In 1910 a political opponent said of Lenin that you couldn't deal with a man who "for 24 hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution". The actual revolution, of course, had no effect on this habit. As the young secretary Khrushchev said to a cheering audience of party members, "A Bolshevik is someone who feels himself to be a Bolshevik even when he's sleeping!" That's how a Bolshevik felt about sleep.
But that is what they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicisation of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitisation of politics; they want the politicisation of sleep.
This is from a letter addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime: "The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They're its shit."
That isn't Stalin. (That is Lenin.) Stalin hated intellectuals too, but he cared about what we call creative writing and had an uneasy feel for it. His famous and much-mocked remark, "Writers are the engineers of human souls", is not just a grandiose fatuity: it is a description of what he wanted writers to be under his rule. He didn't understand that talented writers cannot go against their talent and survive, that they cannot be engineers. Talentless writers can, or they can try; it was a very good thing to be a talentless writer in the USSR, and a very bad thing to be a talented one.
Stalin personally monitored a succession of novelists, poets and dramatists. In this sphere he wavered as in no other. He gave Zamyatin his freedom: emigration. He menaced but partly tolerated Bulgakov (and went to his play Days of the Turbins 15 times, as the theatre records show). He tortured and killed Babel. He destroyed Mandelstam. He presided over the grief and misery of Anna Akhmatova (and of Nadezhda Mandelstam). He subjected Gorky to a much stranger destiny, slowly deforming his talent and integrity; next to execution, deformity was the likeliest outcome for the post-October Russian writer, expressed most eloquently in suicide. He endured Pasternak; he silenced him, and took a lover and a child from him; still, he spared him ("Do not touch this cloud-dweller"). But this is what he did to the Meyerholds.
The world-famous Vsevolod Meyerhold had displeased Stalin, at the height of the Great Terror, with his production of a play about the civil war. Meyerhold was savaged by Pravda (that was a ritual, something like a promissory note of disaster), his theatre was shut down, and eventually he was arrested.
The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov: "The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain.
"When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever." You know that your sleep has been politicised when that is what wakes you. The interrogator, he added, urinated in his mouth.
Meyerhold wrote this letter on January 13 1940 having confessed to whatever it was they wanted him to confess to (spying for the British and the Japanese, among other charges). Stalin needed confessions; he followed the progress of certain interrogations (lasting months or even years), and couldn't sleep until confessions were secured. So his sleep, of course, was also politicised.
A few days after Meyerhold's arrest his young wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their apartment. She had 17 knife wounds. The neighbours had heard her screams; they thought she was rehearsing. Meyerhold was shot on February 2 1940.
The defector historian Tibor Szamuely, my father's friend, had been given eight years in the gulag for privately referring to Georgi Malenkov, prime minister of the USSR, 1953-55, as a "fat pig". This is my father's account from his Memoirs:
"The big daily event in a Soviet gaol is the delivery of the copy of Pravda, and it was Tibor's right and duty, as the professor, to read the contents out to the cell [which contained several dozen inmates]... It appeared that Stalin had protested in person to the UN or one of its offshoots about the inhuman conditions under which some Greek communist prisoners were being held at the end of the civil war there - inadequate exercise, meagre rations, food parcels only once a week, gross overcrowding on a scale comparable with (say) tsarism, insufficient visiting, and suchlike enormities.
After a moment's stunned silence, every prisoner broke into hysterical laughter, the tears running down their faces, embracing, rolling over and over on the floor, old feuds forgotten, for minutes. Indeed, the mood of euphoria lasted not for minutes but, in short bursts, for days. A careless spray of urine over one of the sleepers nearest the bucket would bring not the usual howl of rage, or worse, but a cry from the offender of, "Now, now, comrade! Remember the sufferings of our Greek fellow fighters for peace against the western oppressor!' and an answering guffaw."
Russia, 1917-53: what is its genre? It is not a tragedy, like Lear, not an anti-comedy, like Troilus and Cressida, nor yet a problem comedy, like Measure for Measure. It is a black farce, like Titus Andronicus. And the black farce is very Russian, from Dead Souls to Laughter in the Dark... It seems that humour cannot be evicted from the gap between words and deeds. In the USSR, that gap covered 11 time zones. The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie.
I too, now, am obliged to confess - not to a lie but to a sin, and a chronic one.
The Butyrki was the best prison in Moscow. (A curious statement, some may well feel; but this is a confession I find I am having to back my way into.) Or, to put it another way, there were worse prisons in Moscow than the Butyrki (sometimes transliterated as Butyrka). The Butyrki was the largest of the three main prisons for "politicals" only, and less feared than the other two, the Lubyanka and (especially) the Lefortovo. More feared than the Lefortovo was Sukhanovka, called "the dacha" (it was coincidentally close to Lenin's Gorky estate). Solzhenitsyn knew of only one coherent survivor of Sukhanovka, a place, it seems, of strenuously enforced silence and continual torture.
The Butyrki, built by the tsars to contain the Pugachev rebels, was cleaner and better run than the Taganka and other prisons where politicals cohabited with ordinary crooks and urkas. Solzhenitsyn, again, had some stimulating times in the Butyrki. The standard of prisoner was astonishingly high, with academicians and scientists (and novelists) milling about the cells. It was like the sharashka (a laboratory behind barbed wire in the gulag) described in The First Circle: any physicist would have been proud to work there.
Fate had it that one evening I was alone in the house with my six- month-old daughter. (Another curious statement, perhaps, at this juncture, but I am slowly getting to the point.) Without preamble she embarked on a weeping fit that began at the outer limit of primordial despair, and then steadily escalated. Far from soothing her, my kisses and murmurings might as well have been molten pincers, skilfully applied. After an hour I was relieved by the nanny I had summoned from her home. The weeping ceased at once. I staggered into the garden and started weeping myself. Her cries had reminded me of the clinically explicable anguish of my younger boy, who, at the age of one, was an undiagnosed asthmatic. She had reminded me of the perfect equipoise of nausea and grief, as the parent contemplates inexpressible distress. "The sounds she was making," I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked and called Caterina."
If I had been better informed, at that point, I would have said Sukhanovka instead of Butyrki, and that would have been the end of it. For Butyrki, I am afraid, is now established as one of my daughter's chief nicknames, along with its diminutives, Butyrklet, the Butyrkster, the Butyrkstress, and so on. The cognomen is widely current in the family; Butyrki's four-year-old sister uses it with an excellent and out-of- nowhere Russian accent (these days, even Butyrki can say "Butyrki"); and what a sigh went up in our household, one morning, when I drew attention to Eugenia Ginzburg's chapter heading, "Butyrki Nights".
It isn't right, is it? My youngest daughter has passed her second birthday, and her cries are not particularly horrifying any more, and I still call her Butyrki. Because the name is now all braided through with feeling for her. When I use it, I imagine a wall-eyed skinhead in a German high-rise (and I'm sure such a person exists) with a daughter called Treblinka. Treblinka was one of the five ad hoc death camps with no other function (unlike Auschwitz). I am not as bad as the wall-eyed skinhead. But the Butyrki was a place of inexpressible distress. In 1937 it held 30,000 prisoners crushed together. And it isn't right. Because my daughter's name is Clio: muse of history.
This is the voice of Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina (b 1879), the founder of the Leningrad Puppet Theatre and the wife of the composer Yury Shaporin:
"[October 22 1937] On the morning of the 22nd I woke up about three and couldn't get back asleep until after five... Suddenly I heard a burst of gunfire. And then another, 10 minutes later. The shooting continued in bursts... until just after five... That is what they call an election campaign. And our consciousness is so deadened that sensations just slide across its hard, glossy surface, leaving no impression. To spend all night hearing living people, undoubtedly innocent people, being shot to death and not lose your mind. And afterwards, just to fall asleep, to go on sleeping as though nothing had happened. How terrible...
"[March 11 1938] People in Moscow are in such a panic, it's made me sick, literally... Irina's aunt, a lawyer, said that every night two or three defence lawyers from her office are arrested. Morloki was arrested on December 21, and on January 15 Leva, our simple-minded theatre fan and prop man, was exiled to Chita. At that rate they might as well arrest the table or sofa...
"[February 19 1939] Rybakov died - in prison. Mandelstam died in exile. People everywhere are ill or dying. I have the impression that the whole country is so completely exhausted that it can't fight off disease, it's a fatal condition. It's better to die than to live in continual terror, in abject poverty, starving."
The "election" referred to on October 22 1937 ("Irina came home from school and said, 'They told us there are mass arrests going on right now. We need to rid ourselves of undesirable elements before the election!' ") was a charade designed to celebrate the new Stalin Constitution. On December 12 Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina went along to cast her vote:
"Quelle blague! I went into the booth, where supposedly I was going to read the ballot and choose my candidate for the supreme soviet - "choose" means you have a choice. There was just one name, already marked. I burst out laughing uncontrollably, right there in the booth, just like a child. It took me a long time to compose myself. I leave the booth, and here comes Yury, stony-faced. I lifted my collar and ducked down into it so that only my eyes were visible; it was just hilarious.
Outside I ran into Petrov-Vodkin and Dimitriev. VV was going on and on about some irrelevant topic and laughing wildly. Shame on them for putting grown people in such a ridiculous, stupid position. Who do we think we're fooling? We were all in stitches."
There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the history of the universe. To have its subjects simultaneously quaking with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger - and with laughter.
· An extract from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis (Cape, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.99 plus p&p call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,785144,00.html