(4 of 6)
When we stopped for an hour or so at the dacha (twelve miles outside Moscow) where Daniel spent the last years of his life, the police turned up unexpectedly and announced in embarrassment that as foreigners we were "violating a forbidden zone." The good-natured policemen did little to hide the fact that they were being forced to draw up a report on the orders of the KGB. The quiet snowfall beyond the window, reminding us of an old-style Russian winter, was our reward for this "violation."
But in Moscow I was a welcome guest. I had not experienced such a surge of love and warmth in a long time. Perhaps only once before in my life had I been accorded a similar welcome -- when they brought me to the camp. But that was given to me by those zeks, who, like myself, were classified as "particularly dangerous state criminals." They greeted me as a brother, and the more furiously the newspapers stigmatized and the authorities pressured Daniel and me, the better they treated me . . .
A protracted ideological civil war is being waged in our homeland. Not long before our departure from Paris for Moscow we received a letter from a well- known Moscow poet:
"Today everything is gloomy and vacillating, a lot of people are hoping for a bloodletting, for atrocities and cruelties with all the 'ancient attributes': tyranny, the iron fist, a threatening master, army order. Already from every quarter appeals are heard to curtail Ogonyok editor Vitali Korotich; he irritates them more than anything else, and now the hosts of the 'loyal and prudent' are marching on him . . . No matter what those who are optimistic about perestroika say to you -- the situation is very grave, and it's a dreadful time to live, an enormous stock of malice has accumulated, oceans of worthless money, the fury of poverty, hunger and homelessness, of ethnic hostility and contempt -- all this is bursting forth from the depths and is being channeled against the intelligentsia, which have ungratefully forgotten that under the Genius of All Times and Peoples prices went down every year, there was order and every national group knew its place."
If the magazine New Times publishes an interview with Lev Kopelev, a well- known Russian dissident who today supports perestroika from his home in Cologne, then the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya attacks Kopelev in the best traditions of Stalinist phraseology, explaining in the same breath that Kopelev is a Jew. This recalls the old Russian round-dance game in which one group of dancers sings, "And we the millet have sown and sown . . ." And the other answers, "And we the millet shall trample, trample . . ."
The Russian intellectual, by his very nature a liberal and a democrat, is arrayed against the Russian nationalist, who is always trying to trample into the ground what the democrats try to sow.