Free Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich Page A

himself to join the Party. He absorbed the academic subjects with some difficulty, but he made a real effort, realizing that for his future career it was not achievement but effort that really mattered—the bosses had to see you were making an effort, listening with your mouth wide open and taking notes. And his notes could have been exhibited in a museum. Neat, tidy exercise books covered with pages from
Pravda;
upright, clear handwriting; important ideas underlined in red pencil to prove that after writing the study notes he had also read them. Marat had also learned that active involvement in social life was encouraged more than zeal in the acquisition of knowledge. He knew you had to be able to get along with people and be guided by sober calculation, not the heated impulses of passion, remembering that in real life it was not the written laws that mattered but the unwritten rules of behavior.
    He had not formulated this thought for himself; it had come from the deputy minister of foreign trade, Salkov, the father of Zoya, the girl he was courting. And in his courtship of Zoya he was guided in the first instance by the rules. He was making a career, and he had observed that the age of the fanatics was finished. It was not just anti-Soviet types or malcontents who did not like them, but Party people as well. Party people no longer wanted to work in the old way, sitting up all night long waiting in case the Father of the Peoples might suddenly require some piece of information or something else; they were tired of living in constant fear and remembering that Party workers were still being shot. Now was a less dangerous but more complicated time to make a career; you had to be flexible and not be too hasty in adopting one position or another before it had taken clear shape.
    Marat also realized that the time of excessively modest dressing— Russian collarless shirts, military tunics, semimilitary field jackets, coarse-fabric greatcoats and tall boots—was over too. He dressed as well and as neatly as he could, had his hair cut before it got long by an expensive hairdresser, and even used a little perfume. He avoided speaking to Zoya in the customary overfamiliar manner of the youths in her circle and actually demonstrated a certain old-fashioned gallantry. Which eventually won her heart.

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    What can we say of the others, if even Aglaya’s own son did not understand? She took offense and began writing to him less often and less warmly.
    Her relations with her fellow staff members in the children’s home were strained or openly hostile. Nobody smiled as they used to do or went rushing to carry out her requests, and even the secretary, Rita, greeted her through clenched teeth. Meanwhile, Shubkin had been elevated even higher. He was appointed teacher of literature for the senior classes, and he now entered the children’s home with a triumphant air that suited his position perfectly.
    The new director of the children’s home, Vasilii Ivanovich Chikurin, had no interest in anything except drink, and he allowed Shubkin very extensive leeway, of which Shubkin took full advantage. He not only taught literature in the senior classes; he set up a literary club called the Brigantine, ran the Meyerhold Drama Club and was still editor of the wall newspaper “Happy Childhood.”
    Aglaya had never been a snitch and she didn’t like snitches, but in accordance with her Party duty she pointed out to the new director on numerous occasions that Shubkin was exploiting his position to instill “ideas that aren’t ours” in the heads of the pupils. During literature classes and literary club activities he made ironic remarks about the creative method of socialist realism, promoted writers of dubious reputation from nonrealist tendencies and praised writers condemned by the Party such as Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and Pasternak. He expressed a high opinion of Vladimir Dudintsev’s flawed