Red Ticket: The Great Terror
"They were just like me, except they were dead."
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin is going mad.
If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33.
Chapter 34: The Great Terror
by Robin Whetstone
The citizens of Moscow lay in bed, waiting, as the dark minutes crept by. Nobody in the city really slept anymore, but even so, people lay beside each other, pretending. In a city like this, you had to act normal. Do not attract suspicion, because they are looking for people to take. Everyone in the building heard the hum of the engine, the slamming of the door, the footsteps on the stairs. Is it my turn this time, are they coming up here? But still they pretended. “The neighbors were enemies of the people,” they said to themselves, “but not us.”
The higher-ups in the government and military knew how arbitrary the Terror was, because they were the ones who filled the quotas. Some of them stopped pretending, and this gave them some comfort. A general in the Army packed a small suitcase so he’d be ready when they came for him. He sat on his balcony for the three days that it took the Chaika to arrive, drinking wine and enjoying the weather. A minister of an important department kept his loaded pistol next to his bed. He understood the futility of arguing. He understood that in times like these, pulling the trigger yourself was the only freedom you had.
The bureaucrats who were being consumed by the system they had helped create were the smart ones. They knew that the difference between life and death for thousands of people was the position of their name on a page in a phone book. The State gave mayors of towns all over the empire, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, monthly quotas to fill. The directive would arrive on the first of each month, signed by Stalin. Some 130,000 cancers excised from the civic body this time, 150,000 the next. The local Soviets hoped that by feeding others to the ravenous State, they would be spared. You couldn’t just meet the numbers, you had to exceed them. Blood meant loyalty, and safety.
In the early years of the Terror, there were rules. Igor disappeared because he was the first to stop clapping after the speech by the local party boss. So, keep clapping. Be the loudest singer, the most passionate shouter, the quickest cap-doffer, and maybe it won’t be your turn tonight. Yelena’s nice apartment and the covetousness of her neighbors sealed her fate. So, don’t have anything that anyone else might want.
In a city like this, you had to act normal.
But now, as Stalin’s paranoia increased and his appetite grew and grew, there was no pretense anymore of cause and effect. You could be, and would be, arrested for anything. For nothing. The leaders of the towns and cities would close their eyes and pick names at random out of the telephone directory. The Ivanovs, at 152 Sandy Lane. The whole family, gone.
Russians would not call Stalin a butcher until 1963. They would call him “father of peoples” and “man of steel” instead. Why wouldn’t the people say what was happening to them? Why were they telling themselves these lies? I lay in my own bed in the suburbs of Moscow in the middle of another sleepless night, learning the answer to these questions. Not even Russians can cope with the idea that life and death are extra-arbitrary because the people in charge are insane. There’s got to be some other explanation. It’s our own lack of faith, or the Jews poisoning the wells. It’s the saboteurs and homosexuals. It’s the Americans.
Anti-Western sentiment was growing in Russia as Yeltsin, Gaidar, and U.S.-backed NGOs presided over the looting of the country. Strongmen, men who favored order over freedom, were gaining in popularity as crime and poverty deepened. Russians looked around for people to blame, and found them. The U.S. embassy guy who was surprised in his downtown apartment and bludgeoned to death in his bathtub. The aid worker who never saw it coming, garroted by a gang posing as members of her church. She was ushering her new friends into her apartment when they jumped her from behind. These unlucky people were in their early 20s, had just graduated with Russian degrees, and wanted to be where the action was. They were just like me, except they were dead.
I lay in bed and thought about the men outside my first-floor window, loitering on the sidewalk. They were unemployed, out there all day and night, smoking and talking. What were they talking about, and why did they stop when I passed by? They could see that sometimes I went out and returned with something – a carton of milk, a can of tuna. A bottle of vodka, a pack of smokes. They knew I had something, more than they had. I remembered what I’d learned in school about how Russians turned on each other during Stalin’s Terror, dooming those neighbors with their incorrect ideology and the big apartment they didn’t deserve. I remembered all those books I’d read about what happens to outsiders when things fall apart. I remembered what happened to me in the dorms.
They were just like me, except they were dead.
This was definitely what was going to kill me, I decided, and knowing that helped a little. At least now I could stay alert, focused on what I had to do. I lay on top of the bed, fully clothed, clutching a wrench I’d bought from the perpetual line. It was the middle of the night, 3 a.m. I was alone and unprotected. In every one of my many rooms, a big, un-screened window was flimsily latched, waiting to swing open to let in the smell of the lilacs.
I cursed myself for not taking a gun when I left Lyosha, for not listening when that man told me to find a place with a steel door. I got off the bed and quietly, so quietly, lay down on my back and scooted under it. There was no way to monitor every window in every room. The best thing to do was hide. “But under the bed is a bad place to hide,” I thought. Of course they’re going to look under the bed when they break in, that’s the first place they’ll look. They’ll surround the bed and you’ll be trapped. They’ll grab your ankles like those men did and pull you out. Better to be proactive. Don’t wait for them, don’t be surprised. Stay awake, stay alert, keep your eye on them.
I sat in the dark on the living room couch, staring at the top of the curtains, waiting for the first watery light of the morning to pool on the ceiling. When I saw it, I stood up and walked into the kitchen, amazed at having washed up on shore again after another night at sea. I poured myself the first of three jelly glasses of vodka, and took the bottle with me back to the couch. I did this every morning, and because I did not want to think about what this might mean about me, I added a spoonful of cayenne pepper to each glass that I poured. Someone – Galina Petrovna? Valentina Fedorovna? – had told me that Russians drank vodka and cayenne when they were sick, so, this was not really alcohol, this was medicine. And I needed this medicine, because I was not well.
I sat in the dark on the living room couch, staring at the top of the curtains, waiting for the first watery light of the morning to pool on the ceiling.
I no longer bothered trying to write. A few days ago, in fact, I’d ripped out all the pages of my spiral notebooks and thrown them up into the air over and over again until they blanked the room like a paper blizzard, more than a thousand pages of words all hopelessly mixed up. The pages lay there still, crinkling as I shuffled through them toward the boom box in the corner. I’d been listening to Lyle Lovett softly, very softly, but when he sang “This old porch is just a long time of waiting and forgetting, and remembering the coming back, and not crying about the leaving.” I knew that even at this low volume the words were too dangerous. The thing to do, I told myself, was to make myself as hard to see as possible, to disappear. The best way to do that I’d found, even better than drinking, even better than never turning on a light, was reading.
I was terrified to leave the house, but once a week, I forced myself to. I’d brave the trek to the bookstore in Kitai Gorod and buy as many books as would fit in my waistband, then I’d stop at the kiosk on the way home for vodka and cigarettes, and bread if there was some. No more Cold Sassy Tree for me; I wasn’t interested in being entertained. I wanted books that assaulted me, pulled me under. I read Kafka and Orwell, Kundera and Hegel, Kant and Barthes and Rand. I read Crime and Punishment and the Idiot. I read all of Bulgakov, the USA cycle by John Dos Pasos; The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, and my old friend Gogol. I did not want to read anything that made me feel good or offered me any kind of hope. I wanted maps of the landscape I was now inhabiting, characters who were damned because they were alive.
I sat in the kitchen next to the open oven door and read until the light went away and I could not see. The amount I was reading was exhausting me mentally, and it was also exhausting the few funds I had left now that I wasn’t working. I could see where this was going – the math was simple – and I knew that if I did not stop I would run out of money. But I did not care. I could not stop. I thought vaguely every once in a while about looking for another job. Then I would picture myself twitching in a chair in front of the editor of the Moscow Times and would abandon the thought. Getting the job at the Guardian had been like being struck by benevolent lightening. The odds that something like this would happen again were zero. The only real skill I had – writing – had abandoned me, and now, to make matters worse, I was crazy. The despair and shame over what I was doing drove me to do even more of it to try to stop thinking about it, and dug me deeper and deeper into my hole.
The only real skill I had – writing – had abandoned me, and now, to make matters worse, I was crazy.
My biggest problem — even worse than the alcohol, even worse than the Ayn Rand — was that I had stopped sleeping. Maybe every two days I would drift off in the late morning for 45 minutes, but the price for this lack of attention was too high to pay. I’d start awake from my murky sleep and would leap to my feet, terrified. They were here. They had been waiting for me to let my guard down and now they were here. Run to the bedroom and look everywhere, under the bed, in the small refrigerator where I keep my clothes, behind the curtains covering the windows. I’d go from room to room doing the same thing, sure that they had gotten in, sure that while I was checking behind the stove in the kitchen they had moved to the shower in the bathroom. It was better to remain awake, I resolved. That way I’d be aware of everything that was going on around me at every moment, and would never, ever be surprised.
After five days of vodka-fueled insomnia, I began to hallucinate. Bright lights flashed in the corners of my eyes, dark blobs spidered their way across my vision. That was it, I decided, the nail in the coffin. The days of sitting myself down and giving myself a stiff talking to or reaching out for help were long gone, and no longer mattered. What mattered right now was this very minute, this very page, this very breath. I wrapped myself up in my terror, and waited for morning.
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