(2 of 6)
At the end of December, Mama and Father went out to Petrovo-Dalneye to see the new dacha where they were to live. The house seemed spacious and yet cozy. Naturally, we anticipated microphones in the dacha. It turned out that the receivers and tape recorders had been installed in the little gatehouse. The equipment was mediocre, and the eavesdropping was quite careless. The guards sometimes substituted music tapes for the blank recording tapes to while away the long evenings. When they did, we could make out the faint melodies through the walls of Father's room; the microphones had become speakers. A couple of times, on hearing the music, I pretended to be surprised and proposed searching for the source. A moment later, the music would stop.
Yet the silence oppressed us all the more. We tried to distract Father by attempting to strike up a conversation about some more or less neutral news from Moscow, but he didn't react. Sometimes he broke the silence himself by saying bitterly that his life was over, that life made sense as long as people needed him, but now, when nobody needed him, life was meaningless. Sometimes tears welled up in his eyes.
Father spent 1965 getting used to his new status as a pensioner. When he took a walk, he always brought along a small Falcon radio. In the morning he read newspapers, as he always had, frequently grumbling, "This is just garbage! What kind of propaganda is this? Who will believe it?" He found a Zenith shortwave radio that had been given to him in the 1950s by an American businessman and started to listen to Western Russian-language broadcasts. What he heard didn't exactly make him rejoice. Step by step, all his reforms were abolished.
I brought Father some "forbidden" books. Once I got a typewritten copy of Doctor Zhivago. Later, during a walk, he said, "We shouldn't have banned it. I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti-Soviet in it."
Sometimes, when he went for a walk, Father would meet vacationers and regale them with stories about the past. Or he'd comment on current international affairs. They all listened attentively and asked a lot of questions. Father answered them expansively. But if the questions were about Brezhnev and his policies, he responded jokingly, "I'm retired now. My job is to take walks and not criticize. Let them figure things out on their own."
When I once asked Father if he weren't bored by telling the same stories over and over, he slyly narrowed his eyes and said, "I'm an old man. When I die, all this will die with me. This way, maybe someone will remember. What I'm recounting is the very history they'd like to bury as deep in the ground as they can. But you can't hide the truth, it will find its way out."
Father's memoirs started because of General Pavel Batov, with whom he had fought during much of the war. After Father was forced out, Batov was asked whether Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad. The general hesitated and answered vaguely that he didn't know whether Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad or what Khrushchev had been doing during the war, for that matter!