Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

In general, Vinkel favoured a fair but firm approach. He didn’t do the interrogations himself, as he knew that he was likely to fly off the handle and start shouting at the suspect. For that same reason, they didn’t tend to let him report to the senior bosses. But he had no equal when it came to planning, analysis and coordination of operations. He knew that himself. And as a professional in his field he could appreciate how well his colleagues handled the interrogations. Take for example Yevstigneyev, or now that Särg too, whom Fyodor Kuzmich had assigned to help him from the sixth department, which investigated economic crimes. They knew how to talk to suspects calmly and patiently – not like Ots or Zhukov, who would always resort to harsher methods too quickly, such as, for example, dispatching suspects to Seewald mental hospital for electric shock treatment. In Vinkel’s view those kinds of tactics were tantamount to admitting defeat, but then he wasn’t in the habit of criticising his juniors if there was no absolute need to. If the desired results were not achieved, for example… An American president had once said that he who can, does, and he who cannot, teaches. Those Americans had hit the nail right on the head on that point, at least.

It’s hard to say how many of us had one of those people who was prone to corpulence but otherwise in good shape situated somewhere on the outer edges of our social circle, but it’s safe to say that plenty of us did. The kind of person you might meet at a distant relative’s wedding and talk to at length about fishing, or at some garden party, where he somehow popped up quite unexpectedly, but was very welcome because of his barbecue skills. Or because he could expertly explain why the Zhiguli 07 was a significantly better car than the 05. Some of them might have sailed for a hobby, or gone with their wives to the Sõprus cinema, followed by Gloria restaurant. Because they had their lives to live as well, did they not? They somehow had to exist in the same world as the rest of us – to eat, love, sleep and shit. To yearn and to fear. But where did they come from? How did they explain to themselves who they were, and justify what they did? Surely they had to explain it in some way? A more disturbing question is what these people would have done if our history had turned out differently, more happily. The majority of them would still have been here somewhere, wouldn’t they? It can’t have been that the Soviet system, which held so many people in fear, could have survived for so long just because a sufficient number of our fellow citizens were moral scum, cynics, sadists and dregs of society, who desired nothing more than to cut their betters down to size. Because it’s surely not possible that those people who had a much better idea of what was going on, certainly more than an orangutan’s inkling, could have seriously believed what was written in the textbooks of scientific communism.

Or did they largely mix with their own kind? Believing that they were somehow cut from a better cloth. They probably had neighbours, but not friends? Perhaps they were proud of their own professionalism and thought that even if the system which they were helping to keep afloat was not ideal, it was at least preferable to the chaos which would inevitably ensue if it were not for them? Or maybe it was all a kind of rough sport for them, a chess game against invisible opponents, with human fates at stake instead of chess pieces. Or were they really of the view that the rulers of this world were incorrigible brutes and pigs, much the same wherever you went, and that it was a mistake to believe that some leaders could be better than others according to some kind of objective principle: that was just the honeytongued propaganda of the enemy. The Russian authorities, which have always brazenly plundered the country’s riches, silencing any opposition with a heavy blunt object, have systematically tried to convince their smarter citizens of that point, and they do so to this day. Everyone else is at it, so why not me too, or so the logic goes. And if it repeatedly proves necessary to slam some confused citizen’s fingers in the desk drawer, it might not be pretty, but there’s nothing else for it. Could it even be that when a security operative gives up some part of his humanity in the name of the common good, he is making a tough but benevolent sacrifice which releases him from any higher-order responsibility?

Or maybe they didn’t give it much thought so long as they could keep their cosy jobs and put bread on the table. I don’t know.

Unlike many of my older colleagues my encounters with the KGB were only fleeting. They tried to recruit me a couple of times at university. One time I expressed myself a little too frankly to my fellow students and one of them reported me, so I was invited to the Komsomol Committee where I was presented with various denunciatory letters, including from people whom I’d considered to be friends. But I was already expecting that, since quite a few of them had come to see me about it beforehand. They told me that they’d been forced into it, but that they’d tried to write in such a way that nothing too bad would come of it. Others kept quiet. One of them refused to write anything, although he didn’t tell me that himself; I found out later from other sources. Maybe because the person who reported on me was his roommate. I was seriously afraid, because the man who conducted the correctional discussion with me was known to be connected to the KGB. Although it seemed that my case was initially just an internal matter for the university, and my academic supervisor stood up for me. At that time our department was headed by a very elderly Jewish professor who had spent her best years in a Stalinist labour camp, where she’d been sent after the regime had executed her first husband. He was a Japanese communist who had somehow ended up in the workers’ paradise and was naturally accused of being a spy by the paranoid Soviet authorities. By now she’d remarried and after that incident I started to be a frequent guest at her pleasant home; I still have some of the old editions of Japanese classics which she gave me. But that’s another story. The KGB recruiters wouldn’t leave me in peace, and I had to endure a couple more conversations like that during my university years. The last one to try was someone who introduced himself as Valent Kirilovich (name unchanged) from the KGB headquarters on Liteyniy Avenue in Leningrad, who had an intellectual demeanour and an athletic build. In the end he had to content himself with me writing down his phone number and promising that I would call if I ever felt like talking. Of course we both knew I wouldn’t. I only saw him once after that, when Rosita and I were travelling by metro in St Petersburg (we were not yet married, but she already knew all these stories). We were sitting facing the doors and there he was, boarding at some station somewhere in the middle of our journey, and then standing at the end of the carriage. I tried not to look in his direction. After a couple of stops he got off.

“You know who that was?” I started to say.

“I know,” Rosita replied.

But unfortunately your file follows you wherever you go; you can’t escape it. After I finished university I worked as head of the literature section at Tallinn Puppet Theatre for a few years. One day my desk phone rang and a male voice introduced himself, in Russian, as a member of staff at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and said he would like to meet me because I spoke Japanese and a few other foreign languages. I said that I wasn’t interested, my field was the humanities, and commerce and industry were foreign to me. “What do you mean you’re not interested?” he asked, getting worked up. “We could even send you abroad for a bit… we only want a quick chat, what could you have against that?” I’d already had some contact with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but for some reason he didn’t know about that; evidently information didn’t travel so well there either. I’d once helped out on a visit of some prospective investors from Japan who were interested in the Mistra carpet factory. So I remembered meeting one member of staff from the chamber and I knew that they had quite a different manner. But I didn’t say that to the man who was talking to me in Russian, and so he simply told me an address and the time I was expected there. When I approached the place, which was up on Toompea, I spotted a Volga car parked a little way from the front door, with the engine running and three men sitting inside. I reckon they were waiting for me. But I managed to quickly slip in through the door and head to my acquaintance’s office, who knew nothing of a supposed meeting with me, and thought that I might have been lured out of my house so that someone could burgle me blind – such things were known to happen. I asked her to call me a taxi, and when it arrived at the front door I ducked into it and drove off. The Volga didn’t follow.