Excerpt from the Book 'Fiery Paths - 2'
«For if those days had not been shortened…»
…Four months had passed since my release. Late in the pre-Christmas evening I was walking the streets of my neighborhood. Suddenly a man emerged from the corner of a side lane; his face was hidden—the collar of a fur jacket was turned up, shielding his face from the side. With a decisive, rapid step he drew level with me. “Good, you’re alone. I’m risking myself like never before.” In surprise I stopped. “Captain Klimov?”
“I’m already a Major. Don’t stop—follow me at visual distance,” he ordered. But I had already slowed my pace at such an unexpected encounter.
“I’m risking myself like never before, and do I even need this? Go down to the stream—you’ll see a red Zhiguli—walk past it, turn right through the passage and head toward the old post office—I’ll pick you up.” A biting wind was blowing, a blizzard whirling, the street desolate from the wind that sang its dreary song through the picket fences, the sagging wires, the chimney flues—accompanied by the gusts of light, fast-vanishing wisps of smoke. Empty streets. No one would leave home in such weather without a pressing need.
What had driven Klimov out? My heart was uneasy, troubled. It was no accident he came—oh, no accident! Yes, I even began to feel the wind humming in time with my thoughts. There was the stream; Klimov’s back vanished into the milky blizzard, but he was no longer my guide: I could already see the red car. I walked past the passage and slowed my pace. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the back seat of the car.
Klimov began speaking rapidly and nervously:
“Right, we have little time. I’ll tell you straight—things are bad for you. After New Year’s they’re going to take you.”
“I don’t get it—for what? I haven’t done anything special yet, have I?”
“If you had done something special, they wouldn’t draw it out—they’d have taken you already. As it is, they’ve scheduled it for after New Year’s. In short, a decree came from Andropov on preventive detention: whoever stirs things up—to the bunks, and whoever twitches even a little after the camp—also to the bunks. And you’re very bold: no sooner freed than you went to Moscow to visit your pals and comrades. Did you visit Kuvalkin? I know you did! Well, he gave you up. As they joke in our circles, now there are ‘sitters’ and ‘ex-sitters’, but we have no dissidents. They say Andropov himself invented that joke. Someone who’s done time and hasn’t stopped is a sitter again. You perceive your surroundings as you did before your imprisonment, but the time—it’s not the same; the time has changed. ‘Who doesn’t squeal, sits.’ Everything is being set up by those rules now, and on top of that you called the States six times. That’s why I came—to warn you. You need to disappear for a while, because the time for baseness to be revealed has come. If only you knew how many loyal ‘friends’—informers—you have around you. But I’m not talking about that now; it’s too late to outplay ‘the Office’ now, and you haven’t been granted time for that.
“So, disappear without delay. In a day or two they’ll set up intensive operational surveillance on your house, and then you’re done for. But if you weather the time, you’ll see—something might change. It can’t go on like this much longer, believe me. If they don’t wring your neck, then something will change. Disappear and wait for better times, and trust no one. Otherwise I’m finished, and for contact with me they’ll tack on an even bigger, harsher sentence for you.”
He said this quickly, in one breath. I spoke up, as if thinking aloud: “Of course it might all be true. But who am I to you that you would risk so much for me? You didn’t ‘leak’ me during the investigation—that’s the first thing. And the second: I’ll say it straight—I sympathize with your cause. Maybe it will be credited to me, as you believers say, if not in this age then in the age to come. Wait for better times and trust no one. In our Fifth Directorate they’ve replaced almost everyone; even Rudnitsky was transferred to Sakhalin. They considered that he was the one who botched the work. Now Lieutenant Colonel Perepechkin is in his place—an utter scoundrel. He loves to put the final touch on a recruitment himself; he especially enjoys cornering the ‘object’—morally; he’ll trample him, crush him as a person, make him beg for help, and only after that offers cooperation with ‘the Office,’ as if doing him a favor. What a pervert! What a talent!”
“Why are you calling the KGB ‘the Office’?”
“That’s a new instruction. Call our institution ‘the Office,’ and each other not by rank but ‘master.’ Perepechkin, for instance, is ‘foreman’; the head of the KGB is ‘engineer.’ The regional directorate is ‘the Firm.’ And none of this… KGB.” Klimov was speaking to me with his hands on the steering wheel, occasionally drumming his fingers as if on keys, staring unblinkingly straight ahead through the windshield. His nervous tension was evidently extreme.
“Alexei, how much time do I have?”
“I already said—after New Year’s they’ll take you, and operational surveillance may be set up as much as a week earlier, but no less than three days. That’s when your neighbors—those who live to your right and left—will start dropping in, now for salt, now for matches, and you’ll notice tails behind you. You’ll have no more than a week of freedom. But when that will happen I don’t know; the ‘foreman’ will decide personally. He doesn’t share his plans with anyone and coordinates everything only with the ‘engineer.’ And we don’t trust the cops at all.”
“But what about the prosecutor’s sanction—how will he take me?”
“Are you kidding? What prosecutor? The prosecutor himself comes running to ‘the Office’ and signs whatever they tell him. One more thing: I’m being transferred to the Regional Directorate.”
“Ah… that is, to ‘the Firm’,” I corrected Klimov.
For the first time Klimov looked at me and laughed. At that moment he stopped drumming his fingers on the wheel and, relaxing, leaned back into the seat, putting his hands behind his head.
“Well, that’s it—the audience is over. Now decide your own fate. Your choice isn’t great. However, if you want, let’s meet the day after tomorrow in the woods, at the very spot where you persuaded me to expose our agent network among your people. I think that was five years ago. I know, I know—you have no time for that now, but what I want to tell you… knowing it, oh, how it will not hurt you in the future.”
“All right! Let’s meet at the same time as five years ago.”
-
I got out of the car without a word, and without feeling the biting snowy wind, I trudged home. Thank you, Major — I silently thanked Klimov — good luck to you, you risky guy. If our contacts are discovered, what will happen to you? They’ll give me a sentence anyway, but you could get a bullet in the back of the head. We’re the same age, and we were probably born under the same star, so here we are, walking on a razor’s edge.
-
That night I hardly slept, mulling over my situation. I don’t want to just meekly wait to be arrested. I’ve done so little. I haven’t even recovered from the first sentence. And what about the family, the children? Once again the family will be orphaned; the children have just gotten used to me. Once again they’ll be branded — children of a criminal, children of an enemy of the people. I get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and from prison habit I pace — three steps forward, pivot, and then the same habitual three steps. I pace for a long time, until I’m tired, never stopping my thoughts about my family. Then I quietly go into the children’s bedroom. How I long to stroke and caress them all. Soon we’ll be apart again — either I’ll be arrested or I’ll have to hide, and only God knows for how long. I won’t tell you anything until after Christmas; we’ll be happy these days, and then — may God give us courage. But what should I do? Where should I disappear to? Go to Zina’s parents? No, the KGB will find me there quickly. We have many friends. Maybe I could go to one of them and wait out this time? But where, and how do I leave unnoticed? Mother and Zina were probably right. When I was released, they proposed selling the house immediately and moving closer to Moscow. I thought about it myself, but I couldn’t just abandon everything like that, and we decided to move in the spring. But it seems I’m not destined to see spring here. Lord, what am I to do? I’m ready to accept a new blow from fate. But what about the family? How quickly time flies. It seems like just yesterday I was released, and now the new year is almost here, the new year 1983. What will it bring me? I didn’t notice when dawn came.
“Foreman” Perepechkin.
In the morning I invited the family to pray, but as soon as I picked up the Bible there was a knock at the door. Zina shrugged in bewilderment and opened it. In the doorway appeared an extravagantly dressed stranger of about thirty. Coming into the house, he addressed me like an old acquaintance: “Oh… Boris, good morning! I’ve brought you a little note from Father Frost. And good morning to all,” he extended his hand to Zina, and to my surprise it held a small bouquet of flowers. Then he took out a bag of candy and started handing it out to the children. The children, surprised and timid, took the candy from the stranger.
- “Listen, ‘Snow Maiden,’ what is this circus? Who are you and what do you want?” The children, hearing the word “Snow Maiden,” burst out laughing and relaxed, while the stranger handed me the standard gray KGB summons. He asked me to sign for its delivery, bowed, and left. The children understood nothing and ran into the other room to count the candy, while I read the text aloud. The summons stated that today, December nineteenth, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I was to report to the KGB, and that if I failed to appear, I would be brought in by force.
So it’s begun, and Klimov had said they’d take me after the new year.
Zina looked at me questioningly — waiting for an explanation. That’s when I came to my senses; the house could be bugged.
- “Let’s go for a walk with the children.”
Why not? — I agreed.
The children dressed quickly. Outside it was quiet and sunny; the fresh snow and bright sun dazzled the eyes. Everything around was fabulously beautiful. Snow lay on the roofs of the houses, making them look as if they were wearing fluffy white hats. The trees were also covered in snow, and if you just touched a branch, the snow would fall and sparkle. The street was filled with children’s ringing voices. They were sledding, skiing, and making snowmen. Not far from our house ran a small stream. In winter it froze, and the children skated there. I watched my children with a melancholy ache, while they, like all children, laughed and were cheerful and happy.
Zina and I were silent; I was thinking over my situation and trying to find a way out.
- “Is that why you didn’t sleep last night?” Zina asked.
“Yesterday Klimov met me and warned that after the new year I’m supposed to be arrested, and that I’d better go into hiding for a while. But something changed, or Klimov doesn’t know everything, or they spotted us yesterday.”
“Yes, but then they wouldn’t have brought a summons; they would have just taken me without this masquerade. No, something else is going on. Anyway, I’ll go with you at three o’clock.”
A snowball flew past us. I looked back: Sasha Denega was preparing to launch another one at us. He was walking with his wife, and as it turned out, they were coming to visit us.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the taiga?” I asked, surprised. “I was,” he said, “I came back last night. It’s hard and lonely alone in the taiga,” he complained. “Now I’ll rest a week and then go back until spring, if Lyubasha lets me. And you — the cops aren’t bothering you anymore?”
-
“Not bothering me?! Today I’ve been called to the KGB.”
-
“Well… I don’t envy you. Maybe you could come with me? You’d stop being an eyesore to them, and maybe everything will quiet down.”
-
“I’ll go today as the summons says. If I get through it, then I’ll think about it.” Three o’clock inexorably approached. How I wished I could stop the passage of time. Sometimes you don’t know how to waste or rush time while waiting for a happy event, but now it seemed the clock hands were dragging me relentlessly, giving me no chance to make the right choice, no chance for alternatives. And do I have a chance? I catch myself thinking: Why me? My family has no chance, because I’m the one deciding — deciding for myself, while the family has no chance to decide at all. I decide for myself, and I decide for the family. So what? The family becomes a hostage! — I involuntarily say this phrase aloud. And I myself am frightened by what I said; I come back to reality.
Zina is carefreely telling something to the Denegas, and they are no longer paying attention to me, listening to her with interest. How good that they’re not concerned with me — I don’t want extra questions. And Zina is great — she knows how to keep them engaged.
The children are clearly overindulging in the soft, fluffy snow and, following the example of other kids, are sliding not on sleds anymore but on their bellies, just rolling around and wallowing in the snow. And they are obviously freezing. I called the oldest, Oleg, and asked them all to be home in half an hour.
- “Well, Sasha, we have to go. Sorry to cut things short.” We said goodbye to the Denegas.
Related articles
- Fiery Paths of Boris Perchatkin “Perchatkin’s biography played a major role in drawing the attention of the American people and government to the situation of Protestants,…
- Boris Perchatkin’s Book Fiery Paths Boris Perchatkin’s book Fiery Paths…
- Konstantin Preobrazhensky: Chapter 1 Pastors-Chekists from the Book The KGB Comes with Us It is difficult for an ordinary Christian to believe that a pastor he knows well may turn out to be a disguised…
- “IN HEROD’S ABYSS” Excerpt on Attitude Toward Military Service Despite the fact that Lyova was still so young, many questions made him think deeply…
- Konstantin Preobrazhensky – Author of the New Book KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent The guest of today’s interview on FrontPageMagazine.com is Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a former KGB officer who became one…
- Boris Perchatkin’s Lecture at the Transformation Center from 2007 » Defendant Perchatkin, being one of the leaders of the Pentecostal sectarians in the city of Nakhodka, Primorsky Krai, and since 1980…
- The Devil’s Plan to Destroy the Church Boris Perchatkin’s testimony from Konstantin Preobrazhensky’s book: The KGB Comes with Us The KGB uses its agents…
- Ivan Petrovich Fedotov: Continuation of Life Life Goes On After the trial, I was taken from the Dresden KPD to “Matrosskaya Tishina” prison and placed…
- Boris Perchatkin’s Conference on RussianWest from December 2009 Online conference of U.S. presbyter Boris Georgievich Perchatkin in December 2009 after his first course of chemotherapy…
- Video: Pavel Franchuk’s Fables as a Phenomenon in the Church and Their Consequences We apologize that in the past, there was, as it were, added to my video explanation about Pavel Franchuk’s “testimonies”…
- Boris Perchatkin’s Reply to Slavik Radchuk Slavik Radchuk, December 18, 2010: “Dear Mr. Perchatkin. Your style of communication and manner of presenting…
- Ivan Petrovich Fedotov: Subsequent Convictions The Second Conviction But every victory must be paid for. And a week later, on August 11, I…