THAW STUCK IN THE FREEZER

HISTORICAL FACT

I dedicate this article to my comrade from the thaw and perestroika, Vitaly Korotich. In the restaurant of the Central House of Writers, the former "house of the Rostovs", where Natasha danced at her first ball, there is a special separate room, ennobled with a heavy, more than a century old ...

I dedicate this article to my comrade in the thaw and perestroika Vitaly Korotich

In the CDL restaurant, the former “house of the Rostovs”, where Natasha danced at her first ball, there is a special separate room, ennobled with heavy, more than a century old furniture, Venetian mirrors and an English classic fireplace. There, our oligarchs receive foreign investors, clink glasses with red-velvet Petrus or Chateau Margaux, celebrating successful deals, and sometimes privately “hang out” and confidentially invite to a modest friendly dinner or girls of not too difficult behavior, or officials and deputies of such behavior as order. This room (for some reason at number 8) was once the party committee, where writers were usually called in for brainwashing. It was there, although I was not a member of the party, that I was called for the first time, warning that everything I heard was not subject to disclosure. This happened half a century ago, when after February 25, 1956, rumors spread around Moscow along with a winding snow drift that Khrushchev had exposed Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Our newspapers did not publish the report, and, mysteriously emerging in the West, it was transmitted by the so-called enemy voices, but the Soviet jammers drowned out foreign radio transmissions, working at full power, and it was difficult to understand anything.

At that time we could not have guessed that Khrushchev, who was playing a dangerous game, himself gave a secret order to forward his report abroad, but did not dare to publish it in the USSR. Instead, he decided to limit himself to only confidential reading aloud of numbered copies marked "Secret" for people selected by party organizations in factories, collective farms, universities, military units, and it was forbidden to record anything on a tape recorder or even with a pencil.

It is not known why I, a non-partisan, the grandson of two grandfathers who were arrested in 1937 as "enemies of the people," got into one of these readings. They chose who to invite to the reading, because of the general confusion and confusion, in my opinion, quite by accident - just as they had once been arrested. In Russia, even terror is not without confusion.

About twenty writers gathered in room number 8 - a combined hodgepodge of Soviet literature.

Who was there? The Mohicans of the intelligentsia miraculously survived, still saying “I'm sorry” instead of “I'm sorry”, still remembering who Tsvetaeva, Stravinsky, Chagall were. Hastily, somehow molded from cement and concrete of the first five-year plans, nominees for literature from shock workers, singers of steel-smelting furnaces and tractor conveyors. Slippery polishers of the corridors of power showered with gold medals of Stalin's awards. Front-line soldiers, on whose medals “For Courage” won at risk and with their own blood, there was a profile of a man with whose name they died for their Motherland, and it was he who, confused during the attack, gave it to Hitler to be torn to pieces, having shot so many of the best commanders of the Red Army back in the thirty-seventh year.

In room No. 8 there were also those special writers who worked most successfully in the encouraged genre of denunciations, and those first rare victims of their denunciations, who had already managed to “sit out” behind their native domestic wire and return. But if they then wrote about the camps, then only on the sly, without hasty hopes. So Khrushchev turned out to be the first writer on the camp theme.

The reader of the document was the documentary prose writer Yuri Pilyar, a prisoner of Mauthausen, who participated in the international anti-fascist uprising of prisoners of war in 1945. He seemed to me a man who had risen from the dead: an almost hairless head, more like a naked skull, tightly covered with transparent skin, it seemed whitewashed by rains, dried by winds and with deep holes in the eyes, where the pupils were so invisible, as if they were not there. He read clearly, monotonously, but sometimes he slowed down the speed of reading by a factor of two or three with the heavy slowness of pronunciation of words, and especially the figures of human victims, pressing the mathematics of Stalinist cruelty into our memory so that we would not forget it.

There was a dead but screaming silence in room 8.

The statistics of the Stalinist terror were sealed with seven seals, and Khrushchev was the first to open them at least a little, but even in this narrow gap, as if from permafrost torn apart by crowbars, the glow of icy corpses hurt the eyes painfully.

In room No. 8 it became especially frosty, as in the Arctic Circle in the Gulag, when Pilyar almost impassively, but with convulsions twitching in his cheekbones, read the numbers of the epilogue of the Congress of Victors, hitherto unknown to anyone, first named by Khrushchev:

“It has been established that out of 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee of the Party elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress, 98 people, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mainly in 1937-1938) ... Of the 1966 delegates to the Congress with a decisive advisory vote significantly more than half were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes - 1108 people ... In 1937 - 1938, 383 such lists were sent to Stalin for many thousands of workers and his sanction was obtained ... And what evidence was used? Confessions of the arrested. But how can you get a confession from a person in crimes that he never committed? Only one way: the use of physical methods of influence, through torture, deprivation of consciousness, deprivation of reason, deprivation of human dignity. This is how false confessions were obtained.

I am quoting this speech from an official Soviet source - from the already yellowed Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU of March 1989 - the first publication of the report in our country, 33 years late (!!!) Everyone in room No. 8 was crushed even by these very modest compared to the current, most often assumed, figure of at least 20 million people arrested and killed, which has not yet been confirmed in any of our official history books.

Solzhenitsyn in "The Archipelago ..." named another figure of victims, which absolutely does not fit in the brain - 66 million - adding up the human losses during the Civil War, famine, collectivization, World War II, where detachments killed their own in the back.

If our country now occupies at least some first place, then, without any doubt, due to state shyness. When and who will finally name the exact figure and add to our calendar the day of commemoration of the states killed in the war with their own people? He who plays hide-and-seek with the past will not hide from the past in the future - it will find it there too.

Despite too many reservations, silence, balancing, fawning over the party, the idealization of Lenin, who personally signed the decree on the creation of the first concentration camp in Solovki in 1918 (which we, still very young sixties, did not know), Khrushchev’s report was a feat, proof the possibility of pangs of conscience even in such a not very conscientious profession as politics.

Churchill accurately defined Khrushchev's duality - perhaps inevitable for a man of his fate: "Khrushchev wanted to jump over the abyss in two jumps." This duality is reflected in the Ernst Neizvestny monument by zigzag transitions of white marble into black and vice versa. The Khrushchev period after Stalin's death, which received the name "thaw" from the light hand of Ehrenburg, was interrupted many times by frosts, and sometimes severe ones.

Literary Institute poet Iosif Kurlat unwittingly turned out to be a visionary, writing poems: “Trees, trees, it’s too early to bloom…”.

Shortly after the report, in the same 1956, Stalin, sitting inside Khrushchev himself, brutally suppressed the uprising in Budapest, in 1957 gave Dudintsev’s anti-nomenklatura novel “Not by Bread Alone” for reprisal, after speaking in defense of which I expelled from the Literary Institute, and in 1959 he allowed Pasternak to be persecuted for his novel Doctor Zhivago.

It was then that I was summoned for the second time to that very room No. 8 by one party committee chief, who, for unknown reasons, became a member of the Writers' Union, looks like a bearded dwarf from a cartoon about Snow White, but his eyes were not dwarfs, but only pretending to be kind Koshcheya from a completely different cartoon. At first, he kindly persuaded me to speak on behalf of the youth at a meeting of writers against Pasternak, which I flatly refused.

My intransigence irritated him, and he no longer concealed it:

“Don’t you see how many of the most dangerous microbes came to life during this thaw of yours. You open some thick magazine, and the stench comes from there. It's time to put an end to this, and put your thaw in the freezer ...

I exclaimed with ardent romanticism:

It's not a thaw, it's spring...

He grinned cynically.

- Don't you know such a parody:

Spring has passed, summer has come.

Thank you party for this...

So you better say thank you to the party, while it still offers you to show your patriotism. And then, perhaps, there will be no more offers ...

And I suddenly saw yellow wolf fangs sparkling from his dwarf beard ...

Then the thaw was then thawed many times, sometimes for a very short time, then again thrown into the freezer, as was the case under Khrushchev himself and after him. Recall the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the famous photo of a GDR soldier who, throwing off his hated machine gun from his shoulder, jumps at the last moment over the barbed wire being pulled. But it was in the same year when Gagarin broke into space and the whole world applauded him! We ourselves have destroyed admiration for us. And in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (again thanks to Khrushchev) broke through censorship, and an unfamiliar, long-awaited air of freedom was drawn into the breach.

But in the same year, there was a ruthless suppression of a hungry demonstration of Novocherkassk workers, rockets bombarded with wheat were taken to Cuba, and then, against the backdrop of a general dangerous nervousness both in our country and in the world, an absurd, caricatured scandal broke out when the head of state, stamping his feet and waving his fist , taught artists and writers and shouted: “Take your passport and go abroad!” - the future author of his gravestone.

Even now I hear again through the inciting obsequious screech of the Kremlin rabble: “Out! Get out! - a blow of Khrushchev's fist on the table and a cry: "The humpbacked grave will fix it!", And then - a blow of another fist on the table, now mine, but as if someone else's, dumbfounded by the fact that I also hit it, and my own, but also like a stranger, not listening to myself, a voice stuck in my throat and nevertheless escaping: “No, the times when people were corrected by graves have passed. And hopefully forever. “And get him out too! And him!” the choir screeched towards me. And suddenly I saw that Khrushchev looked at this chorus with gloomy contempt, as if he foresaw that someday he himself would be “surrendered” just as obsequiously. Loyal possession is always a readiness for betrayal. As Yesenin wrote in Pugachev: “But it seemed, it seemed like yesterday, / My dear, dear, good…”. I suddenly realized that this had not seemed to Khrushchev for a long time. Then he made an imperious ataman movement with his palm down, stopping the so-called support of the so-called intelligentsia, and, unexpectedly turning to me, did not applaud, but not at all "stormy" and not "long" three times slowly and heavily clapped his hands, not very willingly , but still expressing support for me.

Khrushchev, during a duel in the Manezh, in a great and powerful language with the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, called him a "faggot", and he, to his amazement, suggested that he put at least a whole female battalion in a certain position and start a competition in men's work. Nevertheless, Khrushchev nevertheless made sure that this sculptor, whom he liked for such resourcefulness, was quietly given a state order for a panel in a “mailbox” in Zelenograd. And I suddenly received a call from Khrushchev's assistant, Lebedev:

- Nikita Sergeevich invites you to the Kremlin to celebrate the New Year.

“Actually, I have an invitation to the FRG, but your documents are stuck somewhere in the Central Committee ...” I practically complained.

“Do you want everyone to love you?” Something about your behavior is different. You come and we'll figure it out...

It was the most incredible New Year's Eve of my life. The tables in the Kremlin Palace were arranged in the form of a giant letter P. At the main table, which was the crossbar of the letter, sat "portraits" - that is, members of the Politburo and Khrushchev himself. All of them, with the exception of Suslov with the face of an eunuch inquisitor, quite willingly took a drink, especially Khrushchev. In my opinion, our Orthodox patriarch, the chief rabbi, and the chief priest, who sat together in a separate box, were not shy about this, but I can’t vouch for the mufti, but, in my opinion, he sinned.

When the head of the diplomatic corps, Swedish Ambassador Sulman, raising a toast to Khrushchev, inadvertently said something like: “Although I am far from the ideas of communism, I love your people and your culture,” Khrushchev, already pretty tipsy, interrupted him and shook his finger at him : “Hey, Mr. Sulman, don’t be cunning - I won’t believe you here. How is it possible to live with us for so many years and not be imbued with the best ideas of communism in the world (Khrushchev's soft sign in this word was psychologically irresistible. - E.E.). Yes, you have been a secret Bolshevik for a long time, Mr. Sulman.

The elder of the diplomatic corps shook his head negatively with a panicky, bewildered smile: “No… no… no…”

But the peak of everything was when, after a sentimental speech by some, it seems, the most ancient Bolshevik in the USSR, similar to the last Don Quixote of “communism” pulled out of a mothballed chest, understanding little of anything, after a tender kiss with him, the shedding Khrushchev was again inspired. In the Politburo, he was the last person who had not yet lost the ability to be inspired from time to time.

Here is the sensational statement he made, unrecorded, perhaps because everyone was too drunk and took it as a New Year's joke. Akhmatova said that direct speech in memories can never be trusted. Therefore, I vouch not for the accuracy of Khrushchev's words, but, in any case, for their main meaning.

- Gentlemen and comrades, and you, Mr. Sulman. You and I have just seen a sincere communist, a pure person, and my heart aches from the fact that there are fewer and fewer such people. What happened to us? Why? No party in the world has so much power in its hands as ours. She is the most popular in the world. Here in America, who votes for the Republicans, who votes for the Democrats ... The people are losing their orientation. And we have all the people oriented, and all support one party. On the one hand, it is, of course, good, but on the other hand, it is dangerous. You know, there are fish that stick to the largest ones, they are called sticky ones. So, our party stuck too much. What are the communists! These are careerists, and a party card for them is like a pass to the top ... We didn’t crawl under bullets in Perekop mud with three-rulers for a career, we kneaded concrete with bare feet in the first five-year plans. And now we come to America, and under these former bare feet they lay a red carpet for us, and an orchestra of capitalism that blows into all the pipes, huh? The anthem of communism!.. Pride is bursting, workers' and peasants' pride. But sometimes, as in a nightmare, I wake up and find no place for myself: how many honest communists do we have in the party, and how many stuck? How to figure it out? Do a cleanup? It becomes scary - how many will have to be cleaned out. Who will stay with us? Once, on such a sleepless night, the thought came to my mind: what if ... and what if ... take it and declare all our people the people of the communists so that the privileges for party members disappear one by one. Let everyone be, as they say, communists from the cradle, but without privileges ... That is, in order to purify the party, you need to abolish the party, make all the people a party. In general, if we talk about the future, then someday all of humanity will be what? Communist humanity, Mr. Sulman! And I see you in these ranks next to me and with your and my grandchildren. So for them - for our grandchildren!

Khrushchev's assistant Lebedev came to me.

- Evgeny Alexandrovich, now we are turning everything off. We, thank God, correspondent tape recorders have neutralized. God forbid, Nikita Sergeevich talks so much that you can't stop him ... But he ended up well with his grandchildren, didn't he? Did you like it? It touches everyone. Get up, it's all over. But just stand with your wife near your table, do not leave. Nikita Sergeevich wanted to say hello to you in front of everyone, so that everyone could see. And then they spread rumors that he quarreled with the writers ... Yes, here he comes. Yes, stand up, for God's sake, he is still older than you.

Khrushchev really slowed down his steps near me and my wife, took me by the shoulders, brought me closer to him and, smiling, slightly turned me around in front of the photojournalists. He spoke exaggeratedly loudly: “Well, Happy New Year to you and your family! This is your wife, did I understand you correctly? You, I heard, are going to Germany? The word of the writer with the fight for peace is now oh so necessary. Although we had a little fight, I love your song “Do the Russians Want Wars”, and I myself sing on occasion, and my eyes are in a wet place, ”and turned and went forward, without removing his hand from my shoulder, dragging me by the himself, and suddenly whispered to me in a barely audible voice: “Let them see that you and I are not in a quarrel. Otherwise, they will eat you - only the buttons will be spit out. You made them so angry that they didn’t want to let you go abroad… Now the escalator, be careful, don’t stumble…”.

And when we got off the escalator, Ilyichev, who hated me with a sweet-poisonous secretary of the Central Committee for ideology, jumped up to me and lisped:

- Evgeny Alexandrovich, you are our most precious ... Everything is in order with your trip to Germany, do not worry.

Suddenly, our then president Brezhnev showed up imposingly and entertainingly, which was a symbolic position in those days: “Happy New Year to my favorite poet ... And now I will dance with the Snow Maiden. I'm the only member of the Politburo who dances the waltz. For this, they keep me in the presidency ... ”

... Everything was still ahead - and attacks on me for my trip to the FRG, where I predicted the reunification of Germany before the end of this century, after which the furious Walter Ulbricht called Khrushchev and demanded that I be recalled, to which he replied: “Well, what should I do with this Yevtushenka, Comrade Ulbricht, send to Siberia? But he was born in Siberia…” and Khrushchev’s irritation with the poem “Babi Yar” provoked by all sorts of clues; and, finally, the conspiracy of the bureaucracy to eliminate the unpredictable tsar-muzhik; and that episode of this conspiracy that I happened to see at a provincial airport, when Khrushchev, who only yesterday was talking with cosmonauts flying in world infinity, returning from vacation to Moscow, entered the plane, and the gangway with his guards suddenly rolled rapidly back, leaving him one; and my visit to him, already retired, when he asked me to apologize to all the writers with whom he behaved “inexcusably rudely” (the expression of Khrushchev himself), and when I asked why, he replied: “Yes, because I understood somewhere that you were right, and even more angry about it both at you and at yourself. But still, not a single hair fell from your head. Is not it?". He then gave me a large package of tomatoes, which he himself grew in a greenhouse. Tomatoes were like him - bumpy, warty, and I ate the last of them at dinner, when his adopted daughter called me on the phone and said through tears that Nikita Sergeevich was gone.

His son, Seryozha Khrushchev, who recently gave a memoir at the University of Tulsa (Oklahoma, USA), told me that, it turns out, I was Khrushchev's last guest.

... When Khrushchev was removed, under which, after all, there was nothing resembling the Stalinist trials, starting in 1966, the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel were already on trial and a constant witch hunt began, ending in psychiatric hospitals, tanks in Prague, the war in Afghanistan. The thaw landed in the freezer for a long time.

Nationalist intellectuals even pulled out a pre-revolutionary quotation from Leontiev to justify it, that Russia should be frozen.

But Gorbachev's perestroika was the daughter of the Khrushchev thaw.

And about what happened to her next, what happened and what is happening now, the conversation is still ahead.

TSAR-MAN

king man,

nugget on a stem

broken corn, -

he pulled it on his hump,

bulging with nodules,

the coffin of his era,

tearing under the load,

trembling from servile fear,

stumbling into blood and dirt.

king man,

there, in Kalinovka, pawing

girls on the benches

who hated the grater

which in the Stalinist kitchen

was tert,

he played the fool

in merry warts

and took revenge on the king-godfather

for slipped into a drunk

cake under the ass.

And for what is inside the wolf

flocks

went to rebellion

and started breaking

our barracks prison,

and for what, all nails

about the fear of encouraging,

scratched out of himself

Stalin

we will be grateful to him.

Not more royally worn

his head he

covered like a hat

radish

"Communism" for him

was one of the damned

the most unpronounceable words.

He Gagarin and Solzhenitsyn

Godfather,

and in painting

humorous theorist.

How much wood did you break

but how many heads he saved!

They stuffed him into the grave.

Surrendered, grave capitalism

not a break.

Something boring

without knocking muzhik

boot

smelly at the UN.

From Khrushchev's rockets

and to the current racketeers -

here are the zigzags of today

post-Babylonian times.

To the memory of Khrushchev

honor,

family invited

not a stucco-mazilka,

and the penitentiary sculptor,

who is his obscenity in the Manege

covered.

The marble was black and white

like a conscience

and the thaw was shoved

in the freezer

and for us

as for the new Japanese,

The Crimea became the Kuriles.

Still better than Khrushchev

than shelter, the former brotherhood

peoples burned.

To the grave of the king-man,

who was outgoing

and cruel

his scolding once

baptized,

but still protected by him,

I omit the unflattering

but also a false flower.

Evgeniy YEVTUSHENKO