Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  Yet the famine-ravaged country Bibikov saw during the winter of 1931-32 seems to have profoundly altered him. The Party was always right, yes – but the Party’s tactics might at least be altered. Like many Party leaders in the Ukraine who had seen the horrors which Stalin’s hard line produced first hand, Bibikov became convinced that Stalin’s rule must be softened if further disaster was to be averted. His chance to speak out came eighteen months later, shortly before the birth of his second daughter, my mother, Lyudmila Borisovna Bibikova.

  3. Death of a Party Man

  It was a long time ago, and it never happened.

  Yevgeniya Ginzburg

  In the first days of January 1934 Bibikov left his heavily pregnant wife at home and travelled with several senior factory managers by special train to Moscow to attend the Seventeenth All-Union Party Congress as an ex officio observer. Because he never discussed politics with Martha, she had no idea that her husband had determined on an act of defiance which was to cost him his life.

  The meeting was billed as the ‘Congress of Victors’, a celebration of the victory of collectivization, the triumphant fulfilment of the first Five Year Plan and the consolidation of the Revolution. But despite the official encomiums to the success of the Party, there was widespread exhaustion among the rank and file. Bibikov, like many, felt strongly that the famine which still continued over much of southern Russia had to be brought to an end. The Five Year Plan had been fulfilled, but the men and women of the grass roots who were more managers than ideologues saw with their own eyes that the insane pace of change couldn’t be sustained. Yet Stalin, the desk-bound firebrand, called for greater production, higher yields, and more vigour in pursuing collectivization despite its manifestly disastrous consequences.

  There was no open dissent at the congress. But there was talk of easing Stalin out of the position of power he had forged from the hitherto insignificant post of General Secretary and replacing him with the more moderate Sergei Kirov. Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad Party, was, at that point, still more than a match for Stalin. He was a Civil War hero, a former close ally of Lenin and the greatest orator the Party had seen since Trotsky.

  Bibikov, along with many of his colleagues from the Ukraine, was encouraged by an apparent spirit of openness, a sense that there was to be a robust ideological debate among equals over the future of the great experiment they were building together, and they wholeheartedly backed Kirov’s plan to slacken the pace. It proved to be a fatal mistake. In Stalin’s already paranoid mind, Kirov’s attempt to soften the punishing pace of collectivization was an unpardonable insult and challenge to his ideological leadership of the Revolution. Stalin did not forget who voted and how, though his revenge was four years in the making. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Congress, 1,108 were to die in the Purges. The conference ended with the now customary standing ovations and exhortations to even greater triumphs in the future. Bibikov stood and applauded Stalin and the Politburo with the rest. But the outcome was politically inconclusive. Kirov had refused openly to challenge Stalin. Yet it was equally clear that Stalin was not yet undisputed master of the Party. The supposedly open debate over the Party’s future was not to be repeated until Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, when dissent was to rip the Party apart for ever.

  Bibikov’s second daughter, Lyudmila, was born on 27 January 1934, just after her father’s return from the Congress.

  Though he named his elder daughter after Lenin, he pointedly did not name his second, as some sycophants were already beginning to do, Stalina.

  * * *

  The year passed in furious work on the factory, with no sign of the political apocalypse which Stalin was quietly plotting. But on the evening of 2 December 1934, Lenina remembers that her father came home from work in tears. He threw himself on to the leather sofa in the sitting room and stayed there motionless for a long time, his head in his hands.

  ‘My propali,’ Bibikov said quietly to his wife. ‘We are lost.’

  Lenina asked her mother what was wrong. Martha didn’t answer and sent her to bed.

  The previous night Sergei Kirov had been shot dead by a lone assassin in his office at the Party headquarters at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. ‘We are lost,’ Bibikov said as he wept for the death of a man he admired. But was he also weeping for himself? Weeping with anger for the mistake he had made in identifying himself too closely with the losing side? For all his cultivated proletarian bluffness, Bibikov must have been a political animal, a committee man, with a rising star’s sense of the way the wind was blowing. As Bibikov lay on the sofa weeping for Kirov, he must have turned over those now-dangerous January conversations in his mind, wondering whether he had said too much.

  And yet the hammer did not fall at once. Stalin, too, wept in public at Kirov’s funeral, and acted as chief pallbearer, leading the nation in mourning. There was time enough to take revenge on the enemies in the heart of the Party which Stalin had identified at the congress.

  On a local level, the Party machine continued to run smoothly. The KhTZ’s production levels climbed to greater heights and the famine mercifully abated – if only because the millions of dead no longer needed to be fed. Bibikov, along with three other members of the KhTZ’s management, was awarded the Order of Lenin, number 301, in a plush velvet box. It was a recognized prelude to greater things. In late 1935, the expected promotion came, to Provincial Party Secretary of the Chernigov region in the rolling farm country of the northern Ukraine. Bibikov was just thirty-two years old, well on his way to a high-flying future – perhaps membership of the Ukrainian or national Party Central Committee. Maybe higher still.

  After the belching factory smokestacks and screeching rail junctions of Kharkov, Chernigov must have seemed like a step back into a slower, older Russia. The Chernigov Kremlin, with its medieval cathedrals, stands on the high bank of the sluggish River Desna. Wooded parkland comes right up to the centre of the city, and in summer the air is filled with pollen from poplar trees which line the streets. The squat, ornamented houses built by Chernigov’s wealthy merchants still stand, and the place has retained an air of pre-revolutionary bourgeois respectability. The town has many great churches which somehow escaped the Bolsheviks’ dynamite. Chernigov was too out-of-the-way, perhaps, to warrant a thorough purge of religious buildings, too far from the great industrial heartlands of the eastern Ukraine where the future of Socialism was being forged. It was a backwater, but Bibikov was sure that if he made a success of his new Party job he would not be tarrying long.

  The Bibikovs lived the life of the privileged. Already the Spartan Party ethic of the early thirties was slackening. The élite quickly accrued perks which set them above their fellow citizens. Martha shopped at exclusive Party grocers’, and Bibikov was entitled to holidays in specially built sanatoriums on the Black Sea. Every month, Bibikov would give Martha a little book of coupons for imported food, textiles and shoes from the Insnab, or ‘Foreign Supply’ shop. The family moved into a large four-room apartment with handsome furniture, confiscated from a wealthy merchant family for the use of Chernigov’s new rulers. There, Varya scrubbed the Bibikovs’ pans with brick dust until they shone.

  Boris installed shelves right up to the high ceiling of his study and filled them with books which he read in his big leather armchair. On his way back from work he’d stop in to the local bookshop and buy children’s books for the girls and ideological tomes for himself. When Martha shouted at Lenina she would tiptoe into Bibikov’s study and climb into his lap, sobbing. ‘Let’s not complain about her,’ he would say. ‘Let’s strengthen our Union instead.’ It was a joking reference to the current Party-speak.

  During their first winter in Chernigov the Bibikov girls wowed the town with their wrought-iron sled, made for them by their old neighbour in Kharkov, which drew crowds of envious children to behold this wonder under the steep earth ramparts of the Kremlin, perfect for tobogganing. In summer Martha made the girls fashionable white cloche hat
s, copied from Moscow fashion plates, and sewed them dresses from imported printed cotton. In keeping with her new status as an élite wife she began calling herself ‘Mara’ because she felt that ‘Martha’ sounded too peasant-like – an odd twist of social snobbery in the land of proletarian dictatorship. Bibikov was as much a workaholic as ever, but began to spend more time chatting – but not drinking – in his kitchen with Party comrades. He bought season tickets to the newly built theatre for Martha and Lenina, though he himself couldn’t go because he worked until nine each night, by which time the play was already nearly over.

  Lenina had never been so happy as during those days of her secret alliance with her beloved father. ‘I see it now so clearly,’ she told me, nearly a lifetime later. ‘I see it like a dream. It’s hard to believe it ever really happened.’

  Bibikov even began to relax enough to philander – or at least, to philander more openly. Lenina remembers Martha screaming at him in the kitchen, berating him about his various mistresses. It was during this time, January 1936, when all Party members were required to renew their Party cards so that unworthy elements could be weeded out, that the portrait photo we have of him in his Party tunic was taken. Perhaps the hard-set face also shows a trace of smugness, of self-congratulation.

  But behind the outward normality of Ukrainian small-town life, the country was drifting into madness. The NKVD, now under the leadership of the ruthless and sadistic Nikolai Yezhov, was preparing to unleash yet another civil war. This time it was not to be on the Whites or the peasants, but against the most insidious enemy of all, traitors within the Party itself.

  Old Bolsheviks whose long standing and moral authority could challenge Stalin’s position went first. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both members of Lenin’s first Politburo, stood to attention at show trials in Moscow in August 1936 and confessed to being imperialist spies, while being hectored by the hysterical Prosecutor-General, Andrei Vyshinsky. ‘Wreckers’, or senior engineers blamed for sabotaging the industrialization drive, were also put on public trial. They confessed to being members of a counter-revolutionary organization determined to subvert the triumph of Socialism. Stalin’s rival Lev Trotsky, the head of the alleged counterrevolutionary movement, had already fled into exile on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul. The vocabulary and tactics of the coming Great Purge were being rehearsed and refined.

  Until 1937 the Ukraine was a relative sanctuary from the show trials that were decimating the Moscow-based élite of the army, intelligentsia and government. But it was the Ukraine, perceived by Stalin to be a den of Trotskyism and potential opposition, which was to feel the full brunt of his wrath when he finally unleashed the might of the security machine he had so carefully constructed.

  At the February-March 1937 plenum of top Party members, Stalin’s opponents made a last, doomed stand, protesting against Stalin’s monopoly of power. Immediately after the meeting a fifth of the Ukrainian Party leadership were expelled. Bibikov, reading the curt announcement in Pravda, must have feared that worse was to come. By early summer close colleagues began to be summoned for questioning by the NKVD. Few returned.

  People instinctively drew into themselves, huddling into self-protective silence like pedestrians hurrying home during a summer rainstorm. Lenina noticed a sudden change in atmosphere. Her father was looking tired and had lost much of his usual jollity. The friendly gossip of the Party wives on the stairwell had become nervous pleasantries. It must have been with relief that Bibikov prepared for his summer trip to a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in July 1937.

  I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather’s NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina’s Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.

  The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of ‘Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region’ for suspected involvement in a ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity’. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor’s resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin – or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting – was charged with finding Bibikov ‘in the town of Chernigov’. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov’s NKVD jail.

  What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he’d said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn’t his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will – though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union’s jails to bursting point that summer. ‘The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.’

  Yevgeniya Ginzburg’s harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge, Into the Whirlwind, describes the infamous NKVD ‘conveyor’. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were confronted with those more resilient, in order to break their solidarity. They were told that resistance was useless; once one made a confession the rest could be shot on that basis alone. Their wives and children were threatened. Perversely, committed Communists could be persuaded to sign for the sake of the Revolution – your Party demands it! Are you defying your Party? Stool pigeons urged fellow prisoners to confess – it’s the only way to save your life, your family’s lives! Solzhenitsyn recounts how convinced Communists would whisper to their fellows, ‘It’s our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too softhearted; now look at the rot which has multiplied. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies.’

  Lied to, tortured, living in a world of pain and confusion, Bibikov the Party man for once refused to obey the Party’s orders and clung on to his innocence for as long as he could bear. But, li
ke almost all of them, he broke in the end.

  Nineteen days after his arrest he signed his first confession. It was a surprisingly long time to have held out. But nevertheless Bibikov confessed abjectly, in writing, to crimes against the Soviet Union. To the sabotage of the factory he helped to build. To the recruitment of Trotskyite agents. To propaganda against the state. He admitted that he had betrayed the Party to which he had devoted his life. His closest colleagues implicated him, and he, in turn, implicated them. None of the twenty-five supposed members of his circle refused to confess.

  The first confession is dated 14 August 1937. It is the first time Bibikov speaks in the file – the first hint of a human voice among the dry officialese. The crimes to which he confesses are so bizarre, so startlingly improbable, that I felt physically nauseous at the lurch from banal legalisms into the grotesque language of nightmare.

  ‘Transcript of Interrogation. Accused Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, born 1903. Former Party member. Question: In the statement you have made today in your own hand you admit your participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. By whom, when and under what circumstances were you inducted into this organization?

  ‘Answer: I was recruited into the counter-revolutionary terrorist organization by the former second Party Secretary of Kharkov, ILYIN, in February 1934… We met often in the course of our Party work. During our meetings in 1934 I expressed my doubts about the correctness of Party policy towards agriculture, workers’ pay and so on. In February 1934, after a committee meeting, ILYIN invited me into his study and said he wanted to talk frankly. That is when he proposed that I become a member of the Trotskyite organization.’