Book Reviews : Reform Comes Too Late for Anatoly Marchenko

To Live Like Everyone by Anatoly Marchenko, translated by Paul Goldberg (Henry Holt: $19.95, 220 pages)

Perestroika came too late for Anatoly Marchenko.

On Dec. 8, 1986, after nearly 30 years in and out of the Gulag, Marchenko died in Christopol Prison, where he was serving a 15-year term for the crime of writing a book. Now we can read the book that cost Marchenko his life--”To Live Like Everyone” is the anguished cry of a man condemned by his own nature to tell the truth, and condemned by fate to spend his life in a place where the truth is a criminal offense.

Life on the Run

“To Live Like Everyone” is Marchenko’s account of life on the run for a man whose restless conscience and dark vision make him an outcast and a wanderer. “To this day, I am convinced that suffering only begins after release from the camps,” he writes. “Spending three days in the same place without an internal residency permit is a violation of passport rules. Three such violations, and it’s back on trial and back to the camps. That’s the vicious circle: the law says, get a residency permit, but the militia refuses to issue it, knowingly and deliberately making you a criminal.”

Born in 1938, Marchenko was a true proletarian, a child of the working poor that still exist in the the worker’s state. His father was one of the mazutniki (“greasers”) who worked on the railroads: “Black industrial fuel literally dripped off their clothing,” Marchenko recalls. “They stewed in it.” His childhood home was one room in a barracks somewhere along the Trans-Siberian railroad--and Marchenko, it seems, stewed in it.

Marchenko introduces us to the contemporary underclass of the Soviet Union, the dead souls who are released from prison only to find themselves a different kind of servitude on the outside. The scenes of the bleak Soviet provincial towns where Marchenko grew up, and where he sought to make a life, are faintly Dickensian, but wholly devoid of charm: a hellish brick factory where former camp inmates spend half their days hauling bricks and the rest of the time atop the brick ovens, which is their only home; a bread-baking plant where each man must hump sacks of flour from grain elevator to bakery, 10 tons per man during each shift.

He depicts life in the remote villages and outposts of Siberia as an unrelenting horror story. A 3-year-old girl disappears in the forest, and the townsfolk blame her death on “the religious fanatics.” A man falls down drunk in the snow and stays there until his arms are frostbitten; now he’s a double-amputee who frightens children with is “black stumps.” A plane crashes near a surveyor’s outpost; the residents ignore the cries of an infant who survived the crash, and loot the corpses: “The infant soon froze to death,” reports Marchenko. “The crying stopped.”

Kindred Spirits

When, at last, Marchenko finds his way to Moscow, he discovers kindred spirits in the intelligentsia, a class that he had been taught to despise. “In all, we equated the people of intellectual professions with authority, the ‘bosses.’ And what’s there to love the bosses for? They are the haves who want to pay the have-nots as little as they can and charge them as much as they can,” he writes of his peasant upbringing.

But it is the intelligentsia of Moscow that gives this angry man a weapon of enormous and enduring power--the typewriter and carbon-paper publishing apparatus of samizdat , the underground self-publishing movement of the Soviet Union. Soon Marchenko is in trouble with the KGB again, but now he has comrades, a cause, and--crucially--a byline that reaches out of the Gulag and all the way to the West.

Marchenko does not come across as an especially heroic or likable man; he possesses the kind of insistent and unforgiving conscience that gets on the nerves of the complacent and the comfortable, whether in enslaved countries or free ones. But we begin to see that a man like Marchenko is especially maddening to those who remember, with a sigh of regret, the days when the great and small feared the knock on the door at midnight.

“Live like everyone!” a KGB agent rails at Marchenko. “Stop throwing mud at the good name of the Motherland! . . . All of you scream, ‘This is no better than Stalin!’ Let me ask you this. What do you think would be left of you if we were no better than Stalin?”

Three Years After Death

There’s an irony, of course, to the fact that Marchenko died before the advent of Gorbachev and glasnost . Today, barely three years after Marchenko’s death in prison, a fellow dissident sits in the Soviet parliament and is free to write the preface to the American edition of “To Live Like Everyone.” Marchenko, observes Andrei Sahkarov, is one of those “people of immaculate honesty who are prepared to make any sacrifice in the name of moral principles.”

Yet I suspect that Marchenko would be wary of the remarkable changes in the practices of Soviet power. Mindful of what he darkly refers to as “the peculiarities of the path of our historical development and our ‘national traditions,’ ” Marchenko warns: “Lawful actions of today could be the criminal offenses of tomorrow. . . . In this country no one--and nothing--is forgotten.”