ABSTRACT
One of our summer cottage neighbours is Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev, M S Gorbachev's comrade-in-arms and former member of the CPSU Central Committee Politbureau. He and I talk with each other now and then and sometimes exchange literature, occasionally of our own production. Yakovlev's hard-line anti-bolshevist position is well known to everyone from his political statements, articles, and books. But is he sincere? This question has long puzzled me and I have come ultimately to the conclusion that he is and that what he says is truthful. Of course, this is an intuitive statement, as E L Feinberg would put it, i.e. one which I cannot prove. Well, the other day the course of our conversation somehow led AN to give us his impressions of Khrushchev's famous 'classified' report to the 20th CPSU Congress. Yakovlev, then an instructor at the ideological Central Committee department, in charge of schools, television, etc, had not been a delegate but had been given an invitation ticket and so had attended the congress. There was dead silence in the hall, he recalls, people were stupefied, they would not look into each other's eyes, and left the hall silent and, in fact, shocked-AN himself included. By the way, some time after that our conversation, I happened, quite by chance, to see AN repeat the story in the 1956 edition of 'The Old Apartment' TV show. (This is the reason, incidentally, why I did not ask his permission for my placing the story here. )3*
Of course, all this is not new and there are many people who testify to the same. Just remember hosts of foreign communists and 'sympathizers' who, in spite of the savage trials of the 1930s in the USSR, kept believing in Stalin and, more than that, kept spying for him at the risk of their life. I admit that very many people, including myself, somehow turned a blind eye to the truth and tried to avoid understanding it1 because, with the full realization of that horrendous reality, life itself would perhaps seem not worthwhile living. Today, when I reflect back, compassion for David 1 The important aspect of life in a totalitarian society is fear-fear of persecution of one kind or another, from public disgrace and expulsion from the Party (or from, say, the Union of Writers), to arrest and even execution. This fear humiliated people and had a shattering psychological impact on them. D A Granin's recent essay Fear (St Petersburg: Informatsionnyi Tsentr Blitz, 1997) explores this theme in considerable depth. I conducted an analysis of the fear issue with respect to myself but it would be out of place to dwell on this here. I think, the problem of fear played a major role in DA's life. But I don't have enough information on that and am not, in fact, entitled to touch on such a delicate theme as far as another person is involved.
