Bez Prava Na Smert'

Zorii Balayan No right to die Prologue In the course of my long life, I have died more than once. On one occasion I crashed headlong to the ground from the very top of a high mulberry tree and was found only on the following day – not breathing and most definitely unconscious, as I was told. Another time, raging surf crushed me and my tiny boat against a cliff and deposited me on a rocky shore – half-dead, according to the frontier guards who saved me. Then again, I once experienced clinical death in the course of a heart operation. People who have gone through this experience quite often tell all sorts of far-fetched stories about what they have seen and sensed “over there”. I, however, didn’t see or sense anything. I was simply told about my death by those who were present and who saved my life. What’s important, though, is this: I have always been horrified by the thought that I might die without having told people about my mother, who went through the GULAG, or my father, who was murdered in the GULAG, about the years linked in our minds with 1937 (and with many other times just like 1937) and about what I myself had to live through. Towards the end of the 1970s, “Literaturnaya Gazeta” published my discussion with William Saroyan, in the course of which I asked the great writer how he reacted to accusations that his works were too full of unnecessary autobiographical references. Let me quote just a small extract from his reply: “I shall never believe that the unbearable spiritual agony, which we see in Dostoyevsky’s heroes, could have been ‘imagined’ by the author at his writing desk. Once I was struck by a title – something like ‘A tale of my sufferings’ or ‘The story of what I have lived through’. I thought, a writer can’t call a work of his that, because writers always write about what they themselves have experienced. That’s why I don’t accept terminology like ‘excessive autobiographical references’. The personal life of Hemingway is all in his books. I truly love and admire Thomas Wolfe and I remember even feeling happy when he too was criticised for notoriously overdoing ‘autobiographical references’.” I have not mentioned these famous names in order to put myself on the same level. I am simply reinforcing my own ideas about a time when events could be experienced only through me or, as Avetik Isahakyan said, “through my own heart”. I am absolutely convinced that the victims of the year 1937 also included those who were not officially registered as among the repressed – the children born to them and even those as yet unborn. Strictly speaking, my book is about them too. I have no doubt at all that, from the age of two, I somehow understood right away – all at once – or rather, I sensed intuitively that everything around me had changed. Life had changed. My mum had changed – her voice had become different. And I myself had changed. After all, I had been living with my father for two whole years – a whole eternity. It really was an immense period of time for someone my age – and I was already solving important problems: I had first learnt to crawl, then to walk, to run and to “journey” across the whole room to the balcony, making my first wonderful discoveries. Now having become a father and a grandfather, as my three children grew up and my six grandchildren are growing up before my very eyes, I see what’s going on in their hearts and in their opinions when I return home. I see my grandsons running to greet me at the door, trying to outdo each other – but, above all, I see them laughing joyfully. All this is happening with the happy faces of their mothers in the background. Back then, however, when I was two years old, all this suddenly changed, it came to an end as if it had never been. In those terrible years, when millions of fathers and mothers were just wood-chips flying, I and millions of children my age were merely “sawdust”. The arguments still going on about the price paid for Stalin’s regime are mainly concerned with statistics (not with human beings and their fate, but with cold figures!), as recorded in the miraculously preserved secret lists of those executed. However, all of us were victims – even those whose families did not include a single “repressed person”. The statisticians for some reason assume that the victims of “repression” were those who were officially executed. Some researchers even include in their total calculations only those people who got recorded in the official documents as having been executed by firing squad. Have we ever asked ourselves – was it harder, at that time, for the dead or for the living? It was that terrible question that once came into my own head – which is why this book is above all about myself and what I lived through and about the millions who were my brothers and sisters in misfortune, in their lives as orphans. It concerns those who, having lived through the horrors of the Stalinist epoch, did not set out in life bitter or vengeful, and those who lived through the collapse of our vast country with heartfelt personal sorrow and spiritual anguish. As a child, I already sensed clearly that many human beings were not living, so much as “surviving”. This was true even of our idols, on whom we modelled ourselves. However, none of my contemporaries, not even the adults, was able to understand that, in our country, there was not merely “lawlessness”, but slavery, which we simply did not recognize. I myself, fatherless, motherless and hungry, used to write poems about the happiness of childhood in my home town of Stepanakert, along whose streets, even after the victory in the Second World War, hundreds of people were being led away under guard and sent off to their deaths… Nevertheless, first of all and above all, while working on this book, I was thinking of the fate of my mother, who herself often asked aloud: “Do we need to reopen the wounds of the past?” She wasn’t expecting us to answer her question. She would simply ask it quietly, as if wondering about the answer herself. After all, she was convinced that it was impossible to overcome hatred by means of hatred – and she would also add that everything evil and tragic in the world could be put right only through love. Once she described how, on 21 December 1989 – the 110th anniversary of Stalin’s birth – there was a programme on television which included a discussion about the repressions. One of the participants, while not exactly justifying the man whose anniversary was being marked, merely observed that this man’s name was linked not only with evil, but also with good things – in particular, winning the war. He suggested that, for the sake of the future, there should be less digging up the past. I could not contain myself and told my mother all that I had been thinking about such attempts at compromise, as if there had been a good Stalin and a bad Stalin, that no-one was ideal. My mum began to try and calm me down. “What can you do?” – she said – “People are different. When I was in camp, I realised this more than once, so obviously we have to accept it as something inevitable.” But then five months went by. One evening, on coming home, I hardly recognised my mother: she was walking round the room, backwards and forwards, talking to herself, not noticing me. It was 8 May 1990. On the eve of Victory Day, film after film was being shown, with Stalin everywhere as the centre of attention. My mum, like all of us, had seen these films many times, but suddenly she simply got furious, seeing on the screen the wise, sensible, calm Stalin being constantly contrasted with the caricature-like, hysterical Hitler. “The hell with it!” – she exploded. “Perhaps the way they show it, that’s the way it was. But how does it turn out? Some people say, let’s not disturb the past, let’s not remember what was bad, but others, deciding that a page can’t just be torn out of history, show that tyrant to new generations as some kind of saviour, like Christ himself…” I shall never forget that day. Outside the window the curfew was in operation. That night my mum did not close her eyes. I knew what was the matter with her. She was upset, above all, because suddenly her life-long principle of the power of love was not working, the principle that evil only gives rise to evil, that hatred cannot rectify hatred. In this book, the reader will discover that, in the camps, mum did not always succeed in upholding the Christian principles she was so proud of. And then, on that forty-fifth anniversary of the victory in the Second World War, before she lay down to sleep, my mum calmly said: “Remembering the millions of souls that were destroyed doesn’t mean you’re stirring up the past. It means telling the truth and calling a murderer a murderer.” During the long years I spent working on this book, I collected a huge number of archival documents. It was difficult not to yield to the temptation of “preserving” in it all I wanted to say about my mother and father, about myself and my times.

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