The Phantom of Beria

"Politics cannot be charitable", the 85-year-old man said with an energy belying his years, and thumped on the table, knocking over a glass with pencils in. The glass slowly rolled toward me. "Charity contradicts economics. Whoever acts generously in economics is a criminal and deserves to be shot".


The stormy political kaleidoscope of recent years has tossed and turned us so much that sometimes it seems as if the Stalinist era is as far from us as the Victorian era is from the realties of contemporary England. How easy it would be if the system of totalitarianism, created by the Communist leaders, really had become history! But the shadow of the past will haunt us.


And the most dreadful inner legacy of the Communist regime is, to use Kantian terminology, the categorical imperative that decades of powerful propaganda has instilled within the psyche of the Soviet citizen. It consists of the preference of the collective over the individual, who is prescribed to sacrifice his personal prosperity for the sake of a certain abstract social good. From this standpoint comes the constant goal of absolute equality in all matters, and also the rejection of outside success, the desire not to build but to destroy. This psychology nowadays has become an economic factor that slows the transformation to the market and hinders the development of the democratic society.


The mentality of the Soviet person is a surprising symbiosis of aggression and submission. Surprising, however, only on first glance, because aggression is bora of hate directed at a successful neighbor, while submission comes from personal volition that has been paralyzed by the totalitarian system. It has long been known that no one is quite as aggressive as the slave.


Sitting before me is a person who is the living embodiment of the Stalinist era. It is hard to believe that such a meeting would be possible in our time. Colonel Boris Vainshtein of the state security service has for many years worked in the central apparatus of the NKVD under leaders, who were in turn all shot - Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria. Vainshtein was a favorite of the latter in as much as he helped collect decisive proof against Beria's predecessor.


Boris Vainshtein led the economic planning department of the NKVD. Dozens of millions of prisoners slaved away within the NKVD system, for all intents and purposes slaves who erected new towns and factories, built railroads and canals and mined ore, coal and oil. Now it is no longer a secret that even Beria personally supervised the construction of atomic and rocket weapons in the U. S. S. R. as well as the entire defense industry of the country. The unpaid labor of the slaves, whose lives were not worth half a kopek, moved the U. S. S. R. out into the realm of industrially developed countries. The economic leadership of the gigantic gulag system, about which Solzhenitsyn wrote, came under the charge of Boris Vainshtein. It strikes me that such people preserve a certain sort of awesome secret without knowledge of which we are powerless to reject the past.


"Forced labor helped the U. S. S. R. win the war", exclaims Vainshtein. "And what do you know about the camps? There were camps where you could live better than if you were free. In the Ukhtinsky camp for example there was even an operetta".


I was about to object: What kind of freedom is that where life is worse than in prison? But I decided that it was senseless to enter into an argument.


The conclusions of Boris Vainshtein are founded not so much on rationale as on emotion and find support among many who even today tend toward the dogma of communist morality. His opinions express the philosophy of a whole generation, a generation that by no means intends to leave the political stage.


"Beria was the first to make use of economic stimuli. If the prisoner fulfilled the norms, then the day's work counted as two day's imprisonment", my interlocutor says in a firm voice and I go all cold inside, a sort of biological memory.


"And why do we need goodness? Peter the Great was no respecter of morality - St. Petersburg was built on bones. and Stalin won the war, whatever the cruel cost. The experience of my whole life tells me that today, in order to get out of the crisis, it is essential to raise a cruel system in Russia, to introduce forced labor".


Boris Vainshtein by no means belongs to the number of people who live with their recollections. A doctor of economics, he is a consultant on many present-day projects of Russia with the West in the industrial-energy complex and enjoys a reputation as an informed specialist.


But however many consultations he may have given, I felt that in the depths his soul the professor was yearning for a strong administration, for a powerful hand for a system based half around the barracks which in Beria's time secured for the U. S. S. R. the desired results. He considers the cruelty of the price a historical necessity. and it cannot be doubted that he has more than a few like-minded thinkers.


Boris Vainshtein is certain that Beria was killed on arrest and that a double appeared at his trial. This supposition is hard to check today. But another may be more realistic. The difficulties of the transition period may provoke the appearance of a double of Beria - his phantom, his successor. The reanimation of images of Communist leaders, supposedly forever rejected by history, is possible only in a society where the dominant factors are aggression and the rejection of freedom of opinion, where equal rights in poverty seems preferable to inequality in wealth. and where society lives by these rules the shadow of the past will haunt us.


Sergei Leskov writes on scientific and economic topics for Izvestia.