When the funeral was over, Lidiya stood up and crossed to the window. She stared down into the street. It was dark outside, and her figure was reflected in the glass: one hand shaded her eyes, and her mouth was tight. Galina wondered if she was crying and wanted to go to her, comfort her, but why would her mother be standing over there unless she needed to be alone? At last Lidiya turned and came to the couch. She reached for Galina’s hands.
It was time to talk of the past, she said in a soft voice. It was time for Galina to know the full story. The words came slowly, as if she were still unsure of the right course of action.
Lidiya had often spoken about her own paternal grandparents, the cigar-making grandfather and the embroiderer grandmother, and her maternal grandparents, both of whom had been tailors. But about her own parents, Vera and Yuri Kogan, she had been largely silent.
‘This was a calculated decision,’ she now said. ‘I thought it was a cruel mother who’d saddle her child with a spoiled biography.’ She shrugged. ‘I still do. But there comes a time when you need your history. You need it to explain your country, and you need it to explain who you are. It’s time,’ she said. ‘It’s time to know where you’ve come from.’
The story of the Kogan family went back a long way, as Russian stories tended to do — before Stalin, before Lenin and the Revolution, before the 1905 uprising, before the Crimean Wars, before the tribe of Alexanders and Nicholases, before great Peter himself, right back to the famed rabbis of Prague.
‘But I’ll start in the early 1890s,’ Lidiya said. ‘With my own grandparents, your great-grandparents.’
She settled back on the couch, and her voice assumed a storytelling lilt. ‘My grandfather was a cigar-maker and my grandmother an embroiderer. They were considered useful Jews, and so were permitted to live in St Petersburg.’ Lidiya reached for a framed picture and handed it to Galina. ‘They knew how fortunate they were — their lives being so much better than those they’d left behind in the Pale. And they were fortunate, in every respect they were fortunate, except they had no children.’
Galina studied the young couple in the picture. They looked so serious, or perhaps they just looked sad, this couple that were unable to have children.
‘For years they longed for a child, and for years they were disappointed. Then, just when they’d given up hope, my grandmother found herself pregnant.’ Lidiya was smiling. ‘Their baby would be Yuri, my father, your grandfather.
‘In Russia’s long history there have been bad times, worse times, and the very worst times. This period when my grandmother became pregnant counted among the worst. People would notice her condition and say it was a terrible time to be bringing a baby into the world, people with four, five, six children of their own. Some would say there was never a good time to bring a Jewish baby into the world, but my grandparents were overjoyed.
‘My grandfather and grandmother were good at their crafts, but there was never enough work nor enough people able to pay. Life for them in St Petersburg might have been better than in the Pale, but it was still tough. Cholera was more common than a full stomach, and typhus more tenacious than ice in winter. Then, in 1891, with the pregnancy well underway, a new deportation occurred. St Petersburg Jews were dragged from their rooms, they were rounded up in the streets: no warning, no explanation, no time to pack up lives that had taken root over decades, no opportunity to calm the children, care for the elderly, or collect provisions. Amid all this, my grandparents, who had thought they would remain childless, were convinced of a miracle. That they escaped the deportation was another miracle. And when their son was born, they named him Yuri, a good Russian name to take into a future where, according to their hopes and dreams, everyone, including Jews, would be equal.’
Yuri Kogan grew to be a strong boy, in every respect he was strong except his eyes. This boy, who loved reading and writing, and who particularly loved numbers, wore spectacles as thick as window panes. Rich Petersburgers were installing the new electricity in their homes — light as dazzling as a hundred candles, so it was said — but for the Kogans, electricity was as remote as the stars. They heard of a way to make an oil-lamp burn more brightly by inserting a strip of tin to spread the flame. It helped, and Yuri’s poor eyesight did not matter quite so much anymore.
For hours on end, young Yuri would sit at a bench in the glow of his special light, blond curls falling over his face, a pencil in his grip as he explored the patterns in numbers. So exceptional was his skill in maths that no quota against Jews could keep him from the gimnaziya.
It quickly emerged that Yuri embraced all learning; whether literature, languages or philosophy, he mastered everything he tackled. With a book in his hands, he could forget he was hungry, he could forget he was cold, he could forget that the soles of his shoes had worn through to the cardboard, and his best friend had sickened and died. Learning supplied him with all the pleasures and experiences lacking in his own meagre life, and there was simply no stopping him. Although the bullies at school did try.
No one, he quickly discovered, likes a clever kid, particularly a clever Jewish kid. There were bruisings, and plenty of them, and nasty taunts, some of which he didn’t even understand. Eventually he found the perfect solution: appeasing the school bullies with cigar ends collected from around his father’s cutting machine.
He studied hard, but when his parents talked about the great socialist revolution, he put his schoolwork aside to listen. This utopia, which would provide work, food and reliable shelter to all Russians, would most certainly come. And how wonderful it would be for the Kogans, and all people like them.
Life now, though, was not fair. Yuri saw the huge palaces where rich people lived in warm rooms, waited on by vast numbers of servants. He heard about tables laden with food, and whole rooms just for sleeping. He gazed at bejewelled churches with spires clad in gold, and fat priests wrapped in ornamental robes. He saw rich children swaddled in furs and coddled by nurses; rosy-skinned and chubby-cheeked, these children had less in common with him than would a mouse. Where he lived, babies died and children sickened, teeth were agony, cuts festered, he was always cold and meat existed only in dreams. With the perennial pogroms against the Jews, with the Ruskoye Znamye pumping out anti-Semitic vitriol day after day, with the rich in their palaces and the poor squashed into rickety rooms, life was definitely not fair.
What was it about his country, about Mother Russia, that made living so hard and death so easy? And when he asked his parents, he always received the same answer: the revolution would change everything; the revolution would bring a good life to all.
The failed uprising of 1905 brought a few minor changes, but didn’t result in fewer rats and more food, nor less cold and better health, at least not for the Kogans. By the time Yuri was a student at university, conditions had actually gone backwards. Yuri buried himself in mathematics and tried to ignore the hardships, but not even he was immune to a raft of new Jewish statutes running to nearly one thousand pages that impinged on every aspect of life — including university study. There were reduced quotas for university entrance, and when enrolled, there were quotas to sit for exams. So a Jew could attend the classes, could do the work, and at the end of the course be denied the examinations and the subsequent credentials. Yuri kept his head down, he pushed himself harder, he wanted to believe that as long as his work was appreciated he would be safe.
With quotas to practise certain professions, quotas for hospital admissions, quotas for cemetery plots, quotas for practically everything, other Jews were not so fortunate. Most of the new statutes struck Yuri as plain ludicrous. Jews were permitted to sit on juries, but couldn’t act as foreman. They could be members of a military band, but not lead one. Jewish soldiers from other parts of Russia could pass through St Petersburg, but weren’t allowed to spend their furlough in the city. When his own girlfriend, Masha, together with many of her friends, registered as domestic servants in order to
keep their residency in St Petersburg, these absurd laws came disturbingly close. ‘What happens if the authorities discover you’re not a maid?’ he asked. Masha shrugged, she would deal with it if it happened. And then she laughed. ‘I could have registered as a prostitute like my cousin Rosa.’ Yuri did not laugh. What was funny about prostitutes and maids gaining residency, when a doctor or a lawyer could not? What was funny about young Jewish women registering as maids and prostitutes in order to finish their studies?
He managed to hold his place at the university, he managed to do his exams, he managed to graduate as the top student in mathematics, he managed to get a job teaching at the university, and that’s where he was working when the war with Austria and Germany broke out. Suddenly, ethnicity didn’t matter anymore. Whether you were Russian, Jewish, Armenian, or a hermit from Azerbaijan, if you were fit enough to fight, you fought for Mother Russia. And Yuri wanted to fight — what young man didn’t? But even if his eyesight had been perfect, his maths would have kept him away from the front line.
Wars need the numbers men. Yuri counted troops, horses and vehicles, and shifted them across the map; he measured out metres of barbed wire, and distributed them across the battlefields; he mobilised uniforms, boots, weapons, tobacco. Throughout those brutal years, Yuri, together with fellow mathematicians, moved the men and the necessities of war. And he counted off the dead and wounded too — staggering numbers of his fellow countrymen. As the numbers soared, he blamed the czar and his aristocratic military men. And he longed for the people’s revolution.
He thought it couldn’t come soon enough, but when the revolution finally did happen, it couldn’t have been at a worse time. Only later did he realise that it was precisely because life couldn’t get any worse that the revolution happened when it did. Russia was losing the war with Germany. The enemy was in striking distance of Petrograd. All the usual hardships were rampant — hunger, cold, disease — but now millions of war casualties, soldiers and civilians alike, were added to the toll.
It is 1917, February, during the Russian winter, when the first uprising occurs. The rouble, already harshly devalued, plunges still further. Food is scarce, fuel is scarcer, and transport is a memory. You have some potatoes, you swap them for fuel; you have your mother’s pendant, you swap it for boots. In March, the czar abdicates; the Romanov dynasty is finished, and the aristocracy of yesterday flees. Yuri has longed for this day, but it is impossible to rejoice when daily life is such a grind. He goes to his job because, revolution or no revolution, the war continues. Meanwhile the search for fuel becomes all-consuming. Palaces are plundered, churches are burned, mansions are looted. Into the stove go gilt chairs, carved bedheads, ornate picture frames, rare books; the spoils of the czars are keeping the Bolsheviks from freezing.
Hardship, pain, misery — it seems to Yuri these are infinitely elastic. You think you are experiencing the worst, whether of hunger or cold or enemy attacks, you think you can’t take any more, but conditions do worsen and you do manage to survive. The European war drags on. Cholera and typhus are rife, influenza is simmering, babies are dying, children are starving. Only lice are thriving.
‘People could learn a great deal from lice,’ he remarks to his mother one night when he arrives home to find their place reeking of karbolka, and his mother on her hands and knees scrubbing.
Yuri and his parents are hopeful, as are so many people, when Kerensky assumes the leadership of the provisional government. But daily life does not improve; there are simply too many factions, each advancing a different program for the new Russia. So they are relieved when, after a few more tumultuous months, the Bolsheviks assume power and the provisional government is dissolved. Lenin promises ‘peace, land, and bread’. It’s a rousing cry amid the dirge of war and deprivation.
‘The worst must surely be over,’ Yuri says to his mother one night.
The two of them are huddled over the burzhuika. Yuri had managed to scavenge some fuel, but the stove gobbled it as if it were famished; now any warmth is more imagined than real. With his father stretched out on the divan, sleeping, Yuri keeps his voice low. ‘Now the struggle must surely cease.’
It doesn’t. The glorious revolution segues into civil war. Russians are now killing Russians, and within the provinces, the bloodshed is further ramped up by ethnic and religious attacks against Armenians, Jews, Poles — all the usual targets. So much hatred and anger and resentment across all of greater Russia, even a committed Bolshevik like Yuri finds himself wondering how many more deaths it will take to bring about peace and prosperity. He estimates the number of dead so far to be at least nine million, surely enough in anyone’s terms. As for the future, he wants to work for the revolution, but the universities are in upheaval, and now that Russians are killing Russians, no one wants mathematicians counting the dead.
Throughout the cities and countryside, the Whites, the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks are fighting, each group against the others, and all of them against the Jews. In the pogroms of 1918 and 1919, two hundred thousand Jews are killed across the land. The Kogans are devastated; this is not the revolution they had hoped for. During the harshest winter in living memory, death attacks on several fronts: starvation, civil war, racial hatred, disease, and the fiercest cold.
And then, without warning, Yuri’s luck changes. He is given a job as a demographer in the newly established ZAGS: the Department of Registration of Civil Statuses, responsible for births, deaths, marriages, and other population statistics. At last, he’ll be working for the new Russia. And his luck doesn’t stop there: in the same month he starts at ZAGS he meets Vera. He knows from the very beginning that she’s the one for him. A teacher of English language and literature, she’s warm and spirited, strong and funny, and like him, she is ethnically Jewish. So certain is he that their future lies together, he could have proposed within days of their first meeting. But for the sake of propriety and the pleasures of courtship he delays. A few months later they marry. There are those who think they should wait — these are, after all, the toughest of times. But he and Vera say their marriage is for the revolution, it is for the future. They move in with his parents, into a pocket of space partitioned off by a bookcase and a curtain of newsprint. Two years later their baby son, Mikhail, joins them in their cubbyhole.
Like all young Bolsheviks, Yuri and Vera have always believed that come the revolution, all aspects of daily life would improve. But the new revolutionary society seems not to be working as it should, and many, indeed most hardships remain unchanged. They rationalise that it is, after all, only the earliest of days in a social program that is radical in every respect; that they must try to curb their impatience and, most of all, they must trust in Lenin. So when Vladimir Ilyich introduces his New Economic Policy they opt for a positive stance, even though they have some concerns. The new regulations under the NEP allow for a limited amount of private enterprise; the government hopes that concessions like this will fire up Russia’s economy. Yuri and Vera talk quietly together in their corner of the kommunalka while little Misha sleeps beside them; they wonder whether any level of private ownership can exist without resulting in inequality and exploitation. In the end, like most of their Bolshevik friends, they decide to accept the risks for a measure of peace and stability.
And life does improve. Food and material goods become more plentiful, buses and trams are more reliable, and there is even the possibility of a place of their own. So many positive changes as a result of the NEP, yet they hear of bourgeois excesses, they see over-consumption by a few to the detriment of the many, and they know there are people who are profiting over and above their needs.
The revolutionary state will eventually be built, they have no doubt of this, although they now realise it will take a good deal longer than they originally thought. Their trust in Lenin remains inviolate; it never occurs to them he won’t see the revolutionary transformation to its conclusion. So when his death is announced in th
e winter of 1924, it initially makes no sense. The great revolutionary leader dead? It’s not possible. He’s only fifty-three. He’s their leader. He wasn’t even sick. And when the truth does finally bite, they are heartbroken, all the people are. Their grief over Vladimir Ilyich is compounded by their fears for the revolution: with so much still to be done, the great and glorious future is in peril.
Their mood remains sombre, their fears will not settle. They’re aware of skirmishes among the potential successors, but the details are shuttered off from ordinary people. When Stalin emerges as the new leader, their anxieties ease. They know Stalin has a special understanding of the workers; he’s a committed revolutionary, a man of action, and he’s young. They hear rumours that some among the powerful are unhappy about the new leader, and that Lenin himself did not choose Stalin as his successor, but in a country where rumours blow through the landscape on the daily winds, Yuri and Vera choose to ignore them.
Their support for Stalin is vindicated when he announces his five-year plan. This strategy, with its large-scale collectivisation of farms in rural areas and industrialisation in the cities, will reverse the compromises made to private ownership by the NEP and, at the same time, restore the ideals of the revolution. With his plan, Stalin promises that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, established just a few years earlier, will be the envy of the world.
Vera’s second pregnancy coincides with Stalin’s announcement. Both within the Kogan home and further abroad in the vast Soviet territories, there’s reason for optimism. In 1928, in the early days of the five-year plan, Yuri and Vera’s daughter, Lidiya, is born. She arrives early by a full month, and is taken from the maternity hospital to the city shelter for premature children. For five long weeks, the longest of her life, Vera says, mother and infant are separated. When the baby is finally permitted to come home, Vera vows there will be no more separations for her family: the four of them will enjoy a long and fruitful life together in the new Russia.
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