"Tell People How Old Steklov Died!"
Wat, Aleksander
Aleksander Wat was born in Warsaw in 1900 to a family of Polish-Jewish intelligentsia. As a young man he was a founder of the Polish futurist literary movement; in 1929 he became editor of...
...Once, in the morning, the guard—you could tell by his face he was gentle—let me stand there, but he said, "No talking allowed here...
...I.H...
...He was calling somebody, probably the nurse...
...The fiftieth anniversary of Steklov's joining the party was supposed to be celebrated with great ceremony under the patronage of Stalin himself...
...I had the feeling of it flowing away to some sea, some sea within me...
...I checked that out later on in the literature...
...And so they took Warski away...
...The look on his face was very different during that conversation...
...Once I heard him say, "Radi Boga" (For God's sake), but by then his voice sounded like a broken instrument...
...But even those tombs had been disrupted by the war, and people began to be pulled out of them and sent to Moscow...
...the eyes dominated...
...Brutality was not permitted against the wife of an arrested man, provided the wife was not under arrest herself...
...This, in bare outline, is the life story of a remarkably interesting literary-intellectual figure...
...And though his skin drooped a bit, the face had a certain energy to it, so you weren't aware of that loose skin...
...I asked Steklov that question: "Why did the heroes of the Revolution fall so low...
...He spoke with disgust about those conversations around the table over vodka when important decisions were being made, the extreme vulgarity and cruelty of those people...
...And then I realized that this old erratic egocentric thought that I had to return because now I had a mission to carry out: to tell people how old Steklov had died...
...He grew angry at me...
...Steklov told stories that would make Stalin burst out laughing...
...The prosecutors would flee from those wives...
...The following excerpt, which is largely selfsufficient, concerns the fate of an old Bolshevik whom Wat met in a prison hospital in Saratov...
...Ceretelli, the whole group of socialists, excellent Marxists, an entire school...
...The two of us were just skin and bones...
...Steklov's gaze was so heavy when he spoke of those things that I could feel the weight of it on me...
...And I also realized that I had a unique chance to get inside information on various things that had been gnawing at me for years, for example, the trials, the confessions, and so on...
...an associate of Lenin...
...Later, SUMMER • 1988 • 347 they were often exiled, but if they weren't arrested, they were allowed to go around everywhere and even create scenes...
...She was told one thing and another, but after a time she received official written notice that Steklov had died...
...After Hitler's invasion of Russia, he was transferred to a prison in Saratov, where he underwent a conversion to Christianity...
...Steklov, the editor of Izvestiya, the worthy author of large books on Chernyshevsky, literature, politics...
...350 • DISSENT...
...A bon vivant, an old man, he wanted to die a natural death...
...then they came for me...
...They had great contempt for Stalin at the very beginning, and there was also that story of Stalin's robbing the train...
...In 1941 he was released...
...That was a very strange thing, but even during the worst periods of the terror, the wives were allowed to make a fuss...
...That must have been very cutting for Stalin, and Yenukidze was locked up...
...But he obviously did not conceal anything from his daughter, and he spoke ill of Stalin to her...
...Wat was arrested in January 1940 by the Soviet authorities and sent to Lubyanka prison in Moscow...
...editor-in-chief of Izvestiya...
...then I'd come to and be listening to him again...
...The memoirs he dictated, under Milosz's delicate prompting, form a brilliant account of European cultural and political life in the twentieth century...
...That was the arrangement, the setup...
...There was also hatred when he spoke of Stalin, a terrible hatred, a hatred all his own—one that was in fact keeping him alive...
...Torture, for us...
...Of course you'll return...
...To confess or not to confess, that was no issue...
...They took him...
...He used vulgar words but always spoke with splendid refinement...
...I don't know if you can say that...
...Each one of us heroes of the Revolution who'd been arrested knew that we could be presented with such a bill of immorality and degradation and villainy that dated back almost to the very start that nothing really mattered to us anymore...
...Steklov was swollen but desiccated...
...My primary intention was to get him to shed some light on the trials, which remain a mystery no matter what...
...But Yenukidze had a daughter who was a devotee in the cult of Stalin...
...Wat died in Paris in 1967...
...A certain nobility, something aristocratic about his face...
...His eyelids were lowered, just narrow slits now, eyelids that I had observed closely in that waiting room and that were almost like fine Chinese porcelain, but now they were thick like tires, and his face wasn't so much a death's head as the head of Ramses, the mummy of Ramses...
...Besides, there was a similar incident with Warski, which people talk about in Warsaw but which, of course, has never been in print...
...Apparently Steklov had come close to finishing the work, and so it's somewhere in the NKVD archives...
...Steklov had a different version, a so-called unknown version, but one that I think was quite common in those times...
...When she was released, Steklov's wife, of course, began running to see everyone she could for help...
...His nose was quite prominent but did not dominate...
...Everything was fine, and then the day before, or a few days before, bang, Steklov was locked up...
...Steklov . . . had been in Lubyanka for a very short time after his arrest and then was sent immediately to Omsk Central—you know, I always mix up Omsk and Tomsk, and so I wouldn't bet my life that it was Omsk Central or Tomsk Central—in any case, one of the famous centrals that basically were mausoleums for those who had been buried alive...
...Because Stalin was basically monstrouslooking: a low shaggy forehead, a short man with a pockmarked face and horrible eyes...
...Conditions were rather free there—a soldier in front of each ward, but the corridor wasn't guarded and I could hear Steklov's voice from there...
...The biographical entry at the back of the book for this once famous figure reads: Steklov, Yuri M. (orig...
...In the late 1950s the Wats settled in Paris, where he continued his career as a poet...
...They had excellent medicine for dysentery there, and after three days I was able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom myself...
...His answer: "Torture...
...I stopped by his door again that evening...
...He then lived through the Stalinist period in Poland, suffering persecution for his opinions and writings...
...In 1964-65 he spent several weeks in Berkeley, California, taping his memoirs in response to questions from the distinguished poet Czeslaw Milosz...
...his opinion mattered to Stalin...
...Were they afraid of torture...
...But you know, a temperature can focus your attention and make the mind rapacious...
...There'd be breaks, blank spots, gaps...
...Far, far away, and I couldn't do anything to stop it...
...His family was locked up too, his wife and son...
...And she ran to Stalin and repeated what Warski had said about him...
...He was retired, old, out of things...
...So Steklov's wife began making the rounds of the offices...
...q Excerpted from My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, by Aleksander Wat, to be published by the University of California Press in September 1988...
...It was a clear-minded conversation, and, in fact, if it were reproduced on tape, it would certainly hold together and be logical, though there'd also be a certain feverishness about it...
...I was experiencing something different, and somehow it seemed to happen mostly when he was talking about Stalin...
...At one point, just after the Revolution, Steklov had announced that he was writing a two- or three-volume study of Chernyshevsky...
...I was taken to a rather large hospital room entered directly from the corridor...
...He told me about Yenukidze's fall...
...Very dry eyes, the eyes of a deranged man, but they had a certain fire to them...
...I mostly listened and only spoke to ask questions...
...that I 348 • DISSENT don't recall...
...He spoke readily about Stalin...
...Reprinted by permission...
...That it wasn't a court but a clique, actually just a gang, that he chose mainly people who were extremely vulgar, common, and coarse...
...you absolutely will...
...Many absorbing segments might have been excerpted, but Wat had a way of weaving different stories and thoughts together, so that it became difficult to find one that would seem self-sufficient...
...They took him first, and he shouted it from the doorway again, "Tell people in Poland how old Steklov died...
...I remember the wrinkles, but the general impression was of a smooth face...
...At the very beginning of the war Steklov had been returned to Lubyanka and soon after had been sent on to Saratov...
...Stalin was very fond of him...
...Yenukidze was a gentleman, a bon vivant, a Georgian socialist, which was a very refined type...
...It was obvious he was dying...
...they were fed well, they had books...
...Ably translated by Richard Lourie and with an excellent foreword by Milosz, they have now been published by the University of California Press as a book entitled My Century...
...he'd received honors...
...Then they came for us, and that was the end of the conversation...
...Perhaps the fever made me try so hard to remember and to remember so little...
...You asked me how he and I could talk when we were both running high temperatures...
...He gave the impression of being very sick, alive only because of that hatred...
...He did nothing wrong...
...What do I remember of what he said about Stalin...
...But that other central was actually extremely dismal, a tomb...
...Those people confessed because they were disgusted by their past...
...To which I replied immediately, and sinSUMMER • 1988 • 349 cerely, because that's what I thought, "I'll never return there...
...Josek had been told by Steklov's family that he had died of a heart attack...
...There were even "gilded cages" like that in Lubyanka...
...This work was looked on with such favor that he was given documents from the archives...
...He'd changed terribly...
...rather, it was power...
...All of us, all of us [this I recall nearly verbatim—a shudder went through me, a cold shudder through my feverish body because of the way he said this], we were all up to our elbows in shit and blood...
...At one point, toward the end of our talk, Steklov said to me, "When you return [this I remember verbatim], when you return to Poland, you absolutely have to tell people how old Steklov died...
...A person could be in there ten years, and no one apart from the NKVD would ever know he was alive...
...Besides, even at Lubyanka there were rumors that people who had supposedly been executed were in fact in one of those centrals...
...I never saw him again...
...When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Wat and his family fled from Warsaw and, once the family was separated, he ended up in Lwow...
...Even though it was late autumn in Saratov, it was a warm day, something like autumn in Poland, sunny and bright...
...Victim of Stalin's purges...
...Preparations were made, portraits in the newspapers...
...I don't know if he spoke about Lenin...
...A certain dry fire...
...every cell had its own toilet...
...But Steklov had noticed me and once again he said, "Tell people how old Nahamkes Steklov died...
...Stalin probably would have spared Warski, too...
...But he used to go for lunch with an old friend from his youth, Dzieripiski's widow...
...Suddenly—despite all efforts and all my desire to listen—my attention, which is the basis of memory, began to flow away from me...
...he had a very ugly reputation...
...He spoke with incredible contempt about the heroes of the Revolution and Stalin: that lowlife Trotsky, that swine Ordzhonikidze...
...And the nurse in our ward, a very kind old woman—all those old nurses were very kind—would cross herself on the sly whenever Steklov said Stalin's name...
...An old SD, an old socialist...
...What else did Steklov say about Stalin and Stalin's court...
...they were able to return to Moscow, where they were given part of the apartment they had previously occupied...
...What was the purpose of those trials...
...How to put it—they had fire but no light...
...What for...
...Steklov was two or three doors down from me...
...Yenukidze was something of a master for Stalin, who listened to what he had to say for quite a long time...
...Very dry skin, wrinkles...
...Not much...
...So that was a rather common occurrence with those Passionaras, those devotees of the cult of Stalin...
...Well, it was so bright in there, the room was so bathed in light, that I was able to observe him closely...
...They were all in solitary there, comfortable...
...Polish text, Moj Wiek, © 1977 by Paulina Wat and Andrzej Wat...
...Certain outstanding scientists were able to do work in their fields and were given whatever they wanted— food, clothing, everything...
...And we had that strange conversation on history, with me avid for the truth...
...It's odd that looks played no role here, for there's no question that there was a sexual undercurrent to all that, but male good looks played no role in it...
...in 1929 he became editor of the communist magazine The Literary Monthly...
...His jaw was already drooping, his breathing was heavy, he didn't say anything.1 He still shouted a few times about Stalin, his obsession...
...One of life's mysteries...
...For the first time, I made a gesture of friendship and he too placed his hand on his heart, a nice smile on his face...
...Stalin had made a cult of Chernyshevsky, and so Steklov assumed that his work had been facilitated on orders from Stalin himself...
...his face had changed completely, like day and night...
...they were afraid of them...
...And she went running to Stalin...
...And then in a strange act of mercy, Stalin not only released the wife and son but did not even have them made "disenfranchised citizens...
...He lived in the Kremlin, a favorite...
...By then, the father was very careful...
...That was the special feature of his eyes, not so much their dry fire as the incredible weight of his gaze...
...You felt it on your skin, especially when he was talking about the heroes of the Revolution...
...Why precisely that sort...
...I stood in front of his door twice in one day, on my fifth or sixth day there...
...he had come very much back to life, though at times he would fade away...
...0. M. Nahamkes) (1873-1941)—Russian Bolshevik...
...I remember that he used his first name that time...
...English translation © 1988 by Richard Lourie...
...Why did the heroes of the Revolution confess...
...And so Stalin destroyed them, but clearly Yenukidze had been Stalin's hero as a young man, and Yenukidze must have so impressed him that Stalin spared him and he set great store by him...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
