Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Apoga was a frightening name to the woman. And the idea of seeing him was just terrible. Everyone was scared by the prospect of seeing this man. The woman left as soon as she could—went back to her village and never left again." Viktor raised his hands. His face was fixed in an expression of helpless pain. "People could be imprisoned for nothing. That man's name, Apoga, represented terror and fear."

I said, "The paradox is that at exactly the same time—the 1950s—we had McCarthy in the U.S. persecuting people for sympathizing with the Soviet Union."

Sergei was clucking "Nyet, nyet, nyet" before I could finish. "I've been to America," he said. "I know about McCarthyism. The problems were not on the same scale."

I had to agree, though the motives, the witch-hunts, the betrayals, the stink of fear—of ruined lives and lost jobs and disgrace—that hung over McCarthyism were similar.

"Here's a story," Sergei said. "Viktor says people were afraid. It's true. I know it from my own family. My grandmother's family was from Kirov"—Kirov was on the railway line, about eight hours west of Perm—"and they had eleven children, seven girls, four boys. My grandmother was considered educated, because she'd graduated from primary school with honors."

Yelena said, "Is also a joke, Paul."

"I get it." I also understood that he kept referring to his grandmother as babushka.

"Her father was a well-known butcher. This man was strong physically, a muscular man. Fifty years later he was still remembered in this province. At the time of the revolution," said Sergei, "my grandmother was seventeen. She got married at nineteen, and for eight years all was well. They were in that remote place. The secret police couldn't reach them.

"In the 1920s, Stalin wanted collectivization, so they came to my grandparents. Her father the butcher was a kulak"—a rich peasant, or one defying authority. "He had a beautiful house that he'd built himself. The inspector wanted the house for his own family. The house was very dear to the butcher.

"'Go to Siberia,' the government inspector said.

"What? Until then he had never worried about the powers of government. He was so upset he just lay down and died of a heart attack.

"His two sons—my great-uncles—ran away to fight against this unfair government. My grandmother stayed in the village. But she was scared. She knew the police were looking for her two brothers. At the same time, she was giving bread to her brothers when they sneaked home. The special police wanted to kill them. This was around 1930 or '31. A few years later they were found and shot by the police.

"My grandmother—her name was Matryona—wanted to bury her brothers but couldn't find their bodies. And her grief didn't end there. After World War Two there was a big famine. As the daughter of a kulak, with primary school honors—ha!—she was made head of a farm. There were no strong men left. She was suffering from hunger.

"In 1946, her son—my seventeen-year-old uncle—went looking for food. They were so hungry they'd go to the fields to look for grains of wheat that had been left behind after the harvest. He found a few grains. And he was seen. He was arrested for theft.

"He screamed at the police, 'You are monsters! You have food and we have nothing!'

"For saying that, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. He spent it in Magadan and Kolyma, washing gravel for gold. There was almost no communication with his mother. In 1954 when Stalin died, he was rehabilitated. He died three years ago and—you know?—he would never speak a word about his imprisonment.

"My grandmother was so afraid of the KGB that when the name was mentioned she made a face. The worst document she'd ever seen in her life was that of her son's sentence. Imagine, twenty-five years. He would have got ten years for theft, but he screamed 'You monsters,' so he got fifteen more."

Now we were in the deep countryside, no other cars at all, and the road was buried in snow. The landscape was like a charcoal drawing on white paper—the black woods and the smudged sky and the whiteness of the blizzard.

"There are thousands of such stories," Viktor said. "It's a story of terror. People were afraid of anyone in power. The system was cruel. The whole basis of it was that Stalin wanted slave labor."

All this time, Yelena was translating and I was writing in the notebook on my knee, which was easy because of the pauses between the men speaking and Yelena's translation.

"And you couldn't trust anyone," Sergei said. "I had a problem myself. I was on file, someone had betrayed me."

"What had you done?"

"Told political jokes," Sergei said. "But I found out about my file in a roundabout way. I was working for Komsomol"—the communist youth organization—"in the Political Education Department. It was the eighties. We were dealing with vets from Afghanistan. They had severe stress and trauma, and they found it hard to adjust to life.