PREFACE

MEMOIRS ARE COMMONLY WRITTEN at the end of active life as the author records for the benefit of posterity what appears in retrospect to have been the most significant and colorful of his experiences. Occasionally the story is told at an earlier stage, especially if the author has an important message to convey.

My reminiscences seem to be somewhat different. When I began putting them on paper twenty-five years ago, my major concern was to record what I had witnessed while the memory of detail was still fresh. I did not feel that my story was exceptional in itself, for there was little that had set me apart from hundreds and thousands of people I had encountered during the years I wanted to describe. I knew there was little heroic in what I did; my own role in the events was important only infrequently; more often than not I was closer to the bottom of the pile than the top. I would have probably eliminated the first person pronoun altogether except that this would have converted my story into a work of fiction.

As to the message, initially I didn’t think about it. Although I wanted the reader to know how bad the conditions were in Stalin’s concentration camps, my instinct was to understate the case; some of the more depressing episodes I witnessed, I deliberately left out. It was not my intent to shock the reader. In fact, my tale is much more optimistic in tone than Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Russia a decade later.

This optimism notwithstanding, when my Soviet Gold appeared in 1949, two years after my arrival in this country, it was received by many reviewers and readers as a contribution to America’s cold war effort. The follow-up volume, My Retreat From Russia, published in 1950, evoked a more mixed reaction. While already struggling against communism, the United States was still emotionally fighting Nazi Germany and anyone who admitted any kind of collaboration with the Germans was (and in places still is) regarded distinctly less than a hero. I now suspect that it was for this reason that the combined and somewhat abridged volume, initially published in London in 1951 and now reproduced here, contained a much fuller version of Soviet Gold than of My Retreat From Russia.

Such a disparate treatment appeared to me unjustifiable, for there was in fact an organic unity to the whole story, a completed chapter of one’s lifetime. In the present publication, I am leaving the British edition intact, save for the elimination of two paragraphs (inserted in the original text on the advice of the publishers) in which I declare my undying hatred for communism. This does not mean that I have made my peace with communism. It only means that my political feelings have never been terribly intense. I am simply not, and have never been, a crusader.

Today, from a distance of a quarter of a century, I view my past with detachment, feeling neither pride nor remorse for my deeds. For all intents and purposes everything described in my book is a closed page. Unlike so many first generation Americans, I broke away early from immigrants’ life and interests, and no one can undergo integration in the American society (and acquire, as I did, nine children born to him in this country) and hope to preserve the continuity of his total life experience. Much as my outlook remains colored by my origin and the fact that the first half of my life I lived elsewhere, Mother Russia does not provide a sentimental framework for my present. It never did.

In this estrangement, I am not unique in my generation. To a different degree and in different ways, this feeling is common even among the Soviet survivors of the cataclysmic years of Stalin’s terror and the butchery of the war. For better or worse, today’s Russia is not the country of their youth.

Thus my memoirs, having lost the significance of a political document, remain a chronicle, a narrative of a young man, with taste for adventure and acute interest in fellow human beings, uprooted early in life and drawn into the maelstrom of great events of the period. He tried to stay alive, naturally, but also, whenever possible, be on top rather than drift helplessly with the current. His skepticism and sense of humor were of help but his proclivity for challenging the high and the mighty—and mischief for mischief’s sake—recurrently got him into trouble. In the end he did well but probably more because of sheer luck (or thanks to Divine Providence) than because of his resourcefulness. Others may conclude differently, but this is the way I read this man’s story today.

LADIMIR PETROV

Washington, D. C.

May 1973