EXECUTIONERS AND VICTIMS
Grossman, Vasily
Vasily Grossman (1905-64) was a Russian writer who grew up during the years of the Stalin terror. Like many other Russian writers of the time, he was neither a heroic opponent nor a political...
...You have undertaken, Comrade Prosecutor, to bring charges against us...
...His thought would bear me along like a wave, and I used to shudder as a beach might shudder when a wave crashes...
...They shared their last crusts with their comrades, their last pinch of makhorka, and they took in their arms and carried off the battlefield fellow soldiers who were wounded and bleeding...
...After all, our sin is its sin...
...The human being does not develop from lower to higher...
...But, after all, only God makes no mistakes...
...Perhaps they derive from the secretions of internal glands, or the squelching of liquids in the 350 intestine, or the rumble of digestive gases, or the mucous membranes, or the activity of the kidneys, or perhaps they arise from the blind instincts of food-seeking, self-preservation, propagation...
...Our century is the century of the greatest violence ever committed against the human being by the state...
...Man to man, human to human, straight and simple, in the Russian way...
...The first consists of an imaginary trial in which the informers who in earlier years had sent endless numbers of people to the camps in Siberia are now being arraigned...
...Perhaps it was human nature itself that produced stool pigeons, police informers, slanderers...
...Pass judgment on it...
...But dead men ask no questions and tell no tales...
...It is much easier for you to cast aspersions on me than on people who are educated and smart politically...
...What has happened, you see, is that it makes us happy to share with each other the burden we share with no one else...
...and its outlook is that of a "Westerner" attached to the values of liberalism and social democracy...
...DEFENSE COUNSEL (interrupting): Permit me to make a clarification here...
...But chaos has no laws of development, or meaning and content, or goal and purpose...
...I lay there on my bunk and I thought, "Good Lord...
...He took her things to the village, where he spent the day with Alyesha, and then once again returned to his work in the artel...
...It may pass through various transformations, but it neither diminishes nor disappears...
...The troika flies, but the human being is motionless and stagnant...
...The history of human beings lies not in the flight of the troika but in chaos and the eternal transformation of one aspect of violence into another...
...But his mind was frightening...
...And what difference does it make to our Russian grief—whether the troika flies or whether it is frozen stock-still...
...You have no alternative, in view of how fearlessly you are speaking out on behalf of truth and justice...
...So they are to blame, so they are not to blame...
...On a winter day he bade farewell to Anna Sergeyevna at the cemetery...
...The state alone bears all the guilt...
...Do you realize that the powerful magnetic field created by our state, that its mass, with a weight of trillions of tons, and the superfear and supersubmissiveness which it induces in the human speck of dust are such as to make EXECUTIONERS AND VICTIMS ridiculous any and every charge directed against a weak and defenseless individual human being...
...Here is the heart of the matter...
...Why should you, who were a participant, pass judgment on us, who were participants, and assess our guilt...
...So let us answer your question with another question...
...His life had worked out badly...
...He had a powerful brain...
...I was hypnotized by fright, by the power of boundless violence...
...But my relief came from the most unexpected quarter—they dragged me off again to interrogation...
...Why are you determined to expose particularly those like us who are weak...
...In Stalin's time you yourself, Comrade Prosecutor, would have been charged with failure to value the role of the state highly enough...
...Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it...
...But how shamed and how pained we must remain, face to face with our human indecency, unworthiness, obscenity...
...There is no progress...
...However, please take into consideration that his personal interests ran parallel to those of the state...
...And so it turns out that it is not Gogol's troika, but the one that is here with us now, that sits somewhere up there signing death sentences...
...The hot breath of fear of the state breathed upon mankind, and the slumbering seeds swelled and burst open...
...Well, we, too, whispered in birdlike voices...
...However, there were cases, even in that harsh time, when the state acquitted people who had been slandered...
...We print below two excerpts from "Forever Flowing...
...the most awful thing is the good that is in them, the saddest thing of all is that they are replete with virtue, that they do good deeds...
...People were destroyed in acThe state had foredoomed those people to cordance with statistical methods, and the death, and our work, so to speak, was con people scheduled for destruction belonged cerned only with the superficial framework...
...He died soon after...
...We knew these parameters...
...This insufferable pain has been inflicted on me by an intelligent man...
...INFORMERS (speaking in turn): They forced me...
...You, like us, were a participant in the Stalin era...
...But it gives birth, too, to the good, the pure, the kind...
...The hell with the troika that flies and thunders and signs death sentences...
...And it was like being shot...
...The human being has only himself to thank for human dregs...
...Do you think it is the evil that is in them...
...They are silent...
...Vasily Grossman (1905-64) was a Russian writer who grew up during the years of the Stalin terror...
...And if the seeds were not hidden within the earth, neither wheat nor weeds would rise from it...
...Sometimes it is exercised against the colored races, sometimes 352 against writers and artists, but as an entity its total quantity is constant...
...Like many other Russian writers of the time, he was neither a heroic opponent nor a political sycophant...
...VASILY GROSSMAN And what talented poets are to be found among them, and musicians, and physicists, and what talented lathe operators, too, and carpenters, the kind of whom people exclaim with delight: "Golden hands...
...Long ago, people saw in it the law and the meaning of progress...
...It was Gogol, Russia's genius, who sang of the `flying troika,' who prophesied the future in its flight, but it was not in Gogol's troika that the future lay...
...Your question, for all its seeming surface simplicity, is by no means so simple...
...Why have you waited until now...
...The main thing about him is that he is static...
...He no longer even has to swing his ax...
...You used to greet us cordially then and wait to be received at the doors of our offices, and sometimes while you waited you used to whisper about us in a birdlike voice...
...Here is your troika: Russia's bureaucratic destiny, the faceless troika, the three-man special sessions of the NKVD, the troika that sentences people to camp and to be shot, the troika that made up the lists of those who were liquidated as kulaks, the troika that excluded certain young people from the universities, the troika that refused ration cards to old women from the old regime...
...And you yourself spent that whole night talking, telling me your story...
...So what...
...Recall the words of Lev Tolstoy: there are no guilty people in the world...
...DEFENSE COUNSEL: Yes, such cases actually did occur—as the result of a mistake...
...PROSECUTOR: Your view is plain: you do not choose to have your clients assume even the slightest trace of guilt...
...THE WELL-EDUCATED INFORMER: Yes, yes, naturally, thank you...
...But tell me, informers, do not you yourselves, at least in some measure, admit to being guilty...
...Yes, and you can remember how rare the acquittals were...
...Nothing can be done with him...
...But today the executioner just turns on the meat grinder and executes a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people...
...We never informed man, translated by Thomas P. Whitney...
...but how detestable they are with HH e was all alone in the room, and he was carrying on an imaginary conversation with Anna Sergeyevna...
...He was imprisoned under Section 58-10, the most common of all sections...
...The second consists of a chapter in which the central character, Ivan Grigoryevich, a broken man after three decades spent as a prisoner in the camps, recalls an especially critical moment of his past.—ED...
...Do you understand wherein the complexity lies...
...Freedom and Russia will become one...
...let them return to their homes...
...And I felt relieved...
...JUDAS THE FOURTH: Why are you picking on me...
...Violence is eternal—no matter what is done to destroy it...
...PROSECUTOR: You are evading the question...
...It is eternal and indestructible...
...They beat me...
...What a list one could make of the techniques of violence employed throughout history: burning at the stake, prison, and now the new technology of annihilation...
...But as it turned out, you see, I felt the need of telling you, you in particular, about all of it...
...And he would continue—waving his threatening finger at Gogol from his bunk: "You were wrong, Nikolai Vasilyevich, you failed to understand or to envision our flying troika...
...I thought I could find oblivion in them and be able to forget what I had suffered, and I would feel as though none of the pain had ever happened...
...In his last years Grossman worked on a novel, now published in the U.S...
...Only those who did not survive have the right to pass judgment on us...
...Yes, indeed...
...The thing that is loathsome, repulsive, is the fact that they exist...
...Perhaps we are guilty, but there is no judge who has a moral right to raise the question of our guilt...
...But nonetheless, answer me: why did you inform...
...He never did have the chance to share with her what he had remembered, thought about, and written down during the months of her illness...
...by Harper & Row under the title Forever Flowing, which constitutes a political-moral testament...
...When are you going to leave the hospital and come back to me...
...And, after From the book Forever Flowing, by Vasily Gross-all, you knew them too...
...When you come home from the hospital, I will tell you about the hour that was the worst of all for me...
...His goodness, his mind, are immovable...
...It gives birth to these piles of falsehood, vileness, cowardice, weakness...
...And I lay there half-dead on the bunk and the only thing still left alive in me was my faith: the history of human beings is the history of freedom, from less to more...
...1 ROSECUTOR: You confirm the fact that wrote, whether we accused these people or you wrote denunciations against Soviet citi- declared them innocent, these people were zens...
...What kind of history can human beings have if their goodness is static...
...only to particular social and ideological In essence, no matter what and how we strata...
...It is the twentieth century that has at last shaken the Hegelian concept of the historical process: "Everything real is rational...
...And, for that matter, he did not have an evil mind, but only a mind indifferent to and derisive of faith...
...Well, get on with it...
...And the troika flies along and cares nothing for our Russian grief...
...It is as simple as the law of the conservation of energy...
...Yes, and the word `history' itself has been dreamed up by men...
...Because of that slimy, hairy, lower element of the human essence, stoolies come into being...
...THE DEFENSE COUNSEL (strikes a pose and makes a speech): Comrade Prosceutor, and you, honored jurors...
...Who was it who made that well-known bad joke: "Man, proud is thy name...
...PROSECUTOR:To speak in terms of the Gospels: push those who are falling...
...The history of life is the history of violence triumphant...
...Wherein lies the cause of this universal, foul, unanimous weakness, submissiveness and compliancy, yours and ours...
...into...
...What is in question is solely the degree, the measure of guilt...
...The informers and the stool pigeons are replete with virtue...
...You knew us all in Stalin's lifetime...
...From the material sphere it slips into medieval religiosity...
...He was talking to her inside his head, and here is what he said to her: I want you to realize that at the most difficult times of all I used to imagine a woman's embraces and think how wonderful they would be...
...Stool pigeons are born of human beings...
...And what devoted, loyal, good friends are to be found among them, and how considerately they visit a comrade who has had to go into the hospital...
...First of all, it is meaningless, but that, as it happens, is of no significance...
...Not because it was evil, you understand, for evil in itself is not frightening...
...He frightened me, he exerted a very strong gravitational force on me...
...They weren't going to let me have time to catch my breath...
...And the law in all this is very simple—the law of the conservation of violence...
...I was brought back to my cell after being interrogated...
...yes, and life itself is freedom too...
...And I felt overwhelmed—worse than I had everfelt or had ever imagined I could feel...
...Tall and enormous prison fortresses, as large as fair-sized cities, and, of course, camps...
...INFORMERS (exchanging looks and whispering, whereupon the well-educated informer among them takes the floor on their behalf): Let me reply...
...History is a molecular process...
...what that means is that mistakes were rare too...
...English against people who belonged to healthy strata translation copyright © 1972 by Thomas P. Whit that were not subject to destruction...
...I believed again in the inevitability of freedom...
...And then explain one other thing, if you please...
...And VASILY GROSSMAN this faith gave me strength...
...All are guilty, including you, Comrade Prosecutor, and you, defendant, and I, who am considering the defendant, the prosecutor, and the judge...
...Now that is what is really awful: the fact that there is so much good in them, in their human essence...
...It was a conversation in a prison cell, at dawn, after I had been interrogated...
...It was this concept, violently debated for decades, that Russian thinkers of the past century finally accepted...
...it contains a serious attack on the tradition of Leninism...
...Capital punishment began with an oak club crushing the skull, with a rope noose...
...I was exploring that precious, marvelous and bright thought which was hidden away in prison rags: "Everything inhuman is senseless and worthless...
...But it was a life like many others there...
...It will not disappear and it will not diminish but will only be transformed...
...Then of the Mongol invasion...
...of the deaths of innocent Soviet citizens...
...And my bunkmate would usually say to me: "Why defend freedom...
...Who, then, is to be judged...
...They are quite capable of great achievements in doing good and getting work accomplished...
...And now, they say, everything is clear: there is no such thing as historical development...
...ney...
...In such cases you PROSECUTOR: Do you admit you are guilty yourselves picked the victim...
...I think he was the most intelligent of all the men I ran EXECUTIONERS AND VICTIMS all their virtues, even with the complete remission of sins...
...My client really did produce denunciations in pursuit of his personal aims...
...That is like emigrating from the earth to the moon, and then bringing suit over a question of land boundaries on earth...
...I was carrying out my Party duty as it was underst000d at the time...
...the history of all life, from the amoeba to the human race, is the history of freedom, the transition from less freedom to more freedom...
...Human nature...
...He mutters to himself:) Permit me through the columns of your newspaper to thank...
...There is no history—it is like grinding water...
...According to a report that came from the distinguished Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky to a friend in the West, Grossman wrote a novel Paustovsky considered a masterpiece...
...PROSECUTOR: Yes, you informers knew your business...
...But it is precisely here that the strength and hope of mankind lie...
...I wanted to die...
...the institutions, the organizations, and also the comrades and friends...
...In actuality, why seek out now those guilty of crimes committed in the Stalinist era...
...It is a deep-going criticism of the entire totalitarian society and oulook...
...And I found it unbearable even to breathe...
...I am not very bright or well-educated...
...The secretary enters and hands the welleducated police informer a document, saying: "From the government...
...INFORMERS: That was just an apparent freeINFORMERS: No, we categorically deny it...
...This is my faith, and with it I would return to my cell after an interrogation...
...But now, at the height of the state's triumph over individual freedom, Russian thinkers wearing padded camp jackets have dethroned and cast down the old Hegelian law and have proclaimed their new, supreme, guiding principle of world history: "Everything inhuman is senseless and worthless...
...His fate is static...
...And he refused to accept my faith in freedom...
...Do you hear me...
...who have sent congratulations...
...PROSECUTOR (reading the document): Even against my will, I cannot but be glad for you —for after all we are all Soviet people...
...Fearlessly, out in the open, out loud...
...Try it...
...In the postwar years he suffered attack as a "homeless cosmopolite...
...They love science, and our great Russian literature, and beautiful music, and some of them are equipped to express opinions on the most complex phenomena of contemporary philology and art...
...The state did not reject the information provided by my client, 'and, consequently, it appears that he performed a useful function for the state, although at a first and superficial glance it might seem that he really produced denunciations out of selfish, personal considerations only...
...Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row...
...foredoomed by the state...
...The entire animal, vegetable, mineral, physiochemical side of the human being is loathsome, repulsive...
...It is nonsense...
...SUCH WAS His imaginary conversation with Anna Sergeyevna—which never took place...
...Yes, yes, they are not guilty, they were forced to it by grim, gloomy, leaden forces, and trillions of tons of pressure were put upon them, and among the living there is no one who is innocent...
...No, not at all...
...But do you realize the most loathsome thing about stool pigeons and informers...
...The human being is equal to himself...
...Begin with the state...
...he tried to survive those terrible years as best he could, keeping silent when he had to, and meanwhile storing up his own ideas and impressions...
...PROSECUTOR: But sometimes you wrote denunciations on your own...
...Only the chaotic course of its transformations deceives the philosophers, who mistakenly interpret them as evolution, the laws of which they then search for...
...And Alexei Samoilovich heard me out, half-alive as I was, and he said: "You're just fooling yourself with hogwash...
...The state is the soil, the earth...
...It once took the form of slavery...
...Well now, isn't it really immaterial whether stool pigeons are guilty or not...
...He is as stationary as a granite cliff...
...What brave and patient soldiers are to be found among them...
...It is absurd to condemn a bit of fluff for having fallen to earth...
...dom of choice...
...THE WELL-EDUCATED INFORMER (after reading the paper): I beg you: in connection with my sixtieth birthday my more than modest achievements in the field of Russian science have been honored...
...Amidst the total triumph of inhumanity, it has become self-evident that everything effected by violence is senseless and worthless, and that it has no future and will disappear without a trace...
...But here, in our state, there is a new formula: the whole world is guilty, and no one is innocent...
...THE INFORMERS: Yes, in a way...
...They are loving, tender sons, fathers, husbands...
...On the other hand, if one considers that these epochs are not really so far distant from one another, and, as the poet said, in terms of historical ages, they stand virtually beside each other, then there arise many other complications...
...it was confiscated by the secret police and no copies remained...
...The comrade prosecutor told my client that he had evaded replying when he asked wherein lies the cause of our general, universal, unanimous submissiveness and compliancy...
...PROSECUTOR: And what about you, Comrade Number Four, why are you silent...
...It moves from continent to continent, and sometimes it takes a class form and then is transformed into a racial form...
...The human and humane element does not increase within the human being...
...The man next to me was named Alexei Samoilovich...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
