Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin. In the intellectual circles of the Party there probably were misgivings and shakings of heads. But the masses of workers and soldiers had not a minute’s doubt. They would not have understood and would not have accepted any other decision. This Lenin sensed well.

  But Trotsky is lying. The masses of workers and soldiers were not told of the ‘decision’ to execute the entire family; for almost a decade they were told, instead, that the Tsarina and her children were in ‘a place of security’.20 Nor was it proclaimed, as an additional morale-stiffener, that the Cheka had simultaneously murdered Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Prince Ivan Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich and Count Vladimir Paley. This group was recreationally tortured, ante mortem. Grand Duke Sergei was dead on arrival, but the rest were thrown alive into the mine shaft where their bodies were eventually found.

  The murder of the Romanovs seems to me fractionally less odious than, say, the murder of a Cossack family of equivalent size. The Tsar, at least, was guilty of real crimes (the encouragement of pogroms, for example). His end provoked, among the masses, little comment and no protest. The murder of the Tsarina and the five children was clearly seen by the Bolsheviks as a political deficit. It was therefore an irrational act, an expression of anger and hatred, though you can imagine how it was parlayed into an assertion of Bolshevik mercilessness, of ‘stopping at nothing’. The ancillary killings sent no message to the Red Army or to the Party rump (except as a rumour). It sent a message to the Politburo, and the message said: we will have to win now, because we at last deserve anything they care to do to us if we fail. The Romanovs were murdered in mid-July 1918. By this time the regime had lost much of its pre-October support, and was responding with hysterical insecurity – that is, with violence. On 3 and 5 September came the decrees legitimizing the Red Terror.

  There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could ‘die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s—’.21 Imagining this, we arrive at a representative image of the gnarled hand of October. One executioner wrote (and he is quoted here for the dullness of his moral tone):

  I know all about it. The shooting was all over the place. I know that … Medvedev took aim at Nicholas. He just shot at Nicholas … Anyway, it was just another sentence that had to be carried out, we looked on it as just another chore.22 … Of course, you start to think about its historical importance … In fact, the whole thing was badly organized. Take Alexei, it took a lot of bullets before he died. He was a tough kid.

  Yes, an imposing enemy: a thirteen-year-old haemophiliac. The Tsarevich outlived Nicholas II (deservedly renamed Nicholas the Last by Orlando Figes). In those final seconds, then, the child was Alexis II. Or Alexis the Last – but undeservedly.

  19 It seems that the Romanovs had two dogs with them in Ekaterinburg. One of them, Jemmy, was killed in the basement. The other, Joy, survived, despite her breed: she was a King Charles spaniel.

  20 Reading Trotsky, one is often impressed by how much dishonesty he can pack into a paragraph. As to the details of the murders: ‘I was never curious about how the sentence [sic] was carried out and, frankly, do not understand such curiosity.’ Well, the Bolshevik leadership was certainly curious about the how: hence the secrecy, the eight-year cover-up; hence the sulphuric acid.

  21 Pipes’s note reads: ‘Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated 8 September 1918; omission in the original.’

  22 ‘This group had not long before executed Prince Dolgorukov, General Tatishchev, Countess Gendrikova and Yekaterina Schneider, who had been accompanying the Romanovs’ (Volkogonov, Lenin).

  The Collapse of the Value of Human Life in Practice – 2

  Stalin famously said: ‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.’ After the death there would be no man and no problem; but there would indisputably be a corpse.

  Corpse-disposal was a national tribulation throughout the period of hard Bolshevism, which ended in 1953. By December 1918, when the regime, responding to the crisis, announced its monopoly of the funeral industry, there were stacks of corpses (and packs of sated dogs) outside the cemeteries of every major city, and you could smell a hospital from a distance of several streets; annual epidemics came with the spring thaw. ‘To die in Russia in these times is easy,’ writes a diarist, ‘but to be buried is very difficult.’ After the nationalization of the graveyards, burial depended on bribery, a process surrealized by hyperinflation:

  Ninotchka’s funeral in November 1919 cost 30,000 [writes another diarist]; Uncle Edward’s funeral in December 1921 was 5,000,000; M. M.’s funeral in March 1922 was 33,000,000.

  Cremation was attractive to the regime. For one thing it undermined the Orthodox Church, which expressly prescribed interment. Cremation was also modern, ‘a new, industrialised and scientific world of flame and ash’.23 After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire. Another solution, of course, was the mass grave. The pits at Butovo, near Moscow, are thought to hold 100,000 bodies; another Stalin-era necropolis, at Bykovna in the Ukraine, is thought to hold 200,000.

  In 1919, as part of a further move against religion, the coffins of medieval ‘saints’ were opened up and exposed to scientific scrutiny. The sweet-smelling, tear-shedding, eternally fresh dead bodies of church doctrine were revealed as little bundles of bone and dust. ‘The cult of dead bodies and of these dolls must end,’ read the Justice Department’s instruction. The policy ceased to apply when, in January 1924, Lenin had his last stroke. A powerful refrigerator was imported from Germany, and the Immortalization Commission worked flat out for six months, anxiously monitoring the mould on Lenin’s nose and fingers. The corpse was rendered incorruptible, by science, and enshrined as an icon.

  After the war, in Kolyma, Stalin’s Arctic Auschwitz, natural erosion brought about a strange discovery: ‘A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses from 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.’ The bodies were transferred to a new mass grave by bulldozer. Varlam Shalamov24 was there:

  The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam …

  And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man – good or bad. And if I forget, the grass will forget. But the permafrost and stone will not forget.

  23 From Catherine Merridale’s Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. In this section I am gratefully dependent on her striking chapter, ‘Common and Uncommon Graves’.

  24 See also pp. 154–58.

  Getting to the Other Planet

  Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag. And your lecteurial love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (at such moments you are tempted to reach for Aleksandr Isayevich) never more intense. ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’ Stalin once rhetorically asked a team of interrogators who were having difficulty in breaking a suspect (Kamenev). He meant that no individual could withstand the concerted mass of the state. In February 1974 the Moscow Cheka served Solzhenitsyn with a summons. Instead of signing the receipt, he returned the envelope with a statement that began:

  In the cir
cumstances created by the universal and unrelieved illegality enthroned for many years in our country … I refuse to acknowledge the legality of your summons and shall not report for questioning to any agency of the state.

  And, for that moment, the Soviet Union and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn weighed about the same.

  Exertions of the imagination are now called for. The Christmas before last, when she came to stay, my mother revealed an interest in Russian ‘witness’ literature. I slipped her a paperback called Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. She accepted it gratefully but responsibly. ‘Didn’t they have terrible times,’ she asked me (and there was no question mark). ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they.’ ‘Terrible times,’ she said. The experience of the gulag was like a nightmare that ever worsened. It was a torment as lavish as any divinity could devise; and we are only on page 94 of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind when we hear the words of Job (these words are repeatedly whispered in her ear): ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me’…

  They had terrible times: unbelievably terrible times. And the camps of the gulag were just the last and longest stop on an unbelievably terrible road. First, arrest (almost always at night).25 Solzhenitsyn describes the body chemistry of the arrested in terms of sudden heat – you are burning, boiling. ‘Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another … That’s what arrest is: it’s … a blow which shifts the present into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.’ In this instant, a poet wrote, ‘you tire as in a lifetime’. Thus you were taken from your world and you entered … You entered what? One must bear in mind Martin Malia’s more general warning: it is not the work of a moment to ‘[grasp] the extraordinary combination of dynamism and horror that characterized the Soviet experiment’.

  Next, imprisonment and interrogation: this period normally lasted for about three months. In the chapter called ‘The Interrogation’ Solzhenitsyn tabulates thirty-one forms of psychological and physical torture (the use of the latter became official policy in 1937). Red Terror torture was competitive and hysterical and baroque. Stalin-era torture could be all that too, but here, in the prisons of the cities, its setting was bureaucratic and cost-efficient. The interrogators needed confessions. It is important to understand that those accused of political crimes were almost invariably innocent. The interrogators needed confessions because these had been demanded from above by quota – that cornerstone of Bolshevik methodology. The apparatus was now immovably plugged into the Stalin psychodrama, and responded accordingly to his spasms of fear and rage, and his simpler need to exert power by mere intensification.

  The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable. This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. This is Solzhenitsyn’s description of ‘the swan-dive’:

  A long piece of rough towelling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking – and without water and food for two days …

  Another method was to confine the prisoner in a dark wooden closet where

  hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bedbugs had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner’s jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling. At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur.

  Yet even here, in his representations of obliterating defeat, Solzhenitsyn is quietly adding to our knowledge of what it is to be human. He does this again and again:

  Beatings – of a kind that leave no marks. They use rubber truncheons and wooden mallets and small sandbags. They beat Brigade Commander Karpunich-Braven for twenty-one days in a row. And today he says: ‘Even after thirty years all my bones ache – and my head too.’

  Starvation has already been mentioned in combination with other methods … Chulpenyev was kept for a month on three and a half ounces of bread, after which – when he had just been brought in from the pit [a deep grave in which the half-stripped suspect lay open day and night to the elements] – the interrogator Sokol placed in front of him a pot of thick borscht, and half a loaf of white bread sliced diagonally. (What does it matter, one might ask, how it was sliced? But Chulpenyev even today will insist that it was really sliced very attractively.) However, he was not given a thing to eat.

  And all this was superimposed on a regimen of unimaginable overcrowding (‘crammed into GPU cells in numbers no one had considered possible up to then’)26 and chronic, depersonalizing sleeplessness: ‘In all the interrogation prisons the prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute from reveille to taps.’ Taps means the bugle call for lights-out; but here the lights burned all night, both in the heaving cells and in the interrogation rooms. The overall process was known as ‘the Conveyor’, because the enemy, who never slept either, came at you in relays for as long as it took. Once in a blue moon we read about people (were they human?) who withstood the attrition and refused to confess, which was nearly always fatal. The confession was in any case merely part of a more or less inevitable process. When it was their turn to be purged, former interrogators (and all other Chekists) immediately called with a flourish for the pen and the dotted line.

  Three months of that and then the prisoners faced the journey to their islands in the archipelago. The descriptions of these train rides match anything in the literature of the Shoah. I thought for a moment that there might be a qualitative difference: the absence of children, or at least the absence of their ubiquity. But the entire families of the ‘kulaks’, the targeted peasants, were deported and encamped in their millions during the early 1930s alone; and entire nations were deported and encamped during and after the war.27 No, the children were there, as victims, and not just on the transports. About 1 million children died in the Holocaust. About 3 million children died in the Terror-Famine of 1933.

  It is the journey we have all read about in Primo Levi and elsewhere, but there were also some Russian refinements. The journey would tend to be much longer (and much colder: Stalin, as we shall see, had things that Hitler didn’t have) – a month, six weeks. The prisoners’ diet – sometimes a combination of heavily salted Sea of Azov anchovies plus no water-ration – has a Russian feel to it. And there is the unshirkable question of Russian stoicism and humour, and of Russian obedience to the herd.

  Eugenia Ginzburg had already been in prison for two years when she was transported to Vladivostok, sharing ‘van 7’ with seventy-six others. At a stop in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk a further consignment of prisoners was wedged on board. All the women in van 7 were half dead with starvation and disease, but there was something about the physical appearance of the newcomers that caused universal dismay: their heads had been shaved. It is difficult, at first, for the male reader to grasp this ‘supreme insult to womanhood’ (Solzhenitsyn notes that among the men head-shaving bothered nobody): ‘[The newcomers] viewed our dusty, greying, dishevelled plaits and curls with envious admiration … “They might do the same to us tomorrow.” I ran my fingers through my hair. No, that is something I thought I would hardly survive.’ There follows a scene of passionate commiseration. Then:

  From the corner in which the orthodox Marxists had ensconced themselves (they hadn’t given up a centimetre of space to the newcomers) came a voice of dissent:

  ‘Did it not occur to you that the order to shave your heads might have been motivated by reasons of hygiene?’…

  The women from Suzdal, who had considered this possibility long ago,
had one and all rejected it.

  ‘… No, it had nothing to do with hygiene, they just wanted to humiliate us.’

  ‘Well, simply to crop someone’s hair is hardly an insult. It was very different in the Tsarist prisons, where they shaved only one half of your head!’

  This was more than Tanya Stankovskaya [who is dying of scurvy] could bear. By some miracle she found the strength to scream out so loud that the whole van could hear her:

  ‘That’s the spirit, girls! A vote of thanks to Comrade Stalin … One’s no longer shaved on only one side but on both. Thanks, father, leader, creator of our happiness!’

  And Ginzburg herself, in the epilogue of her stoical and humorous – and, in every sense, devastating – book, after eighteen years of graphic torment, astonishingly concludes: ‘How good that … the great Leninist truth has prevailed in our country and party … Here they are, then – the memories of a rank-and-file communist, a chronicle of the times of the cult of personality.’28 Reading this, Solzhenitsyn, with his national-historical grasp, must have given a long low whistle.

  There was another Soviet innovation: slave ships. But first, at the Vladivostok terminus, the transit camps – and the Tolstoyan scale of the operation, with vast landscapes traversed, it seemed, by entire populations. ‘As far as the eye could see there were columns of prisoners marching in one direction or another like armies on a battlefield,’ writes the Romanian witness Michael Solomon. ‘One could see endless columns of women, of cripples, of old men and even teenagers … directed by whistles and flags.’ At Vanino, en route to Kolyma, the prisoners entered what was in effect a slave market, where they were prodded and graded and assigned. Political prisoners, unlike the honest embezzlers and speculators, were detailed for the hardest labour, and for this they needed a first-class health clearance. Blind and skeletal from scurvy, Tanya Stankovskaya (‘That’s the spirit, girls!’) was given a first-class health clearance. She died four hours later. On the planet Earth, we are told, for every human being there are a million insects. The transit prisoners at Vanino seemed to have experienced this as an immediate truth. ‘The bugs were so legendary, even by camp standards, that they are reported in almost all the prisoners’ accounts as provoking every night a struggle which would last till dawn’ (Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps). But not even the insects would approach Tanya Stankovskaya.