One more secret of Stalin’s Russia

By Vassily Dalan

Preface

I have decided to write my memoirs for the coming generations, while I’m strong enough mentally and physically and while my memory is sound.

My whole life has been spent in the current of dramatic social changes. I worked and struggled side by side with great personalities and outstanding representatives of Sakha (the Yakuts), a Siberian tribe: George Basharin, Nikolai Mordinov (Amma Achchygyia), Vladimir Novikov (Kiunniuk-Urastyrap), Vassily Protodiakonov (Koulantai), Semen and Sofron the Danilovs, Mikhail Ivanov (Bagdaryn-Siulba), Yegor Alexeev and others.

I’ve been witnessing and taking part in their struggle and striving to revive ethnic intellectual and cultural moral values of the Sakha (Yakut) people.

I’m proud that I didn’t stand aside from their social movement. It so happened, that my destiny had revealed for me the dark side of so - called "Humane Socialism", which had been hidden from the masses of rank-and-file people for a long period of time.

Now I’d like to bring a quotation from Dostoyevsky, who had already seen the dark side of our society at the age of 33: "While serving a penal sentence, I enriched my creative work as a writer with a lot of ordinary characters and human life stories. I didn’t waste time there and I didn’t even manage to learn about Russia, but I did learn about Russian people as ever anyone did".

In prison I met different kinds of people, I saw the way they behave in extreme situations.

This specific experience of knowing the two sides of life comes from my involment in "Basharin’s Case".

My native land - Yakutia - Sakha had been a region of exile, prison, as a certain "Goulag Archipelago" for a long time. And for a long time we had no right to speak and write about that.

The Big Nation’s prominent writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Danil Pounin, V. Shalamov, E. Ginsburg, L. Razgon and A. Zhigulin have already issued their books in this field. As far as small nations are concerned , we , the Sakha people, are only now starting this subject with a newly discovered letters, memoirs of Yakut emegry Mikhail Kornilov. Any action is caused by a certain reason. If fishermen pull a wire warp gradually out of the ice-hole by the end they will pull out the cod end.

I am intending to go over my life story, to think over my prison life to conduct a certain kind of research work.

I hope that my memoirs somehow will help my people to realize the essence of great changes in our life and heal the mental wounds suffered by them.

I wish you happiness and prosperity, my people!

Every man has a right to life, to be free and to personal inviolability.

(General Declaration of Human Rights. Article 3)

Interrupted entertaining reading

It was the 10th of April, 1952, and spring was at hand. It was warm enough but a cool wind blew. I had already been wearing leather boots for a long time.

There were only three of us in our student dormitory room No 29, one of us, Misha Ivanov, had been taken into custody.

The examination session was at full swing, Dima Troyev, our roommate, was lying on his bed after a short daytime sleep, ready to go to the library reading-room.

Gosha Nikiforov was out. I was reading the novel "Spring Time" by Nikolai Mordinov, sitting on my bed, since I had no habit of sleeping after lectures in the day-time. It was a new edition of this novel translated from Yakut into Russian. Meanwile I was waiting for Elya Sleptsova, a student of the Russian Department, who lived next door to us. We were to go together to the Health Center "Krasnaya Yakutia", where our relative had special treatment as tuberculosis patients.

It was quiet in the room. I had started reading the novel not so long ago, but I had already been enjoying the quality of translation. I reached the episode in the novel where a Russian medical attendant came to a Yakut family to treat the head of the family.

"The domestics hardly managed to tidy up their poor hut and put the washed patient in bed, and the newly appointed medical attendant came in with a small wooden case in his hand. "What’s wrong with you? Where does it hurt?" said the young medical attendant in rusty Yakut".

All of a sudden the door of our room was flung open, and an elderly Russian man in a long black coat came in. The man began to walk along the room to and fro without greeting us. Dima sat up in his bed, and his face turned pale with fear.

The fear had settled in our hearts since Misha Ivanov had been taken into custody.

The man continued walking along the room to and fro without saying anything. The silent tension began to grow for a certain time.

"What are you? Who are you? What do you want?" I asked putting aside the book.

The man stopped in front of me and got out a piece of paper from his pocket and pushed it forward before my eyes. "I want you!"

The paper read: "Warrant for arrest and search concerning Vassily Stepanovich Yakovlev". I felt my heart tremble, my face redden. The romantic image of the young Russian medical attendant had vanished, and I realized the cruel iron arms of reality, hanging over me.

"This is not for me, for another man. My patronymic is not Stepanovich", I said to the man without any hope in a low terrified voice.

"You study with Ivanov, do you?"

"Yes, I do!"

"Then it’s for you. As for the patronymic, we’ll correct the mistake".

Then another man in a long coat over his military uniform, with a high-necked tanktop, entered our room and the search had begun.

I began to feel calm, it was like in a dream, but not in real life. I hoped that the dream with the KGB men and the search in our room would soon go away. Only the pale and terrified face of Dima Troyev witnessed the real danger of the scene.

Our student belongings were simple, in my black wooden case, presented to me by my brother in law, a shop keeper, kept under my bed, there was a pair of new shoes, a new tennis shirt, trousers sewed by my elder sister of covert coat cloth. Once, when I and my sister where alone, she confessed tete-a-tete that she had been keeping these trousers for me for a long time for a present for my graduation from the Teachers Training Institute. The shoes and the blue tennis shirt were bought by myself with the money I earned on my own. How I had been waiting for the May Day Holidays to dance with girls dressed in these clothes. The KGB men opened my case with disgust, and sorted out my things, paying special attention to my books. Soon the search was over. Meanwhile somebody knocked at the door, but the KGB men did not unlock the door.

Maybe Elya Sleptsova or Gosha Nikiforov knocked at the door right after the search the KGB men made me go with them downstairs.

Outside there was a "gazhik" car waiting for us.

Later I learned that a young writer Afanasy Fedorov was put in prison on the same day.

That day turned out to be a crucial moment in our lives. It was a sudden thunder peal for me, a young man who dreamed of a new intellectual student life in the world of books, a young man, who came from a poor rural family. If I were older, I could have realized the danger hanging over Stalin’s Russia, my own region - the Yakut Republic in Siberia, right after Misha Ivanov’s arrest. Alas! I was too young and had illusions regarding our future. Now that I’m experienced enough go over my life under Stalin, I feel story for myself, my friends, my people, my country. Misha Ivanov and I had studied together at the Teachers Training Institute for four years. We were roommates in the student dormitory. We shared the same position at the seminar debates and our room debates. I wish I had been cautious that time when Misha Ivanov had been put in prison for two month. He was under investigation. Meawhile, since post-war time when Stalin proposed toasts to the Russian nation, a strange policy had been pursued. And this strange policy increased in 1946, when Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko became victims of severe criticism. There were special resolutions of the Communist Party Central Committee concerning these writers. There was a big campaign against "cosmopolites", there were new "discoveries", according to which Russia was not a backward country but on the contrary, it was a country, where the first electric lamp, the first radio, the first railway steam-engine, he first airplane and the first rocket had been invented. In 1948 there were frame-ups, the victims of which became Soviet biologists, so-called moganists and weimarists, such scientists as geneticists, cyberneticists. Sociology had been declared as bourgeois society’s fiction. Stalin’s speech in philosophy and literature had been considered to be the main guidelines. We senior, students of the Teachers Training Institute, didn't study Economics or Sociology. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity was taboo for us. The mass media constantly informed us about the aggressive enemies surrounding our country and who are ready to invade our Fatherland, about a lot of spies, traitors and adversaries, living side by side with the Soviet people within the country. The slogan of those times was "Who is not with us is an enemy!" Intimidation and atrocities had become the main line in domestic policy.

"The Leningrad case" and "The Kremlin doctors case" were coming.

In ethnic autonomous republics a campaign against so-called "nationalists" had been growing rapidly.

"The Shamile case" and a campaign against muridism made a deep impression on me.

First, writer G. Gouseinov was awarded the Stalin prize for his novel, devoted to Shamile, head of the Caucasian people’s rebellion. Later he was deprived of his prize and was heavily criticized as a "nationalist" as a result of it - the writer committed suicide.

In Yakutia, in our Siberian republic, "The Basharin case" had been in the public eye.