PARTISAN REVIEW
459
If
the terror was greatest in the 1930s and, again, in the 1950s, just before
Stalin died, it later only lessened temporarily, peaked, ebbed,
peak~d
again,
never weakening, never without its ability to apply new pressures. The night
before I met Nadezhda Mandelstam I took trains, cabs, buses, streetcars to
reach a group of dissidents I had contacted on several previous occasions.
Some of them-Vadim Belotserkovsky, a democratic dissident, and Viktor
Mandelsveg,
~
scientist-are now, fortunately, out of the Soviet Union. In 1972
these people met in secret, kissed each other on the mouth arriving and depart–
ing, feeling, like those in the Warsaw Ghello, that any meeting might con–
ceivably be the last time any two people saw each other. Not one of the nine
people in the room was without some prison story. Some had been arrested
just days earlier, for protesting against the "education tax" at the session of the
Supreme Soviet. Vadim and Viktor had been intercepted by the KGB on their
way to stage a sit-in; other's had been put in prison for going on a public
hungrr strike. Their interrogators had learned their techniques from Dostoev–
sky's Porfyry, or from movies like Z. Everything was sham and playacting
except the power.
The same night of my meeting with Nadezhda Mandelstam two friends
and I went to the Intourist Hotel for some food in the middle of the night. As
we entered a long corridor we heard this hideous sound of a young woman
being beaten in a police interrogation room. A red-faced young man stood
with his head down outside the door, unable to do anything to stop the beat–
ing. Russians and other Soviet citizens hurried by-it was past the tourist sea–
son-pretending to hear nothing unusual. And we three Westerners, Candides
who knew the KGB facts of life, passed by that door too.
It's this sense of the present in the Soviet Union that Nadezhda Man–
delstam wants to get through to us in her memoirs. Almost as an aside, sup–
posedly only comparing Ukrainian Kiev, her home as a child, and Russian
Moscow, her present home, she says:
I am glad that
my
capital is Moscow, not Kiev-my native language ... is
Russian, and if Jews are going
to
be slaughtered in both places, beller it
happen to me in Moscow [where) some kindly o ld soul .. . will try to stop
the mob with a few good-humored oaths.
Is she fanciful? Is she paranoid? Is she a religious fanatic unable to come to
terms with modern realities? Can't she see that the USSR has changed, and for
the beller? What possible connection can there be between a killer like Josef
Stalin and that prancing pixie Leonid Brezhnev who slops champagne all over
himself while doing a public relations pitch on American TV? And if she
thinks so highly of Vietnam Nixon, what about the Nixon who arranged the
Cargill wheat deals? What about the more recent wheat shipments that saved
many in the Soviet Union from hunger and even starvation? What of
detente?
