Monumental Propaganda Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - CONSOLIDATION

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  PART TWO - WE SING AS WE FIGHT AS WE CONQUER

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  PART THREE - VAIN EXPECTATIONS

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  PART FOUR - SOMNAMBULISM

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  PART FIVE - DANCING ON OUR STREET

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  EPILOGUE

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  A Note About the Author

  ALSO BY VLADIMIR VOINOVICH

  Copyright Page

  In loving memory of my wife, Irina

  PROLOGUE

  When I opened the envelope, out fell a newspaper clipping about the size of a matchbox. On it, in a black border of mourning, a group of comrades from the city of Dolgov informed the reader with profound regret of the tragic death of the pensioner Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 1933, veteran of the Great Patriotic War and outstanding social activist.

  I was surprised, thinking that someone must have sent me a text from days long gone. But when I turned over the piece of paper and read “New in the Internet,” “Paging Services” and “Tax Inspec” (the end of the word was cut off), I was even more surprised. Who on earth would want to mention membership in the CPSU nowadays?

  The anonymous individual who forwarded the notice had evidently expected it would strike a chord with me, and he was right. It was a long time since I had been in Dolgov; I was not aware that Aglaya had attained such an advanced age and found it hard even to imagine her alive in these times. I set out for Dolgov immediately and took up residence in the former Collective Farmers’ House, now the Hotel Continental, where I stayed for about two weeks, interviewing various people who knew anything at all about the final years of Aglaya, or Oglashennaya (“the woman possessed”) or Ogloedka (“the bone gnawer”)—people used to modify her name in various ways, adapting it to suit her character. Her previous biography was well known to me. I had recounted part of it in my past novels Chonkin and The Scheme. Allow me, without repeating myself unduly, to remind you briefly: When she was a Komsomol member, youthful and ardent, she altered her documents to add five years or more to her age and plunged headlong into the class war. In her leather jacket and with her revolver at her side, she galloped around the local district on her horse, dekulakizing the rich and herding the poor into collective farms. After that she became the manager of the orphanage and married the district Party secretary, Andrei Revkin, whom she was later forced to sacrifice for the sublime cause. When German forces entered Dolgov in the fall of ’41, Aglaya blew up the local power station while her husband, who had laid the charges, was still inside. “The motherland will not forget you!” she shouted to him down the phone as she touched the ends of the wires together.

  During the war Aglaya Stepanovna commanded a partisan unit, which was awarded two decorations for distinguished service in action. After the war she herself was the district Party secretary until she was “gobbled up” by more predatory comrades. She returned to her prewar place of employment and worked once again as director of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Children’s Home, where in February 1956 she was taken unawares by the historical event which provides the starting point of our narrative.

  PART ONE

  CONSOLIDATION

  1

  In February 1956, on the day the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU ended, in the Dolgov District House of the Railroad Worker, Khrushchev’s secret speech about Stalin’s personality cult was read to the local Party core of activists. The reader was the second secretary of the district Party committee, Pyotr Klimovich Porosyaninov, a plump, well-nourished, red-cheeked, bald man with thick, moist ears covered in whitish bristles—his surname, with its obvious resemblance to the Russian word for “piglet,” suited him very well. In fact, in Dolgov there were many people with names that had meanings. There was even a period when the town possessed simultaneously a head of police called Tiuryagin (an obvious hint at the word “tiuryaga,” or jail), a public prosecutor called Strogii (meaning “strict”) with a deputy who rejoiced in the name of Vorovaty (“light-fingered”!), a judge called Shemyakin (reminiscent of the seventeenth-century hanging judge Shemyaka) and a head of the department of public education called Bogdan Filippovich Nechitailo (a surname which could be interpreted to mean “illiterate”).

  Porosyaninov read slowly, smacking his lips together loudly as though he were eating cherries and spitting out the pits. At the same time, he lisped and stammered over every word, especially if it was a foreign one.

  As Porosyaninov read, the core of Party activists listened in silence, their faces tense, their thick necks and the backs of their skulls shorn in semi–crew cuts.

  Then they asked the speaker questions: Would there be a purge of the Party? And what should they do with the portraits of Stalin, take them off the walls and rip them out of the books as they had done many tim
es before with former leaders of the Revolution and heroes of the Civil War? Porosyaninov involuntarily turned his head and squinted sidelong at the portrait of Lenin, then shivered and said that no purge was expected and there was no need to go overboard with the portraits. Although a certain number of individual actions taken by Stalin had been incorrect, he was and remained a distinguished member (that was the phrase the speaker used) of our Party and the world communist movement, and no one intended to deny him due recognition for his services.

  Aglaya Revkina, who had been through so much in her life, proved to be unprepared for a blow like this. As they were leaving the club, several people heard her declare loudly, without addressing anyone in particular: “Such filth! Such terrible filth!”

  Since on that particular evening the street was not covered in filth—in fact, it was cold and there was a blizzard swirling the snow about, so that everything could more accurately have been described as pure white—no one took Aglaya’s words literally.

  “Yes, yes,” said Valentina Semenovna Bochkareva, the planner from the Collective Farm Technical Unit, backing her up. “What people we put our faith in!”

  Elena Muravyova (secret-agent alias “Mura”) reported this fleeting dialogue to the local department of the Ministry of State Security, and her report was confirmed by Bochkareva herself during an interview of a prophylactic nature that was conducted with her.

  But Bochkareva had misunderstood Aglaya. Her words about filth had indeed been intended in a figurative sense, and not the one in which Bochkareva had taken them.

  When she got home, Aglaya was absolutely beside herself. No, it was not Stalin’s crimes but the criticism of him that was what had astounded her most of all. How dare they? How dare they? She walked around all three rooms of her flat, beating her tough little fists against her tough little hips and repeating aloud the same words, addressed to her invisible opponents, over and over again: “How did you dare? Who do you think you are? Who are you to raise your hand against him?”

  “And you, disdainful descendants . . .”—Lermontov’s line, which she thought she had forgotten long ago, came drifting out from some dark corner of her memory . . .

  She had never believed in God, but she would not have been surprised in the least if Porosyaninov’s tongue had withered or his nose had fallen off or he had been paralyzed by a stroke in the middle of giving his speech. The words he had uttered in the House of the Railroad Worker had been too absolutely blasphemous.

  She had never believed in a God in heaven, but her earthly god was Stalin. His portrait, the famous one with him lighting up his pipe, holding a lighted match close to the slightly singed mustache, had hung over her writing desk since the times before the war, and during the war it had traveled the partisan forest trails with her and then returned to its place. A modest portrait in a simple limewood frame. In moments of doubt over her most startlingly dramatic actions, Aglaya would raise her eyes to the portrait, and Comrade Stalin seemed to screw up his own eyes slightly and urge her on with his kind and wise smile: Yes, Aglaya, you can do that, you must do it, and I believe that you will do it. Yes, she had been forced to make some difficult decisions in her life—harsh, even cruel, decisions concerning various people—but she had done it for the sake of the Party, the country, the people and the future generations. Stalin had taught her that for the sake of the sublime idea it was worth sacrificing everything, and no one could be pitied.

  Of course, she respected the other leaders as well, the members of the Politburo and the secretaries of the Central Committee, but nonetheless she thought of them as just people. Very clever and bold, utterly devoted to our ideals, but people. They could make mistakes in their thoughts, words and actions, but only he was ineffably great and infallible, and his every word and every action expressed such transcendent genius that his contemporaries and the generations to come should accept them as unconditionally correct and absolutely binding.

  2

  A large statue of Stalin stood in the center of Dolgov on Stalin Square, formerly Cathedral Square, formerly the Square of the Fallen. It had been erected in 1949 in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, on her—that is, Aglaya’s—initiative. At that time Aglaya was the first secretary of the district Party committee, but even she had been forced to overcome opposition. Everyone understood what great educational importance the monument could have, and no one dared oppose it directly, but secret enemies of the people and demagogues had raised their heads to object, citing the present state of postwar devastation. They incessantly reminded everyone that the district suffered delays and irregularities in deliveries of foodstuffs, that the people were destitute and swollen-bellied from hunger and the time was not yet right for grandiose projects that were too great a burden on the local budget.

  One of the monument’s main opponents had been Wilhelm Leopoldovich Livshits, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Bolshevik Tempos. He wrote an article called “Bronze Before Bread” and published it in his newspaper. In it he stated that monumental propaganda was, of course, a matter of great importance—Lenin himself had emphasized that it was a matter of great importance—but did we have the moral right today to spend so much money on a monument when our people were suffering? “Just whose ‘ours’ and ‘yours’ are these?” Aglaya inquired in a letter to the editor, in which she also explained that our Russian people are long-suffering, they would tighten their belts still further, they would suffer in the short term, but the monument erected by them would endure forever. In his reply Livshits informed her that all of us have only one people, the Soviet people, and that the monument was indeed essential, but it could be erected later, when the economic situation in the district and the country as a whole improved. He even had the effrontery to enlist Stalin himself as one of his allies. According to Livshits, Stalin, being wise and modest, would not have approved such prodigal expenditure at an hour of such great difficulty for the Motherland.

  Of course, that was demagoguery. Livshits undoubtedly knew, as everyone knew—only one did not say it out loud—that the economic situation would only be easy under communism. Well then, were we supposed to just sit back and not build anything, neither saw nor sew nor plane nor forge nor sculpt until the advent of communism? Perhaps that was what the rootless and tribeless cosmopolitan Livshits was counting on? But he had miscalculated. Soon thereafter he had been exposed as involved with the international organization of Zionists and spies known as Joint and suffered the well-deserved penalty. In the quiet hour before dawn one of the automobiles popularly known as a “black raven” or “black Marusya” had pulled up at the Livshits’ house and removed the self-appointed representative of the people to a place far distant from the city of Dolgov.

  Livshits was not alone. Others may have expressed their opinions less openly, but they had also dropped hints.

  Having overcome the resistance, Aglaya had her way and erected the monument—although it wasn’t actually bronze, as had been anticipated at the beginning, but cast iron. Because the railway wagon with the bronze, having left the city of Yuzhnouralsk one fine day, never arrived at the city of Dolgov. (Where it did arrive remains a mystery even now.) This delighted certain spiteful faultfinders. Perhaps it also delighted Wilhelm Leopoldovich Livshits as he squatted on his prison toilet, but his delight was premature. Aglaya’s enemies knew her well, but not well enough. They had underestimated her will to victory and failed to appreciate that she never retreated from her chosen goal. She went to Moscow, consulted the sculptor Max Ogorodov and commissioned him to forge the statue out of cast iron.

  3

  Stalin was seventy years old on Wednesday, December 21, 1949.

  Aglaya remembered for the rest of her life that dark, frosty, misty morning, the granite pedestal and the figure swathed in white canvas wrapped around with string.

  A gusty wind flapped the edges of the canvas in the air and swirled the dry gray snow across the square in a low, thin, shifting layer. Although it was a workday, the enti
re district leadership had turned up—men in identical dark coats and deerskin caps—and Aglaya had covered her own head with a light Orenburg shawl. And in addition, the regional Party secretary, Gennadii Kuzhelnikov, had arrived, wearing a woolen cloth coat with a padded lining and an astrakhan collar, and boots with galoshes from the Red Triangle factory. The head of the district Ministry of State Security office, Ivan Kuzmich Dyrokhvost, stood out in his fur-lined leather coat and peaked leather cap. The chairmen of the collective farms were all to a man rosy-cheeked and red-nosed, wearing sheepskin coats, sheepskin caps and felt boots. Also present, naturally, was the monument’s creator, the sculptor Ogorodov, who had delivered himself from Moscow to the venue for the occasion in a thin autumn coat and a red scarf, with a dark blue velvet beret set on his head at a jaunty angle and patent-leather shoes entirely unsuited to the prevailing weather conditions. Ogorodov had also brought his wife Zinaida with him.

  Zinaida is unlikely to play too important a part in our narrative, but since she has found her way into these pages, let us note that she was a plump, domineering woman four years older than Ogorodov, that she possessed a voice rendered hoarse by smoking and was foul-mouthed to a degree encountered less frequently in those chaste times than nowadays.

  She had found Ogorodov on a garbage heap before the war. That was what she said herself. In actual fact, it was not a garbage heap, but a hall of residence in Malakhovka, where he was living in absolute obscurity as a student, having arrived in Moscow from Kostroma or Kaluga. The appearance he presented was downtrodden, to say the least. He was barely surviving on bread and water from one student grant payment to the next, his only property being what he stood up in, what was in his suitcase, and the suitcase itself, made of plywood covered with glossy green paint, something like an ammunition box with a handle made of bent wire five millimeters thick.

  Zinaida had taken the future sculptor home to the communal flat where she lived with her ancient and querulous mother, washed him off, cleaned him up and begun to live with him. They had survived the poverty of his student years together. At that time Ogorodov used to fashion clay whistles in the shape of cocks, wolves, bears and hares and bake them in the oven, and she used to sell them at the Tishinsky market. There was no question of any other kind of sculpture—what would he have made? Where, from what and for whom? But then when he came back from the war with four medals, with a red stripe on his sleeve for having been slightly wounded and a “Guards” badge, Zinaida began promoting him everywhere as a combat veteran, a hero and a genius. By dexterously exploiting his services to the country, she opened doors and made essential contacts but never overstepped the mark (or if she did, it was only in exceptional circumstances, for the good of the cause). She managed to get Ogorodov membership in the Union of Artists, with a separate studio and an apartment in a wooden house. Heated by a wood-stove, but with no one else sharing it. She did everything for him, and he himself would confess, especially when he was a bit under the influence: “Zinka, my precious, I’d never have made it without you.”