Patriotism and Fanaticism Theme Analysis

Sofia Petrovna would open the door and the assistant manager would drag Erna Semyonovna’s typewriter out of the typing pool into the restricted special department. Erna Semyonovna would follow her typewriter with a triumphant expression: as they’d explained to Sofia Petrovna, she had a “security clearance” and the party secretary summoned her to the special department to type up secret party documents.

Sofia Petrovna didn’t really understand what it was all about, she was bored and wanted to leave, but she was afraid it wasn’t the thing to do and glared at one of the typists who was making her way to the door.

The Mestkom gave her the job of collecting the union dues. Sofia Petrovna thought very little about why the trade union actually existed, but she liked drawing lines on sheets of paper with a ruler and marking in the various columns who had paid their dues for the current month and who had not; she liked pasting in the stamps and presenting impeccable accounts to the auditing commission. She liked being able to walk into the director’s imposing office whenever she chose and remind him jokingly that he was four months in arrears, and have him jokingly present his apologies to his patient comrades on the Mestkom and pull out his wallet and pay up. Even the sullen party secretary could safely be reminded that he owed his dues.

Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the party and the Komsomol.

Two years before, after the murder of Kirov (Oh! What grim times those were! Patrols walked the streets…and when Comrade Stalin was about to arrive, the station square was cordoned off by troops…and there were troops lining all the streets as Stalin walked behind the coffin)—after Kirov’s murder there had also been many arrests, but at that time they first took all kinds of oppositionists, then old regime people, all kinds of “vons” and barons. But now it was doctors.

After the murder of Kirov they had sent away, as a member of the nobility, Madame Nezhentseva, an old friend of Sofia Petrovna’s—they had attended school together. Sofia Petrovna had been astonished: what connection could Madame Nezhentseva possibly have to the murder? She taught French in a school and lived just like everybody else. But Kolya had explained that it was necessary to rid Leningrad of unreliable elements. “And who exactly is this Madame Nezhentseva of yours anyway? You remember yourself, Mama, that she didn’t recognize Mayakovsky as a poet and always said that things were cheaper in the old days. She’s not a real Soviet person…”

“Arrested last night was the ex-supervisor of our print shop, now unmasked as an enemy of the people—Gerasimov. He turned out to be the nephew of the Moscow Gerasimov, who was unmasked a month ago. With the connivance of our party organization, which is suffering, to use Comrade Stalin’s apt expression, from the idiotic disease of complacency, Gerasimov continued to, so to speak, ‘operate’ in our print shop even after his own uncle, the Moscow Gerasimov, had been unmasked.”

“And really, why are you so upset? Since [your husband] isn’t guilty—then everything will be all right. Nothing can happen to an honest man in our country. It’s just a misunderstanding. Come on, don’t be discouraged…Stop by and have a cup of tea sometime!”

“They say our director has been abroad,” Natasha recalled. “Also on a mission. Remember Marya Ivanovna, the elevator woman, told us that he’d brought his wife a light-blue knitted suit from Berlin?”

The night before, in the line, one woman had said to another—Sofia Petrovna had heard her: “No point waiting for him to return! Those who wind up here never return.” Sofia Petrovna had wanted to interrupt, but decided not to get involved. In our country innocent people aren’t held. Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya. They’ll clear the matter up and let him go.

No, Sofia Petrovna had been quite right to keep aloof from her neighbors in the lines. She was sorry for them, of course, as human beings, sorry especially for the children; but still an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers.

“And who is this Frolenko? She’s the daughter of a colonel who under the old regime was the owner of a so-called estate. What, it is asked, was citizeness Frolenko doing in our publishing house, the daughter of an alien element, appointed to her job by the bandit Zakharov? Another document will tell us about that. Under the wing of Zakharov, citizeness Frolenko learned to blacken our beloved Red Army of workers and peasants, to strike counterrevolutionary blows: she calls the Red Army, the Rat Army…”

“So she thinks he’s some kind of innocent lamb,” the nurse began again. “Excuse me, please, but people don’t get locked up for nothing in our country. Enough of this. They haven’t locked me up, have they? And why not? Because I’m an honest woman, a real Soviet citizen.”