Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle. My Life as a Dissenter. April 1961
At that time, our samizdat culture was only just coming into existence. No one was thinking of awarding it Nobel Prizes. I myself have accidentally blundered across it in the darkness, saw in it the only possibility of living, the only alternative.
In the summer of 1958 a statue of Maiakovskii was unveiled. At the official opening ceremony, some official Soviet poets read their poems, and when the ceremony was over, volunteers from the crowd started reading theirs as well. Such an unexpected and unplanned turn of events pleased everybody, and it was agreed that the poets would meet here regularly. At first, the authorities saw no particular danger in this, and one Moscow paper even published an article about the gatherings, giving the time when they took place and inviting all poetry lovers to come along. Young people, mainly students, assembled almost every evening to read the poems of forgotten or repressed writers, and also their own work, and sometimes there were discussions of art and literature. A kind of open-air club came into being. But the authorities could not tolerate the danger of these spontaneous performances for long and eventually stopped the gatherings.
I hadn’t gone to Maiakovskii Square at the time and knew of these readings only by hearsay. But now, after the whole business of the magazine, I regretted that I hadn’t. I could have found kindred spirits, and together it would have been easier for us to defend ourselves and our right to originality. That humiliating sense of being unfree, that sense of outrage I had experienced when outsiders attempted to dispose of my life, had cut me to the quick and I was eager to fight back as energetically as I could. In September 1960, therefore, after entering the university, a friend who lived near the square and another in drama school and I agreed to start up the readings once more. Soon they were again taking place regularly and attracting an enormous number of people. We swiftly got to know the “veterans” from the earlier readings and were overjoyed to discover that they were feverishly active on other projects too. Apart from disseminating the works of poets who had long been banned they were also collecting and distributing their own poetry in samizdat. Their friend Aleksandr Ginzburg had just been arrested for bringing out three numbers of a poetry magazine called Syntax, but they were planning to bring out some new verse collections-Phoenix 1961, Boomerang, Cocktail-and others with similarly whimsical titles.
They also made a point of attending official Soviet lectures and discussions, where they would speak up, ask questions, and start genuine arguments on real issues. Since the original readings they had got to know an enormously large circle of widely differing people: scholars, writers, artists. My own circle of acquaintances grew with startling speed. As for the readings themselves, they attracted all that was best and most original in Russia. This was exactly what I had been looking for all along.
About a hundred years ago, young people devoured socialist pamphlets and discussed socialist utopias; whoever hadn’t read Fourier or Proudhon was considered an ignoramus. The password with us was to know the poetry of Gumilev, Pasternak, and Mandelshtam; and whereas the tsarist detectives had had to study socialist treatises in order to infiltrate the youth of that time, our KGB agents were obliged to become devotees of poetry. When freedom of creation and the problems of art and literature had become central to society, the biggest revolutionaries turned out to be the nonconformist artist and “formalist” poets. This wasn’t because we wanted it so. It was because the authorities denied all freedom of creation and insisted on ramming socialist realism down everybody’s throats. The resulting situation was paradoxical: in the West many of the avant-garde were Communists, while in our Communist country the avant-garde were regarded as outlaws.
Our crowd was immensely heterogeneous. Some were interested only- in pure art, and they fought ferociously for its right to be pure. Throughout the ages such purists have been regarded as totally apolitical, yet these views now put them in the very forefront of the political battle in Russia. There were those like myself for whom the right of art to be independent was one point of opposition to the regime, and we were here precisely because art happened to be at the center of political passions. There were those like the author of lines that I can still remember from that time:
No, not for us can it be to spray bullets At the green-columned marching throng! For that we are too much poets And our enemy is too strong.
No, not in us will the Vendee reawaken At the decisive reverberant hour! Ideas must remain our token, The cudgel can never be ours.
No, not for us can it be to spray bullets! But to mark the significant dates The epoch created poets, And they the soldiers create.
Among the people circulating in Maiakovskii Square at that time were a lot of neo-Marxists and neo-Communists of various kinds, but they no longer counted. That tendency was dying out and receding into the past. It had appeared in the 1950s as a natural reaction to Stalin’s tyranny: taking the classics of Marxism-Leninism as their starting point and making their appeal to them, people endeavored to force the authorities to observe their own wonderful principles. But the authorities had long since ceased to take note of the prophets displayed on the party facade and were guided by considerations of their own self-interest. Meanwhile, the more people tried to elucidate these unshakable Marxist principles, the more they became convinced that they didn’t exist, whereas what did exist led inexorably to Stalin.
Later, others camouflaged themselves with Marxism for demagogic purposes, believing it was both more convenient and safer to criticize the regime from that point of view-to belabor the regime, so to speak, with the collected works of its own beloved Lenin. But since most people even remotely able to think for themselves went much further in their political development, these voices began to sound out of tune. The popularity of Lenin and the rest had fallen so low that this kind of criticism began to sound more like a compliment than an indictment.
It strikes me that many people in the West overlooked this point and too often thought of the movement for human rights in the USSR as one more variety of neo-Marxism. This is because the few people in the movement who managed to retain a sincere faith in socialism with a human face were united with everyone else in their protest actions and their practical activities. But all of us were fighting for the human face, and most of us had had more than enough of socialism.
We were fighting for the concrete freedom to create, and it was no accident that many of us-people like Iurii Galanskov, Viktor Khaustov, Vladimir Osipov, and Eduard Kuznetsov-later merged with the movement for human rights. We all got to know one another in Maiakovskii Square.
The poetry reading right there on the square, in the center of Moscow, created an extraordinary atmosphere. Hundreds came to the readings, which were usually held in the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays. Many of the readers were excellent professional actors and others were first-class original poets: Anatolii Shchukin, Kovshin, Mikhail Kaplan, Victor Kluging, Aleksandrovskii, Shukht, and so on.
One of the works most often read in the square was Iurii Galanskov’s Manifesto of Man.
It was read both by the author and by some of the actors. To this day I cannot say whether it is a good poem or not, and I’m in no position to judge-it is too intimately bound up with my whole recollection of those times. We perceived the Manifesto of Man as a symphony of rebellion, as a summons to resistance.
I’ll go out on the square
and into the city’s ear
I’ll hammer a cry of despair …
used to ring out over Maiakovskii Square like words just discovered that very moment. Iurii’s poem expressed exactly what we felt and what we lived by:
This is me,
calling to truth and revolt,
willing no more to serve,
I break your black tethers
woven of lies.
Like him we felt that out of this despair and this rebellion, a free and independent personality could be reborn and grow.
I didn’t want your bread
kneaded with tears.
And I’m falling and soaring,
half-delirious,
half-asleep …
And I feel
man
blooming in me.
And indeed, this was a manifesto of man, and not some narrowly political manifesto.
Just imagine. It was being recited in the heart of Moscow, in the open air, in that same Moscow where seven to eight years before you would have had ten years stuck on you for even whispering these selfsame words.
Deprived of their former freedom of action and maddened still more as a result, the authorities did not intend to tolerate such liberties. Almost from the beginning they organized provocations, detained the readers, noted their names, and informed their faculties, since the majority were students. The faculties then took their own measures, which consisted basically of expulsion. Formally speaking, the punitive measures taken against us were determined by the City Committee of the Komsomol and the Komsomol’s operational staff, but in fact it was the KGB. From time to time some of the fellows were searched and had collections of poetry and other samizdat material confiscated. KGB plainclothesmen would provoke fights in the square, or attempt to disperse us, or keep us away from the statue at the appointed time by cordoning it off. But none of that could stop us, and in any case the crowd was always on our side.
Simultaneously the Party press started a slander campaign against us. Their favorite argument was that we were all parasites, good-for-nothings who didn’t work. (The latter accusation was sometimes formally true in that, on the orders of the KGB, some of us had been chased out of the university and were also prevented from getting jobs.) But the vilification was good publicity for us, and more and more people found themselves drawn to the readings in Maiakovskii Square.
In April 1961 Iurii Gagarin’s space flight had just taken place, and the day had been proclaimed a holiday. Crowds of tipsy people filled the Moscow streets to overflowing. It so happened that we had arranged a reading for that day to mark the anniversary of Maiakovskii’s suicide. At the appointed hour the square was absolutely packed. Many strollers joined us, simply because they saw a crowd and wanted to know what was going on. We ourselves were uncertain as to whether we should postpone the reading or not, but, in the event, we decided to go ahead. The atmosphere was tense in the extreme and plainclothesmen were ready to pounce at any moment. At last, when Anatolii Shchukin started reading, they let out a howl and made a dash through the crowd in the direction of the statue.
We usually formed a ring around the readers in order to foil any provocations, though we could always rely on the audience to take our side. And we had done that this time as well. But the plainclothesmen were itching for trouble and the crowd was full of bystanders, some of them drunk. A gigantic fistfight broke out. Many people had no idea who was fighting whom and joined in just for the fun of it. In the twinkling of an eye the entire square was in an uproar: people were either fighting already or elbowing their way through the crowd to join in. The police were generally unpopular anyhow, and on this occasion their appearance provoked a great deal of anger; at one point I feared that the crowd would overturn the police car and kick it to pieces. But somehow or other the police succeeded in bundling Shchukin and Osipov into a car and extricated it from the crowd. Shchukin got fifteen days “for reading anti-Soviet verses” and Osipov ten days “for disturbing the peace and using obscene language.” (This last was especially silly since Osipov was known to dislike obscene language.)
This episode alone indicates what an extraordinary time it was. The uncertainty and instability of the leadership and Khrushchev’s fear of making a bad impression in the West stayed the avenging hand of the security organs. Also, the absolute openness and legality of our activities nonplussed the KGB-they kept trying to discover the illegal organization “standing behind us.” They didn’t make any arrests, however, evidently fearing to “frighten off” the mythical organizers.
I knew all these details very well at the time, thanks to my old contacts from the conspiratorial organization, many of whom now worked for the Komsomol City Committee and even the Komsomol Executive, which was officially responsible for breaking up the poetry readings and which worked in close cooperation with the KGB. Generally speaking, we had a lot of sympathizers among the Komsomol officials at that time, and I would get fairly accurate information about impending moves against us and was able to warn the others.
We were constantly being raided, and were sometimes detained for several hours. Often, when they detained one of us, the plainclothesmen would turn us in to a police station and give fictitious evidence of bad behavior. Sometimes the police punished us, but more often they simply let us go–their interdepartmental hatred for these self-appointed police officers from the KGB never abated.
That spring of 1961 1 tried to get my friends among the Komsomol officials to help me establish an official club under the aegis of one of the Komsomol district committees. They willingly gave us the club but at the same time tried to introduce certain limitations and control. Our club’s first venture-an exhibition of nonconformist artists-was banned, and the club closed before it could properly open.
I was also summoned to the KGB for questioning. Up till then I had attracted no particular attention, since I never took part in the readings myself and my function was purely organizational. Besides arranging the actual readings, I worked at securing the safe departure of the readers from the square. While the reading was going on, of course, the crowd was their protection, but as the evening drew to a close you had to lead the readers, one at a time, through the crowd and see them home or to a safe place, unnoticed by the plainclothesmen. Sometimes they had to be given a change of clothes or at least a different hat, or hustled into a car, or some ruse had to be thought up to distract the plainclothesmen in some way. On each occasion it called for a great deal of resourcefulness. The crowd continued to stand around until there was no one left to read, at which point it dispersed. Then came the hardest bit of all we too had to disappear. Sometimes the KGB’s pursuit of us turned into a straightforward chase; we would hardly have been able to get away if I hadn’t grown up in those parts and not known every connecting ‘yard in the neighborhood.
Although I had been detained several times in the past, only now, after my venture with the club, and particularly after our refusal to go on with it, did the KGB take an interest in me. And it was somewhat suspicious that without ever having been a member of it, I had such extensive contacts With the Komsomol leadership and could spend days and nights in the offices of the District Committee (where we had been hoping to start the club) attending practically all the meetings. There was also something odd about the whole business of the club: the initiative had been approved by the city and district committees of the Komsomol, we had brought in a mass of paintings of “undesirable tendencies,” and although the exhibition was promptly banned as an ideological diversion, we had nonetheless succeeded in showing them unofficially for a couple of days. Elsewhere we had been planning to set up a printing shop for the publication of poetry, but wind of that reached the KGB. As a result, I was twice hauled in for questioning.
No case had been started against me and therefore I would have been within my legal rights not to talk to them at all. Unfortunately, all my training for this eventuality had been psychological, not juridical, and I hadn’t the faintest idea of my legal rights. Instead of simply refusing to talk I wriggled and squirmed, made myself out to be a Soviet patriot, and even wrote out a statement congratulating myself on having pulled the wool over their eyes. Without naming or incriminating anyone else, I created a completely false impression of myself. Evidently they decided that I was a yielding, pliable sort of fellow-the worst thing that can happen when dealing with the KGB. Only much later did I realize how much harm I had done myself.
Meanwhile events accelerated. That autumn of 1961 1 was kicked out of Moscow University. As a matter of fact, soon after I had gone there and the moment it had been discovered that I was supposed not to be there, the authorities had started looking for ways to expel me. Formally, my position was entirely in order and there was nothing for them to seize on. There were no written instructions saying that I was to be excluded. But, as always, the Party acted illegally and underhandedly, resorting to backstairs methods. When the first group of exams came along in the winter of 1960-61, I discovered I was not to be allowed to take them. What was the matter? I asked in surprise. All my tests had been taken and passed at the proper time. “We don’t know,” they replied in the registrar’s office. “There must be some misunderstanding. Come back tomorrow.” But time was running short. I was in danger of missing the closing date for completing the session in time, and if that happened they would have every right to kick me out.
Luckily I still had my student record card with me and hadn’t handed it in at the registrar’s office. Taking advantage of this blunder, I went straight to my tutors and asked them to let me take the examinations without an admission ticket.
I explained that there had been some sort of mix-up in the registrar’s office; that they had omitted to give me a ticket. Both tutors-in chemistry and mathematics, two of my favorite subjects-liked me well enough, and seeing I had my record card with me and had completed all my courses, they agreed to let me take the exams without a ticket, provided I brought them the ticket later. And that is what I did. When the registrar’s office later tried to tell me that I had failed to finish the first session, I had the enormous pleasure of brandishing my exam record card under their noses. There was absolutely nothing they could do, and so I got through my first semester.
Toward the end of the second semester the authorities refined their methods, calculated their moves better, and prevented me from even taking the tests. Sensing that this time I wouldn’t be able to beat them, I gave in and resigned from the university voluntarily, giving poor health as my reason. This gave me the formal right to reapply the following year.
But the following autumn, when I reapplied, they refused me. The Komsomol had opposed my reinstatement, they told me. “I don’t know what’s the matter,” said the registrar, “you’d better go and find out. The official reason for rejecting you is that you don’t conform to the ethos of a Soviet student.”
I caught the secretary of the Komsomol for the entire university in the midst of preparing for some sort of tourist expedition-a routine group exercise. She flew into a rage at my effrontery: “You’ve got some nerve coming here and asking questions! Haven’t you already been told that you’re forbidden to study at the university? Don’t you read the newspapers? There’s no room for people like you here!”
It was true that a campaign had been started to squash the Maiakovskii Square readings and our names had often appeared in the newspapers, where we were virtually called enemies of the people. The conversation was obviously pointless: when I said something about the right to an education, she merely snorted. After that I was invariably referred to in Soviet newspapers as “the student who failed to graduate” and who had been “expelled from the university for failing his exams”–and still am.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t very upset about what had happened. It was clear that the authorities weren’t going to let me study. And life at the university was so dull and featureless that it filled me with disgust. The teaching system was little different from school. Attendance at lectures was compulsory. Many of the subjects we studied were Party disciplines, completely useless to my growing interest in biophysics. There were also military studies, and that damned physical training, which I couldn’t stand. It was like living in a barracks-there were specially appointed prefects to see that you went to the lectures, and if you failed to turn up, they reported you. The students had no rights whatsoever, especially if they came from out of town on scholarships. For these scholarships and for hostel accommodations, complete obedience was demanded. Many students informed on their comrades so as not to lose their position. They had absolutely no means of defending themselves and still don’t. You could be expelled from the university for the least little thing and with no explanation-just go and try to complain afterward to the Minister of Education.
To hell with them all, I decided. Anyway, I have no time for it now, I’ve got better things to do!
Indeed, I really did have better things to do. My informants told me that the readings were due to be completely crushed. Orders had at last come from above to round us up at all costs. News of our doings had begun to filter out to the foreign press, and by October 1961, when the Twenty Second Congress of the Party was due to be held, everything had to be quiet.
In August they had arrested Il’ia Bakstein. He was a very sick man, having spent most of his childhood in hospitals with tuberculosis of the spine. He had never performed in the square or read poems, and the fact that they chose to arrest the most helpless and least fit of us all showed the KGB’s intention to try to use him to build a case against us.
Now, as if let off the leash, the KGB stopped at nothing. Just before we were due to meet again they brought snowplows onto the square and let them loose on the crowd. The plows circled around and around the statue, keeping everyone at bay. We were summoned and threatened with reprisals.
Late one night, after one of our readings, I was on my way home when a car suddenly drew up beside me. A group of young men bundled me inside and drove off with me. We had often been picked up before this and detained for several hours and questioned, so I wasn’t surprised at first. After quite a long time, a half hour or more, we drove into a courtyard where there was a sort of office in a basement. It was curious that nobody was in the basement at all, apart from the people who had brought me here. I was led into a big windowless room with no furniture.
We had barely got inside when the man on my right suddenly punched me in: the face. Almost simultaneously another tried to punch me in the solar plexus and knock me down’ but I was already on my guard and turned away. I swiftly leaped into the comer, pressed my back to the wall, and attempted to guard my face and my solar plexus with my arms.
They beat me for hours. One of them grabbed my hair and pulled my head downward, trying to smash his knee into my face at the same time. Another took this opportunity to punch me in the back as hard as he could, aiming for my kidneys. All I thought of was how to keep myself from going down onto the floor, for then they would have crippled me with their boots. I hardly knew where I was, my head was spinning, and I had difficulty breathing. They stopped for a moment, and one of them leaned over me and stroked my check, smiling voluptuously. Then they started beating me again.
It was four in the morning when they pushed me out into the street. “Don’t ever go to the square again, the next time we’ll kill you,” was all they said.
The last days of the readings were upon us. Bystanders had somehow been sifted out and disappeared, and the groups were dwindling, but this led to an even greater intimacy among the remaining few. It grew harder and harder to organize the readings, and even more complicated than before to get the readers away safely and unnoticed, one at a time. Many of them no longer lived at home, but had gone into hiding with friends. Still, every performance left us with an inexpressible sense of freedom and joy. There was something mystical in this reading of poetry to the nocturnal city, the isolated windows in which lights still burned, and the late-night trolleybuses. Even now, many years later, I feel a special, intimate attachment to the friends who held out to the bitter end in Maiakovskii Square.
On the morning of October 6, 1961, three days before the Twenty-Second Congress was due to open, we were all arrested. I suddenly woke up in bed with the feeling that someone was staring at me. It was true. Captain Nikiforov of the KGB-the one who had interviewed me in the spring -was sitting at the foot of my bed. How he had entered the apartment I do not know. A car was waiting by the front door to take us to the Lubianka, the chief investigation prison and headquarters of the KGB.
Offices, corridors, staircases, and people everywhere, bustling back and forth with papers, folders, briefcases. In one office I was cross-examined, in another threatened, and in another I found not KGB officers at all but kindly father figures and dear friends. I was tempted with jokes and treated to tea. Then there was more shouting and fists banging on desks: “Quit being so obstinate, we know everything!” No beatings. No torture. That, I supposed, was still to come. I was led from one office to another, and everywhere there were crowds of people.
The main things were patience and endurance. What did they know? What did they want?
“Here is a pen and a sheet of paper. Write down all you know.”
Oh yeah, smart-aleck. You won’t get all I know onto one sheet of paper.
Two things gradually emerged from all the wheedling, shouting, and threats. They were interested, first, in what I knew about a planned attempt on Khrushchev’s life and, second, in a document I had composed and discussed with some of the other fellows.
Now it was true that not long before this rumors had circulated to the effect that one of our fellows was planning to assassinate Khrushchev. This would have been a monstrous stupidity, and we were appalled. After lengthy inquiries and investigation we succeeded in establishing that one little group had had a theoretical discussion one evening on the subject of political terror as an instrument of struggle; terror was condemned as both senseless and harmful. The question worrying everybody was: What to do if a new Stalin appeared? Would one be justified in murdering him? The majority concluded that the murder of Stalin would not have led to any changes. The Party would have simply promoted a new one, since there were plenty of candidates. It had long been clear that in our system the fortuitous death of the F hrer would not entail political changes. Rather the reverse-when the time was ripe for such changes, the F hrer would suffer either an enigmatic death or an open execution. The murder of Khrushchev could bring us nothing but a fresh wave of intensified repressions. Despite our hostility to him, even we could see that.
The KGB decided to use this discussion as a pretext for arresting even those of us who weren’t present that evening, and went to great lengths to spread more rumors about the intended assassination. Apparently this made it easier for them to get Party sanction for the arrests and for all the other decisive measures they were taking to liquidate the readings on Maiakovskii Square.
The other point was also incidental and had no criminal content. My Komsomol friends had not understood why we didn’t want to hold the readings under the aegis of the Komsomol, why we didn’t join them and didn’t trust their “inner-Party democracy.” To explain this, and at their request, I had written out a couple of pages of argument: my principal objection was to the Komsomol’s utter dependence on the Party, their red tape, their dictatorial method of leadership, and the rest of the usual Party paraphernalia. If the Komsomol were autonomous and independent, permitted its members to discuss political questions openly, and became a proper social force, then, I argued, we would be able to work with it. My friends in the District Committee typed up these arguments on the committee typewriter and arranged to hold a discussion of them. I for my part presented them to my Maiakovskii Square friends at one of our meetings in Iurii Galanskov’s home. None of us regarded any of this as illegal, and when Eduard Kuznetsov asked me for a copy in order to read it more carefully at home, I willingly gave him one.
Now it turned out that the document had been found during a search of Eddie’s home, and he testified that he had received it from me. Naturally I confirmed his statement without the slightest hesitation. How were Eddie, Galanskov, and 1, not to speak of the others present, to know that the KGB would dignify this unfortunate document with the solemn title of “Theses on the Dissolution of the Komsomol” and pronounce it anti-Soviet? As if we hadn’t discussed dozens of such statements during the preceding months!
The stubbornness of the KGB’s questioning about the circumstances of our meetings and conversations put me on guard, and I didn’t give any more testimony. So as not to name any more names, I didn’t even tell them who had typed the “Theses.” I gave evasive answers about the obvious facts of my acquaintanceship with many of the Maiakovskii Square regulars, blaming my poor memory as an excuse. It turned out that I had been quite well prepared after all.
They kept us at the Lubianka all day. In the evening they returned with us to search our homes. Naturally these same “Theses” were lying in my desk drawer. It had never even occurred to me to hide them. They found nothing else of consequence in my room. They confiscated some poems and my own short stories. The search ended late, at about midnight, but I wasn’t arrested, and I was allowed to remain at home.
My parents were terrified, and the occurrence did little to improve my already complicated relations with my father. I can’t say that we were in open conflict-there was just mutual dislike between us. In his own way he was a very honest man and was devoted to his subject-the fate of the countryside. He had been born and brought up in a village in Tambov Province and had spent all his life writing about rural matters. He actually believed in collective farms and thought the liquidation of the kulaks was justified (perhaps because he had taken part in it himself during his youth). Lenin was his highest authority, and he attributed all the subsequent impoverishment and ruin of his beloved collective farms to Stalin’s influence. But that was not the issue so much as personal factors. He was a generally difficult, despotic sort of person. I had turned out to be not at all the sort of person he would have wished. It is strange how cruelly fate revenged itself on him for this dislike. Right up until his death fourteen years later, even after he left my mother and me, he continued to incur regular reprimands and penalties from the Party for having brought me up “incorrectly.” Eventually he was almost not published anymore, and they started crossing out about half of every article that did get through. He was endlessly summoned hither and yon for discussions, and every time I landed in jail, or Soviet propaganda took it into its head to abuse me in print, he was punished in some way.
On this occasion, however, he unexpectedly displayed dignity and contempt for the KGB. At the very height of their search of the room which I shared with my mother, he suddenly came in and said to the plainclothesmen in a deeply angry and suspicious tone: “I suppose you’ll be rummaging in my room next, will you?”
“No, no, not at all,” fussed the plainclothesmen, and soon made themselves scarce. He slammed the door after them and locked himself in his room again. He was capable of sitting there for a whole week without speaking to anyone, and emerging only rarely to go and eat in the kitchen.
From then on we found ourselves being regularly interrogated by the KGB. All of us who were questioned as witnesses-Galanskov, Khaustov, and about twenty other people-used to meet after the interrogations to discuss the situation and exchange advice on how to answer. In effect, none of us added anything to our evidence of the first day, despite the investigators’ cunning.
It was now that I learned for the first time about a witness’s legal rights. Aleksandr Sergeevich Esenin-Volpin, recently released from the Leningrad Special Mental Hospital, read us a whole lecture on the subject.
He had come to the square one day, listened for a bit, and looked around. At our first meeting he hadn’t impressed me much-he was an eccentric sort of fellow wearing a tattered fur cap, and he spent the whole evening holding forth about the need to respect the law. But his words were of practical help, and now none of us allowed himself to be confused or was tricked into blabbing.
Meanwhile we decided nevertheless to spoil the opening day of their Party Congress. On October 9 the square went into action for the last time-we held readings throughout Moscow, not only by Maiakovskii’s statue but also by Pushkin’s and several others’, and also in front of the Lenin Library. This last was the most important-the others were diversionary maneuvers. That evening, more than a little tight from drinking in the corridors, the Congress delegates began to emerge from the Kremlin gates. Seeing the crowd by the library, they came over, listened to the poems, and applauded, and when an attempt was made to disperse us, they even intervened on our behalf. One of the delegates, well under the weather, drew several of us aside and warmly thanked us, assuring us that we were doing great things and very necessary work. Of course, we immediately complained to these delegates about the way the KGB was harassing us and dispersing our meetings, beating us up, and doing other illegal things. Some of them promised to make representations so that we wouldn’t be touched anymore. But I don’t think they did, since after that the readings were officially banned and anyone who dared continue would have found himself behind bars.
Again the Party press heaped mountains of slanders on us. Of me it was inevitably said that I was “a failed student” and had been “led astray by the good life his father gave him.” The reporter had noticed that my father was a member of the Writers’ Union and made the rest up out of his head. How could he know our true relations? But this had unforeseen consequences: my father began to feel uneasy about his hostility to me and, not without embarrassment, bought me a suit-the first, I think, I had ever had in my life.
The fate of our arrested comrades was decided four months later in the harshest possible way. Il’ia Bakstein, with the curved spine, got five years in the labor camps, and Kuznetsov and Osipov seven years each. Nothing more was said, of course, about that fantastic assassination plan. They were convicted of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in other words for the readings and discussions in Maiakovskii Square, and for the poetry. The Moscow court also attempted to accuse them of creating an anti-Soviet organization, but that charge too was later dropped, since the investigators were unable to invent a plausible organization. My “Theses” had been used to incriminate Eddie and figured in one of the charges against him: “the possession and dissemination of anti-Soviet literature.”
The trial was closed to the public, of course. They didn’t even want to let anyone in to hear the sentences. But our great legal wizard Alik Volpin, a copy of the Criminal Code in his hand, proved to the guards that the pronouncement of a court sentence must always be open to the public.
Alik was the first person we had ever come across to speak seriously of Soviet laws. We used to make fun of him. “You really are cracked, Alik,” we would laugh. “Just think what you’re saying. What laws can there be in a country like ours? Who pays any attention to them?” “That’s the whole problem-that no one pays any attention to them,” replied Alik, not in the least disturbed by our mockery. And when they let some of the boys in to listen to the sentence, he exulted. “Look, you see. We’ve only ourselves to blame if we don’t demand that our laws be observed.” But the rest of us shrugged our shoulders.
Little did we realize that this absurd incident, with the comical Alik Volpin brandishing his Criminal Code like a magic wand to melt the doors of the court, was the beginning of our civil-rights movement and the movement for human rights in the USSR.
The literary period in the slow awakening of Soviet society was coming to an end. Poets and readers were being sent away in deadly earnest to absolutely real labor camps. Not soldiers and not conspirators, but poets:
No, not for us can it be to spray bullets! But to mark the significant dates The epoch created poets, And they the soldiers create.
It was an epoch that couldn’t stomach poets-they had to become soldiers.
Source: Vladimir Bukovskii, To Build a Castle. My Life as a Dissenter (New York: The Viking Press, 1979), pp. 142-163.