Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Letter to a Friend

Chalet La Galana,

Calle Los Picaflores,

Esquina Los Biguá,

José Ignacio,

Maldonado,

Uruguay.

10 February 2001.

Comrade Hitchens!

I like the way the Bolsheviki hailed each other in their letters, and will be disappointed if inquiry reveals that the exclamation mark was a national habit – just as the Americans favour the businesslike colon, while the British stick with the diffident yet intimate comma. I like the comrades’ ‘shock’ greeting, with its suggestion that the recipient may have fallen into some deviationist reverie, and its further suggestion that he had better snap out of it and reattend, on pain of death, to his quotas. I like the air of menace, of vigilance, of sleeplessness. Considering my current location, I might have followed what was presumably the practice at POUM[1] and opened my communication with an inverted exclamation mark, as well, obliging the comrade to tense up even quicker.

The northern hemisphere, at least in the months that we call winter, is, I fear, a fool’s game. Here we all wander about the place with the grateful and trusting smile of a recently rescued Bambi. It is a land of thousand-mile beaches, spectacular tormentas, and flipped and wriggling beetles the size of Gregor Samsa. Fernanda has learned how to swim, Clio has learned how to talk, and I have learned how to say one very versatile sentence in Spanish – Yo siento mucho, pero no puedo ayudar (oh and the equally all-purpose Yo no sé nada).[2] All I lack is the presence of my other children. I miss them. And I miss my sister Sally, whom you knew. I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. Now I do know wherefore – but it took some time. ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ It took me a while to find this speech, because I was sure Hamlet was in colloquy with Horatio – rather than with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which makes Hamlet’s dejection even more soiled and thrown-away… The key phrase is ‘but wherefore I know not’. Hamlet doesn’t fully see that his metaphysical miseries constitute a subliminal symptom of grief; and this was exactly my case. I thought I was sick, I thought I was dying (maybe that is what bereavement actually asks of you). Literature gives us these warnings about the main events, but we don’t recognize the warnings until the events have come and gone. Isabel, my senior in the loss of a sibling, told me that you just have to take it, like weather – yes, like sleet in your face. Other skies ask other questions. Even the candid blue of Uruguay. But more of this another time, and there will be more of this, much more of this, and then more, and then more.

Just before we left we had a couple of very good evenings with the Conquests. Bob said to me, ‘Do you remember my suggesting, long ago, that you should call your next novel The Cupid Stunts?’ I said that I did, and adduced the analogous Cunning Stunts from Nabokov (is it from Transparent Things?). Then (dry, professorial) he said, ‘Of course there’s also The Cotton Runts.’[3] I asked him, ‘What is The Cotton Runts?’ And he said, ‘A social-realist novel about Lancashire slum children affected by the collapse of the textile industry’… If Nietzsche is right, and a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, then this joke is a massacre. I laughed for so long that he got going too; as it subsided he took off his glasses and removed a tear with his little finger. I think I reminded him of Kingsley – for the Amis men double over when they laugh, and scrunch up their eyes to remove all possible distractions. More curiously, he reminds me of Kingsley. Because he is really terrifyingly unchanged, isn’t he? Remember in the Letters, when Kingsley and Larkin have been exchanging sincere and eloquent complaints about old age, and Kingsley says incredulously that ‘Bob just goes on as if nothing has happened’? (Liddie[4] says he simply ‘wakes up happy’. Christ, is that what you’ve got to do?) In his Seven Ages limerick[5] he is still hovering between lines three and four – in his mid-eighties. How is he getting on with his memoirs? Will we learn about his Pierce Brosnan period at the Foreign Office? When you see them next, give them my love and say that I’ll be over in June. Now back to business.

Comrade Hitchens! There is probably not that much in these pages that you don’t already know. You already know, in that case, that Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it. So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn’t want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted disciple-ship of Trotsky. These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use. And they showed him a remarkable thing: that it was possible to run a country with a formula of dead freedom, lies and violence – and unpunctuated self-righteousness. During one of our four or five evenings on the subject, you quietly stressed that Lenin’s performance was ‘not hypocritical’. I wonder at that. Isn’t unpunctuated self-righteousness, in a man presiding over the less than perfect world of the Soviet Union, 1917–24, automatically not not hypocritical? Off the record, Lenin was capable of telling the truth, blandly conceding that certain policies had had certain (unpleasant) results. But nothing here qualifies Bunin’s judgment, with which I increasingly concur: Lenin, ‘that congenital moral imbecile’. I will return later, if I may, to Trotsky.

The arc of the late Dmitri Volkogonov is an interesting one, is it not? His Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy appeared in 1989; and although the cover of my paperback is wreathed in quotes like ‘a massive indictment’ and so on, it is in fact comparatively lenient. In 1988 Volkogonov didn’t know that Stalin was responsible for the fates of his parents (and two uncles). He found out later, and directly, in the archives: his father was shot in the Terror for possessing some work of Bukharin’s, and his mother died in ‘exile’ – that is, as a police-harassed woman of the road. Dmitri was nine years old in 1937; he sensed what life was like, but he had already eaten the ideology… His Stalin has blind spots, tacit assumptions (he is almost jocose on the repressions of the clergy). Because he was still a believer: a political believer. The disappearance of that belief was complex, and partly independent of filial outrage, coming ‘like the melancholy of a spiritual hangover’.[6] A queasy counterrevolution of the mind, the heart, the soul, the gut. Volkogonov’s subsequent books in his trilogy, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (1992) and Lenin: A New Biography (1994),[7] continue a curve of mounting disgust and despair. ‘Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,’ he wrote (when his life was ending), ‘was to break with the faith I had held for so long.’ The workings of Volkogonov’s internal perestroika are altogether alien to me; but this quietly extraordinary remark is a goad to the imagination.

You must understand the process better than I do, because you have undergone it, or partly undergone it. Your restructuring remains incomplete. Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror. They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom. A while ago I told you that 1989 was a turning point in your evolution as a writer. Until then your prose had always given me the impression of less than complete disclosure – the sense that certain truths might have to be postponable. Then you lost that inhibition, and your writing voice gained a new quality: freedom.

Seen in terms of freedom and freedom alone, October was not a political revolution riding on the back of a popular revolution (February). It was a counterrevolution. The ‘unrest’ of 1921 – in the armed forces (mutiny at Kronstadt and elsewhere), in the post-Civil War remains of the proletariat (strikes, demonstrations, riots), and in the countryside (peasant rebellion involving millions) – constituted a popular revolution far more thoroughgoing than those of 1917 and 1905.[8] The Bolsheviki, of course, called this a counterrevolution, and bloodily suppressed it. Whereas, in fact, their revolution was the counterrevolution. That was the elephant – the trumpeting, snorting, farting mammoth – in the Kremlin living room. Established on an abyss of untruth, Bolshevism was committed to its career of slapstick mendacity, attaining universal and ideal truthlessness under Stalin. The fragile freedom of the interrevolutionary period was replaced by unfreedom, dead freedom, as Vasily Grossman puts it. And that’s what matters:

So may I make a suggestion? You should reread the twenty-four volumes of Lenin’s works in the following way: every time you see the words ‘counterrevolution’ or ‘counterrevolutionary’ you should take out the ‘counter’; and every time you see the words ‘revolution’ or ‘revolutionary’ you should put the ‘counter’ back in again.

Your boy Trotsky. No, I haven’t read Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast, but I have read Volkogonov’s Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (make that Counterrevolutionary. And what’s all this ‘eternal’ stuff and ‘prophet’ stuff? What was he a prophet of? A Communist England? A Communist USA?). As is certainly not the case with Lenin (I groaned with deep recognition when I recently learned that he couldn’t pronounce his r’s: not a good start, I think, for a Russian revolutionary), the attraction to Trotsky is intelligible, and has some human basis. For one thing, he had literary talent – there is always a lulling quality in his rhythms; and he was a great encapsulator. When the Kronstadt sailors (his ‘flower and beauty of the revolution’ – and make that ‘counterrevolution’) inaugurated their articulate and principled rebellion, he said, ‘Now the middle peasant speaks to us with naval guns’ – because the armed forces had started responding to state terrorism in the countryside. (As against that, he suppressed the sailors with exemplary Bolshevik mercilessness, and never mentioned this postponable truth in his various memoirs.) Trotsky’s slogan at Brest-Litovsk (‘Neither war nor peace’) was insubordinate and gravely counterproductive – but it was original: I can hear that German general saying, ‘Unerhört!’ And so on. But Trotsky was never a contender for the leadership. In that struggle he was a mere poseur (reading French novels during meetings of the Central Committee): a Congress election result of 1921 put Trotsky tenth (and he didn’t come tenth because he was more humane than the other nine). More basically, Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer – they all were. The only thing that can be entered on the other side of the ledger is that he paid a price that was very nearly commensurate. Death was visited on him and all his clan. It is shaking to read the list of Bronsteins, and near-Bronsteins, destroyed by Stalin. When Trotsky publicly offered Stalin the job of ‘gravedigger of the Revolution’ (and make that ‘Counterrevolution’), it was said that he would not be forgiven ‘unto the fourth generation’. And so it might have proved. Murder came to almost everyone who had ever known him or talked to him or seen him up close; hundreds of thousands, millions of innocent people lost their lives for some imagined connection to him and his name. So far as I am aware there is in Trotsky’s writing no reference to what this felt like. He seems simply to have accepted it – that he became a lightning rod for death. But then they were all charged up with the electricity of violence.

We come back to where we started. As you rightly intuit, the gravamen (‘essence, worst part, of accusation’) runs as follows: under Bolshevism the value of human life collapsed. You claim that the value of human life had already collapsed – because of the world war. Well, this argument would have more weight behind it if a) there had been a similar collapse (i.e., total, and lasting thirty-five years) in any other combatant country, and if b) a single Old Bolshevik had spent a single day at the front, or indeed in the army (though it is true that Stalin got as far as failing his medical: that withered left arm plus ‘a defective foot’). The ‘full-time revolutionaries’ spent the war years abroad, or in state-subsidized and unsupervised internal exile, or in the embarrassingly congenial Tsarist prisons, rereading that idiot Chernyshevsky. (Trotsky said that he enjoyed his stays in the Peter and Paul Fortress: he had all his comforts, and didn’t have to worry about getting arrested.) The full-timers nursed their impotence until that night in October, when they saw that power was lying on the streets of Petrograd and picked it up ‘like a feather’. That summer the Party slogan was ‘Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!’ In fact, the Bolsheviki had more in mind than capital punishment. ‘We must rid ourselves once and for all,’ said Trotsky, ‘of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.’ What they had in mind was vanguard violence: a violence ‘not seen for centuries’ (Conquest); a violence ‘whose scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past’ (Malia).

I know a little about Russian Jacobinism, the writings of Sergey Nechaev et al. (kill everyone over the age of twenty-five, and so on), but it isn’t clear to me how the paradise-via-inferno idea survived a moment’s thought in the first place. Let us laboriously imagine that the ‘paradise’ Trotsky promised to ‘build’ suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful ‘Yes’ to a paradise so bought. Means define ends, as Kolakowski said – and means, in the USSR, were all you were ever going to get. And the contradiction within the contradiction is this: the militant utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility. Nadezhda Mandelstam talks of the ‘satanic arrogance’ of the Bolsheviki. There is also infernal insecurity and disaffection, and infernal despair.

Bukharin is apt in his demolition of the permanent-revolution theory propounded by Stalin (and, with variations, by Trotsky):

Now, Hitch, I want to leave you with two images. I cannot find the source in either case, and maybe there has been some unwarranted elaboration in my mind. Anyway.

In the early months of the Great Patriotic War there were reports of pitched battles between troops and their Cheka ‘blocking units’.[9] Imagine such a battle, with machine guns (certainly), tanks (possibly), and a third army just across the field…

The second image is more notional. Trotsky’s other theory of permanent revolution (we should call it Permrev) consisted of the vain hope for a series of revolutions in foreign lands, the process concluding with global socialism. Some prominent comrade further remarked that only then, when Communism ruled the earth, would the really warm work of class struggle be ready to begin… And I instantly pictured a scorpion stinging itself to death. Scorpions have of course been known to do this – when surrounded by fire, for example. But where is the fire, on a Communist planet? It is a fire in the self. It is self-hatred and life-hatred. After all, the scorpion has an excellent ‘objective’ reason for killing the scorpion: it’s alive, isn’t it?

Not with anti-Communist greetings, then, because these thoughts are part of no package, but with fraternal love, as always,

The Beginnings of the Search for Decorum

One evening in the autumn of 1999 my wife and I, together with the Conquests, attended a political meeting at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, Holborn, London, just over the road from the old New Statesman offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We had come to hear the Hitchens brothers, Christopher (pro) and Peter (anti), discussing the European Union. So: a very boring subject indeed. But the debate was lively, and the audience passionately interactive: fierce questions posed in fierce regional accents, drunken braying by ‘name’ journalists, and, from various rotund politicos, the occasionally resonant ‘hear hear’ – which, if I remember my James Fenton aright (he was evoking a lethargic afternoon in the House of Commons), sounded like ‘erdle erdle’ and made you think of an enormous stomach digesting an enormous meal. At one point, reminiscing, Christopher said that he knew this building well, having spent many an evening in it with many ‘an old comrade’. The audience responded as Christopher knew it would (his remark was delivered with a practised air): the audience responded with affectionate laughter.

Afterwards I asked Conquest, ‘Did you laugh?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

And I said, ‘And so did I.’

Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many ‘an old blackshirt’, the audience would have… Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher – or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little moustache and the big moustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

And this isn’t right:

Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.

Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.

Everybody knows of the 6 million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the 6 million of the Terror-Famine.[10]

Yet I know, and I laughed. And Conquest laughed. Why won’t laughter do the decent thing? Why won’t laughter excuse itself and leave the room?

Let us go back, for a moment, to Tibor Szamuely. Given eight years in the gulag for privately referring to Georgi Malenkov as a ‘fat pig’, Tibor was imprisoned en route to Vorkuta. This is my father’s account from his Memoirs:

Russia, 1917–53: what is its genre? It is not a tragedy, like Lear, not an anti-comedy, like Troilus and Cressida, nor yet a problem comedy, like Measure for Measure. It is a black farce, like Titus Andronicus. And the black farce is very Russian, from Dead Souls to Laughter in the Dark… It seems that humour cannot be evicted from the gap between words and deeds. In the USSR, that gap covered eleven time zones. The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie.

Butyrki Nights

I too, now, am obliged to confess – not to a lie but to a sin, and a chronic one.

The Butyrki was the best prison in Moscow. (A curious statement, some may well feel; but this is a confession I find I am having to back my way into.) Or, to put it another way, there were worse prisons in Moscow than the Butyrki (sometimes transliterated as Butyrka). The Butyrki was the largest of the three main prisons for ‘politicals’ only, and less feared than the other two, the Lubyanka and (especially) the Lefortovo. More feared than the Lefortovo was Sukhanovka, called ‘the dacha’ (it was coincidentally close to Lenin’s Gorky estate). Solzhenitsyn knows of only one coherent survivor of Sukhanovka, a place, it seems, of strenuously enforced silence and continual torture.[12] The Butyrki, built by the Tsars to contain the Pugachev rebels, was cleaner and better-run than the Taganka and other prisons where politicals cohabited with ordinary crooks and urkas. Solzhenitsyn, again, had some stimulating times in the Butyrki. The standard of prisoner was astonishingly high, with academicians and scientists (and novelists) milling about the cells. It was like the sharashka (a laboratory behind barbed wire in the gulag) described in The First Circle: any physicist would have been proud to work there.

Fate had it that one evening I was alone in the house with my six-month-old daughter. (Another curious statement, perhaps, at this juncture, but I am slowly getting to the point.) Without preamble she embarked on a weeping fit that began at the outer limit of primordial despair, and then steadily escalated. Far from soothing her, my kisses and murmurings might as well have been molten pincers, skilfully applied. After an hour I was relieved by the nanny I had summoned from her home. The weeping ceased at once. I staggered into the garden and started weeping myself. Her cries had reminded me of the clinically explicable anguish of my younger boy, who, at the age of one, was an undiagnosed asthmatic. She had reminded me of the perfect equipoise of nausea and grief, as the parent contemplates inexpressible distress.

‘The sounds she was making,’ I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, ‘would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That’s why I cracked and called Caterina.’

If I had been better informed, at that point, I would have said Sukhanovka instead of Butyrki, and that would have been the end of it. For Butyrki, I am afraid, is now established as one of my daughter’s chief nicknames, along with its diminutives, Butyrklet, the Butyrkster, the Butyrkstress, and so on. The cognomen is widely current in the family; Butyrki’s four-year-old sister uses it – with an excellent and out-of-nowhere Russian accent (these days, even Butyrki can say ‘Butyrki’); and what a sigh went up in our household, one morning, when I drew attention to Eugenia Ginzburg’s chapter heading, ‘Butyrki Nights’…

It isn’t right, is it? My youngest daughter has passed her second birthday, and her cries are not particularly horrifying any more, and I still call her Butyrki. Because the name is now all braided through with feeling for her. Nearly always, when I use it, I imagine a wall-eyed skinhead in a German high-rise (and I’m sure such a person exists) with a daughter called Treblinka. Treblinka was one of the five ad hoc death camps, with no other function (unlike Auschwitz). I am not as bad as the wall-eyed skinhead. But the Butyrki was a place of inexpressible distress. In 1937 it held 30,000 prisoners crushed together. And it isn’t right. Because my daughter’s name is Clio: muse of history.

The Forty Days of Kengir

There was that time in December 1975, when V. S. Pritchett (perhaps passing Oleg Kerensky on the stairs) came to the offices of the New Statesman in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with his review of The Gulag Archipelago (Parts III-IV, which comprise Volume Two of the trilogy)[13] tucked under his arm. Pritchett’s piece went first to the literary editor, Claire Tomalin, and then to me, her deputy. Having read its conclusion—

—I turned back to see if Claire had provided a title. She had: ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (the reference is to the Ibsen play). I remember I gave a sudden nod and thought: the argument is over now. We can move on from the argument. To what? Well, to remembrance, naturally. And also, perhaps, to a search for decorum.

On page 13 of Volume One, in self-lacerating mood, Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘We didn’t love freedom enough.’ Then: ‘We purely and simply deserved everything that came after.’ In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived ‘not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West’. Among the elements of the state’s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound – and thus to delude. As Conquest says, ‘the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.’

In 1949 Stalin decided partly to isolate the politicals, the ‘fascists’, in special camps (known as the Special Camps), presumably to protect the common criminals from ideological contamination. The decision backfired because the ‘whole system of oppression in his reign’, as Solzhenitsyn writes, ‘was based on keeping malcontents apart, preventing them from reading each other’s eyes’. In the Special Camps the politicals became political; and the result was rebellion. Their first move expressed a terrible logic: they started to kill all the stoolies. They called it chopping, but the process was surgical and cold-blooded – a masked man with a knife in the middle of the night. The stoolies no longer strolled to the camp mailbox with their denunciations, no longer named names for the commandants (even under savage interrogation). And the terror from below continued: ‘You whose conscience is unclean – this night you die!’ Soon the trusties ‘started escaping into the Disciplinary Barracks’, where they sought safety in the Isolators, gratefully agreeing ‘never again to breathe clean air or see sunlight’. The authorities responded with typical enterprise: suspected ringleaders were singled out and delivered to the stoolies for beatings and torture in the prison within the prison.

Solzhenitsyn himself, at Ekibastuz in 1952, took part in an extraordinary protest: a work strike and a hunger strike. Even the goners – the wicks, the garbage-eaters – joined this fast of the starving. With only one year left to serve, and the near-certain prospect, now, of a fresh sentence, Solzhenitsyn nonetheless entered into the unreadable afflatus: defiance, despair, elation, and, most dizzyingly, a moral nausea, a perverse fear of freedom. At the end of the third day came a shout from the window – ‘Hut nine!… Nine has surrendered!… Nine’s going to the mess hall!’ Solzhenitsyn magnificently proceeds:

After Stalin’s death in March 1953 came the ‘Voroshilov amnesty’; ‘utterly faithful to the spirit of the deceased’, it liberated not the politicals but the urkas. There was a riot in Camp Division No. 12 in Karlag, and ‘a major rebellion’ at Norilsk. But the seismic disturbances really began with the fall (and execution) of Beria, in July.[14] That month there was a full-scale strike at Vorkuta. Machine guns were mounted; the men went back to work; but Pit 29, shielded by a hill from the rest of the camp, refused to believe that the strike had collapsed. These men were called out on to the parade ground, where they faced eleven truckloads of soldiers. Threatened with ‘harsh measures’ unless they picked up their tools, the prisoners in the front line linked arms and stood their ground. There were three volleys, and sixty-six dead.

Beria’s fall, and his execution on criminal charges, was an affront to the prestige of every Chekist, and so was the dramatic wage cut that followed it. The response, again, had a brutal symmetry: to prove their usefulness they started to foment disorder by openly and randomly killing innocent prisoners. This terror from halfway up – the terror of the janitoriat – seems to have been especially unignorable at the prison complex in Kengir, near Karaganda in Kazakhstan. They killed a young girl who hung her stockings out to dry ‘near’ the perimeter fence. They would lure others to the boundary, with the promise of tobacco, say, and shoot them down. They riddled a returning work team with dumdum bullets. And it worked. In The Gulag Archipelago the chapter called ‘The Forty Days of Kengir’ runs to fifty pages. The disturbances would blossom into the greatest and most heroic rebellion in the history of the camps.

Yet again, and as always, the authorities reacted with maximum cunning, perfidy, and miscalculation[15] – though not yet with maximum violence. The year, remember, is 1954. They injected 650 urkas into troublous Section Three. They would turn it around, would steal, would rape (a women’s camp was by now part of the rebellion), would wound, would murder, would set man against man, which was always the whole idea. But it was different now, in the camps, in Kengir (and elsewhere); there was bursting esprit; the old camp ethos, perfunctorily yet profoundly expressed in the motto ‘You die today, me I’ll wait a bit,’ was undergoing revolution. And what appeared was, of all things, a little universalist utopia (so this is what it looks like), with equality and respect between all persons, and nothing to be gained by preferment. Naturally the dawning utopia, which was incarcerated and doomed to extreme punishment, had its iron fist. When the urkas were trucked in, their leaders were visited by a delegation from the politicals’ military wing. You are outnumbered, they said, and we have changed. Join us, or we will kill you all. The urkas joined, and were purified. In May/June 1954, Section Three became a civil society.

Everyone at Kengir knew what awaited them. And to take on the enemy, the state, at that level, second-generation and downward-selected and now enraged, an enemy of lead and steel. On 22 June it was announced that the rebels’ demands would be met. On 25 June, in the early dawn, the Cheka came in with snipers, artillery, aircraft, machine guns and tanks. There were over 700 dead and wounded. Then the normal course of resentencings and executions…

Let us remember, as Solzhenitsyn does, the Socialist Revolutionaries of Vyatka Prison in 1923, who ‘barricaded themselves in a cell, poured kerosene over all the mattresses and incinerated themselves’. And the hunger-striker Arnold Rappaport, who ‘starved until he could see the light through his hands’. And, at Kengir, the young couple who threw themselves beneath the tracks of the tank, the women who formed a human shield around the men and received the bayonets, the old zeks on the barricade who ripped off their shirts, ‘pointed to their bony chests and ribs, and shouted to the machine gunners: “Come on, then, shoot! Strike down your fathers!’”

And let us try to remember the utterly invisible victims, whose numbers no one will ever tabulate. In the ‘ancient, slow-moving’ village of Kady, in the remote province of Ivanovo, in the year of 1937, some minor officials were accused of attempting to overthrow the Soviet government by disrupting the local supply of bread. Among those shot (after a risible public trial) was the head of the District Consumer Cooperatives, Vasily Vlasov: honest, fearless, and innocent. Solzhenitsyn adds, in fine print at the foot of the page:

As the stars are known to the Night

In the search for decorum our feelings must have access to the high style. Laughter, as we have seen, will never absent itself from the black farce of Bolshevism; laughter will never raise its hands to its lips, bidding adieu. By now we recognize the kind of laughter we hear; we hear it when we witness epiphanic moral sordor. But there is also a plane of emotion that excludes laughter. The high style excludes laughter.

In November 2000 it fell to me to help arrange my younger sister’s funeral. My father, in the last year of his life, told me that in his most defenceless insomnias he tended to worry about Sally and what it would be like for her when he was dead: the loss of general support, the loss of purpose, of raison. And so it proved. A long depression was followed by a sudden illness. When I arrived at the hospital she was in intensive care and had already lost consciousness. She never regained it, and died four days later. I was apprised of this death, not by any change in my sister’s demeanour, but by the twining coils of the monitor screen. She, or the respirator she was attached to, continued to breathe, to pant ardently: a corpse with a heaving chest. Then they disconnected her, and she could be approached and kissed without horror. And I asked her a question I had asked many times before, but would now have no cause to ask again: ‘Oh, Sally, what have you done?’ Many times, as a child, I silently promised to protect her. And I didn’t do that, did I? No one could have protected her, perhaps. But those promises, never uttered, are still inside me and are still a part of me.

At St Dominic’s Priory Church in Kentish Town my wife and I discussed the service with Father John Farrell (Sally had converted some years earlier). The music (Bach), the readings (Romans 8, Matthew 11), the hymns (‘To Be a Pilgrim’, ‘Jerusalem’ – Blake, with his burning utopianism: ‘I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land.’). It was also agreed that I should recite the poem written for Sally by Philip Larkin (‘Tightly-folded bud, / I have wished you something / None of the others would…’), ‘Born Yesterday’, which bears the shockingly recent date of 20 January 1954.

We moved into the church proper, where my wife (who did it all, really) talked on with Father Farrell while I stood, susceptibly, by the door. My thoughts were already returning to the consolations of habit (the study, the desk) when I noticed the plaque to the war dead of the parish, and the poetry, the war poetry, of their names (Bellord, Cody, Gubbins, Lawless, Notherway, Scrimshaw). Beneath was a stanza of verse etched in stone:

As these lines heaved their way through me, I naturally thought first of their connection to my sister. But again the sudden nod, and the thought that, yes, this would about answer to the Twenty Million.

I had recently come across this poem in one of my father’s anthologies, and I looked it up that evening: ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon. The fallen are the British dead of World War I.[16] And it is not inappropriate, it is not indecorous, that war poetry should resonate with our thoughts about the Twenty Million. A war was prosecuted against them and against human nature – by their own people. War poetry, which is summarized in a single line of Wilfred Owen’s – from ‘Strange Meeting’, where the dead poet meets his dead opposite or double from the other side, who says: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend…’

Binyon was a distinguished scholar and translator (he did The Divine Comedy in the 1930s), and a good, affable, yet unarguably minor poet. But here something happened: an uncovenanted expansion. Despite its opening sonorities, ‘The Fallen’ is not a glorification of war; it is an attempt at maximum consolation, in the high style; and it answers to our theme: