Political prisons, just like other Soviet prisons, had their own aristocracy—cooks, stockroom workers, librarians, boiler attendants, barbers, banya attendants, barracks attendants, movie projectionists, deliverymen, and so on. Many writers who have gone through the Gulag have written about it, including Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg, and Shalamov. In the old days, before the Brezhnev era, when more than half of the Gulag consisted of people convicted under Article 58, all the “aristocratic positions” were filled by common criminals—murderers, thieves, and robbers—the “socially friendly” elements, if we use a broadly-accepted term from Marxism-Leninism. New times brought new prisons. Under pressure from the free world, the Soviets had to acknowledge, at least partially, that they did have political prisoners, and then had to build special political prisons for them. In the entire Soviet Union, there were only four political prisons—three were in the Perm region and one was in Mordovia, the famous Dubravlag. In these newly established political prisons, the “aristocracy” consisted of spies, war criminals, and traitors to the Motherland. In other words, if you were convicted under Article 70, the heir to Article 58 of the Criminal Code, you could never be a barber or a librarian even if, before your arrest, you were the best barber in the Soviet Union or the head of a large library.
Naturally, there were “aristocrats” in our prison too, such as the librarian Anderson, the cooks Maximovich and Petrov-Senior, the barber Kukharuk, the boiler attendants Saar and Muzikyavichus, the banya attendant and movie projectionist (those were part-time positions) Lismanis, the stockroom worker Leikus, the barracks attendant Krainik, and others. In the old times, these “aristocrats” were disrespectfully referred to as strawheads, and Zhora Khomizuri continued this tradition into the new era.
Deinis Lismanis, the Latvian nationalist and social democrat, was arrested in November of 1980 and sentenced in a closed session of the Latvian Supreme Court to twelve years in prison as a traitor to the Motherland, i.e., the Soviet Union. Although accused of high treason against a land in which he had not been born, against a country that he considered an occupier and pillager, Lismanis did not take up arms to fight. After Latvia’s occupation, he went into the underground and became a member of the Social Democratic Party, headquartered in West Germany.
I met Deinis Lismanis under rather peculiar circumstances. As soon as Dato and I arrived at the prison, we were welcomed with two things—dinner and a bath. As soon as I finished my dinner, I was taken to the banya. The local banya turned out to be an interesting place. The first thing I saw was “free” soap. I should explain here that in prison personal hygiene is as indispensable an aspect of our freedom as smoking. And if we were to continue the same analogy, when you’re in a banya, you don’t feel like a prisoner, you’re not actually doing your time. Well, after I saw that “free” soap, I thoroughly lathered up my hair only to discover that there was no more water in the faucet. There were no other people in the banya, so no one could help me. The usual banya day was Saturday, but we’d arrived on a Thursday. The weather was hot, and there was no need for hot water. But you can’t manage without water in a banya! Failing to find any reasonable solution, I wrapped an odd piece of fabric around myself and went out into the courtyard. I stopped the first passerby and asked him for help. That passerby explained that there was never any water in the faucet, that water was collected in a big barrel in the banya’s anteroom, the so-called pre-banya room, and all I had to do was to pour some water into my basin and, using a special ladle called a shaika, pour that water on my head with one hand while using the other hand for all other tasks. It wasn’t very convenient, but the quest for personal cleanliness won out over all reservations. While I was searching for that big barrel of water, the man who was helping me had enough time to tell me a very funny anecdote about the banya. He told me the story with a noticeable Latvian accent, with prolonged vowels and sharp stresses either on the first or second part of long syllables. That man was Deinis Lismanis, a traitor, social democrat, and movie projectionist. “A Nordic type, a true Aryan, and a family man,” as he liked to describe himself, imitating the narrator from the famous Soviet TV drama Seventeen Moments of Spring, written by the renowned Chekist Yulian Semyonov.
Deinis Lismanis was always in a good mood. No one could understand how he managed to be that way in a political prison, but the fact remains: No one ever saw him gloomy or in a bad mood. His cheerfulness was even infectious. Zhora believed that this was only a façade, Rafik thought he was shallow, saying jokingly that if it weren’t for Lismanis’s European appearance, we’d wonder if he wasn’t Lismanishvili, Lismanidze, or Lismanauri (in other words, Georgian), Johnny thought he was cuckoo, Henrikh called him “spray-and-pray happy,” Borya Manilovich considered him a natural anti-Semite, but only slightly, as was the case with all Balts, and Lismanis’s polar opposite, the never-smiling Misha Polyakov, used to say that it would be interesting to get really drunk with him
There were other opinions as well. Yankov, for example, saw Lismanis as someone who rejected the all-Union struggle for democracy and looked upon him with suspicion. This fact, however, didn’t stand in the way of their frequent conversations about Faust—Goethe was Lismanis’s god. He knew German fluently, of course, and often recited long excerpts from Faust. Lismanis liked to joke that Goethe was God-the-Father, Thomas Mann, God-the-Son, and Schiller, the Holy Spirit. The Ukrainians tried to avoid him, finding his smile insincere and his open scorn for Russians just an anti-Slavic schtick. According to a common Ukrainian belief, the privilege to hate Moscals, their derogatory term for Russians, belonged solely to Ukrainians as the only lawful descendants of Kievan Rus.
Unlike the prison’s Jews, who tried to avoid all activity on Saturdays—Grisha Feldman, for example, would prepare his makhorka cigarettes during the week and on Saturdays he’d run around the camp with one between his teeth and matches in his hand asking somebody to light it for him—Lismanis ruled the roost.
Saturdays gave Lismanis double dominion over our two islands of freedom—in the banya and in the dining hall where he’d show us a “new” movie. The movies that came to our prison, however, were never new. They were supposed to help correct our political views and thus lead to our rehabilitation. As a result, the movies were always about Comrade Lenin or Comrade Stalin, or about both of these comrades, or about other true comrades of those comrades, for example, Dzerzhinsky, or “Iron” Felix, the “intellectual” Frunze, or the all-Union head of state Kalinin.
I don’t know why, but fate decided that I would meet by chance or have close relationships with many people that belonged to the world of cinema. First, one of my dearest friends was a film expert. Then once on Kutaisi Street in Tbilisi, I ran into Robert Redford (I still wonder what he was doing in that neighborhood—maybe he was looking for some car parts?). In Angers, France, at a dinner party for librarians, I met the actress Annie Girardot and gave her a short but information-packed lecture about khachapuri. (I recalled that once, on a Soviet TV show, when that actress mentioned khachapuri, the anchorman’s mood, for some reason, went sour.) In the hallway of the Hotel Russia in Moscow, I bumped into the Italian producer Ettore Scola and Gina Lollobrigida, who was no longer young but could still turn her viewers into stone, just like Medusa. I was once on a flight from Moscow to Tbilisi with Lidiya Fedoseyeva-Shukshina and talked to her nonstop about the specificity of Shukshin’s prose. In the international car of the Tashkent-Moscow train, I played cards with the actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who had already become Stierlitz. In Santa Monica, I happened to be in an elevator with Sharon Stone, who was tired and without makeup but still “enough for Holland” (a phrase used by the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, in answer to a Dutch journalist’s question about how many nuclear warheads were left in Russia). Near the entrance to Warner Brothers Studio, I smoked a cigarette with Antonio Banderas, and when Catherine Zeta-Jones happened to pass by, I allowed myself to make a compliment that could have easily brought me an accusation of sexual harassment. Banderas had to explain that I was from the Caucasus, and that for Caucasian people, giving a compliment to a beautiful woman was basically like saying hello. (It’s interesting that in English, one Caucasian means a representative of the white race, so he had to use the plural, Caucasians, or “double” Caucasian.)
Out of all these encounters that I could boast of, I was able to share only two while in prison—the one with Gina Lollobrigida and the one with Vyacheslav Tikhonov. The others happened later. With Lismanis, I, obviously, began talking about the very beautiful Gina, since boasting about a close acquaintance with the spy Isaev-Stierlitz in a conversation with an honest Latvian nationalist would not be bon ton. Back then we didn’t have the word that we would use now to describe Deinis’s passion—he was a real fan of movies, especially Italian movies. As soon as I mentioned Gina Lollobrigida’s name, Lismanis got excited: “I wonder if you know, my Georgian friend, that Lollobrigida is the most American Italian actress, even more so than Sophia Loren? Lollobrigida was the biggest name not only in Italian cinema, but in world cinema of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties! And do you know what kind of period that was for Italian cinema? Do you know that she starred alongside such giants as Burt Lancaster, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, and Sir Alec Guinness?”
“I only know that in real life, as they say, I, personally, have never seen a woman of such beauty,” I said, beginning for the thousandth time to tell the story of me bumping into the animated group of Italians in the hallway of the Hotel Russia in 1975, when Gina Lollobrigida was about fifty years old.
“I wonder if you know, my dear Levan (he pronounced it Leevan, with the stress on the first syllable), that Gina participated in the Miss Italia beauty pageant in 1947?”
“No, I didn’t know that, but I can imagine that she won decisively—she must’ve been only twenty years old back then.”
“No, she didn’t win! She didn’t win! Another contestant won—Lucia Bosè (who starred in Guiseppe de Santis’s No Peace under the Olive Trees and Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist)—and second place went to Gianna Maria Canale (who, by the way, was often compared with Ava Gardner). Lollobrigida came in third! How can we trust beauty pageants after that! We can acknowledge the beauty of Lucia Bosè, but Gina?!”
Lismanis watched all the movies from his projection room, occasionally providing us with unexpected commentaries, which some inmates found truly annoying, but which others found amusing and very entertaining. For example, when we watched the Soviet propaganda masterpiece Wait for Me, with Valentina Serova, Konstantin Simonov’s wife, in the leading role, the first time the actress appeared on-screen, Lismanis stopped the movie to announce:
“Here you can see the blonde beauty, Valentina Vasilievna Serova, the Soviet Marilyn Monroe, the sex symbol of the Soviet big screen in the thirties and forties. She was Stalin’s favorite actress, and at state dinners, the leader of all the peoples of the world and cinema’s greatest friend always invited this lady, along with Chkalov’s wife, to sit next to him, since Valentina was the widow of the pilot Anatoly Serov, a hero of the Spanish Civil War. She later married that asshole Konstantin Simonov (Papayan, please, don’t get upset), but it didn’t stop the blonde beauty from having an affair with the general and future marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky. The affair reached such a scale that, once during a state reception, Comrade Stalin asked General Rokossovsky: ‘Do you happen to know, Comrade Rokossovsky, who the actress Serova’s husband is?’ ‘The poet Simonov, Comrade Stalin,’ Rokossovsky stammered. Then Stalin said: ‘You know, I thought so too.’ After that the future marshal ended all relations with his beloved. The actress lost herself in drink and died alone in 1975. Upon receiving this news, Simonov didn’t interrupt his vacation in Kislovodsk, but sent roses instead. There were only three people, including her daughter, Maria Simonova, who paid their last respects to the Soviet cinema legend. Let’s continue watching the movie now, my friends, and thank you for your attention.”
Lismanis, as a rule, used to say terrible things while showing us such timeless Soviet masterpieces as The Man with the Gun, Lenin in October, and Lenin in 1918, which had become classics of Leninism. All his comments, however, were in Latvian, so Lismanis could always say that he was commenting on the skills of the actors playing Lenin. Sometimes the Georgians responded to Lismanis’s joke, and in their comments, delivered in Georgian, you could hear such innocent assessments as bastard, douchebag, son-of-a-bitch, cretin, and other comparable accolades. The Armenians didn’t lag behind us in this respect, interjecting a few beautiful phrases in the language of the immortal Gregory of Narek. In other words, with Lismanis, watching these renowned masterpieces of Soviet propaganda in lieu of real movies was fun.
Once upon a time, something unimaginable happened—for a Saturday showing, we received a real film, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann. I think the movie was shown first to the general public on the outside, but it was such a flop, they decided to send the film to the political prisons as a form of punishment: Here’s your beloved West and its incomprehensible masterpiece! To tell the truth, the inmates didn’t really like this rather difficult and claustrophobic movie about a fraught relationship between a mother and a daughter. But Lismanis kept pausing the movie, pointing out the mastery of Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s loyal cinematographer for twenty of his movies. Lismanis was a true artist and could spot such details that the famous Nykvist would probably have gladly hired him as his assistant.
Another time, we were honored to be sent a newsreel along with the movie. Lismanis warned us that it wasn’t a movie, that it was only a newsreel, and that the movie would follow. The newsreel was a short documentary, which showed (don’t forget, this was all happening in the era of perestroika, at the peak of glasnost) unique footage that had been hidden from the world for decades by Soviet Communists, as well as by Western democrats. Anyway, the documentary showed how the British, right after the end of World War II, released Soviet prisoners from their occupied territory. Quickly realizing what was going to happen, Lismanis announced that people with delicate nerves should leave the room as we were about to see some horrifying footage. Of course, such a comment compelled even those who were planning to skip the newsreel and smoke outside (we were not allowed to smoke in the dining hall) to stay.
A tall bridge, about a hundred meters above a river, appeared on the screen. The shot was taken from a distance, so you couldn’t see anything clearly. As soon as the camera got closer, some dots appeared, and the dots were flying down from the bridge. The camera kept getting closer, and at some point, it became clear that those dots were people. People who of their own free will were jumping off the bridge into the river to meet their death. On the old, worn-out screen in the dining hall of ZhKh 385/3-5, Soviet prisoners of war were throwing themselves off a bridge over a deep gorge. Those people chose to jump off the bridge rather than fall into the hands of their own people, and there were women and children among them. Most of the prisoners tried to turn back, but the British welcomed them with rifles, killing them all on the spot. A terrible inhuman tragedy was happening on that bridge—and it was happening only a few months after the end of the cruelest war in the history of humankind. The Soviet prisoners from the British occupation zone knew that the Gulag was waiting, that a painful death lay before them, that the road back was cut off by the Allies’ bullets, and that there was instant death in the deep gorge beneath the bridge.
Suddenly a small man appeared on the screen. He was running in the direction of the Russians with his hands in the air. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Waving his arms wildly and yelling something, a small happy man was running toward his people.
All of a sudden, an inhuman scream shattered the dining hall: “Lismanis, stop the movie! No-o-o-o! No-o-o-o! Lismanis, stop!” Confused, Lismanis stopped the movie, and the inmate Timin, a small nondescript man who’d never said a word before, turned to his own image on the screen: “Where are you running to, you idiot?! Guys, that’s me! That’s me running back home only to spend forty years suffocating in the Gulag!”
Young Timin was looking at his older self from the screen. He was looking at all of us as if trying to understand what his future self, tormented in the Gulag, wanted from him forty years later. Lismanis turned off the movie projector. Meanwhile, the news of Timin being on the big screen traveled fast, and soon the entire prison burst into the dining hall. Everyone gathered in front of the screen—there was the warden, Major Shalin, Officer-on-Duty Sureykin, Deputy Commander for Morale and Welfare Lieutenant Arapov, the guards Trifonov, Kiselyov, and Trimazkin, and every inmate, without exception. Even Arkady Dudkin, who usually didn’t watch the movies unless they were about the Battle of Berlin or the raising of the flag on the Reichstag, was there.
“Lismanis, start from Timin,” Shalin ordered. And Lismanis started the film from the moment when a small dot separated from the crowd gathered on the bridge. Then the dot began to gradually increase in size until it transformed into the real Timin. Happy Timin was running, running toward the Motherland that he had so longed to see. He was running toward his twenty-five-year prison sentence, which in the Gulag was extended by another twenty years. He was running because he thought that, in the end, his Motherland would forgive him for his service in Vlasov’s army, or at least they would talk to him in Russian.
The prison administration easily recognized Timin. Every one of them, beginning with Shalin and ending with Trifonov, broke into Homeric laughter and some inmates followed their example. It was a great show. In our dining hall that had been turned into a movie theater for a night, one half of the spectators could barely hold back their tears, their hearts gripped by grief, while the other half was dying of laughter. At first poor Timin tried to laugh too, but he couldn’t. Then, suddenly, he passed out. We Georgians and Armenians, the members of the Christian Federation of South Caucasian Nations, took him outside to get some air, and our local Asclepius, Arnold Anderson, urgently revived him with his signature tincture, the non-secret ingredients of which were plantain and mint. The remaining secret ingredients were never revealed by the inventor of Soviet multivitamins.
“There’s your renowned Winston Churchill for you!” Zhora Khomizuri exclaimed. “You know, Solzhenitsyn wrote about it, but I thought he was exaggerating.”
“Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill,” said the omniscient Vadim Yankov, correcting him. “He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953, and it was in Literature, by the way.”
“Sir Winston Leonard Spenser-Churchill was the biggest democrat of the twentieth century, the greatest politician of all time,” Misha Polyakov said, completing the introduction. (By the way, according to a 2002 BBC research project, the British would consider Churchill to be the greatest Englishman ever, even more significant than Shakespeare and Newton.)
“No, Churchill wasn’t the prime minister at that time, it was Clement Richard Attlee. Remember, the Labor Party won a sensational victory in the 1945 election,” Borya Manilovich said, attempting to save the international legend.
“It’s true, but, my dear Borya, the decision to return Soviet prisoners from the British zone to Russia was made with Churchill’s blessing in February 1945 during the Yalta conference,” Misha Polyakov said, reminding his fellow townsman of the bitter truth. “That means that, along with the illiterate, coarse, and angry donkey Uncle Joe, the responsibility for the tragedy of almost two million people like Timin falls on the chubby shoulders of the Nobel Prize winner, kind Uncle Winston, and the no less kind Uncle Sam—the handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt—along with the entire noble, democratic, and humane West.”
“When they’re all behind a barbed-wire fence, they’ll understand,” Zhora said, reminding the naïve West of Solzhenitsyn’s prediction.
“When there is a Red Flag above Paris,” Borya added, showing no mercy for this international capital.
“There is enough red in their own flag. They love the Communists far too much,” said Yankov, who’d never been fond of the French tolerance for communism.
“What are they supposed do when it was only their Communists and the Catholic Church that behaved decently during the war?” I said, trying to protect the French, for whom I’ve had a soft spot ever since childhood.
“Then they should choose the Church,” Yankov said.
Lismanis came out from the dining hall and said: “Mr. Polyakov suggests that the general mess that is Russia is responsible for sending today’s newsreel into a political prison, but I’m confident that the Soviet Communists have at most three or four years left. I don’t get it, what are those idiots, Shalin & Co, laughing about? Very soon they’ll have to guard themselves in Barashevo. First, the Soviet Union will collapse, then the international Communist movement will collapse, that is, all the Communist parties that are being fed by the Kremlin.”
“What an apocalyptic picture,” Yankov said with delight, unable to conceal his joy over the tragedy about to overtake the world’s Communists. “All three of the Indian Communist parties will be liquidated!”
“There’s no danger for China, North Korea, or Cuba. They’ll enter the next millennium with communism,” Zhora predicted. “But the Communist Parties of France and especially of Italy are in danger of disappearing. Soon L’Humanité and L’Unità won’t be published anymore.”
“Don’t forget The Morning Star, my dear Zhora, the third-largest Communist newspaper in the world, after Pravda and Renmin Ribao [The People’s Daily],” Yankov said, taking a jab at the English Communists out of respect for Timin.
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about Lismanis’s life today, and I have no idea what happened to Timin. But when the inmate Timin suddenly met the big-screen Timin, with the help of Lismanis, I saw the West in a different light. The West, which had seemed so picture-perfect and flawless, became alive and real, and I realized that it had always had its own shortcomings.