and the village outside Moscow, where we rented a
And then I thought, it couldn’t be that I always encounter only exceptions to the rule. So they must not be exceptions, but the norm? And so it was. My parents and those books had been deceiving me. My parents’ faith showed fissures. But only so far as everyday matters were concerned. I simply convinced myself that the time when my ideals would be realized was still a long ways off. I remained an ardent communist and dreamed of universal brotherhood. I only lamented that I saw no principled people around me for whom an idea could take precedence over their own personal interests.
In 1954, when I turned fourteen, my mother and I visited the village of Inta in the Komi ASSR [Autonomous Republic]. We went there because in 1943 my older brother had been wrongfully convicted. My parents explained to me
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that there had been a mistake, and that justice would be restored. It was regrettable that comrade Stalin and his aides knew nothing about this, that it was kept from them; for if they had found out, my brother would be freed and those responsible for the mistake severely punished. Justice, however, was slow in coming. Comrade Stalin managed to die by the time my brother’s sentence was reduced from ten to six years (the time he had already served) and he remained exiled in Inta. (Later, after 1956, my brother was rehabilitated.)
And so, since Mohammed wasn’t coming to the mountain, that summer my mother and I went to see him in Inta. Revelations of things hidden from me began on our way there. From around Kotlas onwards there were endless guard towers with sentries. Those were the camps—and only the ones along the railroad. How many more were farther away, out of sight? It was as if the whole country north of Moscow was inhabited by criminals; that there were more criminals than non-criminals.
Inta consisted almost entirely of prisoners and former prisoners in permanent exile. The crowds of women in tattered gray clothes, surrounded by dogs and soldiers with automatic weapons, were a pitiful sight. But I still really considered them enemies. My visit to Inta enabled me to learn personally what most people found out only after 1956. Only I saw it all in a truer and more horrifying version.
I returned to Moscow a totally different person. I had lost all faith in the correctness of our ideas. In school I had been taught to believe that nothing in history happens by chance. From that time on I began to ponder many things. And my thoughts were one darker than the other. I no longer believed that man would ever learn to construct his life in accordance with the laws of goodness and justice.
“It’s not society that is bad, but man himself,” I decided. “No matter how you change social structure, man will always find an opportunity to be selfish and there will always be injustice.”
At that time I despised people. I had an amazing ability to find the bad (the vile, as I put it) in everyone, and had a very high opinion of myself. I considered myself to be better and more intelligent than others and categorized all people as either the chosen few or the masses, placing myself in the former group, of course.
There is something else I must mention. From my earliest childhood I had experienced, not so much thoughts, as feelings, that life was meaningless. I remember, once when I was about six I crawled under a table and wouldn’t come out. My father tried this and that, but I wouldn’t budge.
“Well, at least explain what’s with you,” my father finally asked anxiously.
“What’s the point of all of this, if we die?” I asked.
“What do you mean by ‘all of this’?”
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“Everything,” I said, and made a sweeping gesture with my arms.
“You’re a little young to worry about such things!” father laughed.
Then I really did stop worrying about such things. But now, at fifteen/sixteen years of age, it all came back, and with much greater force. I considered the chosen ones to be those who understood that life was meaningless and did not attempt to dissuade themselves of this. Though man always strives for happiness, he will never be happy; the same is true for individuals as for humanity as a whole. So why go on living and drag out this drudgery? Why endure sixty or eighty years of stagnant existence; is it not better to cut things short at sixteen? I could take that step myself now, before I become stricken with disease or too attached to life. We all die, after all, so what difference does it make whether it’s now or in fifty years? Life is worth living when one has a goal or purpose, but if there is none—then what’s the point? What’s the point of living if people will never be happy; if cruelty and arbitrariness will always reign in human relations? And if humanity should someday achieve happiness—so what? “I’ll still just become fertilizer for burdock.” And death would be harder to bear for a happy humanity than for an unhappy one. So what should one live for—for fame? One tires of fame. For women? But they grow old and die the same as you. It remains only to live as animals: eat, drink, breed and die. That’s how the majority lives, after all. Simply in order to eat and to cover their nakedness, the majority works and attempts to sweeten this bitter life with movies, books, stamps or with their labor.
So, for what purpose do we have reason? And is it worth occupying oneself with art, science, philosophy, technology, just to eat, drink, reproduce, and die? Of course not.
In school at this same time I was learning the basics of Darwinism. The basic law of the animal world, I was taught, is the struggle for survival. The strong devour the weak. Those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. And man, too, is an animal, isn’t he? This means that among humans the basic law is the same: the strong devour the weak; those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. It then follows, that the accommodating careerists are the most normal of people, and morality is just a fabrication of the weak, made up to console them in their weakness. Yet what if I don’t want to live without morality, only filling my own stomach and taking away my neighbor’s portion? Why the devil would I want such a life? I thought incessantly of suicide, but kept waiting for something and putting it off.
Then I had a revelation. Once, while reading that same textbook,
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really be by accident? Now, if a man doesn’t look after his garden, the garden will die. So how come in nature no one looks after things, but everything is in its place, everything reasoned and wise? We need oxygen, so plants make oxygen for us. Plants need humus, so animals die and their decaying bodies provide humus.
From that moment, I concluded that nature was created by a higher intelligence, God, in other words. But this belief was still far from Christianity or any other religion.
