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your way, will I?” Then he sat on the couch and froze in the position of a passenger waiting for a train that he doesn’t expect to arrive very soon. And with an expression suggesting that what was going on here had nothing to do with him.
    â€œWell then, Comrade Revkina,” Porosyaninov continued. “It’s not a matter of Shubkin, but of the Party line. Our Party’s new policy is directed toward overcoming Stalin’s personality cult. You know as well as I do that he committed many serious political errors. He ruled the country individually, devastated the peasantry, decapitated the army, led the persecutions of the intelligentsia, effectively annihilated the cream of our Party and encouraged his own glorification. And now the Party is courageously telling the people the entire truth, and what do you do? Are you,” Porosyaninov went on, looking Aglaya honestly in the eye, “opposed to the truth?”
    â€œWho are you saying all this to?” Aglaya asked in amazement, recalling that a minute earlier Porosyaninov had been saying something entirely different.
    â€œI’m saying it to you,” said Porosyaninov, casting a quick glance at Nechaev. “I’m telling you that we have the principle of democratic centralism, according to which if the Party has taken a decision, then the rank and file communists carry it out. That’s all.”
    At this point Nechaev stood up and left the room as quietly as he had entered. Aglaya followed him out with her eyes and then turned to look at Porosyaninov. Obviously highly agitated, he took a cracker from the dish and snapped it apart, took another one and snapped it, took a third and looked at Aglaya.
    â€œWell then, Aglaya Stepanovna?”
    â€œWell what?” she asked.
    â€œAre you going to recant?”
    â€œMe?” she asked, amazed.
    â€œTake a sheet of paper and write: ‘I, Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, being slightly crazy, have failed to understand the new policy of the Party and failed to appreciate the wisdom of Party decisions, of which I do thoroughly repent and solemnly declare that I will never do it again.’”
    â€œYou can’t be serious!”
    â€œComrade Revkina!” said Pyotr Klimovich, getting up. “Here in these offices, as you yourself know, we are always serious. I advise you seriously to think about it.”
    â€œYou chameleon!” said Aglaya, and left the room without even noticing his outstretched hand.
    Shortly after that Aglaya received a severe reprimand for opposing Party decisions, and her status was reduced to that of an ordinary class teacher, like Shubkin. Which she took as a terrible insult.

14
    Aglaya complained about her misadventures to her son, Marat, who was studying in Moscow at the Institute of International Relations. From her letter he learned that his mother was less distressed by her own personal misfortunes than by the general direction in which events were moving. “You know,” she wrote, “that neither I nor your father who perished so heroically ever spared ourselves, and I am not sparing myself now, but it makes me ashamed, so ashamed that I could cry to look at people who pour scorn on what they were glorifying yesterday. When Stalin was alive, I can’t remember anyone ever saying there was anything about Stalin they didn’t like. Everyone said the same thing: A genius, a great commander. Our father and teacher. The luminary of all the sciences. Did they really not believe what they were saying? Were they all really lying? I don’t understand—when were these people being sincere, now or then? And how can they be so indifferent when they see that faith in the most sacred thing of all, in the truth of our cause, is being undermined among young people your age!”
    Not once in her long letter did she ask her son how he was getting on, where he was living and in what conditions, whether he was well, what he ate