Russia’s perennial technological backwardness compared to countries further west kept reinforcing the tradition. The three-field system that laid the foundations for Europe’s agricultural revolution in the twelfth century did not reach Russia until the second half of the fifteenth century. Mercantile towns became important only in the nineteenth century.
In the 1920s, idealistic Bolsheviks took the concept of the collective to its highest level by seeking to construct a utopian state that would serve as a new “family” for everyone. That required breaking apart the bourgeois family. Children would be educated not by their parents but by nurseries, schools and universities that would suppress reactionary, egotistical views about familial love left over from the old regime, instilling them instead with good communist ideals. The ideology originated abroad but grew well in fertile Russian soil.
The family structure faced its greatest threat under Stalin. Keenan believes the dictator’s characterization of the state as the new basic unit that would supposedly protect the group from the harmful impulses of individuals remained within traditional ways of thinking. It was an all-encompassing endeavor. Art, literature and journalism were harnessed to shift self-identification from families to the Soviet collective. Stalin became the image of everyone’s father, and the Motherland (Rodina) became their mother. People were instructed to forsake their own parents, as did the notorious and legendary Pavlik Morozov, the thirteen-year-old son of poor peasants who lived north of the Ural Mountains city of Sverdlovsk (now once again named Yekaterinburg).
Although there were countless other such cases, generations of Soviet schoolchildren were raised on the story of Pavlik Morozov, supposedly a model student and committed communist who headed his school’s Young Pioneers group, roughly equivalent to the Boy Scouts. In 1932, he turned in his father to the OGPU, predecessor to the KGB, for forging documents to sell to “enemies of the Soviet state.” The father, who headed the village soviet, or communist council, was sentenced to labor camp, then executed. Soon afterward, Pavlik’s uncle, grandfather and other relatives took revenge on him and his eight-year-old brother by hacking them to pieces in the woods. All the perpetrators except the uncle were soon caught and shot as reactionaries.
Pavlik became lionized as a communist hero. Statues of him appeared throughout the country, composers wrote songs and even an opera about him and Sergei Eisenstein made a film about his story, cementing his status as a Soviet icon. For decades, teachers held him up as a model for the lesson that loyalty to the state must supersede loyalty to one’s own family.
Virtually the entire story was invented. Details of the real one emerged only after the collapse of communism: Morozov wasn’t a model student, a Young Pioneer or even called Pavlik, relatives said; rather, his name was Pashka, another diminutive for Pavel. As for his motives, one version has it that his mother may have compelled him to denounce his father after he’d left her for another woman. It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, not least because the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, continues to deny access to the relevant documents because it considers the case still open. The likeliest explanation is that the secret police or its agents murdered Pavlik and his brother to create a myth that would glorify informers and frighten residents of a region that was staunchly resisting the disastrous policy of collectivization.4
The building into which my mother, Tatyana, moved in 1945, when she was a toddler returning with her mother from wartime evacuation, housed doctors, senior nurses and other top personnel from my grandmother Serafima’s tuberculosis dispensary. Built for wealthy bourgeois families, it had a splendid main entrance leading to a sweeping marble staircase and an elevator encased in ornate cast-iron latticework. The structure became a metaphor for life under communism. Its elevator, like many in Moscow, no longer worked—not that it mattered because the entrance, whose doors had been hammered over with boards, was irrelevant. As in countless other buildings, residents came and went through the “black” entrance in back, originally built for servants’ use. That was partly because nighttime arrests were easier and less visible on narrow back staircases, which also made escape more difficult. The dusty main stairs were used only as a playground by Tatyana—Tanya—and her friends, who would sneak in there and pretend they lived in a mansion where they received guests in grand style.
Serafima and Tanya’s apartment had four rooms, each occupied by a family, and a communal bathroom, a communal kitchen and a large entrance hall. Exposed pipes and wires ran everywhere. The families took turns cooking and hanging laundry to dry on lines over the stove in the depressing, grimy-looking kitchen. With no refrigerator or icebox, food was kept cool between the inner and outer windowpanes. Waiting lists dictated each room’s occupancy; as Serafima gained seniority, she was rewarded with slightly larger quarters as they became available. By the time Tatyana was sixteen, their room was sixteen square meters—roughly 170 square feet.
Tatyana eventually stopped screaming, but she hated the institutions where she had to stay while Serafima was working long hours. She spent much of her first years in nurseries and state-run boarding schools called internat, where she would remain for several days running. After lunch, children would be put on cots outside for naps, swaddled in heavy sleeping sacks against the cold. Little Tanya found it torture—it was impossible to move, even to scratch an itch—but she quickly understood that protest brought worse punishment, therefore her displeasure poured out only when she was safe with her kindly, doting mother. However, dangers for the rebellious little girl lurked at home, too, including in the person of a new arrival she took to calling “the apartment hooligan.”
Almost every communal apartment housed at least one usually feared and hated stukach, or snitch. The word comes from the verb meaning “to knock,” itself a euphemism for informing derived from the supposed practice of knocking at officials’ doors to deliver information. In Tatyana’s flat, the informer occupied the largest room. Soon after his wife died, when Tatyana was in her midteens, he married a corpulent cleaning woman who moved in from her grim basement quarters in a nearby building. She was the embodiment of a peasant woman, a baba—the equivalent of a fishmonger’s wife—with a large mouth from which issued very coarse language in a very gruff voice. Hardly believing her luck in having been elevated from rags to relative riches, she lost no time wielding her new power over her neighbors.
When hemlines began rising in the late 1950s, the stukach’s wife mocked Tatyana and her friends in colorful village dialect. “What’s this?!” she’d bellow, standing in the kitchen. “Look at them walking around town, flashing their pussies!” (She used the term pukhovka, meaning “puff.”) The girls proceeded to scribble caricatures of her holding a sign reading PUKHOVKA, which they scattered in the kitchen cabinets and on the stairwell. Livid, the apartment hooligan complained to the dispensary’s director, which luckily for Tatyana had the effect of only spreading the mockery.
Tatyana’s and Serafima’s friends and relatives provoked hot fury from the stukach’s wife when they visited. Although Tatyana’s father, the military surgeon Mutakhar Khuzikhanov, returned to his family in the Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria after the war, he maintained contact with Serafima and visited occasionally. His youngest brother, Shamil, a gifted pianist who was almost certainly gay—and, needless to say, was tightly closeted in those days—studied at the Gnessin Institute, a musical college second only to the famed Moscow Conservatory. On graduating, he was assigned to the relative backwater of Yaroslavl, a city several hours northeast of Moscow, where he directed a choir. Desperate to return to the capital, he had little hope of doing so officially without obtaining a residence permit after his mandatory stint. Serafima’s cousin Olga Kiva, who worked for a construction agency, eventually used her connections to procure him both the coveted documents and his own apartment. Meanwhile, he often stayed with Serafima and Tatyana.
The stukach’s wife castigated Shamil in archaic provincial speech at ev
ery opportunity. When he snuck into the kitchen to cook, she hustled in to bawl, “Oslaboni gorelku!” (literally “Weaken the burner!”—meaning turn down the stove). But it was jockeying over the single bathroom that caused the greatest friction between neighbors. In the rare instances when it was free, Shamil would hole up inside for long baths. Alerted to his presence there, his nemesis would lurk outside the door and growl, “Moisia, moisia Tatarin, v poslendii ras!” (“Wash yourself, you Tatar, for the last time!”). “Tatar” in itself was a derogatory term. Shamil, who liked to imitate the accents of the archetypal peasant characters who populate the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, roared with laughter at her.
Privately, Shamil’s fierce hatred of the Soviet order generated a steady stream of risqué and risky sarcasm and humor. And although he rarely thanked Serafima for her hospitality, he lavished praise on her cooking, especially her shchi, or cabbage soup. Her rice was never merely good, but “like white Persian lilac!” Eventually, he reciprocated by teaching Tatyana to play the piano.
Socialist realist literature, a term coined in 1932 to describe what had emerged as the single genre acceptable to the state, extolled privation in private life. Its protagonists—“positive heroes”—epitomized the ideal “new Soviet man,” who recapitulated the official version of history, which invariably led to the triumph of Marxism-Leninism.5 One of the classics, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), tells the story of a young Bolshevik wounded in the October Revolution. Overcoming his handicap, he becomes a writer who inspires workers building the new state. In Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, an earlier novel that served as a template for the standard socialist realist plot, the protagonist, Gleb, returns from the Russian Civil War to discover that his previously submissive wife has become a committed communist who sets an example by sacrificing her personal happiness. The couple leave their daughter at a crumbling children’s home so they can help rebuild a destroyed cement factory. When Gleb wavers, his wife, Dasha, asks him whether he prefers “pretty flowers to bloom in the windowsill.”
“No, Gleb, in the winter I live in an unheated room, eat in a communal kitchen. You see, I’m a free Soviet citizen.”6 The daughter eventually dies.
Under the strictures of socialist realism, the individual’s freedom is inseparable from the fate of the state. Novelist Andrei Sinyavski, who castigated socialist realism in the 1950s, wrote ironically that absence of freedom posed no dilemma for people who believed.
When Western writers deplore our lack of freedom of speech, their starting point is their belief in the freedom of the individual. This is the foundation of their culture, but it is organically alien to Communism. A true Soviet writer, a true Marxist, will not accept these reproaches, and will not even know what they are all about.7
Socialist realist art—some of it very good, especially when created by former members of the avant-garde—served the same purpose. Private interiors, the domain of bourgeois selfishness, were rarely depicted. Instead, crowds dominated, often outside the home, as they engaged in productive labor, harmonious street life and Soviet parades. As Harvard professor Svetlana Boym argues, one of the better-known exceptions to the rule illustrates how the distinction between public and private was minimized. Alexander Laktionov’s The New Apartment, a painting completed in 1952, shows a beaming mother and son standing on the threshold of a new neoclassical Stalin-era apartment. The image of the proletarian salt of the earth, the mother has her head wrapped in a kerchief. Her hands are on her hips, and her son wears a Young Pioneers uniform. The boy is holding a portrait of Stalin, the eternally present father figure and benefactor. Around them lie some of their meager possessions, including stacks of books and a rubber plant. It’s a scene of almost complete transparency: all the books, their titles visible on the spines, are by classic Soviet writers, and all the doors are open, so there’s nothing to hide. Neighbors or the apartment’s fellow residents—we don’t know whether it’s communal—look on. However, even that seemingly exemplary Soviet painting wasn’t appropriate for the regime; it was censored after critics deemed the rubber plant too bourgeois.8
Communal living was one of the state’s most effective tools for undermining traditional relationships. Besides the value of its economy when people were flocking to cities where housing was incredibly scarce, the communal apartment was intended to serve the ideological purpose of supposedly freeing women from the dictatorship of the kitchen by enabling them to share duties. In fact, the tight proximity bred suspicion and hatred. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the wife of poet Osip Mandelshtam—who died in prison in 1938—observed that the Bolshevik regime cut social bonds between everyone. “Nobody trusted anyone else and every acquaintance was a suspected police informer,” she wrote.
Every family was always going over its circle of acquaintances, trying to pick out the provocateurs, the informers and the traitors. After 1937, people stopped meeting each other altogether, and the secret police were thus well on their way to achieving their ultimate objective. Apart from assuring a constant flow of information, they had isolated people from each other and had drawn large numbers of them into their web, calling them in from time to time, harassing them and swearing them to secrecy by means of signed statements. All such people lived in eternal fear of being found out and were consequently just as interested as regular members of the police in the stability of the existing order and the inviolability of the archives where their names were on file.9
Boym, who grew up under Soviet rule in Leningrad, describes the resulting practice of speaking “with half words.”
What is shared is silence, tone of voice, nuance of intonation. To say a full word is to say too much; communication on the level of words is already excessive, banal, almost kitschy. This peculiar form of communication “with half words” is the mark of belonging to an imagined community that exists on the margins of the official public sphere. Hence the American metaphors for being sincere and authentic—“saying what you mean,” “going public,” and “being straightforward”—do not translate properly into the Soviet and Russian contexts.10
My grandmother Serafima had a very small circle of friends who—thanks to the lack of restaurants and cafés, not to mention money to spend in them—would take turns hosting each other for tea and gossip in the relative safety of their rooms. Among the visitors was Serafima’s childhood friend from Kazan, whom Tatyana called Aunt Rita. The visitor supplemented her income by sewing dresses for her friends, a service much needed during the clothing shortages, and for her own part took pains to wear lipstick and high heels.
Another frequent guest, Aunt Shura, was married to the brother of Serafima’s husband, Zhora, still imprisoned after his arrest for being a member of the Tupolev aviation team. Anatoly Leimer, Zhora’s brother, had also been arrested and almost certainly died. Aunt Shura, his wife or widow, lived in a small basement room with her teenage daughter Ella, a dark-haired beauty who had many suitors, including a boyfriend who later engaged in illegal “speculation”—trading goods for profit. This enabled him to provide Ella with foreign clothes that heightened her appeal to her admirers.
Although Tatyana knew very little about her mother’s personal life, she did know that Serafima barely talked to anyone outside her little core group. When one or more friends gathered over zakuski and the occasional cake, there was much complaining. Whenever a voice raised itself in a hint of outrage, another voice shushed it with “Careful, the walls have ears!” At one point, Tatyana earnestly examined the walls to try to find them. Later, my mother would remember that “no one knew whether there were listening devices, but despite wanting to know what went on in every room, of course Stalin couldn’t bug every apartment. But all of them had a stukach, and everyone knew who he or she was.”
When Tatyana’s father Mutakhar visited from southern Kabardino-Balkaria for several days once every year or two, he would appear in his military uniform, smelling of tobacco and bearing presents and otherwise unobtainable food he�
��d bought from shops for military officers: caviar, sturgeon, Georgian wine and sparkling water. Tatyana would race down the hall from her room into his arms at the apartment’s entrance beside the kitchen. Tall, athletic and outgoing, Mutakhar died in 1954 from cancer.
Serafima as well as Mutakhar’s younger brother Shamil, the cynical musician, were also close to an army colonel and his wife who, despite his status—or perhaps because of it—shared Shamil’s barely hidden hatred for the communist regime. Alexei Panfilov had served in Vienna at the end of the war, when Soviet soldiers looted whatever they could lay their hands on. With utensils from a lavish pilfered silver service along with fine porcelain and other trophies, his wife, Tamara, taught Tatyana how to properly use a knife and fork.
Tamara took Tatyana under her wing partly because she had no offspring of her own and also because children were considered a special category of people, to be protected from the outside world even by strangers. Youngsters were a vessel of private life; shielding them from the state’s manipulation and repression was the surest way to pass down alternative traditions and values. Even people who didn’t see them that way treated them as a common good.
However, although Russians tend to treat other people’s children well, anecdotal evidence is now emerging that many young Soviets suffered far harsher punishment and more neglect than commonly believed, according to some of the testimony from educator Marilyn Murray’s moving columns in the Moscow Times.11 I’ve seen mentions on Facebook of working parents leaving their children alone for hours and preschool teachers’ threats to punish misbehavior by administering injections or forcing children to clean toilets. That’s not surprising in a country where parents on playgrounds often act more kindly toward strangers’ children than their own, whom they admonish as if they were exasperating, slow-witted adults.
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