuck it away?"
Simple, as she explained. The credits listed all the people who had helped Irina make the film. And with all the cleaning of dirty laundry that was going on in the first few days after the collapse of the coup, it would have been no exaggeration to assume that these people too might be put through the wringer were the video to fall into the wrong hands.
On leaving the Central Committee building, all of the former apparatchiks were searched. The illegality of this action is beyond doubt. These people were hardly members of the State Emergency Committee. Nor were the people regulating their movement into and out of the building legally entitled representatives of the new authorities. But who are we to be splitting hairs? Mao Zedong said power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Here, the gun had simply changed hands.
"Hey, darling!" enthused Irina to the kid standing by the exit on her way out. "Where can I take my dress off?"
"What?!"
"But I thought you wanted to have a look at me."
"Get going..."
And she waltzed by, swinging her handbag, video and all. The next day we took the film out to the dacha, doused it with petrol and burned it to a stinking plastic blob.
***
My wife was brought up in a family which had never believed in God. Where God had never even existed. Where no one even used the word, it meant nothing to them. Hers was a typical Soviet family. It's horrible to contemplate but I suspect that whereas from time immemorial most people have been born with souls, my wife was born with a... hammer and sickle.
I don't want to be misunderstood. The family had suffered at the hands of Stalin. None of her family before her had ever been Party members. And she had joined simply out of her father's profound belief, and she loved her father deeply, that a party ticket would spare his daughter unnecessary suffering.
It would be wrong to say that she revered her 'native party and government'. But she did consider anything Soviet as something somehow eternal, primordially Russian. When I handed her the shards of broken glass from the sign on the Central Committee building, I was handing her the remnants of an icon.
Half of our people, or more likely, two-thirds, even three-quarters, consist of Irinas. Perhaps most of them are not as faithful as she was, but all of them are servants of the same bastard Tsar.
Tsars are slippery fish. Most of the time they manage to get away. But servants are minnows. They always get taken - hook, line and sinker. It's their lot, they lie there gasping for breath. Till they get put out of their misery - slit open, gutted and left to die.
Sergei Ivanov