... It was now that I learned for the first time about a witness's legal rights. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Yessenin-Volpin, recently released from the Leningrad Special Mental Hospital, read us a whole lecture on the subject. He had come to the square one day, listened for a bit, and looked around. At our first meeting he hadn't impressed me much-he was an eccentric sort of fellow wearing a tattered fur cap, and he spent the whole evening holding forth about the need to respect the law. But his words were of practical help, and now none of us allowed himself to be confused or was tricked into blabbing. … The fate of our arrested comrades was decided four months later in the harshest possible way. Ilya Bakstein, with the curved spine, got five years in the labor camps, and Kuznetsov and Osipov seven years each. ... They were convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda"- in other words for the readings and discussions in Mayakovsky Square, and for the poetry. The Moscow court also attempted to accuse them of creating an anti-Soviet organization, but that charge too was later dropped, since the investigators were unable to invent a plausible organization. My "Theses" had been used to incriminate Eddie and figured in one of the charges against him: "the possession and dissemination of anti-Soviet literature." The trial was closed to the public, of course. They didn't even want to let anyone in to hear the sentences. But our great legal wizard Alik Volpin, a copy of the Criminal Code in his hand, proved to the guards that the pronouncement of a court sentence must always be open to the public. Alik was the first person we had ever come across to speak seriously of Soviet laws. We used to make fun of him. "You really are cracked, Alik," we would laugh. "Just think what you're saying. What laws can there be in a country like ours? Who pays any attention to them?" "That's the whole problem-that no one pays any attention to them," replied Alik, not in the least disturbed by our mockery. And when they let some of the boys in to listen to the sentence, he exulted. "Look, you see. We've only ourselves to blame if we don't demand that our laws be observed." But the rest of us shrugged our shoulders. Little did we realize that this absurd incident, with the comical Alik Volpin brandishing his Criminal Code like a magic wand to melt the doors of the court, was the begin-fling of our civil-rights movement and the movement for human rights in the USSR. The literary period in the slow awakening of Soviet society was coming to an end. Poets and readers were being sent away in deadly earnest to absolutely real labor camps. Not soldiers and not conspirators, but poets:
No, not for us can it be to spray bullets! It was an epoch that couldn't stomach poets-they had to become soldiers. … More and more often I found myself visiting Alik YeseninVolpin. After getting to know one another in September 1961, before the rout of the Mayakovsky Square readings, and later during the interrogations connected with them, we used to see one another fairly often, and for a while we worked in the same research institute. He was running a seminar there on semantics, and I used to go and listen to him. Then, when I was in jail, he visited my mother. This was a general rule of his-to visit prisoners' families, even if he didn't know them. And naturally the first thing he did was to explain the laws to everyone. I was astounded by the serious way he discoursed on rights in this country of legalized coercion. Didn't the KGB say to us quite openly: "Give us the man and we'll find a charge for him"? No more than ten years before it had been revealed that these same laws could coexist with the murder of almost twenty million innocent people. The very author of our constitution, Nikolai Bukharin, barely survived to finish it before he was shot. What sense was there in expounding our laws? It was like expounding humanitarianism to a cannibal. Alik himself had been twice committed to prison mental hospitals for reading his own verse-and this not even in Mayakovsky Square, but at home, to a circle of friends. Wasn't this enough to convince him? In short, he struck me as being in the same mold as those dyed-in-the-wool Marxists whom not even prison could enlighten. Alik's permanently disheveled look, total impracticality, inability to adapt to his surroundings, and absolute indifference to his appearance completed the picture, making him an exemplar of the eccentric professor. And he really was a first-rate scholar in mathematics and logic. What was so striking and endearing about him was his absolutely childlike naiveté and defenselessness, quite unexpected in a forty-year-old man. It was this quality, I think, that was prized by most of his friends, almost all of whom had gone through Stalin's camps. As for his theories on legality, his friends regarded them indulgently as forgivable eccentricities, shaking their heads with a smile when he launched into one of his expositions. Whether it was his constant preoccupation with logic that set its seal on him or that he had chosen this subject precisely because of the formal logic's affinity with his mode of thinking, I do not know, but all his arguments were strictly constructed according to logical theorems. Every proposition, from his point of view, had to be either true or false. He completely denied the relativity of these concepts and was made very angry by the common inexactitudes of everyday speech, regarding them as virtually the root of all human misfortunes: we introduce lies, ambiguity, and vagueness into our lives, and then we suffer the consequences. But given that in real life the truth of any judgment is always conditional, all of Alik's arguments became encrusted with digressions, reservations, parentheses, exceptions, and qualifications, and he invariably ended up with the problem of whether and how much a word corresponds to what it denominates, terminating in such a semantic jungle that nobody had the slightest idea any longer of what was being said. Only Alik, turning his shining light-blue eyes onto his interlocutors, still thought that everything was utterly simple. It is easy to imagine what happened when Alik came into direct conflict with the Soviet punitive apparatus. I remember that some years later, Alik was summoned for questioning by the KGB in connection with some case or other. His wife, knowing from experience how the whole thing might end, kindly warned the investigator not to proceed with his scheme, but the latter spurned her advice. Two hours later Alik was drawing assorted circles, squares, and diagrams on a statement-blank in an effort to explain to the investigator just one of his simplest thoughts. Four hours later, after completing a short course in the theory of numbers, they had at last reached the problem of the denominator; the dazed, sweating investigator rang Alik's wife and begged her to come and fetch her husband. Naturally she refused, quite rightly, considering that it was the investigator's own fault for not listening to her in the first place. "That's your problem," she said. Luckily, on this occasion Alik had been called as a witness, not as the defendant; otherwise the investigation would have ended in a psychiatric examination. Psychiatrists were not mathematicians or logicians either; "truth" and "falsehood" were not the objects of psychiatric study. Therefore all investigations of Alik ended in an identical manner, with his consignment to a psychiatric hospital of a special type for particularly dangerous patients. What other result was possible? Imagine, for a moment, that the KGB has taken it into its head to arrest a computer. The computer simply won't understand the ambiguous language of the investigator's questions or of Soviet law. Its logical circuits will give out answers of the "true-false" variety, and if an attempt is made to get an extended answer, it will simply cough out a long perforated ribbon with an infinity of units and zeros on it. What would you have them do with it? I guarantee that the case would end, as with Alik, in the mental hospital. I used to argue fiercely with Alik, sometimes into the small hours. And not only because at the age of nineteen one tends to argue with everybody, but also because his entire line of reasoning and all his premises were unacceptable to me, and nothing he said seemed to have any application to real life. But returning home early in the morning, still burning with indignation, I would suddenly discover, to my horror, that I had completely accepted one or another of his arguments. The central concept in his argument was the position of a citizen, which offered a laughably simple way out of all my dilemmas. These dilemmas began at the point where I was required to be a "Soviet man." This concept is so diffuse and demagogic that you never know exactly what obligations it carries with it. "Soviet" means someone enthusiastically building communism, wholeheartedly endorsing the policies of the Party and government, and angrily condemning world imperialism. And supporting whatever else our propaganda will dream up tomorrow. The official ideology created a mythic image of Soviet man, and each new invention it made became a directive for everybody. This concept of "Soviet man" was really the starting point for all the illegality in the country. Every ruler that came along filled it, as he did the concept of "socialism," with anything he wanted to put into it. And if you tried to argue with it afterward at Party meetings, there were no criteria. The supreme judge in this question was the Central Committee. And any interpretation differing from theirs was in itself a crime. You are a Soviet man," says the KGB detective, "and therefore obligated to help us." And what can you say in reply? If you're not Soviet, what are you? Anti-Soviet? That alone is worth seven years in a labor camp and five in exile. And Soviet man is obliged to collaborate with our glorious security organs-that's clear as daylight. What was I kicked out of the university for? For not conforming to "the ethos of a Soviet student." Alik Volpin argued, however, that there was no law obliging us to be "Soviet people." A citizen of the USSR, on the other hand, was quite a different matter. We were all citizens of the USSR by virtue of having been born on its territory. But there was no law obliging all the citizens of the USSR to believe in communism or to help build it, or to collaborate with the security organs, or to conform to some mythical ethos. The citizens of the USSR were obliged to observe the written laws, not ideological directives. Then followed the concept of Soviet power. Are you against Soviet power, or for it? I could think what I liked, but if I officially announced that I was against it, that would be "anti-Soviet propaganda." Again seven plus five. What was I to do-lie about it? Or consciously break the law? But this was not necessary. According to the Constitution of the USSR, the political foundation of Soviet power was the power of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies-a sham body that had less authority than the average policeman. There was no mention of any party whatsoever in this section of the Constitution. "Do I object to the power of some parliament that calls itself the Soviet of Workers' Deputies?" reasoned Volpin. "No, I don't. Especially since it is nowhere mentioned that it has to have only one party. True, they might have found a more felicitous name for it." This line of reasoning was extremely important, since in practice the authorities simply proclaimed as anti-Soviet everything they didn't like. According to strictly juridical criteria, none of us was committing a crime so long as we didn't directly assail the power of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies. And who was going to do that? In creating our laws mainly for propaganda purposes, our ideologists had overreached themselves. Actually, there was nothing to stop them from not bothering with a Constitution and simply writing: "In the USSR everything is forbidden except what is expressly permitted by decisions of the Central Committee of the CPSU." But this would have led to unwanted complications, and would have made it harder to spread the Soviet form of socialism among the gullible abroad. Therefore, they wrote a Constitution with a plethora of rights and freedoms that they simply couldn't afford to grant, rightly supposing that nobody would be reckless enough to insist on them being observed. Volpin's idea, therefore, came down to this. We reject this regime not because it calls itself socialist-there is no law defining socialism and therefore citizens are not obliged to know what it is-but because it is based on coercion and lawlessness, tries to impose its ideology on people by force, and obliges everyone to lie and be hypocrites. We wish to live in a state ruled by law, where the law is unshakable and the rights of all citizens protected, where it would be possible not to lie without risking the loss of our freedom. So let us live in such a state. We, the people, are the state. Whatever we are will mold the character of the state. A close examination of the laws we have been given fully supports such an interpretation. Let us, therefore, like good citizens of our country, observe the laws as we understand them, that is, as they are written. We are obliged to submit to nothing but the law. So let us defend our laws from being encroached upon by the authorities. We are on the side of the law. They are against it. Of course, there is a great deal in Soviet law that is absolutely unacceptable. But not even the citizens of free countries are completely satisfied with their laws. When citizens don't like a law, they seek by legal means to have it reformed. "But they can't get by without using coercion," we objected to Alik. "If they were to introduce a strict observance of the law, they would simply cease to be a Communist state." "Actually, I agree with you," Alik would say in a conspiratorial whisper, and everyone burst out laughing. "You're crazy, Alik," we used to say. "Anyway, who's going to listen to you with your theories about the law? They'll go on jailing you, just as they did before. What difference will it make?" "Well, if somebody breaks the law and encroaches upon my legal rights, as a citizen I'm bound to protest. I am obliged to fight back with all legal means. And above all with publicity." Again everybody laughed. "Now he wants publicity! Where are you going to get it from? Is Pravda going to help you?" But having had our laugh we were obliged to agree that if you answered lawlessness with lawlessness, there was precious little chance of ensuring observance of the law. There was simply no other way. In exactly the same way, answering violence with violence would only multiply violence, and answering lies with lies would never bring us closer to the truth. Once again our disheveled computer was right. Alik's idea was both inspired and insane. The suggestion was that citizens who were fed up with terror and coercion should simply refuse to acknowledge them. The point about dealing with the Communists is that to acknowledge the reality of the life they have created and to assent to their notions means ipso facto to become bandits, informers, hangmen, or silent accomplices. Power rests on nothing other than people's consent to submit, and each person who refuses to submit to tyranny reduces it by one two-hundred-and-fifty-millionth, whereas each who compromises only increases it. Surely our Soviet life was actually nothing more than an imaginary schizophrenic world populated with invented Soviet men building a mythical communism. Weren't we all living double and even triple lives? The inspiration of this idea consisted in eliminating the split in our personalities by shattering the internal excuses with which we justified our complicity in all the crimes. It presupposed a small core of freedom in each individual, his "subjective sense of right," as Volpin put it. In other words, a consciousness of his personal responsibility. Which meant, in effect, inner freedom. Let us suppose that this point of view were adopted by a great many people. Where would the Central Committee be then with its ideological directives? What would the KGB do with its army of informers? A citizen has nothing to hide, and no need to justify himself-he merely observes the laws. And the more openly he does so, the better. "But what will you do, Alik, if they change the laws tomorrow so that they can't be interpreted in your way anymore?" I asked. "Then I shall probably cease to be a citizen of this country." This was totally beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. What did he mean-that he was going to flee across the border? Alik launched into a long disquisition on a citizen's right to leave his country and, of course, to return to it again, supporting his argument with quotations from something called the Declaration of Human Rights. We merely shrugged. "He's raving again!" I wonder how many of us who shrugged then are now in Vienna, Rome, Tel Aviv, or New York? But only Volpin leaned out of the train that took him to Vienna and made a speech on the need to struggle for the right of re-entry. Vladimir Bukovsky, To build a Castle - My Life as a Dissenter, New York: The Viking Press, 1978
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