LIVE AS OTHERS LIVE
Marchenko, Anatoly
Introduction Anatoly Marchenko is one of the most extraordinary individuals to have emerged in Soviet society. Both his parents ate illiterate railroad workers, and Marchenko himself, who was...
...Why is it such a poor copy...
...After I had submitted the book to Moskva and the declaration of amnesty had passed—as should have been expected, it did not apply to political offenders—my friends and even slight acquaintances told me to go into hiding...
...He was released from labor camp in June 1972 with three years of exile still to serve...
...It is significant that they were sent by complete strangers and not by relatives...
...Who would have bothered talking to you...
...And then suddenly, once I was free, I plunged into this milieu that had hitherto been strange to me...
...Both his parents ate illiterate railroad workers, and Marchenko himself, who was born in 1938, has only an eighth-grade education...
...Live as others live...
...Did they know whom they were following, and why...
...Many people I met during those first days in Moscow have remained close friends...
...In my eyes the so-called Soviet people were a submissive flock, with the regime attacking the last remnants of individuality in each one of us...
...And I still had to run to the cafeteria or whip up something to eat on the kerosene stove...
...One wellknown scientist said the book might be true, but the camp and prison described in it were too horrifying...
...Look at that...
...Soon an opportunity came up, followed by tormenting expectation, waiting for the signal that the manuscript had arrived safely...
...For us kids, the life and occupation of our parents was a curse...
...And because no one recommended me to them, I was really going on my own...
...In addition to the bed, I fitted in a chair, and on top of it I put the suitcase with my clothing...
...It was like a game of cops and robbers: chases, dodges, discoveries, walkietalkie communications...
...But no one would register me and no one could give me a job...
...9 Bulat Okudzhava is a much-beloved song writer in Moscow...
...You should write...
...I told her I liked to sleep in the fresh air, and I lived there until September...
...by Peter Reddaway, New York: Viking, 1972) when he was arrested with Larisa Bogoraz and five others in Red Square during their demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...But even after her defense I don't remember seeing Boris in a decent suit, and I remember Natasha in the same fur coat she wore for many years, which, I would guess, she had inherited from her mother...
...Even meals seemed like wasted time...
...Less than a week went by before I got a 314 message to come immediately to the editorial office and take back the manuscript...
...They both had work to do, but when one was typing there was no room for the other to sit down...
...He looked well-fed and wellgroomed and was dressed in formal wear as if he were coming from a diplomatic reception...
...But on weekdays we sat literally 18 hours a day working on the manuscript...
...She suggested I live there for a little while and arranged it with the administration...
...It was especially empty during the week, and only on Sundays did a few people come for a rest...
...I entered adult life with a firm prejudice against intellectuals...
...He opened the door and whispered menacingly, "Ooo-oo, writer...
...With the manuscript under my arm, I went straight to the office of the journal Moskva...
...I saw that this was not simple curiosity...
...Maybe I was being followed but didn't notice it...
...but by then I was in a labor camp...
...We were supposed to go out, so we warned him KGB agents were going to follow us...
...He had no connection with protests, open letters, and other "dissident" activities...
...I don't know which of the copies—or whether all of them—finally ended up in a publishing house...
...My views about the intelligentsia changed completely...
...Every evening, tired as a dog, I pushed my manuscript away, still not satisfied...
...Once an acquaintance of mine actually recorded my pursuers with an amateur movie camera, but the film was confiscated and exposed...
...Arbat Street...
...I gave my friends two copies of the book for safekeeping, saved three copies for samizdat, one to send to the West, and one I kept for myself to submit to a journal...
...Around this time, a similar, tight surveillance was started on Pavel Litvinov and Larisa...
...I was followed, but not arrested...
...His new friends, especially Larisa Bogoraz, who later became his wife, helped him to write My Testimony...
...The first time I could say, "I was writing a letter...
...So there we were at the resort...
...My parents would point out, as good examples for us, the few people in our town with "clean" professions: teachers, doctors, the stationmaster, the director of the bread factory, the regional party secretary, the state attorney...
...It is also an important document, not only for what it tells us about Marchenko and Larisa Bogoraz, but because it provides a unique viewpoint on a momentous shift in Soviet society: when individuals began to overcome their fear and to voice outspoken criticism of their own government...
...My friend rented a 313 large separate room and came only on her day off...
...Registering and finding work was a hell of a problem...
...In my opinion, this class is the better part of our intelligentsia...
...Soon it would be a year since my release, and another year would go by without any results...
...And suddenly I met, not one or two, but a whole class of people whose existence refuted the "triumphs" of the Soviet regime in breeding "the new man, the man of the future...
...One acquaintance, for example, A., immediately began corresponding with my friend V., who had been imprisoned for eight years and still had seven to go...
...I tried to delay the inevitable—I was still waiting for a sign that the manuscript had reached the West—and managed to escape the agents in Moscow itself...
...No one knew me there, and in such a resort someone writing all day was no surprise...
...I am drinking tea at a friend's place and they are shivering in the entranceway and the archways, not taking a watchful eye off the door...
...But even if temporary, I still had to cast anchor somewhere, find lodgings, get registered, and then have a careful look around...
...Luckily, I was able to get a two-week leave from work...
...I was told no one there would be embarrassed by the necessity to inform, and that meant I would not ruin anyone...
...By the time of my arrest in July 1968, two critical observations reached me...
...He can say 311 about himself, in the words of Bulat Okudzhava, 9 "I will forget all my household cares, I don't need any salary or work...
...But on the outside, a person endangers the work he loves, his career, the well-being of his family, and not for a limited term but, as they say in the camps, to the end of the Soviet regime...
...Translated from the Russian by C. E. THALENBERG and JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN q 318...
...I was afraid I would miss something that would confirm my previous notions about the intelligentsia...
...he said...
...Kuzikova smiled contemptuously...
...13 On January 10, 1968, Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov issued an "Appeal to World Public Opinion" on the conduct of the Ginzburg–Galanskov trial, which had just completed its third session...
...What was the point...
...JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN After leaving the camp in November 1966, I did not intend to find a permanent place to live...
...They let me out for walks only in the dead of night, and even their visitors never guessed there was a third person living in the apartment...
...At the outset they advised me to publish the book under a pseudonym in the West and not approach any magazine...
...It turned out that several people had read it...
...I mumble something in response...
...It was only when B. took her side that I finally calmed down, thinking the reader could get along without my prompting...
...But then fall came, the rains began, and I was forced to cut out these "walks" and move behind the curtain where I was supposed to be...
...And where would I be myself...
...it took a full six weeks...
...My friends supplied m with books...
...From 1954 to 1959 between 7 million and 8 million people returned to their families from labor camps, prison, and Siberian exile...
...However, once I began thinking about it, I began dividing the concept of "intellectuality" into the culture and education of a person and "intellectual" work, which meant, for me, work that was not physical or greasy...
...There are many prisoners behind barbed wire for doing much less...
...It was later explained to me that under some kind of written or unwritten law, the editors are obliged to hand over any seditious manuscript like mine to the KGB...
...By the way, my notion of the material situation of the intelligentsia did not stand the test of experience...
...Besides, in the provinces the managers, intellectuals, and their children socialized among themselves and not with common greasers...
...I knew I had to establish myself closer to the capital...
...I came out from "underground" and in a few days I was nabbed again on the street and brought to a police station...
...State Versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak" (New York: Harper & Row, 1966...
...Around the tenth, I was sitting in an empty apartment—my hosts were not at home— pecking quietly at the typewriter...
...Although the circle of my acquaintances in Moscow was growing all the time, it naturally was limited to a few dozen, perhaps a hundred people in all...
...Come back for an answer in about a month...
...What were they after...
...The essay, like all his writing, has a remarkably blunt, unpretentious quality that he first honed when he wrote My Testimony...
...I also began to prepare for my future arrest and trial...
...317 This time too they requested I sign a declaration that I would leave Moscow, then I went off to Alexandrov...
...I had thought I was supposed to call everything by its name, and the sharper the better...
...Marchenko reached Moscow in 1966...
...Pavel's name carried great prestige...
...In Moscow people showed great interest in present-day camps...
...The last pages were composed in my head two or three days before setting them down, as if someone were dictating them to me...
...K. suggested a secluded spot in the Archangelsk province...
...Boris's salary was slightly higher than the average worker's (170 rubles a month, I seem to remember), and before defending her dissertation, Natasha's was much lower...
...I came to respect true intellectuals since they often displayed the decency and moral principles that you begin to value under cruel camp conditions...
...He was released in August 1974...
...Who needs your heroism...
...But this came later...
...I was afraid the regime would somehow learn of my literary activities and arrest me under some pretext...
...As she was checking over his documents, making a list of all the facts so she could pass them on to the KGB, she learned he was a research scientist...
...A novel...
...Of course, I retrieved the manuscript immediately, but I couldn't understand how a journal could suffer after accepting an unknown manuscript from an unknown author and not publishing it...
...My least worry was the convenience of those who would receive the book from them...
...Why did they follow me...
...You know about what...
...To Mordovia, or what...
...By the time it reached the West in 1968, where it eventually appeared in 18 languages, Marchenko was serving a new term...
...Hiding from our men, escaping through a window...
...In the beginning I was wary of them, listening to each of them, waiting for a certain tone...
...With the help of other activists, he compiled transcripts of two trials (The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, Ipswich, Mass.: Gambit, 1969...
...People probably considered it their duty to support me...
...These two weeks were my last chance...
...He was a leader of an underground Marxist circle—the Union of Communardswhich issued a samizdat journal entitled The Bell...
...Write down what you've been telling us," they urged me...
...What kind of dream was this...
...The secretary noted the information and put my manuscript in her desk without reading a line on the first page...
...I rented a corner of a room from a lonely old woman on the outskirts of the little town...
...Maybe former political prisoners are under special scrutiny, but Larisa came to visit me anyway, as did other Muscovites who were on the KGB books, and I myself went to Moscow to see them...
...I was terribly nervous and often lost my temper...
...But their work was clean and easy...
...One of my friends got a permit for September and October to go to a resort for writers and scientists...
...And, after conducting a search in one home, Gnevkovskaya, an investigator from the Moscow public prosecutor's office, made a sarcastic remark to her friends: "Some intelligentsia...
...The second time too...
...Ten years have passed since my first encounter with Moscow intellectuals...
...They predicted all the varieties of reprisal: from closed court proceedings ("and they'll finish you off in the camp") to an "accidental" murder in a brawl or some other unfortunate incident...
...There was a hanger on the wall above the chair, and there was also a tiny tablesideboard for dishes and supplies...
...It would have been impossible to accomplish anything without these visits...
...The brother of a friend once joined us by accident...
...One copy had to be carried to the West as quickly as possible...
...From my first encounter in Moscow, from the first day I arrived there, I saw and felt that attention and kindness were lavished on me as on one who had returned from "there...
...A teacher, a doctor, an engineer, and especially a judge, a prosecutor, and a writer serve them...
...You have to relate specific things and let the reader draw his own conclusions...
...12 Irina Belogorodskaya is a cousin to Larisa Bogoraz...
...It was not clear whether anything would come of it and there was no end in sight...
...You must understand it's not out of weakness but out of humanity...
...In 1968 he was sentenced to one year for breaking passport regulations, a term that was extended for two additional years on the basis of "anti-Soviet slander" he allegedly uttered to his jailers...
...Hard physical labor never exhausted me as this work did...
...I didn't believe it...
...I don't even know what his attitude was on these matters...
...Even I make a 170...
...I came to the conclusion this alienation had been mostly imagined and inspired by old prejudices and circumstances...
...only then could the book be circulated at home...
...In a word, you had to hurry, hurry...
...My parents lived there...
...Why did they hesitate to arrest me...
...Yes, it was a very narrow circle...
...What do you want to do with it now...
...Didn't you once want to escape...
...Valery Smolkin, also a member of the Union of Communards, served a three-year sentence and was released during the winter of 1967-68...
...By the end of our "holiday," the book was almost completed: close to 200 notebook pages covered on both sides with my tiny handwriting...
...Once again I was struck by the Moscow intelligentsia, its courage, its moral resistance against the activities of the regime...
...could be sent to prisoners by friends or relatives...
...Never mind, they'll read it anyway...
...On top of that I lived in the same room with the landlady...
...There was a stove in the middle of the hut, in front of the stove was an area we called the kitchen, and behind the stove were the quarters that Auntie Nyura and I shared...
...People will be afraid of arrest," he said...
...It's true that teachers and doctors did not live better than we did and many were worse off...
...You're just a coward...
...How long can one burden kind, elderly people with one's presence...
...In the evenings the three of us took long walks and at night we made a bonfire...
...This alienation between the intelligentsia and the greater part of the population still exists in our country...
...I could avoid the surveillance only in Alexandrov, where I had to return anyway...
...Despite a still deeply embedded prejudice, I never felt any pretense in my relationship with these people...
...It was already fall, and the resort was nearly empty, except for a few houses where five or six people stayed...
...The agents would accompany me to the train station in Moscow, ride together with me for a couple of stops, sometimes all the way to Alexandrov, then suddenly disappear in order to show up, invariably, on my return trip to Moscow...
...Nonfiction, nonfiction...
...Our parents weren't called mechanics or conductors...
...In fact, I preferred to come forward in my own country...
...Then with B.'s help, the introductory pages were written...
...Or curiosity about my nocturnal writing got the better of Auntie Nyura...
...The lights were on almost until morning...
...He liked the book very much...
...For example, while interrogating one of the witnesses in Sinyaysky's case, the investigator Pakhomov said, "What kind of a writer is he...
...The isolation of political prisoners, it turned out, resulted from a lack of information about them and not from society's indifference...
...I don't think I attracted attention, but who knows...
...At first, a small open corridor saved me...
...No one, not even people I barely knew, refused contact with me, although I alerted them to the surveillance...
...The regime, in fact, never forgave him for writing the book...
...I used to think the Soviet regime had destroyed all that was alive in our country and that it was using the camps to finish off what was left...
...I was sure no one would be allowed to attend the trial...
...In the meantime, the well-known writer K. read My Testimony...
...A pointless conversation: "We have to talk with you, Marchenko...
...One could say, "But, after all, they are only surviving remnants and, sooner or later, they will find themselves in a camp...
...I did not look for contacts, for friendship, or even for help, but I could not avoid those things...
...I said I had sent it to the West and that now I wanted to submit it to a journal and told him why...
...Among the political prisoners there were many people with intellectual professions, but I never became friendly enough with them for my childhood prejudice to change significantly...
...That issue, which coincided with the tenth anniversary of the publication of My Testimony, contains interviews with a handful of former prisoners, asking them to describe how Marchenko's account coincided with their own experiences and how they themselves regard their years at hard labor...
...But in 1970 the regime imposed severe restrictions on parcels sent to the labor camps...
...A prisoner has almost nothing to lose...
...The protesting intelligentsia had much more to lose than simple "workers" and, naturally, more than we inmates...
...There was no necessity for him to accompany us, but he came along anyway...
...Relying on the help of these new friends, I decided to write as best I could...
...The same man as before was waiting for me...
...The writing itself gave me courage...
...People were openly calling for free speech and creative expression, they were supporting defendants who had dared to publish their work in the West...
...It's hard to believe it was actually like that...
...When our friend came on Sunday, we allowed ourselves a small rest...
...But still, I am convinced it is not a tiny group of outstanding personalities but a whole class of people that comprises the opposition to our widespread system of doublethink and to the regime as a whole...
...Until 1970 any book published in the U.S.S.R...
...I often lost "mine" out of spite, knowing that, wherever I was going, the same mugs would greet me all the same...
...That is of no interest and of no use whatsoever to anybody," Larisa said...
...Lyuda Alexeeva is a veteran Moscow activist, a historian, and former member of the Communist party...
...But once in Moscow he met numerous men and women, mostly intellectuals, who were among the initial activists in the country's human rights movement...
...In Tarusa, a junior police lieutenant, Kuzikova, discovered in one "unreliable" home someone who was not registered...
...I found out more than a year later that the book had appeared in the West...
...But my work at the factory plus these small chores took almost all my time...
...I didn't agree to a pseudonym, not out of a silly notion of bravery but for a very sober reason: specific places, people, and facts pertaining to a well-defined period are mentioned in the book...
...Looking back, I see how lucky I was and how much I have learned from them...
...He emigrated in 1974 and lives now in the U.S...
...once a day we went there for a cheap meal...
...But inside I still objected, and when I wrote again, I tried to spin out the whole story, as we used to do in our encounters with camp 312 officials or visiting lecturers...
...What glory this organization had claimed for itself by 1967...
...Don't you understand...
...I am Semyenov from the KGB...
...They knew...
...In our country and especially in Moscow, a prison record does not surprise anyone...
...It is true they got the final carbon copy and not the one I had just retrieved from the other journal...
...She put down a wooden bed for me with a straw mattress, partitioned the room with a cupboard, and even set off my corner with a curtain...
...In the end, our journal will suffer...
...And that was all...
...Who were they...
...I was willing to help her around the house: bring water from the well, stack firewood, fetch peat blocks...
...They thought highly of the book and, as I was told, "the author's courage...
...Pavel began his dissident career in 1967 following the arrest of Alexander Ginzburg...
...I think the principal moral achievement of the post-Stalin decades is that people have become more trusting in their relationships, if only among their friends and close acquaintances...
...Hmm . . . a scientist...
...I go to the theater—a distinguished escort accompanies me and meets me when I leave...
...Since that day, the second of November, the wheels started to turn...
...After a few days in Moscow, three of us, B., Larisa, and I, discussed a variety of titles...
...I also wanted to visit the places I loved for the last time and to see my relatives...
...They were academics living in a 15-squaremeter room in a communal apartment...
...I got to know several authors of these letters and saw they were ordinary people...
...When the three of us went out together, a whole procession trailed after us: several cars and a gang of various boors with their implacable faces and the proverbial newspapers in their hands...
...Late in 1966 I happened to come across protest letters on behalf of Sinyaysky and Daniel that later went into The White Book.' What was it like for me, who had just left a labor camp, to read them...
...2 Marchenko described this arrest and his subsequent 55-day hunger strike in his second memoir, From Tarusa to Siberia (Strathcona, 1980), ed...
...They signed their own names under these statements and even indicated their professions...
...He was the one who filmed the agents, protested when they took his camera, and presented his identification papers...
...Alexander Ginsburg put together an anthology of documents surrounding the Sinyaysky–Daniel case, including an unofficial transcript of the trial, articles from the official press, and letters of protest...
...In 1975 he was convicted of violating administrative supervision and sentenced to four years of internal exile.' Finally, in 1981, the regime grew tired of his stubborn defiance...
...My friends were very skeptical...
...It was a pleasant way to relax, to throw brushwood into the fire and chatter about everything under the sun...
...Don't ask any questions...
...There was a restaurant in the village, ten minutes away from us...
...What is it...
...Many of my acquaintances later paid for their activities: some were dismissed from their work, some were demoted, some were dragged through endless meetings in an attempt to make them recant, and then fired anyway...
...This demonstrates, by the way, what kind of reputation the KGB has earned among the population, and specifically among the intelligentsia...
...My hosts diverted me 316 with interesting conversation...
...I don't know...
...Semyenov's voice had ominous undertones...
...Her entire but consisted of one room...
...y friends were all worried about me...
...3, compiled in Moscow in 1978 and published in Paris in 1980...
...There were no attempts at ambush...
...I take a trolley—two cars follow the trolley and when I get off police spies pour out of them like peas, rushing to take up their assigned positions...
...I waved at the driver: "Time to get moving or you'll miss me...
...To live meant to suffer, to work meant to toil...
...You're not writing for them," Larisa argued and again crossed things out...
...I. found a reliable refuge for me and even, it seems, a job somewhere in the northwest...
...But my visit to the capital dragged on and proved to be decisive for my entire future...
...For instance, "Car to the Bolshoi Kameny Bridge, Car to the Bolshoi Kameny Bridge," the agent mumbles into his collar, and so on...
...The offices of Moskva are to the right of the subway...
...Today when I remember those days at the resort, it seems as if they lasted for months, but in reality it was only two weeks...
...I was also given the opinion of Alexander Solzhenitzyn who thought present-day prisoners, as I described them, were too brave, and were provoking solitary confinement and other punishments...
...Meanwhile, my circumstances made my attempts at writing resemble a steeplechase...
...There had to be an objective, but I couldn't fathom it...
...She was expelled from the party in 1968 following her participation in the protests surrounding the trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov in January 1968...
...Fiction or nonfiction...
...In the Potma camps of Mordovia, Rumyantsev participated in hunger strikes in support of other political prisoners...
...The volume of what I wrote grew, though very slowly...
...What if suddenly, in my absence, my innocent-looking possessions were searched...
...Afterward the merry-goround world would start again: work in the factory, the daily routine, the corner behind the curtain...
...and the car followed me every step of the way...
...They are the masters who take more from you and give you less...
...The writer Yuli Daniel, who had been convicted in a celebrated case earlier that year, met Marchenko in the Mordovian camps and just before his release in November suggested that Marchenko visit his wife, Larisa Bogoraz, in the capital...
...But after spending six years in the labor camps for political prisoners, Marchenko wrote My Testimony, the first account of the camps in the post-Stalin period, under Nikita Khrushchev, when the Soviet Union seemed intent on liberalization and political reform...
...She sent him books (at the time you could still mail as many books as you liked to prisoners), she wrote to him about art exhibitions and theater performances in Moscow, sent New Year's presents to his children, traveled to visit his mother...
...First, she made me remove all my harangues against labor camps and all statements about the regime in general...
...In the meantime I had to hurry...
...Some were close friends of each other, while others were barely acquainted...
...The police recorded my registration violation (my stay in Moscow...
...Stop pouring filth on your homeland and the Soviet system...
...They approved of My Testimony...
...I couldn't restrain myself...
...I grew up among the children of railway workers...
...Today the government has been compelled to create artificial obstacles to destroy contact between those at liberty and those "in the zone...
...And then...
...How many arguments we had on that subject...
...Although the warmth and sympathy 309 were sincere, it made me uncomfortable to receive such treatment, not for any personal qualities but simply because I had been released from a political labor camp...
...44 115...
...We know all about you, Marchenko, and about your book My Testimony...
...She was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group in May 1976...
...You're all shouting, 'Just like the Stalin era, just like the Stalin era.' What would have been left of you during the Stalin era...
...Afterward, when I reread what was left, I was almost ready to believe she was right...
...Where could I keep my writing...
...The others I just mentioned represented the height of prosperity and contentment in everyone's eyes...
...A history teacher, a physicist, a mathematics lecturer, an artist, an editor, a few men of letters, and scientists, some with those magical titles: Candidate of Science, Doctor of Science...
...Late one winter night, I was coming home from some friends and walked by "my" car with its familiar license plate...
...They were convinced that any attempt to cross the border would end with my death...
...under Stalin and later served as Soviet ambassador to the United States at the height of World War II...
...A few days after my escape through the window, they caught up with me, grabbed me, then let me go...
...True, it is only a fraction of the population but it is continually replenished and revived, filling in the crack between repression and emigration, because hypocrisy and lies contradict human nature and this layer of society has large inner resources...
...This had never happened and could not happen...
...She was the first person to be arrested for distributing letters in defense of prisoners of conscience...
...I might get lucky and fall under the amnesty...
...So I took all my notes to work, running the risk that sooner or later they would fall out of my pockets...
...They considered my actions courageous, not recognizing their own bravery...
...Larisa never rewrote anything for me, but made me rework and rewrite it myself...
...The KGB showing humaneness...
...She worked during the week, and when she came to me on her days off she was so tired that as soon as she started editing she would fall asleep...
...Valery Rumyantsev was serving a 15-year sentence for treason under Article 64 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Republic...
...In August 1968 I was tried not for the book, but for "violating passport regulations...
...Curiously, the notions I had harbored earlier are still held today by so-called civil servants— policemen, prosecutors, the KGB, and so on...
...They were all considered members of the intelligentsia...
...Forced to emigrate in February 1977, she lives near New York City and is the official representative of the Moscow Helsinki group in the West...
...I became close friends with a young 310 prisoner, Valery Rumyantsev, a former KGB officer.' Valery, despite his former, distasteful job, was a genuine intellectual, and I owe him a great deal...
...No sooner did the regime relax, than decency began to bring people together...
...Either they weren't looking for me or they couldn't find me (unlikely, since I wasn't hiding...
...At that time I did not conceal I would try to go abroad since I could not carry out my plan by myself...
...If you don't stop this slander, I warn you, you will be exiled from the country...
...I became ashamed of my recent opinion of such people...
...Go to Alexandrov, live, work like all Soviet people...
...Not to mention what value and kind of "testimony" it would be under a pseudonym...
...When I made up my mind in the labor camp to expose the conditions of the political prisoners, I did not count on any indulgence or consider the possibility of an amnesty...
...But no signal came, and I had to send out copies another two or three times (either by myself or through friends...
...Since I couldn't find any work and I couldn't get registered in any of the nearby places, like Vladimir, Kaluga, Tula, or Kalinin, I went off to Barabinsk near Novosibirsk...
...It is difficult to find a Moscow family from the intelligentsia that was not affected by Stalin's terror...
...I am not certain, but I think during this time the KGB lost me for about a month and a half...
...The grounds were an enormous parkland covered by a mixed forest...
...I felt I had been granted only a short furlough to prepare for crossing the border...
...I get onto the subway—an agent stands on guard at the door...
...A story...
...The White Book appeared in English in On Trial: The Soviet In any case, Semyenov's prediction came true...
...Pavel received five years of internal exile...
...It turned out that my scribblings were saturated with just that...
...Some of his songs have been officially recorded, but the majority circulate unofficially on tapes among large sectors of the population...
...sneered Semyenov...
...She emigrated to France in 1975...
...You could make a movie from it...
...Yuli Daniel worked as a translator from several languages when he was arrested in September 1965 for publishing short stories abroad under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak...
...Others were condemned—for reading My Testimony...
...From that moment until my arrest in July 1968, I never felt I was alone in Moscow, even going to a public toilet...
...Marchenko was hoping that in October 1967 the regime would declare a general amnesty to mark the 50th anniversary of the revolution...
...To any country abroad...
...How much do they pay you...
...Larisa took her vacation at the same time...
...When the editors registered the manuscript, they would enter the date it was written...
...Winter and summer, heavy black grease literally dripped from their clothing...
...I resisted, thinking she was softening my expressions for the sake of my security...
...Larisa was too busy to spend time on my drafts...
...you're in the cubicle, your antagonists are at the door, and duty does not allow them to do their own business...
...Naturally, I was not allowed to live in Moscow although I had friends who would have given me a corner of their home to live in...
...To this day, I rack my brain over it...
...I registered, found work, and lived there from March until June...
...The author has decided to sacrifice his own life," they added, "but why does he have to drag others along with him...
...His grandfather, Maxim Litvinov, had been foreign minister of the U.S.S.R...
...I had messages from prisoners to pass on to their relatives...
...He had originally intended to escape the Soviet Union in order to bear witness in the West to the suffering he had seen in the camps...
...Then he himself arranged for the editors of one journal to receive the manuscript, but to keep it from falling into the hands of anyone known to be an informer...
...I'll do the talking...
...Here's one example...
...Now I had enough time...
...One lovely, single woman friend, Ira Belogorodskaya, 12 volunteered to be my "fiancee...
...She only crossed things out, threw out bits of sentences, paragraphs, even whole episodes...
...It is obvious who is more needed and whom our country values more...
...Then came a period when I expected arrest as soon as they located me...
...Joshua Rubenstein...
...The neighbors would argue in the communal kitchen, one of them constantly hissing angrily...
...based on this material, an interested party could easily identify the author...
...Following Marchenko's arrest in July 1968, Irina was collecting signatures in his defense when she was arrested on August 7. Brought to trial on February 19, 1969, she was sentenced to a year in a labor camp for "attempting to defame" the Soviet political system...
...The experience of my camp colleagues proved that any underground work had to be done in one go, otherwise you just got burned out in vain...
...Then suddenly, the deed was accomplished and I began to hope for a lucky star in my fortune...
...Toward the end of my term I became acquainted with the writer Yuli Daniel,' and also with Valery Ronkin and Valery Smolkin, both engineers.' To my surprise, I did not feel the same alienation with them I had experienced in the outside world...
...Litvinov hardly finished compiling his massive account of the Ginzburg–Galanskov case (The Trial of the Four, ed...
...they were not trying to be heroes or leaders...
...I composed my last statement for the trial, learned it by heart, and 315 gave a friend the text so people would know what I would say...
...Thanks to Khrushchev, a flood of rehabilitated "enemies of the people" inundated Moscow.' For a while this unheard-of humaneness by the Soviet government created an impression that there were no more political trials, no more camps or jails with political prisoners in the Soviet Union...
...Six months earlier I had shared my plans with two or three Moscow friends...
...If statistics were kept somewhere of parcels sent to the camps, the period beginning in 1966-67 would show a sharp increase...
...Before my arrival, Larisa had shown my letters to other friends and they advised me as before: "Write as well as you can...
...the defendants included Vladimir Bukovsky) and was later warned by the KGB not to circulate the material...
...the secretary asks with a displeased but not hostile voice, as she takes down my personal information on an index card...
...Her husband had friends there, they would hide me...
...My listeners were ready to do something, to help those who were imprisoned...
...Everyone unanimously agreed on one thing: I mustn't show up in Alexandrov, even to pick up my things, because they'd knock me off in an ambush the very first evening...
...Without making a mistake I learned to recognize "them" from others breathing down my neck...
...Generally, people in the intellectual professions were associated with the regime, with the bosses, and who likes bosses...
...I thought I heard someone scrape the window...
...On my days off, hiding a few notebooks in my pockets, I went off for "walks" in the woods...
...It is still a mystery to me...
...They'll simply kill you...
...As Marchenko explains in "Live As Others Live,' his stay in Moscow "proved to be decisive for my entire future...
...In this way our "relationship" was formally recorded...
...The first couple to invite me into their home were Natasha Sadomskaya and Boris Shragin...
...the camps were flooded with books and art reproductions...
...In January and February, as I mentioned before, the KGB had apparently lost track of me...
...While someone tinkered with the front door, trying to open it or break it down, and these two kept looking at me through the window, I jumped out the other window—the one facing the park—in just the clothes I was wearing...
...Valery Ronkin, a chemical engineer from Leningrad, was arrested in 1965...
...They didn't have to be changed at all...
...in Alexandrov it is the easiest thing to concoct a "case...
...The closer one showed me through the window a red booklet with the golden imprint "The Committee of State Security of the Government of the U.S.S.R...
...He was a trustworthy fellow, a gifted scientist...
...There was one name for all railway workers: greasers...
...He only has one pair of pants...
...We know you sent it abroad and that you're circulating it throughout the country...
...A second man was hiding farther away behind a tree, but in contrast to the first, he was dressed carelessly, even sloppily...
...If you don't leave Moscow, you will be tried, not for your book but for your violations of Soviet passport laws...
...A. and V. remained friends after his release from camp...
...There was not even a limit on the number of books...
...But how long can one hide...
...No one intends to persecute you for that...
...My plans would remain unfulfilled and I would end up doing time for nothing...
...It is part of a longer manuscript that tells about his arrival in Moscow and his first encounter with Soviet intellectuals...
...In fact, many of my acquaintances in these ten years have passed through prison, camp, and internal exile...
...If I stayed up late, Auntie Nyura had to ask in the morning: "Tolik, what's this, don't you sleep at night...
...And also, of course, because of personal recommendations...
...I was living in a tiny room in the home of some elderly people who were well-versed in the intricacies of conspiracy...
...they had plenty to talk about...
...I would accuse Larisa of losing precious minutes...
...If I had fulfilled Semyenov's orders and subsequently "lived as others live," maybe they really wouldn't have touched me...
...At the same time the government incited simple people against the intelligentsia: engineers were saboteurs, doctors were murderers, they were all "enemies of the people...
...We went together to the registry office and declared our intentions...
...My former ideas about them had been typical of a backwoods yokel...
...Yuli Daniel returned to Moscow where he still lives and works...
...The allpowerful KGB was openly looking for me, but they offered me a place to live...
...A day later they arrested me once more and again released me...
...I lived quietly until December 10...
...Apparently adding to the script, he said on his own, "Some hero...
...We constantly heard the same warning from our parents: If you don't want to end up a greaser like your father for the rest of your life, then study...
...Convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," he was sentenced to five years of labor camp...
...Being decent, the employees of the journal did not want to be informers, but they were afraid to keep the manuscript themselves and didn't register it...
...They tried to convince me in groups and one at a time, at home, or while taking me for nocturnal walks through Moscow...
...There's one suit hanging in their closet...
...that's why I guessed rather than actually heard...
...I planned to visit Moscow for only a day or two...
...In front of the agents and their cameras my friends accompanied me in order not to leave me alone with the plainclothesmen and so to deter provocations...
...Let's see what will come of it...
...Where could I write...
...From his lips I could read, "Open the door...
...I arrived in Moscow full of self-doubt...
...She could get frightened and inform on me...
...One more concern was to find a "relative" among my Moscow acquaintances who would be allowed to take care of my affairs after my arrest, to negotiate with a lawyer and ask for visits...
...It is true that this time, in the police station, I had a conversation with a man who pretended to be a policeman but who, I immediately understood, worked for the KGB and probably not at a low rank...
...I was working without my hearing-aid...
...The KGB might get wind of something and grab me...
...Where would the manuscript be in a month...
...Convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," he was sentenced to ten years of labor camp plus five years of internal exile, a term it seems hard to imagine he could survive...
...Who knows...
...I threw open the blind and saw a young man outside the window...
...None of them were exempt from arrest...
...It's shameful to say, but the excitement of this game drew me in...
...Everyone said, "They will never forgive you for this...
...This time he did not bother with any pretense...
...Tme went by, and my premonitions and the predictions of friends did not come true, thank God...
...I didn't know and didn't care who got it...
...Auntie Nyura was very kind to me, especially after she was convinced that I was not a drunkard...
...Many more have emigrated to the West...
...And the "people" willingly accepted this baiting...
...Marchenko wrote "Live As Others Live" during his time of exile in the late 1970s...
...n the early summer of 1967 I returned to Moscow from my parents' home...
...No one needs you...
...Larisa and I sat over my work...
...Then suddenly I got lucky...
...Well, all right, let it be a story...
...Yet what I had accomplished by the end of the summer did not amount to a manuscript...
...Or we can send you an answer by mail...
...Lyuda Alexeeva helped me rent a corner in Alexandrov, in Vladimir province, a 2-hour journey from Moscow by train.' I managed to register there and got a job as a freight handler in a liquor factory...
...I remember N. walked around the courtyard with me for two hours (such conversations were never carried on inside, we were afraid the apartment might be bugged), trying to persuade me to get on a train the next day and go to the North Caucasus...
...Translators' Notes ' The full Russian text of "Live As Others Live" appears in the journal Pamyat (or Memory) no...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
