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  Nikolay Andreyevich was equally irritated by Mandelstam’s wife—a stout woman who had once been beautiful and who now, it seemed, loved only two things: card games played for money, and the scientific glory of her lame husband.

  And at the same time he felt drawn toward Mandelstam. “Life is never easy,” he would say, “for people so very special.”

  But when Mandelstam gave him a condescending lecture, he used to feel very upset indeed. He would come back home cursing and swearing, raging at that upstart Mandelstam.

  Maria Pavlovna saw her husband as someone quite brilliant. The more Nikolay Andreyevich told her about the indifference and condescension shown by various luminaries toward him and his work, the more fervent grew her faith in him. Her admiration and faith were as necessary to him as vodka to an alcoholic. They both believed that some people are lucky, and some are unlucky, but that in other respects everyone is much the same. Mandelstam, for example, was blessed by special luck—he was a kind of Benjamin the Fortunate of the biological sciences. As for Radionov, he had as many adoring fans as if he were some famous operatic tenor—not that he looked much like one, with his snub nose and his prominent high cheekbones. Even Isaac Khavkin seemed to be blessed with good fortune—in spite of the fact that he had never completed his candidate’s degree and that, being suspected of the heresy of vitalism , he had never, even at the most relaxed of times, been offered work at any research institute. Instead, although he was already gray-haired, he worked at a local bacteriological laboratory and went about in torn trousers. But there was no getting away from it—academicians used to go to him to discuss their work, and the research he conducted in his pitiful little laboratory generated considerable interest and controversy.

  When the campaign against the followers of Weissman, Virchow, and Mendel began, Nikolay Andreyevich was troubled by the harshness of the punishments meted out to many of his colleagues. Both he and his wife were upset when Radionov refused to confess his errors. He was, of course, dismissed; Nikolay Andreyevich cursed his quixotic obstinacy and at the same time arranged for him to earn some money by translating English scientific texts in his own home.

  Pyzhov was accused of “servility toward the West” and sent off to work in an experimental laboratory near Orenburg. Nikolay Andreyevich wrote to him and sent him books; Maria Pavlovna organized a New Year parcel for his family.

  Newspapers began printing articles consisting largely of denunciations: of careerists and petty crooks who had obtained degrees, and even higher degrees, through fraud; of doctors guilty of criminal cruelty toward sick children and women in childbirth; of engineers who had built dachas for themselves and their relatives when they were supposed to be building schools and hospitals. Nearly everyone denounced in these articles was a Jew, and their names and patronymics were cited with unusual punctiliousness: Srul Nakhmanovich...Khaim Abramovich...Israel Mendelevich...A hostile review of a book by a Jewish writer with a Russian pseudonym would include, between brackets, the writer’s original Jewish surname. Throughout the whole of the USSR it seemed that only Jews thieved and took bribes, only Jews were criminally indifferent toward the sufferings of the sick, and only Jews published vicious or badly written books.

  Nikolay Andreyevich was aware that it was not only street sweepers and drunks on suburban trains who enjoyed these articles. He himself was appalled by them—and yet he felt annoyed with his Jewish friends who seemed to look on these scribblings as portents of the end of the world and who were always lamenting that talented young Jews were not being accepted as graduate students, that they were being barred from university physics departments, that they no longer seemed eligible for jobs in ministries or in heavy—or even light—industry, and that Jews graduating from institutes of higher education were all being sent to work in the most far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. And whenever staff reductions were being made anywhere, it was always the Jews who had to go.

  All this, of course, was quite true, but the Jews all seemed to believe in the existence of some grand State plan that doomed them to hunger, impoverishment of every kind, and death. Nikolay Andreyevich, on the other hand, thought it was all just a matter of a hostile attitude toward Jews on the part of a certain proportion of Party and Soviet officials. He did not believe that any special instructions with regard to Jews had been issued to personnel departments or admissions committees of institutes of higher education. Stalin was not himself anti-Semitic and, in all probability, knew nothing about any of this.

  And in any case it was not only Jews who were having a hard time. Old Churkovsky, and Pyzhov, and Radionov had suffered too.

  Mandelstam, who had been the head of the research division, was demoted to a post in the same department as Nikolay Andreyevich. Nevertheless, he was able to continue his work, and the fact that he had a doctorate entitled him to a good salary.

  But then came an unsigned editorial in Pravda about the contempt for Russian theater exhibited by Gurvich, Yuzovsky, and other “cosmopolitan” theater critics. This marked the beginning of a vast campaign to unmask “cosmopolitans” in all areas of art and science, and Mandelstam was declared an “anti-patriot.” In an article for the Institute’s “wall newspaper,” Bratova, a scientist then working on her doctorate, wrote an article with the title “Ivan, Who Has Forgotten His Relatives.” It began with the words, “On returning from his travels to distant parts, Mark Samuilovich Mandelstam has thrown to the winds the principles of Russian Soviet Science...”

  Nikolay Andreyevich went to visit Mandelstam at his home. Mandelstam was upset. He was moved, though, that Nikolay Andreyevich had come to see him, and his haughty wife no longer seemed so very haughty. The two men drank vodka together. Mandelstam roundly cursed Bratova, who was his own student. His head in his hands, he lamented about how his students, his talented Jewish students, were all being driven out of science. “What are they supposed to do now?” he asked. “Sell haberdashery from stalls in bazaars?”

  “Come on now, it’s not as bad as all that,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “There’ll be work enough for everyone,” he went on jokingly. “For you, and for Khavkin, and even for Anechka Silberman the lab technician. There’ll be bread for all of you—and with a bit of caviar too!”

  “Heavens!” said Mandelstam. “What’s caviar got to do with it? We’re talking about human dignity.”

  As regards Khavkin, Nikolay Andreyevich had soon been proved wrong. Things had taken a bad turn for him. Not long after the publication of the article about the Killer Doctors Khavkin had been arrested.

  That article—about the monstrous crimes committed by Jewish doctors, and by Solomon Mikhoels, the Jewish actor—had shocked everyone. It was as if there were a dark cloud over Moscow, creeping into homes and schools, creeping into human hearts.

  On page four, under the heading “Chronicle,” there had been a statement to the effect that all the accused had confessed during the investigation. There could be no doubt; the doctors were criminals.

  Nevertheless, it had seemed unthinkable. It was hard to breathe; it was hard to go about one’s work in the knowledge that professors and academicians had become poisoners, that they had murdered Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.

  When Nikolay Andreyevich thought about dear Doctor Vovsi, and about the brilliant Solomon Mikhoels, the crime they were accused of seemed unimaginable.

  But these people had confessed! And if they were innocent but had confessed anyway, that implied another crime. It implied that they were the victims of a crime still more terrible than the crime of which they were accused.

  Even to think about this was frightening. It took courage to doubt their guilt. If they were not guilty, it was the leaders of the socialist State who were the criminals. If the doctors were not guilty, then Stalin himself was a criminal.

  Meanwhile, doctors he knew were now saying that it had become painfully difficult for them to carry on with their work in hospitals and polyclinics. The terrifying official announcements had made patie
nts suspicious, and many people were refusing to be treated by Jewish doctors. The authorities were receiving countless complaints and denunciations with regard to intentional malpractice on the part of Jewish doctors. Jewish pharmacists were being suspected of trying to pass off poisons as medicines. Stories were being told in trams, in bazaars, in public institutions of all kinds, about how a number of Moscow pharmacies had been closed down because the pharmacists—Jews working as undercover American agents—were selling pills made of dried lice. There were stories about maternity hospitals where women in childbirth and newborn babies were being infected with syphilis, about dental surgeries where patients were injected with cancer of the tongue and of the jaw. There was talk of boxes of matches imbued with deadly poison. Some people began recalling suspicious circumstances around the deaths of long-dead relatives and writing to the security organs, demanding the investigation and arrest of the Jewish doctors responsible. It was especially sad that these rumors were believed not only by street sweepers, not only by semiliterate and semi-alcoholic porters and drivers but also by writers, engineers, and university students, even by certain scholars and scientists with doctorates.

  Nikolay Andreyevich found this general atmosphere of suspicion unbearable. Anna Naumovna, the large-nosed laboratory technician, was coming into work every day looking pale, with mad, dilated eyes. One day she reported that a woman in her apartment, who worked in a pharmacy, had had a moment of forgetfulness and given a patient the wrong medicine. On receiving a summons to explain herself, she had felt so appalled that she had committed suicide; her two children—a girl studying at a music college and a boy who was still at school—were now orphans. Anna Naumovna had herself started coming to work on foot—because of the drunks in the trams who kept starting conversations with her about the Jewish doctors who had murdered Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.

  Nikolay Andreyevich felt horrified and disgusted by the new Institute director, Ryskov. Ryskov kept saying that the time had come to purge Russian science of non-Russian names. On one occasion he declared, “Our science will no longer be a Yid synagogue. If only you knew how I hate them!”

  Nevertheless, Nikolay Andreyevich was unable to suppress a sense of involuntary joy when Ryskov said to him, “The comrades in the Central Committee value your work, the work of a great Russian scientist.”

  Mandelstam was no longer working at the Institute, but he had managed to find work as an adviser at a workplace training center. Now and again Nikolay Andreyevich would tell his wife to ring him up and invite him over. He was glad that Mandelstam, who had become nervous and suspicious, kept postponing their meetings—which he himself was now finding more and more painful. At times like this it was better to be among people who enjoyed life.

  When Nikolay Andreyevich heard that Khavkin had been arrested, he glanced anxiously at the telephone and said to his wife in a whisper, “I’m certain that Isaac is innocent. I’ve known him for thirty years.”

  Maria Pavlovna suddenly embraced him and stroked his head. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I know how much you put yourself out for Khavkin and Mandelstam—and only I know how much they’ve hurt you.”

  But it was a difficult time. Nikolay Andreyevich had to speak at a public meeting; he had to say a few words about vigilance, and about the dangers of gullibility and complacency.

  After the meeting Nikolay Andreyevich had a conversation with Professor Margolin who worked in the Physical Chemistry Department and who had also given an important speech. Margolin had demanded that the criminal doctors be sentenced to death, and he had read out the text of a congratulatory telegram to be sent to Lydia Timashuk, who had unmasked the Killer Doctors and who had just been awarded the Order of Lenin. This Margolin was an expert on Marxist philosophy; he was in charge of the lectures devoted to the study of the fourth chapter of Stalin’s Short Course .

  “Yes, Samson Abramovich,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “These are difficult times. I’m finding it hard enough myself, but you must be finding it still harder.”

  Margolin raised his fine eyebrows. Pushing forward his thin, pale lower lip, he said, “Excuse me. I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

  “Oh, I just, I just mean in a general sense,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “Vovsi, Etinger, Kogan—who could have imagined it? I was once an in-patient of Vovsi’s myself. The staff loved him, and the patients trusted him as if he were the Prophet himself.”

  Margolin raised a thin shoulder, twitched a pale, bloodless nostril, and said, “Ah, I see. You think that it must be unpleasant for me, as a Jew, to say what I think of these monsters. On the contrary, I loathe Jewish nationalism more than anyone does. And if Jews with a leaning toward America become an obstacle on the road toward communism, then I shall be merciless—even toward myself, even toward my own daughter.”

  Nikolay Andreyevich realized that he should not have talked about how much Vovsi was loved by his gullible patients. If a man could speak like this about his own daughter, then it was best to speak to him in the language of official formulas.

  And Nikolay Andreyevich said, “Yes, of course. What ensures our enemy’s doom is our own moral and political unity.”

  Yes, it was indeed a difficult time—and Nikolay Andreyevich’s only consolation was that his work was going well.

  It was as if, for the first time, he had burst out of the narrow space of his guild and into domains of the real world where he had previously not been admitted. People were seeking him out, seeking his advice; they were grateful when he told them his views. Scientific journals that had usually ignored him began to take an interest in his articles. He even received a telephone call from the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, an institution that had never before contacted him. He was asked to send them the manuscript of a still-unfinished book so that they could look into the question of its publication in the People’s Democracies.

  Nikolay Andreyevich was deeply moved by the advent of his success. Maria Pavlovna took it more calmly. What had happened was inevitable; it was, she thought, simply impossible for it not to have happened.

  Meanwhile, the number of changes in his life only increased. He still did not like the new people at the head of the Institute. Even though they were promoting him and his work, he was repelled by their coarseness, by their extraordinary self-assurance, by their readiness to call their opponents toadies, cosmopolitans, capitalist agents, and hirelings of imperialism. Nevertheless, he was able to see in them what was most truly important: their boldness and strength.

  And as for Mandelstam—Mandelstam was wrong to refer to these people as illiterate idiots, as “dogmatic young stallions.” What he himself saw in them was not narrowness but passion and purpose—a clarity of purpose that was born of life and oriented toward life. That was why they hated abstract theoreticians, hair-splitting talmudists.

  And although these new bosses sensed that Nikolay Andreyevich was not the same as them, that he was someone who thought and behaved very differently from them, they still thought well of him and had confidence in him: he was a Russian! He received a warm letter from Lysenko, who thought very highly of his manuscript and suggested that the two of them work together.

  Nikolay Andreyevich had no time for the theories of the famous agronomist, but this letter still brought him great pleasure. And it was wrong to reject all of Lysenko’s work out of hand. And the rumors about his dangerous readiness to resort to “police methods,” to denounce any scientists who disagreed with him—these rumors were probably exaggerated.

  Ryskov had invited Nikolay Andreyevich to give a paper debunking the scientific work of the cosmopolitans who had been driven out of the biological sciences. Nikolay Andreyevich kept refusing, although he was aware how much this annoyed Ryskov. The director wanted the public to hear the wrathful voice of a Russian scientist who was not a Party member.

  It was around this time that rumors began to circulate about the construction in eastern Siberia of a vast city of ca
mp barracks. These barracks, evidently, were for the Jews. They were to be deported—just as the Kalmyks, the Crimean Tatars, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Balkhars, the Chechens, and the Volga Germans had already been deported.

  Nikolay Andreyevich understood that he had been wrong to promise Mandelstam bread and caviar.

  He felt troubled and anxious. Every morning he looked through the papers to see if the trial of the Killer Doctors had begun yet. Like everyone else, he tried to guess whether or not it would be an open, public trial. He kept asking his wife, “What do you think? Will they publish day-by-day reports, with transcripts of the prosecutor’s speech and of cross-examinations, with final statements by the accused? Or will there just be a communiqué giving us the verdict of a military tribunal?”

  On one occasion Nikolay Andreyevich was told, in the strictest confidence, that the doctors would be executed in public on Red Square. After this a wave of pogroms would sweep through the entire country and—to protect them from the just but merciless rage of the people—the Jews would all be deported to Siberia and to Turkmenistan, to work on the construction of the Turkmen canal through the Kara-Kum desert.

  And this mass deportation would be an expression of the eternally vital spirit of internationalism which, while understanding the wrath of the people, could not tolerate lynchings and mob law.

  Like everything else that took place in the Soviet Union, this upsurge of spontaneous fury had been conceived and planned well in advance.

  Elections to the Supreme Soviet were planned by Stalin in exactly the same way; information was collected, deputies were chosen—and from then on the spontaneous nomination of these deputies went ahead as planned, as did their election campaigns and eventual victory in national elections. Stormy protest meetings were planned in exactly the same way—as were outbursts of popular fury and emotional expressions of brotherly friendship. And in the same way, several weeks before the May Day parades, officials gave their approval to the texts of journalists’ reports from Red Square: “At this moment I am watching the tanks race by...” It was in this way that the personal initiatives of Izotov, Stakhanov, and Dusya Vinogradova were planned; it was in this way that millions of peasants chose to join the collective farms; it was in this way that legendary heroes of the Civil War were brought into the limelight or faded into the background; it was in this way that workers came to demand the issue of State loans or the abolition of days off work; it was in this way that the entire nation’s love for its great Leader was organized; it was in this way that secret foreign agents, spies and saboteurs were chosen—and it was in this way, after long and complex interrogations, that accountants, engineers and lawyers who until recently had not for one moment suspected themselves of counterrevolutionary activity came to sign statements confessing to all kinds of acts of espionage and terrorism. This was how great writers beloved of the people were chosen; this was how editors chose the texts of moving appeals, addressed to young sons fighting on the front line, to be read into microphones by wooden-voiced mothers; this was how Ferapont Golovaty’s sudden patriotic initiative was planned; this was how Party officials chose people to participate in free and open discussions if, for some reason, free and open discussions were called for; this was how the texts of their speeches were carefully coordinated in advance.