SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

by Birgit Lahann

 

There he stands between the hose and the washing machine and the plates and the pots, between the table and the chair and the television, and laughs until the hole where his missing tooth once had been shows through. "I only moved in yesterday," says Bukovsky, running his hand through his hair and stepping over a pile of books. It was not easy to find a house in Cambridge. Did he buy it? No, just rented.

 

We are going into the living room. The winter sun shines through the window and into the fireplace. He closes the flower-patterned curtains, and we lie down into two armchairs that don't yet fill the empty space of the room. Bee Gees and Deep Purple records are leaning against the record player.

 

His fortune sits on the floor in the corner. He goes over there, picks it up, puts it on the table, spreads his arms: "To Build a Castle". Which is the the first book he wrote after his release, and which has become his bank, his insurance policy, his success. The Russian civil rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky -- exchanged for the Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan after 12 years of suffering through Soviet camps, prisons and psychiatric institutions -- has written his memoirs.

 

With the royalties he can pay for his studies, his rent, and support himself and his mother and sister who live in Zurich, because the book is a bestseller in France and in Italy.

 

In his book Bukovsky recorded the most exciting psychological panorama anyone has ever created of the closed Soviet society: with wide literary breath, harsh, ironic, poetic.

 

He describes the battle he waged against the Soviet regime in the era immediately following Stalin's death. His weapon: intellect, persistence, and human dignity. Their weapon: prison terms for undermining the authority of the state.

 

Did he ever believe in communism? "No," says Bukovsky. "Not earlier and not today, neither in the Leninist kind, nor in the Stalinist kind." Could he imagine a new revolution in Russia? "The passive, terrorized majority would again willingly submit to a strong center. Which will end in a new dictatorship." And does he not give Russian communism a chance? With an ironic smile, he drops the corners of his mouth downwards and quotes the phrase that is popular among the Soviet scientists and the Soviet military: "You have to serve Russia. The communists will disappear sooner or later by themselves."

 

He lights the fifth Dunhill filter. How many does he smoke a day? "Fifty." Is that much? "That is less than the strong tobacco he used to turn into murderous cigarettes while in prison, wrapping it in pieces of "Izvestiya" newspaper. 

 

Bukovsky not only lives like a true Cambridge Don, he already speaks English like an old Englishman -- fluent and easy and sometimes slurs the words. He learned his English in prison reading novels by Dickens and Thackeray, memorizing two to three thousand words a month in the process. Now he is studying neurophysiology at the most famous university in England, King's College, Cambridge.

 

He leans back and is amused by club rivalry in college circles. "Do you know this joke?" He asks and tells the story of a shipwrecked man who 25 years later is being rescued from an island and shows his rescuers his spartan abode where he had lived all those years. "But there's a lovely house back there," they say. "Why haven't you been living there?" "That couldn't be done," says the rescued man, "that was an impossible club."

 

And Bukovsky sits there in his dark trousers and a dark shirt, very informal, very relaxed and yet excited about the degree of his success. Lanky, like Shakespeare's Petruchio, he sits in the armchair, a prankster on the go, a bird -- full of humor -- with a stubble and tousled hair and laughs until the black hole comes out again.

 

He's not a martyr, not a is he heavy or ponderous. He never makes you feel inhibited by his life story. It never occurs to you to ask him anything in a minor key. But the story of his life sounds like an echo of a chapter from Dante's Inferno.

 

Vladimir was born during the evacuation in the Urals. He grew up in a suitcase, аs there were no cradles or beds. He began to talk late and to read early. When he was five, he became interested in newspapers. He loved caricatures above all else, especially Uncle Sam and John Bull, the American and the Brit who always got kicked down and fell into muddy puddles. After the war the family moved back to overcrowded Moscow. Four families lived in one apartment, and shared a toilet. In the evening his grandmother read him Grimm and Pushkin tales. When she would fall asleep, he would tugs her sleeve: "Grandmother, go on!" During the day he would stand with her in lines to buy food.

 

At school he would annoy the teachers, as one should, daydream during boring Russian lessons until one day the teacher said, visibly moved, "Children, the spring is coming!" It was December. 

 

As a member of the pioneer organization, he forced a boy to self-criticize and for the first time saw the dreary effects of ideological demagogic indoctrination could have on a person.

 

He protested, refused to join the Young Communists League and published a satirical student magazine together with like-minded students, which only appeared once because it contained verses similar to these:

 

Take the hammer, then the sickle,

That do our Soviet land recall.

Bang or reap, whichever you pick,

It makes no odds, you'll get fuck all. 

 

The director got fired, and Bukowski's father, a journalist -- once praised by Stalin and accepted into the Writers' Union following this -- received a reprimand from the Communist Party.

 

But his fight had already started three years earlier, at the age of fourteen. Because when he was fourteen, the Soviets invaded Hungary and quashed the uprising.

 

Until then, Bukovsky had only played war with his friends. Until then he had only fought against "enemies". And the enemies were the Germans. "Given that nobody wanted to be the Germans, each side considered itself "ours" and the others -- the Germans."  When Hungary got strangled, Bukovsky felt ready for anything.

 

"Oh, romance, blue haze, our souls were torn like rags."

 

He becomes a member of a clandestine organization. "We smoked and swore like troopers, spoke filthily about women, drank vodka, and ahead of us all we could see was a void." They rehearsed emergency situations, tested each other out, spy on each other in order to develop skills, become "refined to the point of cynicism", but secretly each of them "perhaps unconsciously thirsted after death”.

 

Bukovsky was arrested for the first time in 1963. He made a copy the book titled "The New Class" by the Yugoslav critic and writer Milovan Djilas. And Djilas was forbidden. The combat with the police apparatus began in prison. 

 

Bukovsky took the laws at their word and demanded those word to be followed to the letter. He wrote complaints because you were allowed complain. He taught thieves and murderers to complain. And suddenly there were 75,000 complaint letters against the Vladimir prison administration. Nobody read them. But the sheer volume of them! The prison slips into the league of badly run penitentiaries -- no more awards, no trophies, no banners.

 

Bukovsky gets punished. They put him in isolation. He starves in the damp solitary confinement cell. He has a one cigarette left, but no fire to light it. For three days he tries to run up the cell wall to light it on the lightbulb. He collapses in tears.

 

"I feel pain, therefore I am" is Descartes' philosophy of existence, modified for isolation cells. Deprived of outside stimuli, his imagination kicks in: he draws castles on scraps of paper, designs them from cellars up to battlements, furnishes them, invites friends over, and pours wine into goblets. And when the KGB man calls him for interrogation, he thinks, "These poor fools, they don't know that soon I'll be back with my friends, resuming our interrupted conversations by the fireplace."

 

"The castle," says Bukovsky, "saved my life back then." But he also has some wonderfully funny anecdotes. Bukovsky tells them with laconic charm. He is in Troitskoye, the psychiatric institution near Moscow. Which resembles a dive bar. Everyone pulls their money together and the hospital attendants buy vodka. On the first evening Bukovsky gets his glass -- and falls over. Then he gets used to it. Patients and hospital aides drink every day. But once they drank themselves bare. Everyone has run out of money. Where could one some? A pickpocket says, "Let me out for an hour." They do. He gets street clothes, an attendant accompanies him, and after an hour both are back -- with twenty-five rubles. "The feast went on."

 

Bukovsky goes into the kitchen and empties the ashtray, cleans it, puts it back in the room. We are going into town, to King's College. You can get there in twenty minutes if you walk fast. Does he do this on foot every day? "Yes."

 

Before he found his house, he had a room in the university. That was convenient. And pleasant, because he likes to sleep in late. "I'm a late bird," says the late bird. But there was no telephone in the college, and he had to make calls every day -- to his mother in Zurich, to publishers, to friends. He waited in queues in front of the telephone booths and froze.

 

What does he do after lectures? He goes out to drink tea with friends. And then? Does he go to the cinema, to the theater? No, he studies in the evenings. And reads everything he can get his hands on from the Russian underground press. On television he is only interested in political programmes and old films. And when the Times went on strike, he read the Herlald Tribune.

 

He doesn't do any sport. "I always hated gymnastics." And he no longer plays chess either. Even in prison he didn't like doing it. "Chess is a confrontation," he says. "And when one is defeated every time, it can become dangerous."

 

Did he follow the Karpov-Korchnoi confrontation? Sure. But they played their matches so clandestinely that he assumed they were both hypnotized.

 

We go to a tea room across the road from the university. I want to bring him a sandwich. But he isn't hungry. Although he didn't have lunch, and now it's five o’clock.

 

He tells me about Solzhenitsyn, whom he visited in America and who works like an obsessed man on his "Truth About the USSR." He says he has been trying to call Sakharov for months. But whenever his wife says "Hello" at the other end, the line breaks down.

 

Bukovsky, who uses his face and hands when telling stories, is open, fresh, alert. He looks like someone who has returned from the inferno with his health intact.

 

Does he still have dreams about the camp and the prison? "Very seldom," he says and adds with a laugh: "Thank god. I am, actually, someone who believes that dreams can come true."

 

And have his years in the West changed him? He used to be more reserved, more active, always on the go. "But I kept saying what I thought in Russia too," he said. "The only difference was the I was being locked up for it in Russia."

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Translated from German by Alissa Ordabai.