Old Men at Midnight Read online

  Three women, all widowed by the Civil War, cooked and served our food—abundant, tasty—in a common dining room. We chopped and hauled our own wood. The house was run by a dour-looking man with the rank of major, who had under his command a squad of special troops. No one in all my subsequent years in Moscow ever spoke of that house in the forest. When we left after five months we were ordered not to mention its existence. I don’t know if it is still in use today or even if it is still standing. I remember the rooms smelled strongly of antiseptic cleanser and were always kept warm.

  The day Lenin died, in January 1924, the people I saw in my apartment building—I lived now on the third floor—and in the offices on Dzerzhinsky Square were all grim-faced and spoke in low voices. No one wept. The phone in my office rang: I was to head up a security squad for the funeral.

  That was an uncommonly cold day, even by our standards, as if nature had drained all warmth from the world and joined with us in mourning. The crowd was enormous, respectful. We stood in the cold for hours while factory whistles blew and cannons thundered. The bier carrying Lenin passed quite close to me. I could not figure out why he had been mummified, why they had made a holy relic of him—filled him with alcohol, glycerin, formalin to preserve him as a sacred object—when everywhere we were knocking down churches and demolishing relics and confiscating icons and church treasures. I wondered why Trotsky was not at the funeral. Would he be the next leader?

  One of the pallbearers was Stalin and I got a close look at him. About five feet four inches in height; his face sallow, pockmarked, a gouge in the flesh below the right eye; his left arm deformed. He seemed like a cat, eyes slitted, yellowish. Pockmarked that way. During the failed offensive against Poland, the brigade commander had several times mentioned a Comrade Pockmark.

  I didn’t know much about the political maneuvering that then went on inside the Politburo. I remember, of course, that Trotsky was sent into exile, and in mid-1927 Stalin rose to sole power. In the meantime, I was rising in the ranks, and eventually was able to move into the fifth floor of a huge new apartment building with large wooden front doors, a marble entrance hall, and an inner courtyard with benches. An elevator took me to my apartment. I had no lack of women friends but did not marry. Many Gentile members of the Central Committee and the Politburo had Jewish wives; but no Jewish woman would come near me once she got wind of what I did, and I did not want a Russian wife. Very few among us were unmarried, and the head of my department often urged me to find a wife. I would greet his words with a nod and a smile. After a while he stopped mentioning it.

  I had plenty of work and I was very good at what I did. My left arm was quirky, would go numb at odd moments. I did not want to injure my right arm, would use it only on rare occasions, used instead the science of persuasion, intimidation, endless interrogation, threats of harm to the family. I had no regrets. Those who came before me were enemies of the people, swine, mad dogs, saboteurs, degenerates. The older ones were the hardest of all; during their Revolutionary years, they had already been through the worst—so they thought. The Party people I now saw were well fed, most of them in fairly good health. Weeks and weeks of work: letting them sit and stare at the instruments; then the lengthy days of interrogation; then take away their sleep and force them to stand for hours at a time—what that does to the legs; then, only if necessary, the truncheon. Weaken them, wear them down. It worked; they would sign the one hundred pages or so of testimony in their own trembling hand.

  Whenever it was possible, we suited the treatment to the individual: the diabetic wife of a prisoner would be deprived of insulin, a heart patient’s nitroglycerin might be carefully withheld. I got to be so adept at my work that I even wrote a long interoffice memo—a sort of handbook—on interrogation techniques I perfected, and to my astonishment the minister saw it and showed it to Stalin, who commented on it favorably. Word came down that he wanted to meet me and I had awful night sweats over that. But the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934 distracted him, and nothing came of it.

  A strange pall of fear descended upon Moscow. Many of the inhabitants of my apartment building worked in the various offices on Dzerzhinsky Square, and we would pass one another in the marble entrance hall and the corridors, or stand packed together in the elevator—and avoid eye contact and remain silent. In the neighborhood shops, where I would always go straight to the head of the line, the clerks continued to serve me—but without conversation. Like a pervasive gray mist as fine as powdery snow, the fear hung in the air, clung to light poles and tramlines, fell upon the streets, and stopped up mouths. It was well that people were cautious: more than the walls had ears. We were running so many informers that it was difficult to keep up with their reports, many of which were outrageous lies: people getting even with unfaithful lovers, despotic bosses, authoritarian teachers; husbands looking to get rid of wives or hateful relatives.

  During one of those winters, in the early or mid-1930s, I went about Moscow trying to find a pair of socks and could not find any in the entire city. No socks in all of Moscow. I couldn’t quite figure out why Stalin was expending so much time, energy, and money cleaning out the enemies of the people from the cities and the rich peasants from the villages, when all the while no one was thinking to bring socks into Moscow. Maybe the enemies of the people were sabotaging the supplies of socks the way they were ruining everything else. The country seemed to be brimming with saboteurs.

  I did not like some of the things I saw. The unnecessary use of force on prisoners; the occasional crude interrogation that bordered on sadism; the haste with which at times, on explicit orders from above, investigations had to be conducted, confessions obtained. Also, some of our men acted badly, would confiscate the possessions of a prisoner’s family and divide the clothes and furniture among themselves; others would move with their wives and children into the apartments of families that had been arrested. We had unpleasant fellows in our midst. In the end, about twenty thousand of them were arrested. No great loss to the Motherland.

  One day in the mid-1930s, when I had begun to think that I could not take on any additional work—I labored deep into the nights, I slept fitfully, I had frequent nightmares about my parents and sisters moldering in their grave, my left arm troubled me endlessly—I came into my office, read through the previous night’s special arrest list always placed on my desk by one of the secretaries, and noticed what I thought was a familiar name.

  I checked; it was the correct name. A prominent member of the Central Committee. But hardly the first of that august group to have been arrested. And he was assigned to me—my old brigade commander, Semyon.

  “Well,” I said, after the guards had left and we were alone.

  I extended my hand. He stared at me, blinked, squinted his cold brown eyes.

  Hesitantly, he shook my hand. His fingers were cold. He looked at me narrowly, a deep wedge between his pencil-line eyebrows. “I wondered what had become of you. Here of all places.”

  “Sit down.”

  He reached for the back of a chair and slid stiffly into the seat. He seemed to be suffering from a bad back and sat very straight, his hands on his knees. He had gained weight. His once long and narrow face was now jowled and ended in the beginning of a double chin, and he had the start of a paunch. The frenzied look of the new believer, which I recalled from our time together in the Red Army, was still part of his bearing, but only distantly discernible, windowed over now by a fragile defiance that was intended to conceal the disbelief, the helplessness, the desperation all prisoners felt when they were brought into this building—as if to say: Surely a mistake has been made! Surely there has been a bureaucratic mixup somewhere! Surely you will soon discover the error and have me released! He wore a gray suit, a shirt, no tie. Already the jacket was crumpled, the trousers creased. He would lose weight fast; his clothes would droop; he would need to hold up his pants with his hands because his belt had been taken away; he would become a shell, a bu
ndle of sticks, like the peasants I had encountered on that assignment more than ten years before—and whose starved, dark-eyed faces I sometimes saw in dreams.

  “Perhaps you could let me have a cigarette?” he asked, sitting stiffly in the chair.

  I was perched on the edge of the desk, my legs crossed. “We don’t permit smoking in our offices.”

  He looked at the pale-green walls, at the closed window, at the linoleum floor.

  “Tell me, if you will, exactly what am I being charged with?”

  “You of all people know I can’t discuss that.”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Others will determine that. I’m not in charge of your case.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and sat very still in the chair. His lips went rigid, vanished entirely into his face, leaving only a vague line of mouth. He opened his eyes.

  “You have no influence here?”

  “How much influence does a major have?”

  “I repeat, I have committed no crime.”

  “Well, comrade, either I believe you or I believe Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich. Whom would you have me believe?”

  He trembled then, quite visibly. I pictured him on his horse, urging men on for our cause. Yesterday an influential member of the Central Committee; today a traitor, to be interrogated and made to confess—by any means. “Beat, beat, and then beat again,” Iosif Vissarionovich had repeatedly ordered concerning others. Over the phone someone had given me the list of the comrade’s transgressions: enemy of the people; petit bourgeois deviation; Trotskyist opposition; membership in a terrorist organization; Polish spy; plotting to assassinate the head of state. They would be merciless with him.

  He knew what awaited him. He ran a trembling hand over his flat hair.

  “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I have a wife and children. A boy and a girl. I plead with you that they be spared.”

  “Comrade—”

  “What happened was that somehow he must have learned I once called him ‘Comrade Pockmark.’ Maybe I told that story about Comrade Pockmark recently to a friend after a little too much vodka. That’s what happened, I’m sure of it. Otherwise this makes no sense. No one could be more loyal to him than I was—than I am.”

  I looked at him.

  “Listen, Comrade Major, ask them if someone can assure me that my wife and children will be safe. I will say anything and sign anything if I am given that assurance.”

  “I’ll pass that on.”

  “Tell them, if you will, that I embrace Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich and I embrace the Party, no matter what happens to me. Nothing can stand in the way of the Party.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  There was a pause. I buzzed for the guards and they led him away.

  I called Colonel Razumkov on the interoffice phone.

  “I can’t speak with any authority about his wife and children, and I don’t want to know about his love for them. There are certain things he must do and say for us, regardless of what is to happen to his wife and children, and he will do and say them even if we have to stick twenty needles up his ass. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

  He hung up.

  It took some while for my left arm to stop throbbing.

  Those who were assigned to deal with the brigade commander reported that his interrogations were lengthy and thorough. But he would say nothing until word came down from on high that his family would be spared. Then he gave them names, accused others, and signed the 128 pages of confession they put before him.

  He went on trial, was found guilty, and two days later was executed with a single shot to the back of the neck. He was an enemy of the people and got what he deserved.

  Soon afterward we received orders to arrest his wife. She was given ten years and sent off to one of our labor camps in the Far East. I don’t know what happened to their children; probably relatives took them in.

  About two or three years later, we began to arrest Red Army and Navy officers. Some generals came through my office, a cool professional lot, who thought they knew how to take interrogation. On a number of them we used what we called the “conveyor”: teams of interrogators that went at it for days without stopping. Most of the time, one or two weeks of that was enough; they confessed to the crimes we put before them and then incriminated themselves in court.

  About the time the Germans invaded us in 1941, the arrests had almost come to an end. By then I was a colonel.

  Earlier that warm June night, the night of the 21st, I was with a woman. By the beginning of the forties there were fine restaurants in Moscow and even some nightspots. I got back to my apartment after midnight, sated and in a good mood. But I slept restlessly, woke and slept again, troubled by dreams.

  For weeks some of our departments had been receiving secret dispatches from our overseas agents, from certain other reliable sources, from our embassies, from our commanders in the field, about a German troop buildup along our western frontier. We knew that Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes were constantly overflying our border and photographing our airfields. British intelligence kept insisting that Hitler was planning a June invasion. But we were at peace with the Germans: tourists arrived regularly from Berlin by commercial aircraft to take in the sights of Moscow, and ships and trains laden with food and raw materials moved from our ports and our heartland to Germany. I couldn’t figure out why Stalin had made a nonaggression treaty with Hitler, the most hated enemy of Communism—unless he thought the Germans and the English would exhaust themselves in war and we would then emerge as the dominant power in Europe. All those heated warnings about German activity along the frontier were repeatedly dampened by explicit orders from the top that we say and do absolutely nothing that might be interpreted as even the slightest provocation against Germany.

  Our country was in an awkward situation. Many of our marshals and generals had been shot by order of Stalin. Most of our officer corps—dead or in labor camps. Our forward border units—pulled back. On Dzerzhinsky Square we were reasonably sure we understood what was going on: the Germans were getting ready to move against us. But we had been told: “Don’t panic. The Boss knows all about it.”

  I dreamed that night that I had stepped through a massive wooden door into a world of pure silence. Not Russian silence, which is the silence of terror, or of reverence for those taken by age or illness or murderous events. Rather, the silence that was the absence of all light and sound, the silence of an emptied globe, a planet without people, without life, without air, a world of naked rock and dormant sand distantly seen by indifferent stars.

  I woke with a sense of dread.

  Someone was banging on the door to my apartment. They were coming to arrest me.

  I opened the door and saw my driver.

  A redheaded twenty-year-old lad from a village south of Leningrad. He lowered his arm, his face went scarlet. “My apologies, Comrade Colonel. They tried to phone you but could not get through. I have orders to wake you.”

  He informed me that the German army was crossing the border and we were at war. All department heads were ordered to report immediately to their offices on Dzerzhinsky Square.

  My instinctive reaction as I absorbed that news—a flood of relief that I was safe. Then—cold dread. We were at war with that monster from the west—and nearly naked before its murderous teeth and claws.

  There is a Russian saying: every day learns from the one that went before, but no day teaches the one that follows.

  How we stumbled and staggered about during the weeks that followed! Three million men were marching against us—Germans, Rumanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns. With thousands upon thousands of aircraft, artillery pieces, tanks. They had split their force into three huge army groups: the northern was to take Leningrad; the center, Moscow; the southern, Rostov and the Crimea and the oil deposits of the Caucasus. How we bled! Millions of lives, vast stretches of the Motherland—quickly lost t
o the teeth and claws of the enemy.

  The Dark Tyrant was not in Moscow when the Germans struck but in his dacha at Kuntsevo. And Comrade Zhdanov, the chief of Leningrad, toward which an enemy army was now advancing as if the roads were greased—Comrade Zhdanov was vacationing in the Crimea on the shores of the Black Sea.

  In our building on Dzerzhinsky Square a rumor began to creep through corridors after four days of silence from the leadership: Stalin had returned to Moscow, gone for a briefing at the Commissariat of Defense on Frunze Street, been stunned by the realization that our entire central front had disintegrated, exploded with anger and insults, left the briefing room with his head down and stooped over, like a peasant shrinking from an arm raised to strike him, climbed into his car, and gone home. Now, in a mood of black despair, he was hiding in his dacha, with no idea what to do. Drunk on vodka and awaiting imminent arrest for his disregard of all the warnings, his misreading of Hitler’s intentions, his immense political miscalculation. The Politburo was trying to keep the country from falling to pieces. Then came the rumor that the foreign minister, along with two or three others from the Politburo, had gone to the dacha and urged Stalin to establish an emergency defense committee, with him as chairman. He had immediately regained his self-confidence, was now back in the Kremlin. And some days later we heard his calm voice over the radio:

  “Comrades! Citizens! Fighting men of our army and navy! Brothers and sisters! I turn to you, my friends.”