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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

An Untraditional KGB General

21 September, 1999 - 00:00

(Continued from the Title page)

Today many reproach Yevhen Marchuk for worked in the KGB and rose high in its ranks. I do not know all the aspects of his service there, but still I want to tell you about one episode: the way he dealt with me and how it turned out.

A man I do not know sat in front of me. Dark hair, brown eyes. Black eyebrows. He introduced himself: “Yevhen Kyrylovych Marchuk.”

I did not have to introduce myself. In general, I do not intend to say anything but the common courtesies: “Good afternoon” and “Goodbye.” For he was a KGB official and I a political prisoner, so it would seem we had nothing to discuss. He had, of course, looked through my dossier from the very first interrogation. So he was well informed that I never answered KGB questions. That means we were simply going to sit around for an hour or two. I would be bored, and so would he. Perhaps, seeing a new person, he would try to bawl me out and pound his fists on the table to begin with until he got tired. Then we would part company: I would have no idea where he would go, but I would be taken back into my cell. Jangling the keys, they would lock me up until the next reeducation session. Then, when this stupid monotony got on everybody’s nerves, I would be taken back to the camp and again thrown into a freezing punishment cell. I thought I would breathe my last breath in one such cell, quite soon at that. I had been worked on quite thoroughly of late. How boring when you know everything in advance!

But it went quite differently. It became interesting very soon. And would then rack my brains so long: what kind of a person was he? An actor of genius or a saboteur of genius deserving, according to Soviet ideologists, to be placed in a cell next-door to mine? See which year it was in!

August of 1991 was five years away. For me, it was the fourth year of doing time, just before the fifth. I saw no earthly chance to do the whole term and stay alive, so I never clung to insane hopes.

I had a great advantage over the KGB man: I would simply sit in silence, thinking my own thoughts. You can even compose verses in your mind, that is, tend to your own business. But he was not supposed to keep silent, he had to speak: to spin a tale about how now we have perestroika, and they will gladly release me provided, of course, I do a mere trifle: sign an innocent piece of paper, an appeal for a pardon. All you have to do is to write three things: that I really committed some crime, was imprisoned justly, and that I repent and promise never to do it again.

In my case that meant to write no poems and forget the words “human rights.” The very phrase “I ask your pardon” is a crucial one, for it is criminals, and not innocent people, who can be pardoned. You must write this phrase word for word, while the previous two items can be expressed loosely, only to preserve the required meaning. For there is perestroika, so too strict formalities are not needed. This will satisfy everybody. Otherwise, I cannot even dream of being released. I am only too well aware why: perestroika chief Gorbachev declared to whole world that there are no political prisoners in the USSR. But was common knowledge he was lying and was often caught lying during his frequent travels abroad. A bit awkward... But it is equally awkward to release them: look, here they are in flesh and blood, how could you deny their existence? And those who survived will tell about those martyred — what a nuisance! But if criminals are pardoned, it becomes a whole different kettle of fish. For they have already repented, been reeducated, broken forever, and are being pardoned at their own request. And here is a sheet of paper with a signature. Why not show it to L’Humanite: look, they wrote it themselves! Those who libeled themselves are sure to keep silent, for they will feel uneasy recalling it. They will simply try to forget it all.

But, to write this a person must be completely broken. For this reason they tried to break people. They were at wit’s end in Gorbachev’s times. We were confined to punishment cells. We were so emaciated and haggard that we could be cast for a film on Auschwitz. If you smiled, your lips cracked. And you had to smile: what else could we support each other with? None of my cell mates had died yet, but other camps claimed quite a few lives. Now it came our turn: we were barely alive... Moreover, the new law allowed prolonging terms as much as they liked.

I did not know at that time, of course, that the Kremlin was going to release some political prisoners, as a goodwill gesture, in October of that portentous year of 1986, on the eve of the Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Reykjavik. They were selecting from those who raised the loudest outcry in the outside world. They hesitated who to choose: Anatoly Marchenko or me. So the two of us were supposed to repent immediately and by all means. Thus they instructed General Marchuk to work on me. They brought me to the Kyiv KGB prison and shoved me into the cell. Get to work!

I knew the KGB methods: carrot and stick. They could blackmail one using his/her family and health or even “promise” death in detention. They might as well have resorted to psychological pressure and torment with cold and hunger. I had already gone through all these and many other things. What else could this new man say to me? So he says:

“As I understand, you do not intend to write an appeal for pardon? Well, then don’t. I promise we will never touch this topic again. I will try to do something without it. As you understand, releasing you depends not only on me. It is up to Moscow. But we’ll try. Now just relax a little. What can I do for you, while you are here? Any requests?”

Of course, there were no requests. I remembered the convict’s golden rule: never believe, never fear, and never ask. I think he knew this and took no offense.

“You’d better eat up here for a while. And I’ll bring you books, any you want. Tell me which, I’ll jot it down.”

(Inmates are allowed to keep not more than five books. But even these can be taken away during the search. A prison library is a pitiful sight. There is no library at all in a camp: we, political prisoners, were debarred from it. The hunger for books was part of the punishment system. There was nothing to read, and I had left the Bible at the camp). And he takes a pen and a sheet of paper:

“Well, dictate the list.”

Then there is a string of strange things: packs of books were being brought to me almost every day. Bulgakov, Tiutchev, Shvarts, and Akhmatova. Everything that at least once was published legally in the USSR. I could not even lift such heavy piles of books, so they were brought in by a jailer. No more prison torments (more than most I can remember the Kyiv jail when I was still under investigation!), there was not even a stool pigeon in my cell. All kinds of parcels, even fruit, were allowed in. I was allowed visitors, which I had been deprived of for the past three years. You had to talk to a visitor over the table, in the presence of a jailer. If you say something the latter does not like, the visit is over. But when my husband was let in, the young plainclothesman, pointing his silent finger to the ceiling (a prisoners’ code sign for “Careful! They’re listening”), demonstratively sat facing the corner and remained in this position to the end.

I was, of course, on guard: so many unscheduled liberties from a KGB officer, could it be the old good cop, bad cop routine? No sooner do you relax with the good cop, the bad one brings new headaches. Well, we were ready. But, as promised, there was no talk of repentance. No brutalities about my friends and relatives, no lies, no blackmail. Could this really be a KGB officer? A month passed, then another. I even gained strength: when I walked down the corridor I stopped being dizzy. I could not imagine what was General Marchuk up to. For Moscow would certainly take him to task: where is the result of his work with me? They need appeals for pardon, otherwise it meant you had done a bad job! But he was doing no job at all, at least not with me. I could even talk with him — so interesting was the phenomenon! — having, of course, limited the circle of subjects in advance. For instance, about literature and the weather. But I stay clear of what the KGB should not know, without his attempting to the contrary. No unexpected questions. Just sitting and discussing art, Christian ethics, and the sense of life in general. Under different conditions, I would say he is a highly-educated, well-read, and clever conversationalist. Obviously, a university alone could not provide such an education: he learned things himself, with a sense of purpose. He had some interesting ideas about the educational system. He knew about literature, to my pleasant surprise. One of his favorite books is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, and he commented on it in a very unorthodox way. We agreed that it was next to impossible, to our deep regret, to make an adequate film version of this book. In general, he liked literature and did not hide his aversion to me having been imprisoned for nothing but literary pursuits. He spoke of the economy with pain: it was clear to him where we are sliding to and what should be done. So it turned out he was miles away from the standard Soviet official. Under different conditions, I would not doubt that this person is not indifferent to the destiny of his people. But in this situation, I still did not trust him. His plain clothes were nothing but a uniform disguising a possible enemy. Too much was at stake: not only my honor but also the destiny of other political prisoners. For if one broke down, pressure mounted on the others. I had it tested on myself. He saw this mistrust but showed no sense of injury. And I sometimes thought: there were instances, albeit rarely, when KGB officers shirked their immediate duties. Perhaps, they did not want to commit a sin and thus began to help those whom they were supposed to persecute. Such valiant people tended not to do well. How sad he must have felt, I thought, dealing with me, risking his career at best or in the worst case his head. He may be sincere, I thought , but I still suspected him of everything imaginable. Politeness apart, he was still on the opposite side of the barricade from me. I had no right to think otherwise.

Of course, when Mr. Marchuk told me joyfully in October that I was being released and he was going to drive me home, I thought: here is the key trick of the good cop. Either I will be taken home for five minutes and then back to prison (such a practice did exist, and I heard it was a heavy psychological trauma), or they would arrest my husband the same day, giving new impulse to blackmailing me. So I was in no haste to rejoice. I only looked at him closely: he was obviously very glad. An actor of genius? Well, now he would obviously show his hand.

But Mr. Marchuk, indeed, took me home and immediately left without any unnecessary words. I stayed behind in surprise and closed the door. The next day he came by, flowers in hand, to greet me. I had already taken off the prison uniform and could speak to him in a human way, that is, much more amiably. But maybe, I thought, he would now try to demand something? For 24 hours had already passed since I had been freed. I had given several telephone interviews mainly boiling down to the fact that political prisoners are indeed being tortured. They must be rescued as soon as possible, for many are barely alive and Gorbachev keeps on lying. And then, name by name, I told everything I knew about those still in prison camps. And all this was timed to the Reykjavik summit. This means the KGB already knew that once at liberty I would do what I was expected to and they would try to cut it short. But General Marchuk did not. He did not come to do this. He simply came to show his pleasure in the fact that I was at home. I want to remind you that the KGB did not practice this kind of behavior at that time. New arrests and continuations of previous persecutions were still in store. Three weeks after my being freed, Anatoly Marchenko died in a prison camp. He had been pressured in earnest, as was ordered, to file a pardon appeal. They pressed him too much. And so many more did not live to be free precisely during those final attempts by the communist regime to break us.

Thus, Mr. Marchuk, contrary to the Kremlin’s practices of those days, never made such attempts in respect to me. He did not like the job, nor did he want to fulfill it, although he was supposed to. Of all the KGB officers I dealt with in prisons and camps, he did not lie to me even once. The others sometimes even introduced themselves under fictitious names, not to mention all the rest.

I had to abandon the idea that this was some kind of crafty maneuver. For a maneuver always has a target, while he wanted, demanded, and sought nothing from me. He only helped me within the confined of what he could do in those conditions, incidentally, without expecting any gratitude from me.

In early 1992 he phoned my husband and me in London and congratulated us on the birth of twins. We had by then been stripped of Soviet citizenship for upholding the cause of political prisoners, so those Soviet people who had something to lose would keep away from us, by force of inertia, for another two years. By the way, he said the time was not yet safe enough for us to come back, and he would let us know when it was safe. We also understood it this way: it was too early to tell this story. For dissidents traditionally kept such untraditional KGB officers out of trouble and did not talk about them, let alone disclose their names, so that people who, in spite of official policies, decided to be human beings did not suffer. I happened to know a former KGB officer who was put inside a psychiatric hospital for four years back in the 1960s because his conscience kept him from going by the book. Moreover, he was told his diagnosis was for life. That was, of course, an entirely different case. But here, too, there was a good reason to suppose that General Marchuk would not be encouraged, to put it mildly, for this kind of behavior.

So I am writing this now not in contravention of traditional ethics but with Mr. Marchuk’s permission. This is also an essential point: he believes that the old times will never return. And, clearly, the very fact of this permission means he is not interested in returning to the old days. I am glad, naturally, that at least now I can admit I came across a very unusual KGB officer in 1986. Of course, most KGB operatives dealt with foreign intelligence, detecting true spies, terrorists, etc., as do their counterparts in all countries. But there also were departments which unleashed terror against their own compatriots, following the Party’s guidelines. It is they who tarnished the KGB’s reputation among the people who justly retain bitter memories of this organization. It is they that people with noncommunist ideas were supposed to come across. But there were rare exceptions even among them. The public at large only knows those of them who were caught and punished for being too humane. Those who were not caught were, for obvious reasons, in the dark. Few knew about them. Time is said to make many things clear. I cannot by any means support the tendency to let bygones be bygones. Yes, the past should be remembered. But we must not only remember but also take the trouble of looking into things: what exactly was going on and who was doing what in those interesting times. As for me, I am pleased that the barricade no longer exists, and I can simply talk about somebody without fear of doing him harm. I have forgotten nothing from the past, but I only have good memories of General Marchuk.

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